Google quality raters guidelines, here come new indications on quality and YMYL
More details on the category of YMYL content, clarifications on what low-quality pages means, simplification interventions for some definitions and minor corrections: a year after the last update, Google has published new guidelines for Search Quality Raters, the Quality Rater Guidelines that, as usual, they also offer important insights to those who try to understand what are the roads to building pages and content in tune with what Google wants to place higher in search results.
Quality Rater Guidelines, Google updates the document after one year
The previous update of these guidelines dates back to October 2020, and on that occasion Google brought the document to a total of 175 pages, without modifying the content very clearly. This time, however, despite the reduction to 172 pages total, the interventions seem more substantial, because they concern the content that falls into the YMYL category, the explanations on the pages of inferior quality and in general everything that regards the way in which Google tries to estimate the characteristics of the EAT of the pages.
The 5 news of the October 2021 update
The update, dated October 19, 2021 and available online at the URL https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterhub.com//en/searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf, introduces significant changes and clarifications on issues also useful to the SEO; specifically, as reported in the changelog at the end of the document, are the 5 areas in which Google’s work has been focused:
- Expanded the definition of the YMYL “People groups” subcategory (to cover more groups of people who might feel marginalized or attacked by others).
- Updated the guide on how to search for information about the reputation of websites and content creators.
- Renovated and updated the “Lowest Page Quality” section, with examples reorganized and updated to reflect the new structure.
- Simplified the definition of “Upsetting-Offensive” to remove redundancy with the Lowest Page Quality section.
- Minor general changes, such as updated screenshots and Urls, text and examples for consistency; obsolete examples removed; correct typing errors and so on; in addition, in many of the cases where the word “users” was used, the word “people” is now present insteadBut these variations don’t really change the context of what the guidelines say.
Several experts have already analyzed the changes, and in particular Lily Ray and Jennifer Slegg have highlighted the following crucial points.
What changes in the quality rater guidelines
The first major news concerns the extension of the definition of Google in the Your Money Your Life category for the section about “People groups”, which now refers to information on “age, caste, disability, ethnicity, gender identity and expression, immigration status, nationality, race, religion, sex/gender, sexual orientation, veteran status, victims of a major violent event and their relatives or any other characteristic associated with systemic discrimination or marginalisation”.
We can interpret this change as a sign of Google’s intention to have all the pages that attack the victims of a major violent event and their families evaluated with lower quality (as happened in the United States and not only as a result of terrorist attacks, with many pages following conspiracy theories designed specifically to attack the victims or their families)and to counter the emergence in SERP of pages that discriminate against any possible group.
In addition, the change also shows that Google is working to expand its knowledge of YMYL content to include various identities, socioeconomic conditions and more, and this implies (and reminds us) that EAT is essential when publishing content related to one of the above groups of people.
Greater emphasis on reputation (including content creators)
The other major update front of the current version of the guidelines concerns guidance on finding the reputation of sites and, above all, content creators: to Google, in fact, it is important that evaluators consider the reputation of both the website in general and the person who is creating the content on the page they are evaluating, inviting them to deepen the information by searching “what other people and experts have to say” on the site and on the author of the main content.
In this sense, Google suggests some ways in which quality raters can search for information about the reputation of content creators on the site; for example, “user reviews are often useful reputable sources for websites that offer products or services” and evaluators may “consider a large number of detailed and reliable positive user reviews as evidence of a positive reputation”, while searching for individual authors or creators of content “biographies and articles with biographical information may be a useful source of reputation”.
Obviously, reputational sources may vary depending on the type of activity, topic or website – curiously, this section removes the mention to the Pulitzer Prize (introduced in the September 2019 update) as a symbol of prestige, replaced by a more generic reference to journalistic awards – and “customer reviews may be useful for researching the reputation of online stores, but much less for medical information websites” (and probably of all YMYL contents, whose EAT level is calculated differently).
How to recognize a lower quality page
Google has made significant changes to update the section of guidelines dedicated to the calculation of Lowest Page Quality, the bad page quality, and in particular has expanded definitions and provided specific examples of what it means for a page to cause damage, spreading hate or disinformation to users.
In the introduction to the definition of pages of bad quality there are now three specific indications for quality raters, which must:
- Assessing the true purpose of the page – whether the website or the page have a harmful purpose or are designed to deceive people with respect to the true purpose, should be rated as bad.
- Assess the potential damage of the page. Websites or pages that are harmful to people or society, unreliable or containing spam, as specified in these guidelines, should receive the lowest score.
- Perform a PQ (page quality) evaluation based on how well the page achieves its purpose using the criteria outlined in the guidelines: pages that do not achieve their purpose should receive the lowest score.
