Let those spreading 'Fake News' and disseminating poor content, beware: Google's new Search Quality Raters Guidelines have you in their sights!

Google's Search Quality Raters Guidelines are going to impact millions of Internet users (and more importantly, abusers) in the months and years to come. So if you're not across these new guidelines, or else make a living out of corrupting the system for your own ends, be afraid. Be very afraid.

To find out what these Search Quality Raters Guidelines mean to your business, read on. Because the changes to online content will be, *insert dodgy Trump impression here*: "Huuuuuuuuuuuuge!".

Let's start with the obvious question: 'What are Quality Raters, exactly?'. Quality Raters are a Google Army of over 10,000 (and growing) independent contractors whose job it is to check that the facts they read on websites are accurate, and that the content and the website that content is on, is reputable. They check the credibility of websites, report images that are illegal or offensive, and help push the best pages to the top of Google's search results.

They are also tasked with getting rid of false, offensive, or generally hateful information that has been showing up all too frequently in Google searches of late, by using humans to supplement super-smart machine-learning algorithms like Panda, in order to stem the tide of dross that is forever pouring into the internet.

Good luck with putting that particular genie back in the bottle I hear you cry!

But what exactly are Google's Search Quality Raters targeting? To find out the answer to this, I invite you to read Google's 157 page Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines document. A document that covers everything from understanding YMYL pages ('Your Money or Your Life'), to learning how to spot EAT pages ('High Level of Expertise / Authoritativeness / Trustworthiness'), and everything in-between.

But if reading 157 pages of techno-babble sounds a little too much like hard work, then allow me to give you the crib notes, so you can get a handle on the topic without devoting three days of your life to the task!

'Fake News!' can be viewed as the dissemination of misleading and falsified information presented as fact. Whether this involves using a website to exaggerate the truth, or else completely make things up, this is a tactic that simply isn't going to fly in Google anymore. The irony of course in all the 'Fake News!' brouhaha, is that Trump, the king of 'Fake News!', was the very person to coin the phrase. Thus to a very real degree, allowing him to own it.

Do you remember the end of the Curtis Hanson, '8 Mile' film, when Eminem is in a rap-battle against that guy who hates him? And how Eminem - going first - uses all the negative stuff that he knows his opponent will say about him. But says it first? Thus getting ahead of the 'information' and self-deprecating to a point where he OWNS his faults, his flaws, and by so doing takes the power away from his opponent who can no longer use the self same 'facts' as weapons. Well that's exactly what Trump's done. By coining the phrase, 'Fake News!' and using it against real news outlets like CNN, BBC NEWS, et al, he has been able to blatantly lie about just about everything, while instantly shielding himself from the inevitable criticisms from those very organisations who actually care about pesky little things like facts, because he has a ready-made response that says that anyone who disagrees with him, or questions what he says, is simply spreading 'Fake News!'. 

The tactic is breathtakingly Machiavellian. And if it weren't so insidious, so downright evil, then one might actually admire the audacity and scope of it. But given it's coming out of Trump's warped and twisted psyche, 'admiration' is not a word that'll spring to mind in anyone with an IQ in triple digits... 

With its newly hired army of fact-checkers, Google is now going to be working to combat the spread of 'Fake News!' (because Trump is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to lies being disseminated as facts on the internet). So when 'Fake News!' sites are spotted by the Quality Raters, they will now be pushed down in the search results, thus preventing them from organically being found. And (hopefully) preventing them from 'going viral'.

Google Search Raters Guidelines state that any websites that mimic other, more prominent sites, specially news sites, are going to be hit big by these new guidelines. For example, any sites that are designed to look and function like news sites but actually contain false or misleading information will be going down hard. These kinds of sites typically exist to misinform readers and spread false information / propaganda etc, for the gain or benefit of some other person or organisation.

We now live in a post Trump world. And like it or not, while he still has his finger on the launch codes and the Twitter Feeds (God help me, I don't know which is more dangerous), then we are all of us at the mercy of 'Fake News'. So hats-off to Google for trying to eradicate the disease at its source.

Any overtly racist or hateful content will now, thanks to Google's Quality Raters, be given a lower spot in the search results, and in many cases, will be removed from the search results completely. Pages that promote hate speech or actions against specific groups of people are now able to be tagged with an "Upsetting-Offensive" flag.

Of course this has the potential to get into very murky waters, as the internet was founded on freedom of speech and the spreading of ideas. And when one organisation (no matter how noble their intent) starts being the judge, jury and executioner of what should, and should not be shared on the internet, then we're suddenly a lot closer to 1984 than 2017. Censorship being one of the most insidious of all the evils. 

