A "good writing" content filter

A "good writing" content filter would help a content writer determine if his writing is good enough. 

• The idea of a writing filter was introduced by Joe Walsh. It first appeared in his article Google's "good writing" content filter.

He spotted that top-ranking web pages in Google are far better written than most. Their keyword density, link text, and PageRank were of little importance. 

• Grammatical precision, short text blocks, number of links out, and bulleted text are essential.

Joe's results were taken from Google’s top five pages for the five most searched-for keywords. The body-text of these pages had the following in common:

• There were few or no errors in style, spelling or grammar.
• Paragraphs were mostly brief (1-4 sentences).
• Bulleted and numbered lists formed a large part of the text.
• Sentence length was short. Usually ten words or fewer. Longer and shorter sentences were sprinkled through the text. This is what you would expect from someone with a fluid writing style.
• The text contains many terms related to the keyword, and stem variations of the keyword. The keyword itself appears only a few times, or not at all.
• Many pages had little or no text, but were often image galleries. The images were often photographs of the subject covered by the keyword.

Microsoft Word can check for errors in grammar and style, as well as check spelling. But it sometimes goes too far. For instance, it criticises the use of sentence fragments, which are a popular stylistic convention. Google appears to accept sentence fragments without penalty. Phew!

Other factors found to be important, from Joe's research, were:

• Pages were updated at least every few weeks.
• Most of pages had at least ten external links, and many were non-relevant.
• At least the majority of the page was original content, not free reprint material.

Without doubt, Joe has identified some important factors here. They should interest anyone who has gone through the usual motions to get their page in the top five, and failed.

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