Have you heard of the Panda update in Google’s algorithm? It is an update that Google released a month or two ago that aims to remove poor quality websites from Google’s search results. For a few months, Google was catching a lot of heat from online and mainstream media because a few poor quality sites had figured out how to game the system and rank well for a lot of keywords.
Google release a whole list of questions to help give people an idea of what the algorithm might have consisted of. Google rarely provides much insight into their algorithm (although almost every other product they push is “open”), so it is up to webmasters to infer meaning from the cryptic list of questions they provided. The questions are what webmasters should ask themselves about their own content.
One of the items that many people are inferring is that grammar and spelling play a big part in the ‘quality score’ that Google is assigning content. While this is great if you run a website with great content, it can be tricky if your site accepts user generated content.
Lets look at this with an example. Lets say I write an excellent post about “The history of Trade Shows”. My article is well written, well researched, and provides great value to the reader. And, as such, Google really likes it. Then, as the article grows in popularity and more and more people start really reading it and liking it, it gets more feedback in the ‘Comments’ section at the bottom of my website.
People love the article, and contribute more information and details that further help readers. However, some of these comments have some small spelling errors, and a few grammatical errors. Google, when re-crawling my site, sees that my great post now has some new information that isn’t so hot. At this point, does Google decide that they aren’t going to ‘like’ my website anymore and bury it down in their results? I suspect that this is a very strong possibility.
The #2 item on my wishlist could make this something I would have to worry about. What I think would be awesome is a Grammar checking tool built into a comments section. I’m not exactly sure how this would work, but if a user write a comment and clicks ‘submit’, they could be show a list of grammatical errors in their note. I’m sure this wouldn’t be overwhelming because most comments are very short, so this could be very effective.
So there you have it! If we could have a Grammarly comment editor plug-in that could handle WordPress, Disqus, Intense Debate, Blogger TypePad, Facebook comments, etc, I think a lot of webmasters would worry less about the quality of comments left on their website because they would be confident that comments would pass Google’s Panda test.