Google Updates their Search Quality Rater's Guidelines
After a year Google has updated their Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines, which you can download a fresh copy here:
The handbook of guidelines is the same one that Google gives to their team of human site quality raters with instructions on how to rank the search results based on the quality of sites that are returned for a query from both a desktop and mobile perspective.
There are many that will argue for and against the importance of these guidelines. We here at SEN highly recommend taking the time (once a year or so) to give them a read. It's a 164-page book written by Google describing exactly what they feel are high quality web pages and search results. This is not the holy grail of SEO. It is, however, the foundational guidelines for building a trust worthy and high quality website.
Within the updated guidelines Google spent time focused on the reputation of the creator of a website or webpage, which is a very interesting change. You can find details on page 14 of the guide lines. Google went into detail on how a rater was supposed to research the expertise of the creator of the article or website. It's a solid reason to look at your business (brand) as it's own entity and to work on growing it's expertise in your industry.
Google also redefined what low quality is considered, built out the 'your money your life' pages, added a new section about sensationalized titles that fall into the spammy click bait category and asked raters to evaluate the beneficial purpose of a webpage. However, the more we tried to pull out the most important aspects of this document and explain them - to save you the time of reading it - the more it became obvious that there are just too many. Again, our advice is to set aside a few hours in August and give this document a read. It's SO worth your time to see what quality looks like from Google's perspective!
However, if you'd rather just see what's been updated them Jennifer Slegg did a solid write up here.
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