Website Quality Score: Is It A Google Ranking Factor?

Is Google’s organic search ranking algorithm based on a quality score similar to the one used in Google Ads?

This has been a contentious topic for years, to the point where there are even articles on how to optimize for it.

Is there an organic quality score, though? Is it affecting your rankings?

Let’s look into some of the resources and debate surrounding the Google organic quality score concept to see if we can get to the bottom of it.

The Claim: The Quality Score Of A Website Is A Ranking Factor

There are a few factors at play in this topic, which can lead to some confusion.

What we know so far:

Quality Score is a feature of Google Ads.

Google assigns a number between 1 and 10 to PPC ads based on three factors:

Expected clickthrough rate (CTR): The probability of your ad being clicked when it is displayed.
Ad relevance refers to how closely your ad matches the search intent of a user.
Landing page experience refers to how relevant and useful your landing page is to those who have clicked on your ad.

When you hear that Google uses a quality score to evaluate websites, you might think of the Quality Score used by Google Ads.

No.

Inorganic ranking, Google does not use its Google Ads Quality Score.

So here’s the question:

Is there a quality score that Google uses to assign a number to a website (it could be 1-10, 0 to 100, or something else)?

We already know that Google considers E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) to be a crucial guiding principle for any website that publishes content.

So, if Google thinks it’s important to look at the E-A-T of individual content creators, isn’t it also important to look at the website where that content is published?

Could you quantify that with a PageRank-style score, if that’s the case?

Consider this: I’m going to write a blog post.

Is it more likely to rank on Search Engine Journal than on [Insert Random Blog Name Here]?

Yes, this is the contentious notion of domain authority (not to be confused with Domain Authority, the Moz metric, which we debunk in a later chapter of this guide) – that some domains have an inherent SEO advantage over others.

With an organic quality score like this, even if the page lacked other quality signals, it could still benefit from the site quality score’s ranking benefit.

Is there an automatic ranking advantage for Search Engine Journal, The New York Times, or Wikipedia (or any other dominant site you can think of) overall/most of their competitors?

Is it possible that Google has assigned them a site-wide organic quality score?

The Case For Using Quality Score As A Ranking Factor On A Website

Google’s Michael Wyszomierski provided feedback on the company’s most recent algorithm change in 2011. Google Panda was the name of the update, and it primarily affected sites with low-quality content. In part, he said:

“…it’s important for webmasters to know that low quality content on part of a site can impact a site’s ranking as a whole. For this reason, if you believe you’ve been impacted by this change you should evaluate all the content on your site and do your best to improve the overall quality of the pages on your domain.
Removing low quality pages or moving them to a different domain could help your rankings for the higher quality content.”

Is it possible that Google uses a quality score comprised of a number of signals to identify low-quality websites?

Many SEO experts, including Jeff Ferguson, contend that Google ranks web pages rather than websites.

While this is correct in theory, Wyszomierski’s statement raises serious concerns about how low-quality content on one page of a website can affect the ability of the entire site’s content to rank.

Wasn’t that the answer when Google filed a patent for a Site Quality Score in 2012?

The patent includes the following:

“This specification describes how a system can determine a score for a site, e.g., a web site or other collection of data resources, as seen by a search engine, that represents a measure of quality for the site.
The score is determined from quantities indicating user actions of seeking out and preferring particular sites and the resources found in particular sites.
A site quality score for a particular site can be determined by computing a ratio of a numerator that represents user interest in the site as reflected in user queries directed to the site and a denominator that represents user interest in the resources found in the site as responses to queries of all kinds.
The site quality score for a site can be used as a signal to rank resources, or to rank search results that identify resources, that are found in one site relative to resources found in another site.”

As is always the case, just because Google has a patent on something doesn’t mean it’s being used in its search algorithms.

We also have speculation from 2017, when Moz published a Whiteboard Friday on an organic quality score.

They stated at the start of the presentation,

“While there’s no hard proof it exists, the organic quality score is a concept that’s been pondered by many SEOs over the years.”

Seer Interactive published a guide in 2020 on how to optimize your website for organic search using the Google Quality Score components.

The Quality Score is not assumed to be a ranking factor in the guide.

Rather, they want to provide PPC marketers with a fresh perspective on content optimization for organic search.

Our Opinion On Google Quality Score As A Ranking Factor

Google has not confirmed or denied the existence of an organic site quality score as a ranking factor.

The Site Quality Score patent, which was filed in 2012, is only speculative evidence that Google might use a quality score as a ranking factor (or at least considered doing so, around that time).

It’s also logical.

Based on its link profile, a site should be able to pass a base level of authority (or even a topical relevancy score) to new pages (both internal and inbound).

So, could there be a domain/website quality score that serves as a starting point for new pages?

Wyszomierski’s remark raises the possibility that something similar is at work in Google’s algorithms.

Is it reasonable to assume that if low-quality content can harm a site, it can also be helped organically by consistently publishing high-quality content?

While we have ruled out the possibility that Google uses the Google Ads Quality Score for ranking purposes, the principles behind it – particularly those relating to intent, relevance, and usefulness – can easily be applied to organic search.

Understanding E-A-T and the Search Quality Rating Guidelines can help you with your SEO in the same way that understanding E-A-T and the Search Quality Rating Guidelines can.

We can’t call organic quality score a definite Google ranking factor without direct confirmation as of this writing.

It is, however, possible.