steveb - 8:47 pm on Jan 27, 2007 (gmt 0)

"I didn't realize this thread was only about "bots" and not real visitors?"

Check out the forum, dude. This is the Google forum.

We aren't talking about real visitors here. Real visitors are completely irrelevant to the concept of "signals of quality" and of crap too. Real visitors for example can read "Geore washington was the 37th President of the US" and know this is a signal of crap. A search engine bot on the other hand can't judge a fact like that. Bots look for signals of quality (like links from respected sites) or signals of spam (like having only links from banned sites).

Addresses or privacy policy are useless to bots a signals of quality. Likewise, any content that has to be coherent and accurate is no signal of quality or crap to a bot. Bots only can look for signals that make it likely something is good quality or not.