Punctuation And Grammar

[clickshops]

With the emphasis on quality content with Google, does anyone see the day when Google will be looking and ranking, based on the actual grammar of the content?

If they did, I would imagine lots of review and forum sites would be particularly hard hit, if they just publish reviews in the form that they arrive!

[crobb305]

With the emphasis on quality content with Google, does anyone see the day when Google will be looking and ranking, based on the actual grammar of the content?

the day has already come and gone. Proper spelling and grammar add credibility. I know some will dispute this, but I know that I dismiss any content I read that is loaded down with spelling errors. Accidents happen (trust me, I have found my share of mistakes on my site), but that is what spell check is for. Just correct them.

I read an article yesterday about climate change. It was loaded with spelling errors, including "carban dioxide." Dismissed.

[indyank]

I think google is already considering spell errors as a quality factor in this panda update.But punctuations and grammar is a tricky thing as you have English spoken and written differently in different parts of the world. British english is considered to be the purest form of English. But there are several other countries with English as a national language and there are many different slangs used worldwide. So it would be tricky.

[tedster]

That's where Google's automated taxonomy system would come into play. Different types of content can be measured by different criteria.

[crobb305]

I think that words with multiple acceptable spellings will get a pass (for example, theater vs. theatre).

[edited by: crobb305 at 5:47 pm (utc) on Apr 7, 2011]

[clickshops]

That's where Google's automated taxonomy system would come into play. Different types of content can be measured by different criteria.

Are you saying that they could treat review and forum sites differently to how other sites are ranked, because the text is user generated as opposed to site owner generated?

[indyank]

he nofollows the all comment sections

what do you mean? I see the comment texts on the article pages and they aren't separated.

[tedster]

Are you saying that they could treat review and forum sites differently to how other sites are ranked

Yes - and Google has been developing this potential for a long time. There are taxonomies for types of query intention, types of websites, and I assume, types of users. The final SERPs involve getting this all mixed and matched effectively. That's a huge machine-learning project.

[edited by: tedster at 5:40 pm (utc) on Apr 7, 2011]

[crobb305]

what do you mean? I see the comment texts on the article pages and they aren't separated.

I was looking on the main page, and noticed his links to the comments were nofollow.

But I see what you mean now. You're right, he isn't noindexing at the page level, only nofollow on his internal linkage. So the comments do appear to be spiderable. Sorry for the confusion, I was wrong. I edited my last post so I don't create confusion for other members.

[bramley]

One can have a 'show comments' 'link' (JS) that uses ajax to put them on the page (or auto ajax on page load.

Does anyone know if the G crawler follows JS links and ajax requests ?

[LifeinAsia]

There's been some speculation among my group that Google might view UGC without any spelling mistakes with suspicion. Whereas before the appropriate team might have corrected typos and bad grammar in UGC, they now leave as-is. There's also the speculation that leaving in the typos helps the sites for the same typos in searches.

Although I can see the reasoning, I also don't want the overall quality of the sites to be lowered because of UGC with excessive typos and bad grammar.

[tedster]

Does anyone know if the G crawler follows JS links and ajax requests ?

If the JS link switches visibility between "visible" and "hidden" then the content is already in the page's source - crawled and indexed with no need to follow a link, because the "link" only changes the CSS attribute value.

When it comes to AJAX in general, there's a lot of "sometimes" and "maybe" in the answer. See Google Code's information that is available from: Making AJAX Applications Crawlable [code.google.com]

[Dan01]

How do you spell Khadaffi? Ghadaffi? There are tons of spellings.

When I first started I got a ton of traffic because I misspelled someone's name. So I started adding misspellings to the meta-tags (or should it be metatag).

Sometimes I will add a hyphen or take one away so that it may rank higher. Hey, people will type it both ways.

But things have changed. Google now provides the results for the correct spelling and in some instances asks you if you want the results for the misspellings.

I would love to know for sure. It would be bad for one of my sites if they devalued the whole site because of misspellings in some articles.