Google Quality Rating - Part 4 - Lowest Quality Content

So in the previous three episodes , we covered the foundations of the quality rating process how to determine a page's core purpose , how to discover more about the website and the content creators of the page , the topic of the content and what the key considerations needed to be to take into account when rating a page .

Now we're at the meat of the process actually rating pages . The process will now walk us through the different rating types , from lowest , low , medium , high and highest , in that order , which suggests that raters are encouraged to rate from the bottom up , having to discount the negative ratings before moving on to considering

if a page should get a more positive rating . The lowest quality rating is definitely the one that is the biggest first order to get over , and it has a lot of detail about what constitutes a low quality page . Indeed , the guide spends more pages on defining lowest quality content than all the other possible rating levels added together .

So let's look in detail now at what Google determines , in their opinion , makes the lowest quality content . So , to start , the guide talks about what the different types of lowest quality pages are and it groups them into three broad categories , which are harmful , untrustworthy and spammy .

Now , a site can be in one or more of these categories , but obviously I think if you've reached one , basically that's it . You're going to have the lowest level that you can .

But these types go in terms of harmful and this is stuff that's been discussed in the other podcasts that's harmful to the self or other individuals , harmful to specified groups , like defamatory or encouraging people to harm other groups , and harmful to misleading information .

So stuff that's just plain wrong and if people follow that advice then they're going to come to harm or financial loss . The second thought is untrustworthy web pages .

So these where they have untrustworthy characteristics , like pages which have a deceptive purpose or design , or pages that are designed to manipulate people into doing things that benefit the website owners rather than the actual user themselves , which can also cause harm to themselves and others . And the third one is spammy web pages .

Now , these are ones which , have you know , the Google would say cover their web spam guidelines , which is covered in separate documents . Examples include like sort of deliberately hacked pages , defaced pages , spammed pages , pages created with no main content or just gibberish , so anything that's really really unhelpful like that .

An interesting caveat that they do add after giving us these three groups is that just because content is controversial , one-sided or putting or distasteful , it might not necessarily meet the criteria to be lowest .

So it's really important to sort of go through the guidelines in detail before applying a lowest ranking , just in case , like this content doesn't actually meet that it might actually be higher than it appears at first instance . So let's look at harmful to self or other individuals .

Examples of the content like this would be where the content incites violence towards other people , where it makes serious death threats or realistic sounding threats , doxing people . So exposing information about people so that they can then incite harassment from other people towards them . How to make bombs or commit violent acts in an easy way .

Advocating or glorifying violence and atrocities and disparaging the victims of these atrocities . Depicting or promoting information that facilitates or leads to serious harm to people , so things like how to commit suicide , that kind of thing .

Encouraging people to do dangerous activities like drinking bleach and health advice that's contradictory to well-established , scientific-led health advice where it could prevent people from getting the best medical care or doing the right thing for their own health .

Things that are sort of common in the same manner but are not considered harmful are depictions of violence in an action movie , a news story about violent events , any kind of educational content that might depict violence or sort of terrible imagery when it's in an educational setting , an explanation of a scams , trying to expose scams and portrayals of dangerous

activities in a way that's meant to sort of discourage people from taking part in them . So it's clear here that it's . The difference is whether it's educational , whether it's glorifying or trying to encourage your harmful behaviour .

So if you're trying to educate people against it or teach them why something happened or the news around why something happened , that's fine . But if you're trying to glorify it or you're trying to promote it , then that's bad . Bad harmful content . Harmful to a specified groups is the next sort of category and this one's a bit more nuanced .

I'll go through the examples and you'll see the differences there .

So if it's harmful to specified groups , if it encourages violence or real treatment towards a specified group , promotes intolerance by demonstrating a staunch on willingness to allow the views , beliefs or behaviour of a specified group implies that one specified group is superior or inferior to another , contains extreme , offensive and dehumanising stereotypes of a specified

group . Note that stereotypes can be negative or positive . Now that's what is harmful .

Now , what isn't deemed harmful to a specified group is historical documentary of World War II featuring speeches from Nazi leaders , a stand-up comedy routine that plays off in stereotypes in a way that is not mean spirited , a newspaper article about a hate organisation , the dictionary definition of a slur or discussion about a particular religious text and its views on

women , for example . So those are not deemed to be harmful to specified groups . So really , here it's the nuances , the tone . So if it's sort of serious and mean spirited , then it can be considered harmful , but if it's comedy or artistic expression , then that isn't considered harmful unless it's clearly mean spirited . Similarly , sort of educational purposes are fine .

