Learn how the latest Google Quality Rater Guidelines impact your website

The Google Quality Rater Guidelines were updated in October 2021. This matters to you because these guidelines give you insight into which websites Google prefers to rank.

Google employs search quality raters who use these guidelines to review and evaluate website content for relevance, trustworthiness, and expertise.

You need to know the information and factors these human search quality raters use when looking at your website, content, reviews, and links to determine if this content provides relevant search results.

Google says this about its Quality Rater Guidelines:

These guidelines are more than 160 pages long, but if we have to boil it down to just a phrase, we like to say that Search is designed to return relevant results from the most reliable sources available.

We want you to pay attention to the bolded content in the sentence above – relevant results from the most reliable sources available.

This is exactly why you need to pay attention to and understand the latest updates to the Google Quality Rater Guidelines.

Keep reading to learn:

• What the Quality Rater Guidelines are
• Why search quality raters matter to you
• The importance of information quality
• The 5 October 2021 updates to the Google Quality Rater Guidelines
• Your Google Quality Rater Guidelines action items

We get it – the Google Quality Rater Guidelines document is not an easy read. It’s long and detailed. It’s a good idea to have the link to this document available when you’re discussing website changes, content updates, and SEO with your colleagues (and us). But it’s not your job to know these guidelines inside and out – this is our job and what we do for you.

So, read this blog, but don’t sweat the details. We just want you to understand the reasons why we make the suggestions we do about your content, website design, links, and SEO.

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Learn the facts on search intent, SEO, and your search engine results

Search intent is the problem, question, or query a person wants solved. This drives the terms they enter in a search engine.

Knowing search intent or user intent is essential to optimizing your content for your users. When you know what your users are looking for, you can create content that resonates and helps them. 

Ultimately, Google’s goal is to provide your searchers with the best content that answers their questions. And you want this to be your content that Google displays at the top of the search engine results.

And this is why search intent is critical to optimizing your content for SEO and your audience. What search intent tells you is that not all keyword terms and phrases are equal.

For example, how a searcher uses the word cat in a search query determines the intent or problem and how you should be optimizing for this keyword.

If you operate a veterinarian clinic specializing in cats, you want content that meets search queries like “how do I know if my cat is sick?”, “how often should my cat be vaccinated?”, or “common cat healthy issues”. But if you sell cat toys, you want content optimized around these search queries, “why do cats like catnip?”, “best cat toys for senior cats”, or “where to buy cat toys”.

Ultimately, Google cares about search intent. If Google cares – we care – and you need to care as well.

Keep reading to learn:

• More about why search intent is important
• About the 4 different types of search intent
• How to determine search intent
• 4 search intent optimization steps

At the end of this blog, we’ve created a short 4-step search intent checklist for you. Use this whenever you’re researching keywords, writing or refreshing new content, or doing an audit of your content.

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