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The Secret Google Quality Raters’ Handbook

Last month the Google Quality Rater’s handbook was leaked online. This is what Google deems important when judging the quality and relevance of a web page.
In spite of what many say, Google does not entirely rely on automatic computer-based algorithms in its search engine rankings.
They do employ human editors that control the quality of selected sites and they may give a boost to sites these reviewers deem especially useful.
The guidelines given to these human editors may also give search engine marketers an idea about what Google is looking for when judging quality and relevance. In short: If you want your site to rank well, it makes sense to take a look at the same guidelines.

However, Google has so far managed to keep its search engine algorithms a secret and search engine marketers have to rely on reverse engineering to find out what makes a web page succeed or –as black hat SEM goes — what you can do to trick Google into accepting spam.
A few weeks ago, however, the The Google Quality Rater’s Handbook was leaked online. Google managed to get some versions of the file off the web quickly, but by then, of course, it was too late.


Query types
First it is interesting to note that Google operates with three main types of searches and — presumably — that they try to keep a balance between the three on search engine result pages (SERPS):
The three query types are:
  • Navigational (someone is looking for a specific site)
  • Informational (someone is looking for information on a specific topic of interest)
  • Transactional (someone is out to find a product or service to buy)

Web pages may be relevant to one or more of these three categories for any given search query.

Five relevance categories
Google is sorting web pages into five different categories as regards relevance:
1. Vital pages are pages that are considered to be the official page related to the query.
As anyone having used Google to search for a specific hotel will know, this is not as simple as it sounds. The home page of the hotel is often hard to find, and the results are filled up with various hotel affiliate portals (which are considered spam by Google, according to these guidelines).
As the handbook points out regarding “Vital” pages “the dominant interpretation [of the query] is navigational”. This means that there is one and only one correct result.
It makes little sense to strive for this status for other pages than for the pages that are evaluated to be the “official page of the query”.
2. Useful pages are pages that are highly satisfying, comprehensive, high in quality and authoritative:
You really want your pages to be in this category and the only way to achieve that is to write highly informative content, articles in the case of informational queries and pages that allows the user to find a specific product and complete the intended transaction in the case of shopping.

3. Relevant pages are less comprehensive or less authoritative that the “useful” pages.
Even if a page is deemed “Relevant”, it may also be categorized as spam, cf. the hotel affiliate sites mentioned above.
4. Not Relevant pages are pages with outdated or poor content.
5. Off Topic pages have no relevance to this particular query, although they may get a different category for other queries. Note that Google says that if navigation to helpful content is very difficult, a rating of Off-Topic may be assigned.
There are also other categories, like

  • Didn’t Load
  • Foreign Language
  • Unratable

and flags like

  • Pornographic content (pages that may be filtered out if the searcher’s content filter is on)
  • Malicious code on pages (pages that are to be excluded from the index)