Google’s Search Quality Raters Guidelines: What You Need To Know

Learn about Google's Search Quality Raters Guidelines, how it impacts search results, and what you need to know about the concept of E-A-T.

What I'll be covering:

It's only a 168-page document. But as the name says it, TL;DR does the reading so you don't have to!
 
 If a basic guide is what you've been looking for, keep reading.

You'll learn what Google's Search Quality Raters Guidelines cover, its impact on search, and all you need to know about E-A-T:

Here we go!

The document outlines all the elements that should and need to be considered, and how a website should be rated, by that person.

 Basically stated; thousands of people are hired at Google to rate websites and make record of it's qualities or flaws across and amplitude of areas.

 What is most important to understand : a positive or negative rating by a rater will not directly impact your ranking. One could argue that their role is so much larger than that. They don't influence the rankings of the sites the rate. They influence the rankings of EVERY SITE.

Like most do, I pay attention to what is said and than make guesses on how certain tasks will be accomplished with success.
 

The most likely structure to make the feedback of ~10,000 quality raters actionable is to do it in the way that Google does best: algorithmically.

In the backend of the system, the raters are using a slider to assign values:

Example:
 if a site or group of sites are consistently given a high rating or better, the system will review ALL signal data from the site(s) to try and find commonality. The same is true for site(s) with low values.
 

As such, the system will produce:

So, while a Quality Rater does not impact an individual site’s ranking, they do impact the entire web.

When we look at areas the raters are told to look at, we're basically:

The guide states:

“As a Search Quality Rater, you will work on many different types of rating projects. The General Guidelines primarily cover Page Quality (PQ) rating and Needs Met (NM) rating; however, the concepts are also important for many other types of rating tasks.”

I won’t be looking at the tasks specifically here and will focus on the more important (from the context of this piece):

What do they mean?

The question that raters would be asking themselves in assessing it is:

How helpful and satisfying is this result?

That is all!
 
 During testing, a rater could visit a single page OR visit a search results page and rate every, single, result. What a job!

Either will send the signal to Google about the site structure, device, demographic, and location results differences, and I’m sure a number of other factors that apply to the grading of each result (there’s a reason they have more than 10,000 raters around the world).

This data will then be used to drive changes to improve the results to algorithmically determine which signals or signal combinations are common to the higher rankings results.

It’s important to note that as with the real world, the Needs Met rating does require decent Page Quality. In fact, the guidelines state it clearly:

“The Needs Met rating is based on both the query and the result.”

One can have a medium Needs Met with a low Page Quality, but it would be highly unlikely that they could get a high Needs Met rating.

After all, the user intent it’s satisfied if the searcher doesn’t trust the result.

By this, we are to consider queries with multiple possible meanings such as the following, from the examples they give:

When the rater is assigning a Needs Met score, they are to give more weight to pages satisfying higher intents.

This prevents:

And the weight given to each is based on the type of site and query (again … the similarity is uncanny).

The key ones noted in the guidelines are:

Your Money or Your Life (YMYL)

As Google words it, a YMYL site is one that:

“… potentially impact a person’s future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety.”

With YMYL sites, raters are directed to put more weight on E-A-T.

The guidelines categorize them as:

Most people don’t think of shopping when they think of YMYL … but it’s in there.

Content Sections

According to the guidelines, the sections of a website can be classified into three main categories:

Following their direction, understanding a webpage is quite simple.

The ease-of-access and volume of the Main Content play their parts in Page Quality calculations.

It’s what assists the rater value on not just whether the need is met, but also how easily supplemental content is accessed, should it be desired.

Before I continue, you need to understand one thing:

Say it with me one more time:

E-A-T is what the raters are looking for. Raters use E-A-T to assist them in how they are rating websites. It is in no way a part of any algorithm.

Here’s a tweet from Google’s Danny Sullivan that explains it well:

It is not part of the algorithm.

The goal is that if the raters use it to judge websites, and Google uses their ratings to adjust their algorithm, in the end, the algorithm will align with the E-A-T principles.

So, E-A-T can well be used as a guiding principle for design, content creation, and supporting external signals.

You can’t optimize for it specifically.

Without getting into too much detail, they are basically:

The expertise of the content creator. This is related only to the content of the page being judged, and not the site as a whole.

It does not have to be an author and the criteria are not set in stone.

When looking for information on lung cancer, an in-depth study on causes, impact, statistics, etc. from an important medical school or institution or government agency would likely get a high score.

If the searcher was looking for information on what’s it’s like to live with it, a personal account from a bank teller who’s partner lived with it for years would fulfill the Expertise criteria exceptionally.

It may be on an important site, or it may be an exceptional member of a forum answering questions.

It’s all about context and addressing with expertise, the need to be met.

The authority of the content is judged by the authority of the content itself as well as the domain.

In general, this would be based on external signals such as links and link quality, brand mentions, citations, etc. both to the content specifically, and the domain as a whole.

When thinking of authority I can’t help but think of a patent granted in 2015, Ranking Search Results Based On Entity Metrics.

In it, they discuss the following key metrics:

While there are certainly other characteristics, I find these helpful guides.

The trust of the content is judged again by the trust of the content specifically, as well as the trust of the domain.

Trust is similar to authority, but more pointed.

Where authority focuses more on the volume of quality references, trust focuses more on specific signals and sites.

An example they use in the guidelines is the BBB.

While they don’t talk about it being used as a positive signal, they do note that a bad rating based on a significant volume of users could be used as a negative.

Takeaway

If you’re just getting your feet wet, or just looking for a different point of view, I hope you’ve found this helpful.

I’ve tried to avoid getting into strategies around the subject, as that is relative to each niche, starting point, and current E-A-T.

This is an important document. It tells us where Google wants to go, and they’re throwing a lot of resources at it.

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Talk to you soon, you lovely humans you!

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