Who writes the guidelines?

• Quality Raters write the guidelines. Google’s quality raters are a team of anywhere from 10–100k people that Google has hired. They determine how well Google’s search results solve a user’s needs.
• • Google uses their feedback to help understand the impact of algorithmic tweaks.

 

The document has three main sections:

• Page Quality Rating Guidelines – This section explains the main factors that quality raters should look for in the search results. These include the purpose of the page, E‑A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) signals, content quality, ownership of a website, and the website’s reputation.
• Understanding Mobile User Needs –This section breaks down how Google views mobile interaction.
• Needs Met Rating Guidelines – This scale evaluates how well a search result solves mobile user needs.

 

The high points that matter!

• Pay attention to what other sites say about you
• Address positive and negative reviews (we have talked about this for years!)
• Show off your expertise
• Clarify who is responsible for information on the page
• Keep your About Us page updated and current
• Add extra E A T signals for Your Money or Your Life sites
• • Health + fitness
  • Safety
  • Shopping
  • Finance
  • Government or law
  • News
  • Groups of people (specialized groups like disability, nationality, veterans)
  • College
  • Jobs
• Ensure your website clicks work deeper into the site
• • Test your interactive content. Use any tools or calculators on your site and make sure they work.
  • Watch embedded videos. Videos are a common source of UX issues. Make sure any video embeds play as expected and don’t negatively impact the user experience in other ways.
  • Go through your checkout. Add products to your cart and go through the checkout process to ensure everything works as expected.
• Avoid low quality practices
• • Overly shocking or exaggerated post titles (when the page title elicits a click but then still leaves the user confused).
  • Copied main content or scraped content This isn’t to be confused with syndicated content, which Google says is OK if done correctly.
• Make sure ads don’t distract from the content.
• Make your 404 pages informative
• Pay attention to keyword intent and freshness

What Google really wants

• Its algorithm to reward high-quality content and avoid malicious or thin content.
• High-quality content isn’t content that just “looks good”; it also needs to be helpful.
• Site reputation doesn’t stop at the site level—off-page factors play a bigger role in Google’s algorithm than you might think.

Bottom line: These guides are written by real people, which should make you feel a little bit better about the rules and guidelines.