What are the very low contents according to Google
In the other paragraphs of the section, then, Google includes more descriptions of the types of bad pages that evaluators might encounter, going into detail and adding specific references to doxxing examples or even specific instructions on how to help someone commit murder, as well as content that contains offensive or dehumanizing stereotypes, harmful contents that can be easily refuted by widely accepted facts and groundless theories that are not based on facts or evidence.
Also interesting is the paragraph dedicated to spammy pages (previously called “pages that do not reach their purpose”), which are those created deliberately without Main Content or with incomprehensible Mcs, or pages violated, ruined or spammed, as already defined by Google’s webmaster guidelines (toward which there is an explicit reference).
At the end of this particular section, in fact, new notation appears that signals the quality rater to use their own judgment based on guidelines, rather than their personal opinions, because “even if the content is controversial does not necessarily mean that it is of lower quality” – a recommendation already present since the 2019 update, which focused precisely on the need to provide objective and non-biased assessments.
In a later step, another brand new section appears in which Google talks about EAT and the reputation of the site and the creator of the content, always referring to low or bad quality pages. Reputation and EAT “are some of the most important considerations in evaluating the quality of the page”, say the guidelines, “and if the EAT of a page is sufficiently low, people may not or should not use the content of the page”especially for YMYL topics.
More precisely, “if a YMYL page is highly inexperienced or highly authoritative for its purpose, it should be considered unreliable and rated as bad”, because lowest is the level “appropriate for pages that are so lacking in competence or authority as to be unreliable”, while “a page without expertise or adequate authority should be rated Low”.
Google invites you to use the lowest rating if the website and content creators “have an extremely negative reputation, to the point that many people would consider unreliable the website or website”. Moreover, pages of bad quality are to be considered those “harmful for the people or the society, unreliable or spam” and in such cases do not matter neither the (eventual) competence nor the topic of the contents.
The search for upsetting and offensive content
The latest update of the quality raters guidelines has completely revised the definition of upsetting/offensive content to make it shorter and concise.
Among the novelties, evaluators must mark content that could be disruptive or offensive from the point of view of a typical user in their locality “keeping in mind that people of all ages, gender, race, religion and political affiliation use the Internet to understand the world and other points of view”, possibly marking it as “Not for Everyone” (Not-for-Everyone) i “content that may be unpleasant to some people in the area (for example, content that may not be appropriate in a public space, in a professional environment or at school)”.
What Search Quality Raters Guidelines are for
In a post Danny Sullivan, Public Search Liaison, explained the meaning of these updates, which serve to ensure that the guidelines “work as expected”; even the apparently minor changes, “as the language update for clarity and the organization update” of the information, actually help to clarify “what constitutes content of bad quality and give an updated and modernized guide on the search of the reputation of websites“.
According to Sullivan, search quality raters guidelines are over 170 pages long which, summarized in a sentence, “help to ensure that the Search returns relevant results from the most reliable sources available“.
The quality of information is at the center of Search, reiterates the public voice of Google, and the systems work fundamentally to bring out high quality information: in particular, the guidelines help the quality raters to determine whether a planned improvement meets this objective, providing a clear and uniform definition that everyone uses to assess the results they see.
More specifically, high-quality information is “content that demonstrates competence, authority and reliability on a topic, or EAT for short”. For example, he continues, a health site with medical content and produced by a medical institution would have a high level of what many would consider competence, authority and reliability.
Why to study the Search Quality Raters Guidelines
We have to remember a crucial element: the quality raters evaluations do not directly affect the rankings (as Google has clarified several times, even in the document itself), but still provide feedback that help Google to improve its algorithms (they are in fact used to inform future updates of the algorithm) and, above all, open a glimpse of the many factors that Google considers when assessing the quality of content.
Keeping an eye on the evolution of the guidelines can therefore also help our website optimization activity, because it offers us a way to learn more about the orientation of Google on which websites and Web pages deserve a high ranking and – with reference to the very latest changes – which should be categorized as bad.
Precisely in this regard, now the guidelines are much clearer in defining exactly what is a page of very low quality, simplifying the evaluation of quality raters with references easier to follow.
Indications about EAT and reputation
Another very delicate focus is dedicated to EAT parameters and the reputation of sites and authors: for a long time experts have been stressing how these factors are important for the success of a site and that Google is actively working on algorithms in this direction, and the modifications of the Quality Rater Guidelines confirm these concepts.
What we see is that Google is putting the emphasis not only on the website itself, but also on the reputation of content creators for the site: this means that we have to worry (also) about how others on the Web perceive us, our business and our content creators and one way to begin to take care of these aspects is to create more informative biographies for content authors on the site or on other parts of the Web.
In general, as said, we can understand the guidelines for quality raters as a way by which Google communicates the constituent elements of an excellent website, and reputation and EAT parameters are definitely among these: it is hard to know specifically what their weight is on the ranking, but surely Google is trying to make sure that its algorithms identify EAT and reputation, thanks to the support of human evaluators.
