This isn’t an area of great interest to me and definitely not something I I know much about however I worked briefly in a content agency not too long ago and I heard this Google Panda being mentioned a lot. Google Panda is a quality filter that Google introduced to filter the content on websites. My understanding is key words still play a big part however websites just adding extra pages for no reason to fit more key words in doesn’t quite cut it anymore.
Tip: Panda looks for quality original and new content. Here is a great info graphic that explains it if you’re interested in understanding it a little more. A new algorithm, Panda 4.0 was released in May this year. Google is always looking for ways to improve their user experience.
Awesome, thanks for following up on this! This is a really fantastic example of attempting to measure quality in a quantitative manner. I have my doubts (you can’t use an algorithm to measure the quality of anything, life doesn’t work like that) but the infographic is a really useful way of learning what works and doesn’t work when trying to make something popular online.