News purposes are fine , as long as there's a beneficial purpose of informing society on these issues , and then it's done in a way where they're trying to sort of capture the beliefs of different eras in the context of educating people , that is not harmful .

So again , here it's really the viewpoint on the positioning of the , also the content that will decide whether this is harmful or not harmful . Next up is harmfully misleading information . So this is where a page has been produced with the intent to misinform people .

All the content creators may believe the inaccurate information they're sharing is true , but this is particularly for YMWL . There's a very high standard that has to be goes for YMWL topics . So examples are harmful and clearly inaccurate information .

So content that could be refuted straightforwardly by widely accepted facts , like making a false claim that someone famous or a world leader has died or given false dates for an election . So that's where you can just see it's wrong straight off the bat , but you don't need to do a lot of research .

The next type is harmful claims that contradict well-established expert consensus . So this is things like claims that lemon can cure cancer or that buying a lot of tickets is a perfect way to save for retirement . So this is where you're going against sort of widespread expert consensus in a field . The third one is harmful . Harmful obstantiated theories and claims .

So this is content which isn't grounded in any reasonable factor or absence . So it's really its conspiracy theories . So things like 9-11 attacks were planned by the US government , or claims that world leaders elizard people . Hopefully , it should be pretty easy to see why this kind of content would be deemed lowest quality .

The raters are actually told to research do separate research to find out how far off these things aren't , and to check facts and see if they are misleading . And if they are misleading , then , yeah , market is lowest . Next , the raters are asked to check whether the believer's webpage or website is untrustworthy in itself .

So this is where they're trying to find websites that are engaged in deceptive or malicious practices ,

and it gets split down into a few different bits , so we'll go through each one . First one is inadequate information about the website or content created for the purpose of the page . So this is where , for example , you've got an online shop but they're not giving you any kind of information on how to contact them .

They may not have a secure checkout process , no information on where to do returns , that kind of thing , that on these especially when it's on a Y and YL , these kind of things where there just isn't enough information .

You can't work out who's creating the content , why they're creating the content , and they're not giving you enough information about how to get in touch with them if you need to go back to them for a course .

They specifically say that Y and YL pages or websites that handle sensitive data with absolutely no information about their website or content creator should be rated the lowest , and that's pretty clear on that one . Point two is lowest EEAT and lowest reputation of the website or content creator .

So this is where , if the EEAT of a page is too low , people cannot or should not use the main content of the page . So , especially on Y and YL topics , a good example of this would be an e-commerce store selling products where all the reviews that the rate is most defined online for this store say that people have paid but never received the goods .

So it could be a perfectly looking great website , but if they're just scamming people and not providing anything that people pay for and just keeping the money , then this should be marked lowest , regardless of how great the main content is on their page . So this is where it's been found clear that this site , the content creators , are dodgy .

You just don't even need to go and look at the main content . You can just mark them lowest straight off . Thirdly , we have deceptive page purpose and deceptive main content design . So this is pages or websites that are in untrustworthy because they have a deceptive purpose .

So these are websites that appear to have one purpose but in fact exist for a different reason . So , for example , a website that impersonates a different site , so copying a logo and branding and mimicking another site . Web pages that look like a news source or information page but in fact are trying to manipulate people .

So this is things like financial scams that make out that they're trying to make it look like they're a newspaper giving an honest and biased review of something , or give , say , celebrities endorsing a product on the page when these celebrities haven't . And it's all faked .

Web pages that claim to offer independent reviews but in fact have been purely created for the owner of the website to make money without trying to help users . So this is giving misleading or inaccurate information just so you can get people to monetize from links or by buying the product . Impersonating celebrities websites .

There's another one pages with misleading titles or a title that has nothing to do with the content on the page . So if someone comes to the page expecting one type of content and then get a different type of content , they'll feel tricked . Web pages with deceptive website information so they try and misrepresent who they actually are .

They don't actually give the real details of who the page owner is and how to contact the site or how the content was created . So they're trying to manipulate . They're trying to pretend to be one thing and actually turn out to be completely something else . Another type of deception that's specifically sort of flagged is sort of deceptive design patterns .

