Excellent article and about time something was done to help prevent some of the rubbish written only to achieve higher ranking results. But will it ever happen? Difficult when some companies have so much money and resources available to them.

There’s two things that unfortunately affect article ratings on Google for me. The first is content mills, as you describe in the article, with very little worth but tons of SEO. The other that hurts is sites that publish partial feeds from my RSS feeds with my title and part of my content. They have better SEO than me because of the way that they publish and my genuine, primary articles get pushed onto the second or third page.

And it’s not like I’m a teeny tiny site – we average over 50K+ uniques a month. For what we do, we’re highly regarded and have permalinks on multiple related sites.

What about content that is not only written for the user but also for ranking? I think there is a middle ground that can be reached. I operate sites like this and not only do I write for rank but ALSO for the user – whats so bad about this???

Seriously, Ehow is one of the worst sites on the web. 95% of their articles are garbage, and I make it a point to skip their results on the SERPs.

Here’s a game you can play:

Google any term, and look for an Ehow page. Read it, and really rate the quality.

Here’s my example — http://www.ehow.com/how_6126621_write-bad-article.html (probably 100 words tops)?

On-page optimization is a tiny part of the Google ranking puzzle-it’s links that drive position on Google.

And I don’t really understand your point anyway. How can Google rate the quality of content? Surely it can really only rate the relevancy – and that means relating it to the keyword searched for. This doesn’t just mean stuffing the article itself with the keyword, as you wrongly believe, but building backlinks with keyword rich anchor text.

I’m not saying that Google has got it right, but using your theory of quality over relevance seems rather naive. William Shakespeare would outrank Wikipedia for ‘Julius Caesar’. Dan Brown’s book cover would appear when I search for ‘da Vinci images’. And ‘Leonardo Romeo and Juliet’ would throw your ‘quality first’ search engine into spin, when it is obvious that I want IMDB.

Whichever path Google chooses to take; quality or relevancy; this article will end up in the SERPs basement, as it is neither.

What Google claims about the workings of their search algorithm is nothing but hogwash!

And trying to work out how hogwash works is a complete waste of time. If they were honest and disclosed just how they rate search results and rig everything for their own greed and avarice, then they would go broke within months, and that’s just what that “do no evil” felonious fraudster deserves.

When I said “pass the sauce” I didn’t mean ‘pass the effluent’!

Maybe I’m being naive here but google dominates the internet and in doing so can do whatever it chooses to do to bring the web up to ‘its’ standard. For which as website owners we all have to follow or fall by the wayside in their eyes. Is it googles fault or our own when we chase the google dream for wanting a piece of the action to become ranked at the top and then be-moaning the fact when we’re not?
Stripping your article down, there are just two clear points. The search engines and your website visitor. No matter what the consequences of my search engine rankings and standings my audience pays my bills not google. There are many other ways to find visitors other than ranking first page on google and when you’re searching for that audience it’s tempting to want to ride on the back of another site that is doing well such as “E-How”. However haven’t read some of their articles I wouldn’t drop my standards that low. It’s typical of any major corporation to want to keep itself at the top and to do so will always bring in unlikely ‘bedfellows’. Control is everything to them and it has gone beyond a joke when people worry about, talk about and probably even daydream about ‘How Can I Be Number 1′. Sad really. This is just a distraction from the quality and content for your own audience.
The way I look at all of this now (one time I chased the google dream – succeeded in one area) is to write my articles build my links through simple honest directories and participate in one or two forums of my chosen subject and B**L**KS to google or any other search engine madness that perceives itself as the latest must do action. Who knows what’s on googles mind? Who cares?

The recent Google changes seem to cause reduced page-views mainly the mid level and small websites but not Demand Media sites.

I’ve been to seminars at Demand Media and also interviewed management before they went public. That’s when their most popular articles were “How to Write a Check.”

One of the editors said that they also get information from Facebook. If you combine and Google and Facebook data, you do have an unfair advantage.

Recently, I searched on how to fill out a W-9 form in California and didn’t get the IRS but got eHow. When I finally found the IRS publication, it actually showed the form and what to spaces to fill and was much better.

For a while, Demand Media was allowing anyone to write for them. They then found because of their high page ranking, writers were putting in affiliate links. Now all writers have to be approved. Today, eHow sent me an email saying that all writers had to login via Facebook. That could be a sign that even more Facebook data will be used.

The great thing about Google and most of its policies is that they claim to be open. Google Adsense opened up the web to small publishers. Their current changes don’t make ideal-sense or Adsense.

There was a time when internet offered level playing field for even the small fries if they had quality content. You could rank well above giants. Now the giants have come in different avatars – content farms. An ordinary webmaster can never hope to out do these content mills when it comes to their own field of expertise. The major problem for Google and other search engines is how do you separate the wheat from the chaff ? Content quality is subjective and no matter how sophisticated your algorithm is – it can’t decide what makes the best content. Is it in the number of words ? May be. The 10 $ content writer is unlikely to have the expertise on the subject he is writing about. So at best his writing is going to be limited to about 300 words or less.

On the other hand, the expert will always ramble on and end up writing pages with longer content.

This is news? Goggle has been off the mark for over a year now.