What is a quality website according to Google?	1.3/5.0 (3 votes total) Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
Barry Goggin January 30, 2009

A Google document from 2007 entitled “Google Guidelines For Quality Raters” was released into the wild last year. I wanted to analyze it a bit because if you are going to develop a domain, then this document describes what a quality site is, in Google’s eyes. Much of this information is what you should be doing anyway when building a website but it also describes possible traps you should try to avoid.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO techniques are ways to tweak a website so it will rank better in the search engines. They are usually not overnight fixes but ways to rank well as the website grows. Much has been written about SEO but because Google and other search engine companies keep their algorithms secret, it has been hard to confirm which techniques work or not except through experience and trial and error.

Google Quality Raters

Google quality raters are people used by Google to review or “hand-check” queries and websites found by those queries to make sure that the search engine gives quality results. They also make sure that the ranking of the website in the search engine is not due to spamming techniques.

Good practices

I would like to use this document to encourage good website development practices. This document confirms basic techniques that have been used by the SEO community for quite some time now.

Location matters

If a user searches for “football” and is located in America, then they are expecting websites about American football. However if they are located in England, they would be expecting websites about football aka soccer. Thinking about your user’s expectations is important when crafting web pages on your site.

Broad or specific

“Broad queries are best matched by broad pages; specific queries are best matched by specific or narrow pages.” A good technique is to have both broad and narrow pages. For example, a page describing cell phones (broad) and several pages describing each model of cell phone (narrow). This way you fulfill both types of queries.

Rating scale

Pages are assigned a ranking according to a “Rating Scale: Vital, Useful, Relevant, Not Relevant, or Off-Topic” by the quality reviewer.

Vital pages are rarer and are classified as such when they are dominant e.g. Microsoft.com (official company page).

Useful pages

Most of us will aim to generate “Useful” webpages. “A rating of Useful is assigned to pages that contain some or all of the following characteristics: highly satisfying, comprehensive, high in quality, and authoritative.”

Not Relevant

We can also learn from “Not Relevant” pages. One example that turns up quite often is where the search engine returns a webpage that in itself does not have any good information but instead links to another page with good relevant information. These kind of gateway pages can be improved by putting the link into a page in context with good relevant content around it.

Off-Topic

“A page that contains the query terms, but is conceptually off topic, should be given a rating of Off-Topic.”

This is common sense but it can happen accidentally when the query term has multiple meanings.You can add a page or pages for other meanings if appropriate to your users but it is not good practise to create one solely for the search engines.

“If navigation to helpful content is very difficult, a rating of Off-Topic may be assigned. For example, if the link
to good results is poorly-labeled or buried at the bottom of a long list of links, or if you need to click multiple
times to get to helpful content, you may assign a rating of Off-Topic”

Good practice says you should label your link properly to reflect what it links to. The best links are ones that are made in context as opposed to a long list of links. If you need to make a list of links, it is a good idea to provide a line or two description about what the user will find when clicking on that link. This helps add context for the search engine and user.

Next time I will go over what Google considers as spam. Again the goal will be to make sure that you generate quality webpages that do not accidentally run foul of these guidelines.

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