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Google's Search Quality
Guidelines and how touse them to your advantage.
Search quality is AN progressively standard topic within the blogosphere as a result of it can have a colossal impact on rankings.
Why is this so? Making sure usersare sent to high-quality and trustworthy search results is critical for Google to safe guard their position as providing the best all-round search experience. While this sounds a little vague, you can use Google's search quality to your advantage and get an edge over competitors. Did you know that Google publicly published their “Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines ”, updated on July 27th, 2017? If you didn't, well now you do.The document's 160-pages long, so presuming you don't consider a dense white paper leisurely reading, I'll list out the most important and actionable take aways, so you can use them to your advantage.Google Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines - Most Important Factors In Google's whitepaper, they list out their holy-trio of most important factors when it comes to search quality. And here it is...EAT... That's right, EAT... Expertise, Authority and Trust (EAT). Acronym choice aside, to establish quality, Google are looking at the expertise,authority and trust worthiness of the page and site. This includes things like the content quality and how aggressive ads are on your site. The reputation ofthe site and its authors, publicly-listed information about the site ownership, contact details, and several other factors. Now we know what's important from a top-level perspective, let's zoom intoactionable and practical take aways straight out of the document that will affect the average Joe trying to nudge his way up the search results.Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines—Key Takeaways
1. Real name, company name, and contact information listed on an about page. If you don't have this information listed on your website, why should Google, or anyone else for that matter, trust you? Better make sure you include it.
2. Excessive and unnatural internal structural links across sidebars and footers. If you've got 150-links in your footer, it's obvious to Google you're trying to do something sneaky, so be conservative with the footer and side bar links. Keep it restricted to the most important pages on your site or what's useful for your users.
3. Over monetization of content. Specifically, if you are disguising advertisements as main content, or your advertisements occupy more real-estate than the main content, than one of Google's search evaluators will probably flag your site as spam. Take a common-sense approach with your ads, don't overdo it!
4. List editors & contributors. Are you publishing a bunch of articles underpseudonyms or generic usernames? Listing editors and contributors, i.e. real people, is more trust worthy and will increase the perceived quality of your page.
5. Provide sources. Publishing generic articles en masse without anyreputable sources? You'll get a better-quality assessment, and a higher ranking, if you list sources for your articles. Listing sources shows the writer has performed diligence in their research and increases the credibility of the page.
6. Financial transaction pages. All you drop-shippers and ecommerce retailers out there stand up and take note—pages associated with financial transactions (shopping cart, checkout, product pages, etc.) must link to policy pages for refunds, returns, delivery information, and the terms and conditions of your site. Think about it from the user's perspective, if you are average Joe shopper thinking about buying something and the page doesn't list any of this information, how safe would you feel checking out?
7. Pages giving money info should be of the very best quality.
Googleare stricter with these types of pages, as it falls into their “Your Money orYour Life” category—meaning it could affect the financial well-being of theuser. If you're publishing this kind of content, make sure you're doing everything you can to provide high-quality, detailed articles, citing sources,fully disclosing financial relationships, and making it clear what author orcompany is behind the content. That sums up the most important take aways from the Google Search Evaluator Guidelines. If you haven't got them in your site, work‘em in and you'll get a leg up over your competitors, or worse, your rankings could suffer. And if you really, really want to sit down and read through the 160-page whitepaper on page-quality assessment, here it is for your enjoyment.Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines - July 27th, 2017 https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//insidesearch/howsearchworks/assets/searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf
Why is this so? Making sure usersare sent to high-quality and trustworthy search results is critical for Google to safe guard their position as providing the best all-round search experience. While this sounds a little vague, you can use Google's search quality to your advantage and get an edge over competitors. Did you know that Google publicly published their “Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines ”, updated on July 27th, 2017? If you didn't, well now you do.The document's 160-pages long, so presuming you don't consider a dense white paper leisurely reading, I'll list out the most important and actionable take aways, so you can use them to your advantage.Google Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines - Most Important Factors In Google's whitepaper, they list out their holy-trio of most important factors when it comes to search quality. And here it is...EAT... That's right, EAT... Expertise, Authority and Trust (EAT). Acronym choice aside, to establish quality, Google are looking at the expertise,authority and trust worthiness of the page and site. This includes things like the content quality and how aggressive ads are on your site. The reputation ofthe site and its authors, publicly-listed information about the site ownership, contact details, and several other factors. Now we know what's important from a top-level perspective, let's zoom intoactionable and practical take aways straight out of the document that will affect the average Joe trying to nudge his way up the search results.Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines—Key Takeaways
1. Real name, company name, and contact information listed on an about page. If you don't have this information listed on your website, why should Google, or anyone else for that matter, trust you? Better make sure you include it.
2. Excessive and unnatural internal structural links across sidebars and footers. If you've got 150-links in your footer, it's obvious to Google you're trying to do something sneaky, so be conservative with the footer and side bar links. Keep it restricted to the most important pages on your site or what's useful for your users.
3. Over monetization of content. Specifically, if you are disguising advertisements as main content, or your advertisements occupy more real-estate than the main content, than one of Google's search evaluators will probably flag your site as spam. Take a common-sense approach with your ads, don't overdo it!
4. List editors & contributors. Are you publishing a bunch of articles underpseudonyms or generic usernames? Listing editors and contributors, i.e. real people, is more trust worthy and will increase the perceived quality of your page.
5. Provide sources. Publishing generic articles en masse without anyreputable sources? You'll get a better-quality assessment, and a higher ranking, if you list sources for your articles. Listing sources shows the writer has performed diligence in their research and increases the credibility of the page.
6. Financial transaction pages. All you drop-shippers and ecommerce retailers out there stand up and take note—pages associated with financial transactions (shopping cart, checkout, product pages, etc.) must link to policy pages for refunds, returns, delivery information, and the terms and conditions of your site. Think about it from the user's perspective, if you are average Joe shopper thinking about buying something and the page doesn't list any of this information, how safe would you feel checking out?
7. Pages giving money info should be of the very best quality.
Googleare stricter with these types of pages, as it falls into their “Your Money orYour Life” category—meaning it could affect the financial well-being of theuser. If you're publishing this kind of content, make sure you're doing everything you can to provide high-quality, detailed articles, citing sources,fully disclosing financial relationships, and making it clear what author orcompany is behind the content. That sums up the most important take aways from the Google Search Evaluator Guidelines. If you haven't got them in your site, work‘em in and you'll get a leg up over your competitors, or worse, your rankings could suffer. And if you really, really want to sit down and read through the 160-page whitepaper on page-quality assessment, here it is for your enjoyment.Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines - July 27th, 2017 https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//insidesearch/howsearchworks/assets/searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf
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