Google Quality Rating - Part 1 - Purpose, YMYL, and Content Types

In the last podcast , we went through machine learning the basics of how it works and how Google use machine learning to improve their algorithms . As part of that , I briefly mentioned the Google quality raters , who are a set of people I think there's about 16,000 plus people around the world who are used by Google to rate the quality of individual webpages .

In this episode we'll start to look at the Google quality rate guidelines in more detail and the work of the Google quality raters . To make it easier for me , I'll say raters , I mean Google quality raters , and guidelines will be the Google quality raters . First things first , some very basic things .

The raters themselves when they rate a website , they are not actually ever going to affect that individual website itself from their rating .

So if they go to a website and they don't like it and they rate it really low , it's not going to have a negative effect on that website in the Google search results straight off , because Google appreciate that different raters are going to look at different websites differently , and so what they do is they take an aggregate score , so they will disregard people

who give extremely low ones compared to the average , and they'll also disregard extremely people who rate it extremely highly compared to the average . They're looking to find the average ratings for a website and , again , even when they've taken the average , that average isn't going to affect the individual website directly .

What these ratings are for is to train a machine learning model so that model can then get an example of here's a whole load of sites that are considered low quality , medium quality , high quality and all the graduations in between , so that it can then build a model from those ratings to then apply to other websites . So yeah , the actual rate is themselves .

So if your site got rated , it's not going to have an immediate impact by the effects of those individual rate as quality thoughts on you . So let's now move to the guidelines themselves . I'll put a link to where you can find a copy of these guidelines in the show notes . Now the guidelines themselves .

It's quite a big document 176 pages of quite dense information , plus links to many examples of websites and content that it refers to . So it's quite a lot to go through , but it's split into three separate parts .

The first part is page quality rating guideline , and this is this part explains how users , raters , should actually define what is an isn't a quality page and the kind of things they need to look for . Part two is understanding search user needs .

So this is partly of looking at the query the search query that these results are being shown for , and seeing whether the pages match the search intent of the users . And then the third part is the needs met rating guideline and that's where the raters will say whether the actual website , how well it , met the needs of the users .

So it covers three different parts , but today we'll start looking at the page quality rating guidelines , which is the larger part really of the guidelines . It's probably about half the document and we'll start to look at that in the first instance . We won't cover the whole lot today , but we'll start to go into the beginnings of it .

So the goal of page quality rating is to evaluate how well a page achieves its purpose . The first thing a raters has to do is then to understand the purpose of the web page , so why the web page was created . Google says most pages are created to be helpful for people .

So as long as the page is helpful for someone , then it's got a beneficial purpose and that's a good thing .

However , some pages those created merely to make money , with little or no effort to help people these are deemed as bad pages , of low quality pages , and especially those that would create a harm , are used to inject malware or viruses or to misinform people .

It's really important here , clearly that your pages are created to help people and beneficial reason and aren't just made to make money , and especially you don't want your pages to do anything that might be considered harmful to users .

Now , an interesting note is , let's say explicitly in the document as long as the page is created to help people , we will not consider any particular page purpose or type to be higher quality than another . For example , encyclopedia pages are not necessarily higher quality than humor pages .

So this is a really key thing to say that they're not differentiating against particular types of sites or pages , as long as the content is designed to be helpful and beneficial to people and not to cause harm . Next , erator is told they've got to determine whether the topic of the web page is what's known as your money or your life topic , a YMYL topic .

Now , this is important to Google because these topics have a high risk of harm , because these topics can really impact people's health , financial stability or the safety of people or their welfare or the well-being of society . And these topics they call your money , your life or YMYL .

So some examples of YMYL are health and safety , so anything medical or anything that could encourage people to take any kind of particular risks with themselves . Physically . Financial , so anything which might encourage people to make financial decisions that could harm their financial situation , such as bad financial advice .

Society , so anything that could negatively impact people or groups of people , public interest , public institutions , that kind of thing . And then they've got a broad other , which is many topics that could hurt people or negatively impact welfare or the well-being of society .

So , with these YMYL sites , if the Rater determines that the topic of a site or a web page is one of these , then they have to hold the site and the content of the site and the creator of the site to a much higher level of scrutiny and accuracy than sites and pages which are not considered YMYL .

So , essentially , if you're in one of these topics or have classified as one of them , then you really really have got to be able to level above any other kind of topic . Now , google said that most content online is not YMYL . So for many people most people then yeah , it's not going to apply .

But if you think you are in a YMYL niche or getting close to one , then you really have got to up your game and take that into account . If you're not sure whether your site or niche is YMYL , then there's a couple of questions that Google here Give to their Raters who are similarly having trouble deciding .

So one would , a careful person , seek out experts or highly trusted sources to prevent harm , could even mine it in accuracy , cause harm ? If yes , then the topic is likely YMYL . And then , secondly , if the specific topic one that most people will be content with only casually consulting their friends about , if yes , the topic is likely not YMYL .

So again , look at it in your own terms and think Is this something where I would go looking for expert advice on and think really hard before making a decision on it ? That's like to be YMYL . If it's something where you're never really going to consult people on it , so an easy decision , or it's a cheap decision , then you're not like to be YMYL .

Okay , so the rate is now worked at the purpose of the page and they've made a decision on whether the content on the page is YMYL or just normal content . The next thing they have to do is to classify the different types of content on the page and that's split into three parts .

Those parts are the main content , the supplementary content and advertisements , slash , monetization . Okay , so let's look at each one individually . So , main content what is main content ? Well , that's any part of the page which directly helps the page achieve its purpose .

So this could be the text , images , videos , features like calculators and games , and it's the content created by the site creator that helps this particular page achieve its purpose . So it's generally going to be stuff that's specific to that page .

It can include information that's not immediately visible on the page , that might be in tabs , so say , a tab that you have to click to see customer reviews . That would be considered still part of the main content .

And the main content also includes the title that's visible at the top of the page , so not the HTML title , but the headline title that a page may or may not have . It should have one . It's obviously good practice to have one , because they specifically call it out here and that title should be helpful . That summarizes what the main content on the page is .

Next is supplementary content , and that's anything on the page which does not directly help the page achieve its purpose but is in itself , useful . Commonly this would be things like navigation , your head or your footer , and anything within that's sort of common amongst other pages .

So if you think about your own websites , you don't have a template that you use and there's certain elements that appear on every page or on multiple pages but aren't specifically related to the content of the actually the main content of the page that they're repeated elsewhere . So , yeah , that's the supplementary content .

The third thing that raters are asked to identify adds . Now Google are clear that ads are not necessarily bad and that they can count to a good user experience and that it's normal for many websites to need to monetize their content , to pay for the content . So that's why they're saying that it's expensive to create and expensive to maintain .

So they do appreciate that it is a necessary part of running a website for many websites . They are also clear that advertisements aren't just banner ads or block ads in your face ads . They also are any kind of monetization via affiliate programs . So links to other products and other websites may be affiliate links and they're asked to identify those as well .

So we've reached the point now where a rater has been asked to understand the purpose of a page and whether it's beneficial or harmful , whether the page is your money , your life topic or not , and they've identified all the content on the page and determined whether it's main content , supplemental content or advertisement content .

But at this point they're still not being asked to classify the contents of the page . The next step is for the rater to look at the wider website in the content creators , and we'll cover that in the next episode . Thanks for listening . I really appreciate it . Please subscribe , share . It really helps . Seo is not that hard .

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