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Covering a wider breadth, pages with more words are preferable to shorter, superficial articles. A recent study found that content length seems to correlate with SERP positions.

There's a known correlation between the depth of topic coverage and Google rankings. Therefore, pages that cover every angle of a topic have an edge over pages that only cover a topic partially.

Proper grammar and spelling signify quality, although Cutts gave mixed messages a few years back on whether or not this was important.

A page that's part of a closely related category may get a relevancy boost.

As pointed out by Backlinko reader Jared Carrizales, Google may distinguish between “quality” and “useful” content.

Any page including content that can affect someone's health, happiness, safety, or financial stability is a YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) page.Google reserves very high-quality rating standards for YMYL pages because bad info could hurt people financially, physically, or emotionally. Due to one of Google's latest update – dubbed the “medic” update – YMYL pages have found themselves in the spotlight.

According to Google Quality Rater Guidelines: “Websites or pages without some sort of beneficial purpose, including pages that are created with no attempt to help users, or pages that potentially spread hate, cause harm, or misinform or deceive users, should receive the Lowest rating.” (in E-A-T, ie. Expertise-Authority-Trustworthiness).

A Google Patent outlines how Google can identify “gibberish” content, which is helpful for filtering out spun or auto-generated content from their index.Sites with low-quality content (particularly content farms) are less visible in search after getting penalized by Panda. Google understandably hates auto-generated content. If they suspect that your site's pumping out computer-generated content, it could result in a penalty or de-indexing.

Google can identify UGC (User Generated Content, a viable SEO technique), in contrast to content published by the actual site owner. For example, they know that a link from the official WordPress.com blog is very different than a link from besttoasterreviews.wordpress.com. Links tagged as “rel=sponsored” or “rel=UGC” are treated differently than normal “followed” or “rel=nofollow” links.

In a nutshell, write for humans, not machines.