Ericka Lewis
The newest version of Google's Search Quality Raters Guidelines, published in PDF format, provides a treasure trove of information regarding what Google constitutes as high quality search engine result pages (SERP). To fully evaluate websites, Google quality raters enter specific queries and determine the relevance of pages returned by Google's search algorithms.
These human quality raters are not 100 percent responsible for ranking websites. Instead, they are simply sending feedback to Google's engineers describing the accuracy and soundness of the algorithm. In this way, you could say that these human raters may be indirectly affecting potential future updates to Google's search algorithms.
If you don't want to take the time to read the 160-page PDF booklet (which does contain quite a bit of secondary information), here is a highly condensed version of Google's Search Quality Raters Guidelines that includes the 10 things you need to know about Google's latest instructions for quality raters:
1. "Regular Websites" and "YMYL" Websites/Pages
Google draws a strong line demarcating two types of websites--regular websites and Your Money or Your Life websites. Held to a much higher standard than regular websites, YMYL websites offer content that may affect a user's physical and mental health or their financial well-being. Examples of YMYL websites include:
- Websites that allow visitors to purchase products or services, pay bills or transfer money from one institution or person to another
- Sites providing information about taxes, investments, buying insurance or planning for retirement
- Websites offering medical information or advice about diseases, drugs, mental illness and treatments
- Legal websites offering information or advice about any legal topic
Since medical, legal and financial websites have the ability to significantly impact an individual's life, Google places extremely high standards on YMYL websites.
2. Google's Quality Rating Scale has Five Categories
The highest rating a website can receive is a "vital" rating. This indicates that the query result is navigational and that the page returned to the rater is the official website of that query. For example, entering the search term "White House" will return the www.whitehouse.gov website.
The second highest score is a "useful" rating. "Useful" ratings are given to results that are neither too specific nor too broad. A website receiving a "useful" rating would be www.webmd.com/migraines-headaches/tc/migraine-headaches-symptoms if you entered the search words "migraine symptoms".
"Relevant" is the third highest score raters may give to websites returned by queries. According to Google's guidebook, "relevant" sites are "less comprehensive, less authoritative and cover just one important aspect of a query". Finally, the bottom two ratings are "not relevant" and "off topic". These may be websites that deceive users or create pages primarily for search engines instead of users.
3. Characteristics of Websites Receiving the Lowest of the Low Ratings
- Complete lack of primary content (ex: the URL is www.bestcellphones.com but the content talks about where to buy used cell phones)
- Content is authored by people with little to no expertise on a highly complex subject
- Website has supporting content and/or advertisements that deliberately distract visitors from primary content. This also includes invasive ads and high ratios of advertising content vs primary content
- Website contains automatically generated content or programmatically generated content. Auto-generated content consists of text that has been translated by an online translator and published without curation. Text generated through Markov chains and other automated process or text generated by "stitching" content together gathered from other web pages is also considered auto-generated content.
4. Website Ratings and Their "Reputations"
Rating a site's reputation involves evaluating user feedback, impressions of topical experts and whether the site incorporates knowledge of an actual "brick and mortar" business. Google raters get their "reputation" data from blog articles, the Better Business Bureau and other ratings websites, reviews and news articles, among many other sources.
It is interesting to note that websites may be rated useful but have no reputation. However, apparently well-developed, well-written websites cannot be assessed as useful if they have a negative reputation.
Alternately, websites with very good reputations that lack some professionalism concerning development and layout may maintain a useful rating simply because the business is trustworthy and popular with consumers.
5. Websites Must be Mobile Friendly
Google has been liberally dropping hints over the past several years about how they love mobile-friendly websites. It's also been rumored that Google is informing their raters to give low ratings non-mobile-friendly pages. To be on the safe side (and to remain on Google's good side), make sure your website is mobile friendly.
6. Highly Meets and Fails to Meet
Google's Quality Rater's Guidelines has a new section called "Needs Met" that determines how well a search result meets or addresses the searcher's query. Receiving a "highly meets" rating means that searchers found everything they wanted to know about their query from one website. To help your website qualify has a "highly meets" website, keywords and titles should match the subjects of professionally content.
Google's guidelines also states that raters can give a "fails to meet" rating to websites that are not mobile-friendly.
7. Content for Medical, Legal, Scientific and Highly Specialized Websites Should be Academic Journal Quality
Google considers content that's been cited and linked to credible or even peer-reviewed sources as trustworthy content. Only information that is considered general knowledge does not require citations or hyperlinks to authoritative sources.
8. Each Page of a Website Should Provide Information about Who (Business, Individual, etc.) Owns the Website
Google expects high quality websites to offer an "About Us", "About Me" or "Contact Us" section that describes further details about the contents of the website. For example, the Cleveland Clinic medical center in Chicago is solely responsible for the content it publishes, not just one individual.
9. News Websites that Want to Maintain a "Useful" Rating Must Be Dynamic
The Rater Guidelines state that Google expects "news websites to add articles very frequently and to attach correct dates to every article. In addition, "individual pages created for individual topics must be updated as soon as new information is available". Failing to update a news website may garner the owner a "not relevant" or "off-topic" rating--and that's not good.
10. Incorporating Functional Page Design is Essential to Impressing Google Raters
An optimal functional page design significantly enhances user experience (UX). Qualities supporting exceptional UX include prominently displayed main content, inclusion of advertisements that do not distract from UX and assimilates principles of human-computer interaction (HCI).
The Bottom Line
Now that we know Google is raising the bar higher than ever for 2016, websites are going to have to jump higher than ever--or face a losing fight with Google's muscular, well-trained algorithms. If you want to stay afloat, focus on content quality and engagement.
