Hi Folks,
Google is doing everything in their capacity to weed out spam and return meaningful results for search queries. However it seems that they missed on an important aspect!
Concept
A good quality website will definitely have proper (if not accurate) spelling and grammar. Using advanced spelling and grammer checking routines, it is very much possible to weed out spam and provide higher rank to high quality websites.
Benefits
This approach has many advantages:
1. Quality will get preference over quantity
2. Sites which are ranked lower due to poor quality spelling and grammar have a chance of imporving ranks by correcting spelling and gramatical errors. This will initiate a rush to improve user experience and we will be able to see better quality sites all over.
3. Sites which use more “generic terms” and less “proper nouns” will get higher rank as they are simple to understand and are written with a generic audience in mind.
4. Spam sites which simply puts in pages generated from search results will get totally eliminated as they will have broken sentences.
5. Links farms, FFA, Generic directories can be identified and ignored unless specifically requested by the user.
Implementation
The implementation can be further enhanced by setting up a baseline and quality benchmarks, just the way Google did for link popularity (Page Rank).
Sites can be evaluated on a regular basis based on the following parameters:
- Total number of words in the page
- Spelling errors per 100 words of content in the page
- Gramatical errors per 100 words of content in the page
- Another parameter which can be useful is how the page validates. Is the page full of HTML errors? Is it XHTML validated? Is the CSS validated?
- How often the page have been updated?
- How often the site has been down?
This data can be collected over a period of time and can be be used to determine how the site has improved or declined in quality.
Can it be implemented?
Now the question is – “How difficult is the implementation?”
I have recently been watching some of the changes introduced by Google in order to refine their ranking algorithm:
a) Penalty being imposed for duplicate content
b) Reciprocal links getting lesser weightage than one-way links
c) Usage of Latent semantic analysis (LSA) to find relevant related results
If we consider the total processing power required for each of these refinements, we can safely assume that they have enough processing power to implement spelling and grammar check.
I will not be surprised if Google is already working on this. Therefore it is advised that try to improve the above mentioned parameters before the magical google update strikes you!
I hope to see “quality based ranking” in action soon.
Abhishek
I agree with you, spelling and grammer are definitely two very important factors that can be used to judge the quality of any website. It is beyond doubt that Google has enough resource to get these factors into their algo , however, there is one important question that comes to my mind when I think of “spelling and grammer” being included in the algo – the question is ,
English has got various dialects and styles. Particularly the form of language used by Americans is no where close to the original form of the language in terms of spelling and grammer but the irony is that is the most commonly used form in the business world today. Google being an US based company, it is most likely that they will accept those American style spellings to be correct but someone from UK would never use such spellings or grammer in his site. In this case, should Google consider the UK form of English as incorrect ? If not, Google will have to work with two versions of English, UK and USA and accept both of them as correct.
Now, if they are accepting the distorted American version of the language as correct, then isn’t it justified for the European countries like France or German (most of these countries use horrible spelling and grammer, if at all they are using English) to put up a claim for their form of the language ?
Google doesn’t give a rat’s patooty about proper spelling and or grammar, for example here’s one of several tests I did
http://www.google.com/search?q=Ichthyosaur+Didgeridoo+Asterism+Velutinous
where the top ranked post has 100% of the words in the post spelled wrong