So these are things where you've got ads in the main content disguised as main content . So this is things where you think a search box or a button clicked next that kind of thing where you're expecting it to take the next page or perform an action on the page actually is an ad and clicking it will boot you off to another site .

And pages that disguise ads as navigation links . They give an example of a fake directory page where it looks like helpful links but really it's just loads of links trying to get you off onto other people's sites . The next category is deliberately obstructed or obscured main content .

So these are things like ads that continue to cover the main content when the website visitor scrolls down a page .

Ads that are virtually impossible to close without clicking on the ad Popups that obscure the main content and can't be closed without taking an action to benefit the website Institutional pages that attempt to use as the download or click on a link that does not benefit the website visitor but does benefit the website owner Ads that push the main content down so far

that you might not even notice the main content and main content in white on white text or presented in a way that's difficult for people to read . So this is sort of like trying to hide content on the page . That's a deliberate spamby technique . That's not because of the world , but it's clearly things like that .

So where the main content is trying to be almost hidden away and other content being shown over the top , that's beneficial to the website owner , not to the website visitor . There are a couple of exceptions to this that are listed and those are logins or paywalls Shouldn't be considered as untrustworthy , deceptive or coercive .

So these are things like magazines or newspapers which have to monetize through subscriptions , so paywalls are allowed . Some types of main content should be login protected , like those with personal information on banking websites , social network pages , private pages , those kind of things .

So it can be normal for a user to have to login to get to the main content , to do something to get the main content in those cases , and that's acceptable . And also there are . Another reason is where , say , there's some content that isn't allowed to be shown in a certain region .

So , for example , some companies don't show information into the EU because of certain privacy rules . So if a website is choosing to restrict content to a particular geography , that's not a reason for it to be seen as lowest quality . At the end of the day , the raters told to use their best judgment .

And also , again , at the very end , they do remind the raters that it's okay for websites to have ads and to monetize , but it's just not to do it in a deceptive or obstructive way . The next category is suspected malicious behavior .

So this is like phishing sites , basically , where someone is trying to get you to input personal information , maybe login information for other things , and trying to sort of get this information off you . So they fraudulently log into these websites and sort of hack into things and persuade you to do things that you shouldn't necessarily be doing .

So especially things which might try to encourage you to download malicious software , all those kind of things essentially really scammy websites , and they actually tell people that if you think that you are on a scam website like this , then don't actually try and continue on the page . Don't try and continue rating further , just market lowest straight away .

So you want to be really careful that you're not doing anything that could make someone think that you're trying to do something malicious . So that covers what Google determines as untrustworthy websites that should be marked with the lowest rate , with the lowest ranking . The next section is spammy webpages .

So this is where they want the reader to identify if a page is spam or not and basically what the definition of spam is . You know pages that are created to benefit their website owner , with very little attention paid to the experience of the people who visit it and use these kind of sites .

You use deceptive techniques to rank hardly in the search engines , which they say might disincentivise creation of high quality content by crowding out good pages with spam basically . So they go through a number of different points that could make a site be considered as spam . So we'll just have a look at those now .

So the first one is you know you can't determine a purpose of the web page . There's no main content , little main content or very low quality main content . So it says all pages should be created with sufficient main content quality so that the page can achieve its purpose , but if any of the following are true , then the page should be rated lowest .

So , despite your best efforts , the purpose of the page cannot truly be understood because the main content is gibberish or otherwise unusable for people . The page deliberately has no main content . The page is deliberately created with so little main content that it fails to achieve any purpose .

And the page is deliberately created with such low quality main content that it fails to achieve any purpose . So this really is just like . The page just doesn't mean anything , say anything and it's just rubbish . Secondly , we've got hacked , defaced or spammed pages .

So this is where you know if it's happening on your site . It's not actually your fault that this has happened . Essentially , you've been hacked by someone else who has modified or added pages to your site for their own benefit . So this kind of spam what you might not have done it yourself , google will hold you responsible for it .

So if your site is liable to getting spammed or hacked like this , then you need to take action to make sure this doesn't happen . This is why you should take real care to make sure that if you have any kind of user generated content in your site , that you're watching out for bots and things like that . This really is .