That said, if a website is promoting hate speech against the gay and lesbian community, or a particular religion or ethnic minority, or engaging in internet bullying, or attempting to re-write history by saying that the Holocaust never happened because 'Hitler was right', etc...then is the internet really losing anything when said content is buried on page 968 of a particular Google search? I suspect not.

But again, censorship is as censorship does. And it's a slippery slope when an all-powerful organisation starts to make judgement calls on content, just because said organisation deems it to be against guidelines it internally came up with, and which may or may not (depending on the individual reader's moral compass or beliefs) be 'offensive'.  And just because you and I, and most of the people we know, disagree with what is being written, we should never disagree with the author's unalienable right to write it.

One of the biggest problems plaguing the web right now is clickbait. To understand why clickbait is so bad, you must first understand what it is:

Clickbait articles usually feature shocking or catchy headlines designed to make people click on the article so they will be redirected to an external website which exists purely to make revenue off paid advertisements. The problem with this method is that the actual pages the reader goes to when they click on the click bait stories, contain nothing of substance. In many cases they may not even answer the question posed by the catchy headline at all. They exist purely to drive the reader to an external website and make the reader click through dozens of pages in order to see so called 'facts', one 'fact' at a time. The model being that each page a 'fact' or 'story' appears on, is surrounded by paid adverts. And the website owner receives revenue every time a sucker clicks on an advert. And sometimes they even get paid per 'impression' rather than 'per click'. So the website owner makes money even if the readers ignore the ads because the advert has been 'served' and therefore seen by the reader. Ker-ching, Ker-ching.

Google wants the web to be full of brilliantly written, well researched, knowledgeable information that answers a reader's search query. However, because so many people click on those misleading titles, those posts are rapidly moving up the search results and gaining traction because of an increased Click Through Rate. So they get to rank well, even though they do not deserve to. Googles Quality Raters are aiming to help combat this.

E-A-T stands for “Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness” and it’s the yardstick Google’s Quality Raters use to help Google rank pages. 

According to their guidelines (Section 4, Part 1), this is what constitutes 'High-Quality' pages:

1. Enough Main Content (MC): content should be ample enough to satisfy the needs of a user for a page’s unique topic and purpose (broad topics require more information than narrow topics, for example).
2. The page and its associated content is expert, authoritative, and trustworthy for the topic they discuss.
3. The website has a positive reputation for its page topics.
4. The website features enough auxiliary information, for example, “About us,” “Contact,” or “Customer Service” information.
5. The website features supplementary content (SC) that enhances the user’s enjoyment and experience of a web page.
6. The page is designed in a functional fashion that allows users to easily locate the information they want.
7. The website is maintained and edited regularly and frequently.

Attempting to get your head around what EAT actually means is tricky, as ultimately what Google is talking about brings to mind the old 'chicken and egg' question (ie: which comes first?). To be trusted by Google on a particular topic, you need to be an expert on the topic (what you say), and brilliantly express that knowledge (how you say it) both vertically and horizontally on your website. This then leads to a 'Positive Reputation' for the new content as the pages then get trusted by Google, because Panda loves it and because human beings respond to the pages by staying on them a long time, by interacting with them, and by going to other similar / related (Supplementary Content) pages on the website. 

But you can't get that 'Positive Reputation' if nobody finds the articles you've authored because they're buried on page 129 of Google, now can you? And therein lies the conundrum for Small Business Owners and Entrepreneurs everywhere. Because you can't have an egg without a chicken. But you can't have a chicken without an egg...

You also can't fake the 'Expert' part. Because you either know what you're talking about or you don't. Plus the level of craft involved in how that knowledge is expressed on the page (the quality of the actual writing) is now of paramount importance. And with Panda being the most important algorithm out there, the days of you outsourcing your content writing to India to somebody named 'Frank' (real name 'Gupta') are gone. Because when it comes to content (like everything else in life): YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR.
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The takeaway in all this is that when it comes to EAT:

1. You need to be an expert in what you're writing about.
   
2. You need to be (or hire) a professional writer to express that knowledge on the page (because Panda can tell how well written the content is, and knows the difference between 'University Level Writing', 'High School Level Writing', 'Primary School Level Writing' and 'Donald Trump Level Writing').
3. You need to garner a 'Positive Reputation' on the web, via quality on-page analytic data and via links from reputable, industry related websites that Google already trusts.

