Every SEO dreams of being a fly on the wall at the GooglePlex. We want exact details on what to do and how to do it - directly from Google. Not too much to ask right?! Well, we were given a short-lived peek into 'What Google Wants' mid-October when the industry was buzzing about a marketer named PotPieGirl. Maybe you heard the news - maybe you didn't.

PotPieGirl announced on her blog that she had discovered a document that was probably Google's most recent quality guidelines for their search results raters. However, I'm getting a little ahead of myself here. So, to avoid any confusion let me start at the beginning...

Google contracts several companies worldwide to employ people to manually review the quality of Google's search results compared to a quality guidelines document they're given.These people manually rate the quality of the list of results and the types of results displayed on a page for a given query. They also click through to the pages that rank well and rate the quality of those URLs as results for that search. It's a solid way to manually review results.

On the flip side - knowing exactly what results Google is striving toward for industry specific search queries would be like stumbling onto a goldmine for some people. Now all of a sudden, there was an Internet marketer claiming that she had this document and was sharing it publicly.

This leaked copy of the Rater's Guidelines was apparently a Google doc that was publicly shared on accident and she happened to stumble across it. As you can imagine, this document spread like wildfire and anyone linking to it or republishing it were politely asked to take it down. Within days, it was no longer accessible anywhere online. Luckily, we took the opportunity to study it before it disappeared permanently.

After the experts here at Planet Ocean had read these guidelines it was clear that unfortunately it wasn't going to tell us something completely new that we ...