How can content be ranked if there aren't many links to it?

Today's question comes from India.

Ashish asks, how does Google determine quality content if there aren't a lot of links to a post?

That's a good question.

So in general, that sort of reverts back to the way search engines were before links pretty much judging based on the text on the page at that point.

So Google has a lot of stuff to sort of say.

Okay, the first time we see a word on the page count, it a little bit more the next time.

Okay, a little more.

But not a ton more.

And then after a while, we say, you know what?

We've seen this word.

Maybe this page is about this topic, but it doesn't really help you to keep repeating that key word over and over and over again.

And in fact, at some point we might view that as keyword stuffing. And then the page would actually do less.

Well, not as well as just a moderate number of mentions of a particular piece of text.

So we do have other ways. In theory, we could say, Well, does it sit on a domain that seems to be somewhat reputable?

There are different ways you can try to assess the quality of content.

But typically, if you go back to a user is typing possibly some really rare phrase.

If there's no other pages on the web that have that particular phrase, even if there's not that many links, then that page can be returned because we think it might be relevant.

It might be topical to what these are looking for.

So it can be kind of tough.

But at that point, we sort of have to fall back and assess based on the quality of the content that's actually on the text that's actually on the page.