There are websites and there are websites. Some sell widgets. They may be good widgets, they may be bad widgets. But one thing is for sure, 'believing' the information expressed on a particular web page about the widgets will not effect your health or your state of mind. Nor will it impact your happiness or income (unless you're stupid enough to spend your life-savings on buying a gazillion widgets I mean!). In other words, visiting a widgets' website is unlikely to impact Your Money or Your Life.

However if you read a site that tells you that taking X cures Y (when it doesn't). Or you read a 'Fake News' site that tells you that X happened and Y was responsible (when it didn't, and they weren't), then those things can impact Your Money and Your Life.

Google offers the following categories as examples of YMYL pages:

1. Any page with the potential to be dangerous or detrimental if it possessed low levels of EAT.
2. Shopping or financial transaction pages.
3. Pages that offer medical information about specific diseases or conditions or mental health.
4. Pages that offer financial information, for example, investment or tax information.
5. Pages that offer legal information about topics like child support, divorce, creating a will, becoming a citizen, etc.
6. News articles or public/official information pages.
7. Disaster response services.
8. Web pages which are important for maintaining an informed citizenry, including information about local/state/national government processes, people, and laws.
9. News about important topics such as international events, business, politics, science, and technology. 
10. Government programs and social services.

The YMYL bottom line being that if your website is making bold claims, make them quantifiable and accurate claims. And if you website is stating facts, let those facts be, you know...factual.

With the release of these new Quality Rater guidelines, it's obvious that Google is pushing more and more for websites to have well written, high quality, accurate content. But how do you as a Small Business Owner or Entrepreneur know if your website content is good enough? What exactly qualifies as low quality content anyway?

Good question! For a more in-depth answer to this, read the definitive Panda article. But so far as Google's human Quality Raters are concerned, think of it like this:

• Your website content needs to be ORIGINAL. Not unique - nothing's unique on the world wide web - but ORIGINAL all the same. Have something to say that isn't just, 'We're great, buy our stuff!', because that's exactly what your competitors are saying on their site about themselves.
• Your website content needs to be FACTUALLY CORRECT. Because if what you're saying is incorrect, or -worse - deliberately misleading...then your website will get nuked by Google big time.
• Your website needs to be well designed. Because, while the Quality Raters aren't too fussed about how your website looks (functional wins over pretty in their eyes) functional and pretty wins over everything. So if your website is poorly presented, has a messy or cluttered design, or is hard to navigate, etc, your Google rankings will take a hit.
• Your website content needs to be PROFESSIONALLY WRITTEN, because the Panda algorithm can tell great copy from good copy, and good copy from bad. And just because you can string a few words together in an email yourself, or just because you wrote a few papers whilst at uni, DOES NOT MAKE YOU A PROFESSIONAL COPYWRITER. Any more than having a driver's licence makes you a formula one driver. So if you care about ranking your website: CARE ABOUT THE COPY YOU PUT ON IT.

At the end of the day, if people do not have a good experience using Google, they will stop using Google's services altogether. So search quality is everything to Google, which is why they have to continue to release new algorithmic updates to combat the surge of low-quality content. And why now, for the first time ever, they've hired an army of HUMAN BEINGS to supplement the algorithms.

Essentially, when you click through to a website, Google wants whatever you find on that website to match your search expectations. This isn't rocket science, people!

Ready to conquer the first page in the SERPS? Then call SEO North Sydney. We are here to assist with your all your small business's online marketing needs, including SEO, Web Design, Pay Per Click Advertising and Content Marketing.

Four out of every five calls SEO North Sydney receive are from small business owners who dwell on the subject of keywords because they’ve been ‘shaped’ by previous SEO companies to ask questions that the SEO companies know how to answer. But much like Pavlov’s dog continues to salivate, even though no food is on offer, so too SEO companies continue to sound the ‘Keywords’ bell, while offering little in the way of demonstrable returns on investment for the privilege. ​

Google have just announced that they have this week started rolling out the new and improved Panda algorithm. The roll out is expected to take a week to two weeks to totally proliferate the internet.  

This Google Panda update is influenced by webmaster and user feedback, which has allowed Google to eek out a few more signals to help Panda identify low-quality content. This will result in a higher percentage and greater diversity in search results, and will enable high-quality small and medium-sized sites to rank higher against larger and traditionally more powerful sites.

This is a nice touch from Google, as the quality of the content should be the ultimate deciding factor in a page's worth, not the overarching power of the TLD it comes from. Sure, great content doesn't exist in a vacuum, but just like each individual page has its own page rank, so does each individual page have its own on-page ranking factors, with how great the content is being by far the most important.

