fathom - 10:49 am on Feb 28, 2011 (gmt 0)

A number of us have been saying for weeks now, "tell us exactly what is meant by 'quality'".

Quality to a blind bot is a relative thing.

Even Wikipedia can be considered a content farm... it has a massive archive and within that lots of rather "thin" pages which are especially thin when compared to its even more remarkable "compelling" pages...

In context... Wikipedia's "thin" pages shouldn't get the VIP treatment simply because they're associated with its compelling pages... that would be unfair... wouldn't it?

Now apply that to all domains unilaterally... and all domains are equally compared.

This IMHO is still Google's link obsession... pages that don't have unique links to them aren't compellingly unique or rather pages with lots of unique links are more compelling thus pages with less (per domain) are considered "low quality".

The "FARM" part is about cultivating a volume. An ezine isn't cultivating a single SEO page and that page acquires lots of unique links for SEO... it has 20,000 similarly crafted SEO pages for 20,000 different SEOs all after their page and none are consider "high quality" because none stand out in the crowd. It's up to the ezine to get rid of 19,999 and focus on the one!

All Google is saying ...quality trumps quantity ... having 10 million pages of nothing much isn't better than alot less but spectacular!

Back at your simple question "tell us exactly what is meant by 'quality'"... that's easy... UNIQUE LINKS!

<added>in the same context WebmasterWorld could also be a content farm... few threads get lots of unique external links to them while some really outstanding threads get massive amounts of unique links because they are compelling... but not every thread of WebmasterWorld should be at the top of Google because of a few great resources are there.</added>