Yeah , it's one where it's not fair on you necessarily as a site owner if this happens to you , but really they're saying , if you're responsible website owner , you will take steps to make sure this kind of thing doesn't happen . So it's something to really watch out for . The third type of spam that they're told to watch out for is auto-generated main content .

So this is where someone uses little effort or originality , with no editing or manual creation , to just create huge numbers of web pages . You can make thousands , hundreds of thousands of pages with this kind of thing . Now there are plenty of sites that do auto-generate content and that might be based off . They've built their own databases .

They have sort of collated different databases together . They fact-checked and money , done stuff with them and then created a large number of pages from it and that can be fine . This is really like incredible spam content where there's no real originality on into it .

They've just taken existing data feed and just repackaged it with no real attention to the experience , and now added value 21 out of visiting the page . They're told that they can obviously check for auto-generated content by clicking around multiple pages on the website and seeing if it looks like severely templated content , they say from a single page .

It's not necessarily always obvious that some things mass-generated like this , but they say you must explore the website to see if you think the content is templated . Now in the explicitly state that pages and websites made up of auto-generated content with no editing or manual curation and no original content or value added for users , should be rated lowest .

So here again they're not saying you shouldn't do auto-generated content , but if you do there's got to be value in it , a value add for the user .

So that's the really key thing to make sure that you don't fall into the trap of just churning out the same content as everybody else that's got from freely available information that you're just repackaging in a way that adds no value . The fourth type of spam that they're single out is copied main content with no added value .

Now this one takes a little bit of careful reading because it could be read wrongly if you just skimmed it . Now , basically what they're saying is if you scrape or copy content from another source without adding any original content or value to users , then that's spam . Any type of content may be copied , so that's text , images , videos , etc .

Images may be slightly cropped or edited to try and avoid detection , but it's still copying . Just taking cut down sections of videos or trying to alter videos , it's still copying .

Now , the key thing to consider here is that actually and they say it themselves it's not actually wrong to embed content , and sometimes embed it content from another source is the right thing to do . But what you have to do is add significant original content and value on the page .

So this would be like if you were to embed social media posts , then that's fine , as long as you add additional content , context or discussion around it . Now that's the same with any other type of content . So , yeah , it could be completely legitimate to copy a segment of another document for the purposes of then discussing that document .

So the key thing really is to make sure that you are not just taking whole pages or just putting pages full of copied content or videos with no additional context , content or discussion around them .

So , yeah , if you're just creating automatically pages using these things or just copying various sources to make a new page without adding anything yourself , then that is going to be considered spam .

Now there is one important exemption to this copying rule , and that's license or syndicated content , such as that news articles by Associated Press or Reuters that is syndicated around lots of different news websites that they consider to be perfectly fine . They then go on to give advice for raters on how to try and determine if content is copied .

A lot of it is just pasting queries from sections of web pages into Google to see if the exact match text appears on any of the websites and then to see if they can figure out which one was the original source .

They also even talk about using the Internet Archive Wayback machine to try and see if content's been copied previously but is now so the original source has changed , so you can still go back and find the original source .

So it's an interesting way of thinking how Google might automate some of these duplicate content penalties themselves when they go through it , but it's interesting that they're getting people to manually try and rate this as well . I'm sure you're now wanting to see lots of examples of what exactly these lowest quality pages look like .

There's actually loads of examples , pages and pages of links to examples of what Google determined are the lowest kind of websites quality websites look like . So I'd strongly suggest yeah , download in the document yourself . I'll put a link in the show notes and then go and look at what some of these examples are .

It's really , really interesting to see in them and it's very valuable to look at .

So , in summary , we can see that the very lowest quality pages , those that cover one or more of these categories that's harmful to people's mental , physical or financial well-being , untrustworthy and deceptive whether that be the content that's deceptive , the curator of the content , the creator of the content is deceptive . The website itself is deceptive .

You do not want to be untrustworthy and then spam .

If you are spamming and trying to do anything spamming and again it's manipulative and trying to not give someone a great experience but just trying to get them to do things for your own benefit those are all things where you're going to come flagged under this lowest category and that's really where you do not want to be .

So it's important to understand what lowest quality content is , so you know how to avoid it . In the next episode , we'll look into what Google classifies as low and medium quality pages and I look forward to seeing you then . Thanks for listening . I really appreciate it . Please subscribe and share . It really helps .

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