It is expected that approximately 3-5% of all queries will be impacted.

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Looking for SEO Sydney for your website? Then you've come to right place. Simply call 0425 204 887, today. The first page of Google is only one click away!

Google has today announced that it is rolling out the Panda 4.0 update. While other SEO companies, who try to 'game' the system to get their clients better search results will be negatively impacted by this, SEO North Sydney clients, who are all run on a white hat content mapping strategy, will greatly benefit.

Bring it on I say, bring it on! This has the potential to be HUGE!

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Want to master SEO? Then book in yourself or your staff for some SEO Training Sydney today! Sydney's #1 SEO Trainer Brian M Logan shows you everything you need to get your company website on the first page of Google. SEO Training can be in-house (we come to you) or classroom based (you come to us).

Or you can always call us on 0425 204 887 if you want to leave your SEO Sydney requirements to the experts. Your website's 1st Page of Google results are guaranteed in writing in the contract.

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There are literally thousands of algorithmic factors that Google weighs when working out who goes where in a particular search. Trying to get your head around what algorithm affects what outcome is a little like chasing the rainbow looking for a pot of gold. Because by the time you’ve got to where the end of the rainbow was…it has already moved on. Or - in SEO speak - by the time you work out what Google algorithm affects what short or long tail searches you’re trying to rank for in the SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Positions), Google up and changes the algorithms* and you’re back to square one.

*Google on average rolls out between 500 to 600 algorithmic updates every year. Or just over one and a half algorithm updates every single day…

However, notwithstanding the continuously changing slings and arrows of outrageous Google fortune, there are some factors that are pretty much constant. How important they are can change (and have changed) over time, but they are still with us so are worth mentioning here. There are many, many others factors of course. And if you want to know the Top 50 Google Ranking Factors (IN ORDER) that Google uses to rank websites, you might wish to book yourself or your staff into our one day SYDNEY SEO TRAINING COURSE (where this, and every other piece of ‘Must Know’ information about Google is revealed IN DETAIL).

1.      Age of the Domain as a Factor in Search Engine Trust.

Age of the domain is important because the older a domain is, the more times the Google spider has crawled it and thus the more it is inherently ‘trusted’ by Google.

Newer websites are at a distinct disadvantage when compared to older websites for just this reason. There are ways to get around this problem (which will be discussed in a different blog entry at a later date), but make no mistake, if your website is still wet behind the ears, Google will know it, and it’s much harder for your site to rank in the SERPs.

Note: despite what you may have read, every page on the web is its own ‘website’, and has its own ‘Trust Value’ in Google’s eyes. So if your site has 1,000 pages, that equates in a very real sense, to 1,000 websites in Google’s eyes. Of course Google knows that all the pages belong to the main TLD (Top Level Domain), but every page is viewed as a separate entity with its own ranking signals as well as a part of the entire domain. Which means that, on rare occasions, a page in a website can actually have a higher PR (Page Rank) than the home page it belongs to (though this is highly unusual, as most links go to a site’s home page).

2.      Page Rank / PR.

Every page on the web has a Page Rank (PR). Page Rank goes from 0 to 10. The higher the Page Rank the more innate trust value that page has in Google’s eyes. Page Rank is an algorithm created by Larry Page, who with Sergey Brin was one of the two co-founders of Google in 1997 / 1998. Page Rank is not only a clever play on Larry’s surname, but is an algorithm that exists to rank websites based on the trust value given to that site’s content, by other websites.

In times past Page Rank was the huge elephant in the room in Search Engine Optimisation and played a major factor in where you ranked in the SERPs. How could it not as it was the very algorithm that changed the landscape of search as we know it (for everyone – including Yahoo and what we now know as Bing). As such the Page Rank algorithm would update every 3 months or so because of it. But in the last few years Google has been downplaying Page Rank, at least publicly. They don’t offer a Page Rank toolbar for Chrome and they stopped supporting the Page Rank Toolbar for Firefox back in 2011, which many in the SEO community took to mean the death of Page Rank.

Indeed, as far back as 2009, Google’s Amit Singal said in a Bloomberg Interview:

“No one should feel, if I dismantle the current search system, someone will get upset. That’s the wrong environment. When I came, I dismantled [Google cofounders] Larry and Sergey’s whole ranking system. That was the whole idea. I just said, That’s how I think it should be done, and Sergey said, Great!”

