Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines Secrets Revealed

Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines As example, this was what Google’s John Mueller shared an overview of the quality raters and their guidelines that suggested a nugget of maintaining humans in the loop

During a recent Search Central Live NYC event (formerly known as Google Webmaster Conference), John Mueller spoke about the third-party quality raters they that tell them about the reception of changes to Google’s search algorithms. And while it wasn’t spelled out, the nuance was clear: having a human in the loop is still a significant element in tuning your SEO decisions.

Third Party Quality Raters

By now, I hope everyone knows that Google has third-party quality raters that review algorithm changes and provide feedback that Google can use to assess whether various algorithm updates and tests were successful. They don’t really impact the rankings of individual websites; their decisions are about the efficacy of the algorithms that, in turn, affect hundreds of thousands and millions of sites across the Internet.

Usually, these judgment calls of useful sites or sites that are not are highly subjective (matter of opinion). And because of this, Google came up with a series of guidelines for the raters to adhere to and help standardize the quality criteria that the raters use to create more objective assessments (like facts which are either true or false).

Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines This is how John Mueller explained it, I noted:

“And one of the ways that we do that is we partner with, so-called, quality raters. These are external people who assess the quality of search results, who assess the excellence of web pages to determine whether we are solid? Are we moving in the right direction? So, are the changes that we’re working on actually, you know, making sense for you and acceptable to you?’

What’s telling about that exchange is that the whole point of goodness of the algorithms is whether they are acceptable to humans or not.

Mueller then brought up the quality raters guidelines and how critical it is for SEOs and publishers to read. In fact, he says it’s important and that anyone who is concerned about getting better in the rankings should read this at least to scan for things that might be important to them.

He continued:

“So we have a set of guidelines that we published for these quality raters, which I think is actually somewhat surprisingly important. It’s a huge big book, I don’t know, 180 pages. But this is a lot of guidelines where we sort of go through what we think makes sense for quality raters to look at as far as the content goes. Which is publicly accessible information. Feel free to check it out for yourself, too.

For most every website I think it makes sense at least have gone through it, or maybe control F and at least search through it for keywords you care about just so that you have a sense for what Google is thinking when they’re making changes.”

The QRG Is Not A Ranking Factors Handbook

The reason is that there are a lot of SEOs who have publicized misconception that the quality rater guidelines provide a glimpse of what Google is using to rank websites. That’s false.

And Mueller goes on (my paraphrase):

“Obviously quality rater guidelines is not something like, this is how we do ranking, but rather just, this is how we review things on the web when we solicit input from these quality raters.

One of them is page quality where they tell us like, is this a high quality page or not? The second is to assess whether the pages that we provide in the search results are adequate for a user. Which is extremely subjective at times but we tell them what can they do there and the other one is A/B testing, side-by-side testing which is we show quality raters a set of pages before and a set of pages after and they tell us which of them is actually better.”

Humans In The Loop

The most important thing to know about Mueller’s discussion of the quality raters and the guidelines they use is that how human beings respond to the results of a search is the essence of what Google is doing with their algorithms. Some people, they think of Google’s algorithms as mechanical machines that are cranking out these search results and that’s pretty much what they are but they’re also emulating human judgment about what is and is not spam, what is and is not a high quality search result.

Rote SEO is super hungry for machine feed but the machine is mimicking human evaluation. SEO today is increasingly about thinking how every aspect of a site impacts human beings and less about fretting if you have enough entity keywords on a page, and if your H1 heading is missing.

Human Judgment Is Essential to Google’s Algorithm Development

Quality raters are utilized to determine if changes in the algorithms are improving search results for people. They are adjusted based on human reactions and not machine metrics.

The principles that measure the quality of search results

The Quality Rater Guidelines are not a ranking manual. They outline what Google considers helpful content of high quality. They can act as a mirror that business owners and SEO can hold up to their own content, then reflection and compare that against Google’s requirements for a piece of high-quality content.

Human experience is what SEO is about today.

Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines, the deeper message hidden in all that Mueller was discussing is that Google’s algorithms are mimicking human judgment, and so SEOs should focus on user experience and usefulness rather than checklists and busywork such as adding author bios with unnecessary information that does nothing for actual site visitors.