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.”

Grounding some Myths about Social Media

Information technology is a consistently changing discipline that requires a person to be versatile in order to be successful. We can take social media as an example here. Social networks, at the time of their inception, usually offer a connection between people. Then they usually start injecting the features that give businessmen some help to find their potential customers. Apart from this shift, social media sites often undergo upgrades like algorithmic changes which are usually made to ensure compatibility with search engines.

With this transforming nature, it is not uncommon for the myths about social media to surface. It may be due to the fact that update is usually a bad notion for internet community. These myths are only for the comforting purposes. What’s unfortunate here is that digital marketers are often found confused when their clients ask questions regarding these myths with such a belief if these were true.

Some very common myths about social media are answered below.

What happened to free social media for businesses?

Many clients ask this question hoping to get a justification of social media marketing cost. The truth is that social media marketing was never free. It’s not an SEO feature that marketers would work on as a part of their Indianapolis SEO strategy. You ask for the social media marketing for your business, it will come at a price. Social media marketing teams don’t work for free.

Social media can’t be measured

Of course social media can be measured. Every reputed social media platform has its own analytics that provides traffic information in the form of graphs and bars. Moreover, there are paid tools available that help in measuring social media marketing status.

Leads from social media can’t be converted into buyers

It is an absolutely wrong notion. You need to target the specific audience that show interest in the type of product or service you sell. With the help of advanced analytics available, you can look into the buying habit of people in your marketing domain.

A little piece of advice is that you should pay attention to the audience before signing up for a paid advertisement. Before starting your advertising campaign on social media, get latest information about the market trends in your domain and check for its compatibility with your product, your business reputation and your marketing efforts.

Existing consumers do not interact with social media

This concept might have been true for a time when devices with internet weren’t introduced. Now, every person with an internet browsing facility at hand at least takes a look at his/her social profile and friends circle. Hence, you can continue with your social media campaign without worrying about still-existent tinier minority that doesn’t like to interact with others using social platforms.

Social media marketing involves advertising on every platform

No, the social media marketing involves marketing only on suitable platform. If your advertisement isn’t a video message, it would be wrong to adjust its link on YouTube. The advertisement that involves text has to be placed on the platforms which are made to display text as the main content, e.g. Twitter and LinkedIn.