A completely new version of the Google Quality Ratings Guideline is now available for quality raters to rate websites for Google. There is little semblance between the old and the rewritten version. Google is set to provide the most trustworthy and credible websites to users. To be among the top ranked sites, the web making industry must take into account this new Google SEO Rating Guide.
The main focus of Google with the in the new Quality Rater’s Handbook is the idea of E-A-T, which pertains to a website’s “expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness”.
Google has seen the need for quality raters to give a low rating to those sites which fail in the aforementioned categories. If a website lacks expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, the raters must eventually give a low quality rating according to Google.
This will serve as a guide for webmasters to make their website as expert, authoritative, and trustworthy as possible.
Google especially told the quality raters to take caution about sites with user contributed content, such as forums or other sites where users submit articles or information because these sites may not be trustworthy and many lack the essential E-A-T.
Of course, there may be high quality websites with frequented by users who are experts themselves. This must be taken into consideration by the quality raters as well.
Who May Be Considered an Expert?
In relation to E-A-T, there are different kinds of expert according to fields of expertise, discipline, and subject matter.
A person may be considered an expert even without a license or official training. For instance, support forums are great sources for specific diseases, since they have input from those who are suffering from the disease and have had firsthand experience with such. Those contributors might not be physicians, because they’ve personally dealt with the disease so that they might as well be considered experts in sharing those personal experiences. Finally, when it comes to specific medical advice, it should still come from doctors or health professionals.
Taking into consideration the importance of expertise, SEOs should establish the authority and expertise of their authors and writers. This expertise and authority must be clear as to induce readers and, more importantly, the quality raters.
Ad Heavy Sites Rank Low
A new feature of the quality raters guide is the emphasis on making sure that sites don’t have too much advertising on them. These sites may be deceptive, according to Google. For instance, a user might be scrolling forever before actually seeing the content he or she is looking for only to find out that there is no substantial content at all.
Aside from site overcrowded with Ads, those with bad supplementary contents are also worthy of low ranking under the new quality raters guide.
The Google SEO rating guide can provide web makers and those engaged in the SEO industry insights on how to create an expert, trustworthy, and authoritative website that would pass or even rank high among the quality raters.
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