Google`s Quality Rater Guidelines Leaked

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Someone at Google has leaked quality rater guidelines. The document is full of information that is highly desirable to anyone trying to rank a site high in Google's results pages. This article will take a close look at the guidelines and cull the most important points for your use.

Document Review

The document circulated on private forums but was made public by Search Engine Land.

• Download leaked Google quality rater guidelines (44 pages)

This document details how Google quality raters score pages, treat spam and classify search queries. It has screen shots of Google's "raters hubs" and forums, some of which we'll feature here.

This is a review of the most crucial and useful points from this document. If you are in the SEO game I highly recommend that you download this file, put it into a safe place and read it at your own pace.

Raters only rate "pages" and not entire domains. The document refers to "landing pages" as opposed to domains. If a page is excluded by a rater, it is only excluded for a specific query, not for all queries. There are people like Matt Cutts who analyze sites on the domain level, but Quality Raters of the lowest ranks do not have this responsibility (at least, that's what I learned from the document).

Here's an interesting leaked video of the inside of the raters hub. http://www.searchbistro.com/secretlab.html

Importance of Country to Relevance

This is a key factor in Google's scoring system. Throughout the entire document, raters are presented with example queries that specify: [query], language (country).

For example "[camera], English (US)" or "[camera], Russian (Russia)."

If the page in question provides relevant information to the query, but isn't relevant to the country the user is in, then the page may be discounted.

You will be given a Task language and a Task location for each query-page Task. You must evaluate each Task in the context of its language and location.

In many cases, when there is a mismatch between the Task Location and the country domain of the page, you will need to lower the rating for the page.

Next: Researching and Understanding the Query >>
 

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