What Google Tells Its Raters to Look For

What Google published on Thursday

On Thursday Google published the full guidelines it gives its search quality raters, the people it pays to look at search results and judge how good they are.

Raters do not change anyone's rankings. When Google tests a change to its results, raters look at what the change produces, and their ratings help Google decide whether it is an improvement.

Google first shared a version in 2013. The new document is the full one, updated with phones in mind, and the plainest public account of what Google means by a good page.

Much of it concerns pages that have nothing to do with small businesses. The parts that do are worth an hour.

What raters are asked to judge

• The purpose of the page, and how well it achieves it.
• Expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, shortened in the document to E-A-T.
• The main content, as distinct from menus, sidebars and ads.
• Who is responsible for the site, and how to reach them.
• The reputation of the business, judged from what others say.
• Whether a result meets the searcher's need, often on a phone.

The fourth can usually be put right in an afternoon. Raters are told to look for it, and many sites make them hunt.

Pages that take money get a stricter reading

The guidelines single out what they call Your Money or Your Life pages: pages where low quality could do real harm to someone's health, finances or safety.

Medical, legal and financial advice falls in that group. So does any page that takes payment, which includes the order form or booking page on many ordinary small business sites.

For those pages, raters are asked for a higher level of trust. A shop or a booking page is expected to say who runs it, how to reach them and what happens if something goes wrong.

Who runs this site

Raters are told to look for an about page, contact information and, for shops, customer service details such as returns and refunds. On a page that takes money, their absence counts against it.

For a small business this is mostly a matter of saying what is already true: the owners' names, where the business is, how long it has been running, and a phone number a person answers.

A contact form alone, with no address and no name, leaves a visitor wondering who will receive their money. A rater is asked to wonder the same thing.

Expertise that shows on the page

Expertise in the guidelines does not always mean qualifications. They also accept what they call everyday expertise: real experience of a subject, written about carefully.

That suits small businesses. The plumber who explains why water heaters fail, or the grower who says how a crop was raised, shows expertise no borrowed text can.

What counts against a page is the reverse: thin text that could describe any business, copied descriptions, and claims nobody could check.

Reputation is found elsewhere

Raters are also asked to research the reputation of the business behind a site, using sources other than the site itself: reviews, news coverage and what other sites say.

A business cannot write its own reputation, which is the point. Testimonials on your own pages count for less than reviews customers leave elsewhere.

What you can do is make the business easy to recognise: the same name, address and phone number everywhere, a complete Google My Business listing, and a habit of asking for reviews.

A worked example

An organic box delivery service packs fruit and vegetables from local farms and a wholesaler into boxes, delivered weekly or every second week to homes across a few suburbs. Customers sign up and pay online.

Its site was mostly photographs of produce and a sign-up form. Two people ran the business from a rented warehouse unit, and neither appeared anywhere on it.

There was no street address, only a contact form. The terms said nothing about skipping a week, cancelling, or a box left at a door nobody answered.

Reading the guidelines, the owners recognised their own site: a page taking regular payments, with no sign of who would receive them.

The about page now names both owners and the farms they buy from, and says which growers are certified organic and which are not. The contact page gives the warehouse address, a phone number and pickup hours.

A plain policies page covers skipping, cancelling, substitutions and missed deliveries, linked from the sign-up form. None of it was written for Google; all of it answered questions customers already asked on the phone.

Searches made on a phone

Much of the new document concerns phones. Raters judge how well a result serves someone searching on a small screen, often while out, often wanting to call, visit or buy.

Some searches are marked as visit-in-person, where the searcher wants a place nearby. For those, hours, an address and directions matter more than anything else on the page.

What not to read into it

The guidelines are not the ranking formula. They describe what Google wants its results to look like, not the signals it uses to get there.

E-A-T is not a score that can be added to a page, and there is no tag for it. Nor is length a goal: raters judge whether a page achieves its purpose, and a short page can do that well.

Expect offers to optimise your site for the rater guidelines. What the document rewards is ordinary good practice, done honestly, which is what a good web team does anyway.

The counter-case

A small site with a clear about page, real contact details and pages written by people who know the work may find nothing here to change.

Some of the document concerns medical, financial and news sites, and holds them to standards no florist or electrician needs to meet.

For everyone else the useful part is short: say who you are, show what you know, make contact easy, and make pages that take money especially clear.

What to do

1. Name the people behind the business on the about page.
2. Give a street address and a phone number.
3. Add returns and cancellation terms near every payment.
4. Replace generic text with what you actually know.
5. Search for what you sell on a phone.
6. Ask satisfied customers for reviews elsewhere.
7. Ignore offers to optimise for raters.

Step three matters most on pages that take money. The guidelines ask for more trust there, and so do customers, who want to know what happens if something goes wrong before they pay.

How Google's quality changes reach sites gradually, and why their effects are hard to read, is covered in Panda rolls out slowly this time.

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