Orlando Web Design
In an attempt to humanize the cyber universe, google has released new guidelines for quality raters. These new ground rules are geared towards content creators. In the past, when it came to such guidelines, the focus was usually on site owners. However, with this update Google is aiming directly at those producing the content displaying on your browser. Let’s take a look at quality raters and how the new guidelines can affect your website’s search results in Google.
Who are Google search quality raters and what do they do?
Google contracts about 10, 000 people around the world to conduct actual searches and evaluate websites. Basically, this is just one of the measures Google takes to guarantee relevant and quality websites are at the top of user searches. Because there are many factors that come into play when it comes to google’s ranking, quality raters do not have the power to ban websites or to cause them to lose ranking.
What are the Search Quality Rating Guidelines?
So, now that I have established what google quality raters are and their importance in google’s ranking, we can jump to the good stuff. Google sets guidelines so that all quality raters can assess the websites they come in contact with. Such guidelines are usually 200-pages long, and they are constantly being updated. As you have probably figured it out by now, these can affect your website negatively or positively, so make sure to take a good look at them and take the necessary measurements.
Google published the first Search Quality Rating guidelines back in 2015. According to Google, “the Purpose of Search Quality Rating Your ratings is to evaluate search engine quality around the world”. The 164-page set of guidelines helps real humans known as “quality raters” to assess websites & provide feedback to Google.
What are the main changes in the new 2018 Search Quality Rating Guidelines?
On this update, Google wants their “quality raters” to not only evaluate the website reputation, but it also wants them to evaluate the website authors or “content creators”. With this move, Google is trying to spot fake news, unreliable content & google guidelines violators to improve the quality of its search results.
Google also wants their raters to understand and evaluate the purpose of a page or article. If a website has a helpful or “beneficial purpose” it means that it was created to help human users, not just to improve search engine results. Content with “beneficial purpose” will not cause harm or misinform a user.
Reliable Creator Reputation is Essential
As we mentioned before, creator reputation is at the center of this update. Who are your writers and contributors? And, how are they presenting themselves on your website?. It is key that content writers are not only experts on their fields, but that you can actually demonstrate such expertise. In Google’s Update of Quality Rater Guidelines, raters are encouraged to:
“Look for information written by a person, not statistics or other machine-compiled information. News articles, Wikipedia articles, blog posts, magazine articles, forum discussions, and ratings from independent organizations can all be sources of reputation information. Look for independent, credible sources of information.”
If the website content is created by someone with a great online reputation (Bio, social media, backlinks, etc.), Google will rank that content higher than from someone with a bad or lower reputation.
What are the most important factors for Page Quality rating?
According to Google, these are the 5 most important factors for Page Quality rating:
- The Purpose of the Page
- Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness
- Main Content Quality and Amount
- Website Information/information about who is responsible for the content
- Website Reputation/reputation about who is responsible for the content
How can my website stay up-to-date?
Fear not Orlando web designers and Orlando business owners, here are some tips to stay compliant with the previous guidelines:
- Add a picture of your writers or contributors. It is sometimes difficult for users (and raters) to recognize someone by name, so it is a good practice to include pictures of your writers.
- Include a well-written and concise bio of your writers. Even more, you could include the option for in-depth bios on your website for those readers who would like to know more about this person’s background and expertise.
- And, while you are adding that bio we mentioned before, make sure to also put a link to your writer’s social media pages. This will help in building this person’s credibility not only for google, but for your readers and visitors as well.
- Pay attention, or have writers pay attention to their social media bios. If you have a site related to the healthcare industry and your contributors have jokes on their Facebook bios that will not help convey their professionalism and competence in the field. This advice, as expected, applies especially to LinkedIn profiles since this is considered a mostly professional platform.
Having quality content on your website is extremely important, and this is only achievable, if you have experts and reliable writers in your team. The previous tips will not only help you stay compliant and up-to-date with google standards, but it will attract visitors and potential clients.
Are you still looking for more Google news? Make sure you take a look at our previous article “What is Google’s Knowledge Graph?“.
Orlando Web Design Company
If you want to have excellent content on your website, make sure to contact us for a free consultation! We are an Orlando Web Design company with years of experience creating quality content for websites of all sizes.
