Google Search is one huge product that has become one of the most influential on the web.
While the company has directly and indirectly shown how its algorithms can make the search engine better on every update, not that many people know that it has been working with more than 10,000 people around the world to help evaluate the search engine.
These people are called 'quality raters', and they are given actual searches to conduct, drawn from real searches that happen on Google. These people rate the quality of pages that appear in the top results, hence the 'quality rater' name.
Quality raters cannot alter Google's results directly. What they can do, is to mark particular listings to make sure that they are properly ranked. The data by these raters are then used to improve Google' algorithms.
Over time, quality raters' data may have an impact on low-quality pages that are spotted. But it is the algorithms that will automate things, and give real impact on those pages that weren't reviewed.
And here, Google is updating the rater quality rater guidelines to include additional areas of focus.
Google is putting more focus on what it calls "beneficial purpose” of content.
When there are so many websites that create content solely for SEO and rank high on Google Search results, many of them don't have user in mind. They just want their content to rank high in SERP with the highest paying keywords in the hopes for them to convert big when they land on their pages. Whether that is by clicking on ads or on affiliate links.
Google wants its raters to think whether or not a site's content has the beneficial purpose for its users.
Besides that, Google is also making itself more refined, as spams have also populated the web.
Clearly, the search giant is in war against clickbait. And here, the company is asking raters to rate sites low where the title is too sensational or doesn’t match the actual content.
Google also wants raters to not only look at the reputation of websites, but also the content creators. This is one criteria that many websites have failed.
For example, some sites may have an 'About Us' page to describe what they are. But they may lack the information regarding how people can contact them, or lack in describing the authors of the pages. What Google is doing here, is making contributors to have reputations as well.
The company's focus with this addition, is to ensure that contents that are created by creators, get the reputation they deserve, and so should the creators themselves.
What this means, misleading post should blamed the author. On the other hand, good post that adds value should give credit to the author.
It was in 2015 that Google first made these guidelines public.
Since then, the guidelines have been updated several times, with the more recent having focus on topics such as spotting fake news, biased or upsetting content, as well as other factors that Google perceives as problematic when included in search results