However reports of the demise of Page Rank have been vastly overstated. Page Rank is still important (for indexing and search reasons) today, and is still the cornerstone of how Google prioritises their search results. It’s just that Google now has (post the Panda and Penguin updates particularly) many hundreds of ranking factors that they use in concert with Page Rank, to work out where a website should appear in the SERPs, and so are much less reliant on the time honoured ‘how many links you have pointing at your website’ metric than they were back in the day.

3.      On-Page SEO Factors.

On page factors are vitally important in ranking a website, with the quality of the written content, post Panda, being the single most important factor in search today.

Other on-page factors such as how fast a page loads, meta tags and description, et al, combine to give Google an idea of the quality and relevancy of your website’s content. But now, in 2014, it all starts with HOW WELL THE CONTENT IS WRITTEN.

Which, let’s face it, is exactly how it should be. Because Google search is ultimately only interested in two things: 1) relevancy of the content to the search, and 2) the quality of the content itself. Everything else is window dressing to put those two factors together.

4.      Off-Page SEO Factors.

Off page factors such as the type of links, number of links, anchor text, etc are less important now than they were before Google released the Penguin and Panda algorithms. But make no mistake they’re still very important. Though if the current trend toward content being king, continues (as I assure you it will), Google will, over time I believe, phase out their reliance on links all together*.

*And it’s only at THIS point that Page Rank will be retired.

In 2014 however a targeted (rather than an aggressive) off-page strategy is still vital to a website getting on the first page of Google.

Think of it this way, if you put up a new website Google says, ‘The only people who think the content on this website is any good, are the people who put it there’, so Google is more or less ‘Content Neutral’ at the time the website is launched. But when other websites (that Google trusts) link to a page on your website, then you receive a tacit endorsement of the quality of your content (on that page) by a third party. And the more third party websites that give your content the ‘thumbs up’ via a link, and the more relevant that third party is to what you do and where you are, the higher up the search rankings that particular page goes.

Note: whatever you do though, do NOT hire an SEO company in India (or similar) or an SEO company in Australia who outsources link building to India (ASK THIS QUESTION!). Because one in three calls SEO North Sydney gets each day, is from a business whose website is suffering from a Penguin penalty (either algorithmic or manual) due to toxic links. And ‘recovering’ a site from toxic links is an expensive and time consuming process, with no guaranteed end result.* Many clients in fact choose to dump their old domain completely when they get a penguin penalty because it will cost too much and take too long to fix, and thus are forced to start again from scratch. And as I’ve mentioned above, new sites have no innate trust value in Google’s eyes, so a company doing this finds themselves back to square one due to being forced to pick the lesser of two evils.

*it can take anywhere between 3 and 9 months for a site to recover from a Penguin penalty on average.

5.      Number of Pages in Relation to Search Engine Optimization.

Post the Panda algorithm, this is more important than ever. It's what I dubbed, 'The Wikipedia Principle'. Because the more pages you have, and the greater the depth of knowledge you express on a given topic, the more likely Google will think you're an 'authority' on the subject you're discussing.  But don’t think that having hundreds of pages by and of itself will rank your site. Because, due to Google’s Panda algorithm now being able to use a sub-section of Machine Learning known as Support Vector Networks to gauge the quality of a site’s content and practically read the page like a human being (it can now literally tell great content from good content and good content from bad content), if you’ve just got dozens or hundreds of pages of poorly written or duplicate or ‘thin’ content on your website, having more pages will actually harm your site’s performance in the SERPs not help it. But if you want to rank for something, having more ‘supporting pages’ on a given topic and then using those supporting pages cleverly in your IA (Information Architecture) allows you to push page rank around your site to the places that need it most. This is known as page rank sculpting, which of late has got a bad rep (due to affiliate marketers and dodgy SEO companies abusing the practice for many years) but when used judiciously, this – plus the additional pages of original, brilliantly written ‘supporting’ content - can help you enormously. But again, done incorrectly, or by the untrained, this too can damage your site more than help it. But in the hands of trained (and ethical) SEO professionals like SEO North Sydney, this technique can produce exceptional results and a great deal of ‘quick wins’ in the SERPs.

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Want to master SEO? Then book in yourself or your staff for some SEO Training Sydney today! Sydney's #1 SEO Trainer Brian M Logan shows you everything you need to get your company website on the first page of Google. SEO Training can be in-house (we come to you) or classroom based (you come to us).

Or you can always call us on 0425 204 887 if you want to leave your SEO Sydney requirements to the experts. Your website's 1st Page of Google results are guaranteed in writing in the contract.

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