Google’s quality guidelines- here’s what you need to know

Introduction

Whether you’re a small business owner, or someone that works within digital marketing, it’s important to keep your online marketing knowledge up to scratch.

As most of us already know, when it comes to Google’s algorithm, things don’t stay the same for very long at all.

That’s to say the seo methods that you may have used for a long time, well they may simply become outdated. So, this means that most of us will spend ample amounts of time reading seo news websites for help and advice.

And sometimes this also means taking advice from respected seo agencies websites. Yet, we pose this question to you- why not obtain advice straight from the horse’s mouth?

What we mean by this, is if Google was to publish a document which provided us with some insight into how they rate a company’s website, well that would be a pretty useful document to read, right?

You’re not wrong!

That is why countless seo consultants will be spending many hours studying “Google’s quality guidelines”.

This is a document published by Google that was issued to quality assessors. Yet, as you can imagine is also pretty useful to us SEO’s.

You can follow the link to read the PDF format of this document.

What can us SEO’s learn from this document?

Well, one thing is for sure, you need to stick the kettle on before you start having a read. That’s because there is useful pieces of advice, yet as you would expect it’s quite a lengthy document, and one which provides many examples.

Now, that you have a coffee firmly planted into your mitts, let’s start understanding why this document was created in the first place.

This document has been created for Google’s team of quality assessors. Which are kind of like judges of how good a websites content marketing actually is.

Yet, you have to remember that the “judges” verdicts will not have any direct impact on that particular websites rankings.

As you would expect there are simply far too many websites out there for an assessor to sit down and manually review every single one.

Yet, with that said, it is our opinion that Google uses these assessors to evaluate various websites so that they can further fine tune their own algorithm. So you got it, its kind of like testing how good their own algorithm is.

Which kind of makes sense, that’s because if the algorithm now has AI technology (RankBrain), and is now making judgements on its own, well you would naturally want to keep it in check every now and then.

So, as you can imagine, somewhere at Google HQ will presumably be set of boffins which will be comparing what the algorithm calculated a websites quality score to be, and what the bunch of assessors thought.

And yes, you got it, when there’s enough data to say that the algorithm needs to be enhanced an update could possibly be rolled-out.

All interesting stuff.

How does Google measure the quality of a website?

It has been stated that Google ranks the quality of content marketing on a five-tier scale. The scale therefore reads as follows, lowest, low, medium, high and also the highest.

Sounds rather simple, right?

Well it does, but how Google, or should we say the quality assessors arrive at this verdict is rather complex.

For example, the document references “E-A-T” countless times throughout the entire document. This acronym stands for “Expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.

Now even though the document cites many examples throughout the long winded article, as you can imagine Google’s not going to state exactly how the algorithm works.

Otherwise this document would be in the hands of all those SEO agencies that want to cut corners, and fool Google’s algorithm.

Yet, with that said it does provide us with some pearls of wisdom, like for example the E.A.T model makes us believe that Google’s algorithm is possibly giving more weight to articles when it knows a bit more about the author.

This then had our cogs turning, and this had us thinking could the expertise of the author be further enhanced via entity building?

For example, if Google’s algorithm knew more about the author, could this mean the website would rank more highly? We think that this a ranking signal that could increase in terms of its importance.

For example, if someone was an expert on a subject, say SEO for example, would the algorithm increase the ranking of that page if the algorithm could validate the knowledge of the author somehow? For example, the author may have listed a long career working in SEO on a linkedin page, or even has a separate website that details the authors extensive career history for example.

Exciting possibilities this document alludes to.

The other attributes being authoritativeness, and trustworthiness- well we could only guess that at this current time your conventional forms of backlinking to a website would indicate this.

So, for example, a website with 100 backlinks from other trusted websites would mean that page could also be deemed as a high authority and trustworthy page.

Focus more on the “beneficial purpose”

Okay, so it will come as no surprise when we say the quality of a business’s content marketing matters.

This notion is as old as the hills. Yet what is confirmed is the author must place their focus and energy on making the content marketing valuable to the user.

This makes sense, as most seo agencies now know that if your create content marketing for pure seo benefit, well that work is then set-up to fail.

To conclude

The document doesn’t really inform us of any new insights that would drastically change how most white hat agencies implement their work.

Yet, for us we think the document does provide somewhat of a glimpse into the not too distant future.

What we mean is we think pages will become ranked more heavily on how authoritative that author is, and their knowledge inline with what is known about the entities described.

Which basically means we can see a future with less reliance on backlinks as the primary ranking factor, and more on how much does the author know about what they are talking about?

Will behavioural signals then become even more important as the voting factor as to who gets to the top spot? Well we think so.