How does the search engine bot define the site quality? Which are the parameters it judges upon? What features of the site could lead to a better user experience and could make visitors return to your site?

I’ve found the thread at WebmasterWorld forum where the signals of a poor quality sites were discussed. Some of them are debatable and site-dependent, however they give a clear idea of what should mainly be avoided when building your website. The initial list gives 25 items:

1. Reciprocal link request pages.
2. No Privacy policy.
3. Outdated copyright date or last modified date visible on the pages.
4. Error pages that don’t send 404 headers or send content regardless of the page requested/querystring entered.
5. Massive numbers of incoming links from link farms.
6. Dead/404ing links.
7. High link churn.
8. No published contact address, email address or phone number.
9. A high bounce rate (surfers clicking back on their browser and selecting another search result).
10. Too much duplicate content.
11. Whois info for the domain which is the same as other domains previously penalized or banned. (Could also be true of adsense publisher/affiliate ID’s and other identifiable footprints)
12. Use of/links to affiliate programs that are known scams
13. Domains previously used for spam or that are blacklisted.
14. Stagnation (Site never changes)
15. Excessively long URI’s/URL’s (query strings or folder and file names)
16. A high percentage of affiliate links vs regular outbound links.
17. No / very few outbound links.
18. No / very few inbound links.
19. All inbound links are to homepage only
20. Outbound links to questionable/spammy/crap sites.
21. Profanity or explicitly adult language on a non-adult site.
22. Too many spelling errors.
23. Contains unrelated subjects (ex: a site that reviews toys and tries to sell insurance or viagra).
24. Lack of interest from social bookmarking sites.
25. MySQL or PHP errors in the pages

However, the discussion grew and came up with some more valuable additions:

• No real menu or information architecture.
• Excessive Adsense
• Big percent of links from blogs
• A large number of template-based, keyword-driven, computer-generated pages that contain little or no content
• Crappy html coding
• Images that aren’t compresses and take forever to load.
• Highjacking the browser back button
• Pop-ups , Pop-Under, DHTML Windows sliding
• Database related or server side errors in the pages
• Showing different content to visitors and bots

You could deep into the whole discussion on WebmasterWorld forum.

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