SEO Search Engine Optimization

The guidelines for quality rater from Google have been leaked by one of there staff.  The document is packed with information valuable to anyone trying to rank a site high in Google's SERPs.

Download Google's quality rater Document

This document shows how quality raters score pages, clasify search queries and treat spam and includes screenshots of quality raters hubs, forums and more.  In this article we will review the most important aspects of the quality rater document.

Raters only rate pages:

Importance of Country to relevance:

Understanding the query:

The document states:

You should understand each query before you evaluate it. If the meaning of the query is unclear, you will need to do web research to learn about it. You can do this by entering the query in the search box of one or more search engines and looking at the results returned by them.

Google tries to ensure that they understand a users search query, instead of matching words and phrases.  For example:

For the query 'football', it could be [football], english (US) - the interpretation in this case is american football, with an oval ball or [football], english (UK) - the interpretation in this case is british soccer, with a round ball.

The type of query is not crucial, these are the main categories:

Navigational

Your basic request, 'ebay', 'Yahoo directories' or 'microsoft.com'.

Informational

A query looking for information, 'how to stop smoking' for example.

Transactional

A query to find a product to buy.

Rating scale

This is informative, Google classifies pages as:

• Vital
• Useful
• Relevant
• Non relevant
• Off topic

Vital:

The query has a dominant interpretation which is navigational. The evaluated page is the official web page for the query.  For example, for the query 'BMW 3 series', the vital page is http://www.bmw.com/com/en/newvehicles/3series/overview.html, this is the official product page on the correct site.

A rating of Useful is assigned to pages that contain some or all of the following characteristics: highly satisfying, comprehensive, high in quality, and authoritative. Useful pages answer the query just right; they are neither too broad nor too specific.

In my opinion this accounts for about 80% of Google's search results.  According to Googles document, these are the types of useful pages:

• Highly informative pages.
• Timeous informative articles.
• Pages that allow the completion of a transaction by the user.
• Important subpage on a correct site.
• Home page of a correct site for a specific product.

You should aim to have most of your pages classified as useful by filling them with good content, thereby creating highly informative pages and or pages that allow the user to complete the desired transaction.  This will keep both your users and Google satisfied.

The Google Hilltop Algorithim:

Browse the Hilltop White Paper

Hilltop algorithim is another fix for PageRank.  Google realized that a high PR page could pass authority to a totally disrelated page through a link.  This meant that a site with lots of unrelated links would rank highly in the search engines.   Hilltop supposedly sorted this out and now a link to a toy shop site from a high PR page about gardening would count for very little.  Hilltop is similar to Trust Rank, but more automated, relying on 'expert documents' and links from them to other documents with the assumption that:

• If A links to B and B links to C, then A and C are related.

The Hilltop white paper also suggests that the Title tag and Header tags are very important, a fact that we see more and more, we believe that the  title tag is the most important of all the tags, browse our SEO ranking influences for more information.

Hilltop & search engine optimization:

The trick here is to spot and get links from these 'expert documents', aim for editorial links from authority websites, much as most SEO professionals have been advocating for some time.

Spotting authorative sites:

Look for a site in the SERPs (search engine results pages) that has a sitelink, these are links below the first search result, links to subsections of the site in question.  Links from these sites are worth gold.  Also look at the back link profile of the site you concider to be an authority site.  Use Yahoo Site Explorer to analyse these back links, you might find that the root hubs that link to your site are even more authorative.

Conclusion:

Trust Rank and Hilltop were introduced by Google to minimize the effects of overly aggressive search engine optimization techniques.  Prior to the introduction of these two algorithims, SEO professionals could dominate the search results of competitive terms by getting links from high PR sites.  With these algorithims in place we now need to focus on authority sites, not just PageRank.

 Your Google quality rater comments are welcome...