Google Revises ‘Quality Rater’ Guidelines, Once Again!

Yet, again, Google has revised its content quality guidelines for contractual reviewers. Google works with 10,000 ‘quality rating professionals’ to assess content quality for its search engine results

Quality raters now have their hands on the latest edition of Google’s ‘content quality reviewing guidelines.’ At 164 pages, this is one of the many revisions that Google has made to these guidelines. The first set of rules was published by Google circa 2015.

Google has an army of 10,000 ‘content quality reviewers’ globally, for content evaluation. Google issues reviewers real search queries to review. Post that, Google expects its ‘quality raters’ to rate the quality of content. This is content generated as a search result of the user’s query.

Jennifer Slegg, who has spoken at SMX Advanced confirms that there are several key changes in this latest guidebook. She has been writing and observing these changes from the genesis of the ‘quality rater’ guidebook.

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Key Changes in the Latest Google ‘Quality Rater Guidebook’

Rating contributors

Google has strictly asked its ‘content reviewers’ to check not just for the quality of content but also the quality of the contributors. Google is of the opinion that irrespective of the website’s reputation, the reputation of the contributors may jeopardize a website. Websites are trying to inculcate rich content but their author personas appear lackluster.

Websites need to be careful about accepting content contributions from writers who do not work for the website.

Ranking as per reputation

Google wants to rank pages higher if the content creators have a big reputation. They want to create a richer experience for the user reading search results. Google believes that content coming from someone with a bad reputation detests its users.

This also means that good writers with bad bios need to hone up on working on their reputation. Google will apply these rules not just for content in text, but also for content in video and social media.

Google’s immediate critical goal seems to make content appear without the adulteration of conspiracies or fake news.

Killing Clickbait

As a part of its war against Clickbait, Google has asked its ‘quality raters’ to filter sensationalized titles or haphazard content. Google has been observing a refined format of spam recently. The analysis of their quality raters will enable Google to develop algorithms to counter Clickbait.

Meaningful Content

Google believes that websites are creating content for Google. Sites are packing their content with keywords just so that they organically rank higher in search results. Such content is not useful for the user. All sites want is for the user to somehow buy what they are selling.

Google has specifically asked its quality raters to hand-pick chunks of content that are not beneficial to its users. Google may eventually plan to eliminate such instances from its search results.

Hence, content writers, SEO professionals or websites need to take precaution while developing new content or editing the existing one.

How Does Google Plan to Apply ‘Quality Rater’ Results?

Quality raters cannot make changes to Google’s result data directly. Their inputs will help Google optimize their current and future algorithms. Google wants to automatically rank pages. Over a period of time, Google’s algorithm will affect both, low ranked reviewed pages and un-reviewed pages.

Also Read: Have Facebook and Google Done Enough to Restore Advertiser Trust?

What does this mean for the Content Community?

Content Creators

Content creators should focus on writing rich content that users can benefit from and delve deep. Content writers should educate themselves with emerging capabilities of writing in order to deliver potent content. They should not only focus on keywords but try and focus on quality content that helps their readers.

Marketing professionals

Marketing professionals need to be very cautious before initiating marketing campaigns. They need to leverage technologies like programmatic advertising to direct their campaigns towards the right audience set.

Marketing professionals will always find it handy to know the best Ad Stack available to promote advertisements.

SEO Professionals

The only thing that SEO’s should keenly focus on is optimizing pages with legit methodologies. They should collaborate with content creators and find out the best possible ways of creating content that readers find intriguing.

Also Read: Not Social Media, But SEO: Customers Still Search for Businesses Through Search Engines