What is the internet?
When talking about what makes a good page there are two main distinctions that can be drawn. The first is that a page is ‘good’ based on its content and appearance — it is aesthetically pleasing; the information is useful, informative, interesting, humorous —whatever its purpose is to be; and that it’s easy for users to navigate and read. The second distinction and the one that Google and other search engines use is that a webpage is ‘good’ or should appear high in the list of search results based on the amount of views the page gets and how many links there are to it from other pages (among 200+ other factors). You would hope that these two distinctions are related however and that a page would have a lot of hits and links BECAUSE it is aesthetically pleasing, user-friendly and informative. You wouldn’t expect to find a Year 7 student’s attempt at a school blog page about owls ranked higher than the Wikipedia result. That said there are some fantastic and informative webpages out there that would never appear in the top pages of a Google search no matter how relevant they are as they just don’t get anywhere near the traffic of larger professional websites.
As Google states:
‘In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by creating high-quality sites that users will want to use and share.’
