Updated Google Search Quality Rater Standards

Google is constantly updating its search quality rating guidelines to improve the search results for users. These changes affect low-quality pages and how Google assesses content trustworthiness. For example, they recently released two major updates: a YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) update and an EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) update. In this article, we will discuss both of these updates so you can understand what needs to change on your SEO Agency Calgary in order to be seen as trustworthy by Google.

When assessing a page, consider the following:

• Is this page’s purpose to help users make decisions?
• Do trustworthy sources back up the claims on this page?
• Is this page’s content likely useful for a wide variety of people or just a specific audience?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, we recommend you use your judgment as to whether the information is authoritative.

Low-Quality Pages

If you work with YMYL pages, it’s important to remember that these websites and pages will be held to a higher standard. Google wants YMYL pages to be trustworthy sources of information.

When evaluating the quality of your site, consider which types of pages you have on your site:

• Low-quality content (e.g., spammy)
• Low-quality page layouts (e.g., excessive ads)
• Pages that may not be relevant to a user’s query and may mislead users into clicking them.

Why do these changes matter?

This update is intended to remove surface-level or “thin” content from the search results. This could be a risky move for Google since it could lead to fewer relevant results for users, but we’ve seen this type of thing happen before with other updates. In 2017, Google rolled out an update that targeted content farms (sites with generic and low-quality articles), and the subsequent removal of these pages caused some SEO professionals to predict a decline in traffic that year.

Instead of just relying on user feedback as with other types of quality raters sessions, this one focuses solely on technical analysis and has no involvement from real users. This means there will be less variation between scores given by different raters than there would be otherwise—so if you’re concerned about losing rankings as a result of this new update, then you should try to avoid making any major changes until more information becomes available!

Conclusion

That’s the update in a nutshell. In summary, we can expect to see a greater emphasis on on-site quality and authority, as well as a greater focus on content relevance and user needs in general. These changes will affect us all—content creators, SEO professionals, marketers, and more—but they shouldn’t be too difficult to adapt to if you take them seriously from the start. Consult CA Digital – The top Calgary SEO Agency if you are looking for SEO services and to level up your business.