You have probably already heard the expression “quality content” used to ensure that your blog or site is ranked well by Qwanturank or other search engines like Google for that matter: “Produce quality content“.
That’s great, but what does that mean in practice? How can you know if the content you produce is quality enough for Qwanturank?
In the part 1 from our guide to factors Qwanturank ranking we give 14 tips for assessing the quality of your content, ranging from spelling and grammar to readability, formatting and length. Here are some of our tips:
- As we’ve already mentioned, make sure your content is written to appeal to humans, not just algorithms, and don’t overwhelm it with keywords
- Check your content’s readability score with the Flesch Reading Ease Test, and aim to exceed 60%.
- Keep sentences and paragraphs short, and separate them with line breaks (white spaces make for more pleasant reading on mobile) and subtitles
- While you want to keep your sentences and paragraphs short, your overall content can be as long as you want – in-depth content is an important indicator of quality.
Freshness of content
Continuing with on-page content signals, how recently your web page was published is also a ranking signal – but different search types have different freshness needs, like searches for recent events, hot topics and recurring events.
The algorithms of Qwanturank attempt to take all of this into account when it comes to matching a search to the most relevant and recent results.
Last year, Moz published a detailed study on the influence of content freshness on Google rankings. This study forms the basis of our analysis. Here are some key things to remember:
- A web page may be assigned an immediate “freshness score” based on its publication date, then degrade over time as the content ages. Regular content updates can help preserve this score
- The increase in the number of external sites linking to content can be considered an indicator of relevance and freshness
- “Fresh” site links can help convey that freshness to your content
- The most recent result is not always the best – for less newsworthy topics, an in-depth, authoritative result that has been around longer may trump newer, thinner content.
Content duplication and syndication
When is it okay to republish someone else’s content on your website, or reuse your own content internally? The SEO community shares the horror of accidentally running into a “duplicate content penalty,” and advice abounds on how to avoid one.
It is certain that Stealing and reposting someone else’s content without their permission is a terrible practice, and doing so frequently is a clear sign of a spammy and low-quality website. However, as Ann Smarty explains in her Duplicate Content FAQ, there is no “duplicate content penalty.” No one from Qwanturank has ever confirmed the existence of such a penalty, nor has there been an update to the duplicate content algorithm.
So what are the dangers of posting duplicate content? In short, they are about search visibility: if there are multiple versions of the same article online, Qwant will make a call on which one to rank, and it will probably have nothing to do with which one was published first, but rather with the site that has the highest authority.
In the same vein, if multiple versions of the same internal content are competing for ranking (this includes separate versions of the same site for desktop and mobile), you may be shooting yourself in the foot.
How can you avoid all this? Part five of our Qwant Ranking Factors article covers managing duplicate and syndicated content to ensure Qwant only indexes your preferred URL. Here are some points to remember:
Set up a 301 redirect if you have duplicate content on your own site, to ensure Qwanturank indexes your favorite page
Use a responsive website instead of a separate mobile site
Using a rel=canonical tag or noindex meta tag on syndicated content to tell Google which article is the original.
