Google’s Search Quality Raters Guidelines had been discussed by an SEO community for ages, way before Google made them public.
It has always been an insight into how Google may interpret “quality”.
But just SEOs should use the guidelines? Jim Boykin, CEO of Internet Marketing Ninjas, and Ann Smarty, IMN’s analyst, are discussing Google’s Search Quality Raters guidelines and how SEOs should use the document as part of their SEO strategy.
What are Google’s Search Quality Raters Guidelines?
Google has a team of people whose job is to search Google and rate top results based on their perceived quality and relevance of the page.
Quality raters have no direct impact on search results:
We use responses from Raters to evaluate changes, but they don’t directly impact how our search results are ranked.
Source: Google
When Google engineers see a huge discrepancy between what the algorithm found relevant and quality and how their human raters reacted to those sets of results, they adjust their algorithm to return better results.
Human raters also help Google understand if any of their multiple experiments might be a good idea or how to improve them.
In other words, the human input helps Google create a search engine that better fits human needs.
You can read the guidelines here.
How to use the document correctly?
Google’s Search Quality Raters Guidelines do not have a direct impact on search results, so optimizing your site using these guidelines doesn’t make any sense.
Yet, the document inspires some optimization ideas that will help both human visitors and search crawlers to trust your site and engage with it.
These ideas may include:
- Using more detailed and better linked author profiles
- Creating a better About us page
- Connecting your on-site authorship with off-site mentions, etc.
