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There's been an abundance of discussion, misinformation, and general mayhem for many site owners in the preceding weeks over Google's latest algorithm update. Questia.com, one of my company's sites, was negatively affected by the change, in some surprising ways. .
Explicitly targeted at "low quality" sites, many companies feel that they were wrongly classified as low quality by this algo update, but I'm not here to make a stump speech for Questia. Accounting for my own bias, we feel like there's considerable value for users of Questia: with over 75,000 books, millions of peer-reviewed journal articles, and tools (annotation, citation generation) for students and researchers, offered at a reasonable cost.
The question, in my mind, is how closely can an algorithm model a human's experience of quality, using Questia.com as a case study? What is it about the site that might cause a person (or algorithm) to classify it as low quality?