Quality Raters Guidelines and Their Connection with Ranking Signals

Many of the SEOs talk about Broad Core Update in Google’s Quality Raters Guidelines. In this scenario, you may wonder if quality rater guidelines tell something about Google’s algorithm or if it is a way to teach the third party contractors the methods to evaluate the websites.

In reality, quality rater guidelines tell us about E.A.T (expertise, authority and trustworthiness). In other words, the success of a website is mainly dependent on the expertise, authority or trustworthiness of that site, according to what many in the SEO industry believe. Hence, it is quite logical that the sites that lack these attributes are most likely to suffer after an update in the Google’s algorithm.

Author biographies

Quality Rater Guidelines also ask quality raters to check the author biographies to make sure that the authors are expert. They also check what credentials the authors have and what awards they have achieved. This way, Google tells the quality raters about the ways to verify the credibility of authors.

The response to these guidelines by SEOs was that they started treated author biography as a major ranking signal. Many of the SEOs have cited lack of the author bio as a major reason for loss of ranking in Google’s Webmaster Help Forum.

Quality Raters Guidelines do not talk about ranking signals

Quality Rater Guidelines is basically a document that gives instructions to the third party raters about reviewing experiments to algorithm. And these guidelines do not talk anything about ranking signals. This document tells non-expert people just about the way to review a site.

Quality Rater Guidelines teaches about the ways to rate

It is wrong to think about Quality Rater Guidelines as an insight into the Google’s Algorithm. In reality, this document gives an insight about Google’s description of a quality website. Quality Rater Guidelines do not talk about the ranking signals.

Google just wants raters to check the quality of a site in order to evaluate whether a Google update is working properly or not.

Quality Rater Guidelines is not an SEO manual

Referring to the Quality Rater Guidelines is not a way to know about the working of Google’s Algorithm. And if this document is used for this purpose, it can lead to erroneous conclusions. Although rater guidelines tell us about how to build a high quality website, there is no explanation about the ranking signals in these guidelines.

No need for the optimization of a website for quality raters

After looking at the guidelines in Quality Rater Guidelines, many of the SEOs have started their websites according to what is explained in the guidelines. In literal meaning, they are actually considering these guidelines as ranking signals.

But as mentioned above, these guidelines do not provide an insight about what Google Algorithm does. Here is what John Mueller has explained about the Quality Rater Guidelines.

“Essentially our quality raters, what they do is when teams at Google make improvements to the algorithm, we’ll try to test those improvements.

So what will happen is, we’ll send the quality raters a list of search results pages with a version with that change and without that change, and they’ll go through and see like which of these results are better and why are they better.

And to help them evaluate those two, we have the quality raters guidelines.”