Google Raters Updates Leaked - How to Make the Grade

In the same month that Google's Webmaster Guidelines were prematurely published and subsequently taken down, Google's Rating Guidelines caused a stir when they were leaked online by the same marketer, PotPieGirl, that released a copy of them back in October of 2011.

The document, dated June 22, 2012, is 161 pages and largely unchanged from the original that we reported on in-depth in Google's Leaked Quality Guidelines Unveiled and Simplified. However, there is a new section that explains how raters should evaluate page quality and they're definitely worth a look.

Page Quality Grades

The new guidelines explain that each landing page is given an overall grade ranging from Highest to Lowest and also broken down into different components and evaluated on each individually. The grades are based on the main content of the page, the relevance of the supplementary content (links to related information, or internal links), page layout and the advertisements.

Pages with spun material, spammy ads and content containing only links will be given the lowest grades. While those with thoughtfully placed, relevant links that focus on quality content will receive the highest. Google also instructs raters to ignore the search query when handing down the quality evaluations. Here's a screen shot of a part of the instructions.

An interesting thing to note is that the type of page being evaluated does not automatically mean it's of higher or lower quality. The rater does not hand out quality evaluations based on whether or not the material is newsworthy; rather the rater is asked how well the page meets its own objectives.

For instance, in mainstream media if you were evaluating the New York Times vs. PerezHilton (Hollywood Blogger extraordinaire) there's no debate that ...