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What Google Quality Rater Guidelines can teach us about Panda

Google Quality Rater Guidelines in Context of Panda

Machine learning is going to be a big part of the inner workings of the internet in the future. In fact, Google has stated that Artificial Intelligence is now part of every user query served by the search giant. For the machines to be able to make a decision on which page to serve for a particular query, they have to have someone to learn from.

This someone for the last few years has been an army of quality raters – people whose job it is to visit random websites and evaluate what they’re seeing. Sounds like something you might do when you’re bored, the only difference is that they get paid for it. Google started using the quality raters’ brain power to improve their search algorithm as early as 2005.

Ever since 2008 when the first PDF document containing Quality Rater Guidelines was leaked on the dark realms of the Internet, SEO experts have been trying to reverse-engineer Google’s ranking algorithm. It is understood that Google uses at least 200 ranking signals to determine the position of your page in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), and certainly many of the really important ranking signals are centred around on-site quality.

So, let’s look at some ways we can take the most recent Google Quality Rater Guidelines document and learn some actionable lessons to improve our web copy.

This famous document has been "leaked" on several occasions; and recently Google has decided the best answer to unscrupulous raters constantly leaking classified info would be to leak the document officially. That’s what they’ve done with the last few reincarnations of the file.

There has been a lot of talk about the latest version of Quality Rater Guidelines that were released earlier this spring, however we have a feeling it’s a good time to blow the dust off its covers.

We’d like to put this in the context of Panda – the on-page quality evaluation system that was introduced as a separate periodic update by Google back in 2011 to combat article farms and other cesspits of outrageously low-quality content.

Although this black-and-white animal is almost 6 years old and is now a solid part of the Google algorithm, it’s far from complete. Google is still working on it and it’s very much an ongoing project. Google is still trying to teach its Panda new tricks, even more so now that the whole focus shifts from desktop to mobile.

We’ve given you a summary of the guidelines by pointing out sections that may have the biggest bearing on rankings. It’s time to look at your web content through the eyes of Google Panda.

 

Think mobile

If you take the time to read through the PDF document, you’ll notice that there’s a heavy emphasis on mobile devices. The majority of the instructions aimed at the raters are related to displaying and evaluating pages on mobile devices. Refer to the page 56 onwards within the report.

Even if you take it with a pinch of salt (as people often do with material that is officially leaked by the originator), it’s a simple and efficient guide to understand how you can serve mobile visitors better. For the first time in the history of the internet, there are more people accessing the web on their mobile devices than there are using the old-school desktop setup.

Test your website on various mobile devices extensively. Check page 56.

 

Learn from lazy students

It’s interesting how Google is making an effort of explaining low quality content to its raters. Now, if you’re an assiduous student, or used to be one during your Uni days, you might find this extremely insulting, however, this is what Google has to say about the way students create content:

“Many students take shortcuts to save time and effort by doing one or more of the following: buying papers online or getting someone else to write for them, making things up [...] or paraphrasing content by changing words or sentence structure…”

They continue by making a badly-conceived Panda joke detailing another example of badly-written content: "[pages] using a lot of words to communicate only basic ideas or facts, for example, 'Pandas eat bamboo.  Pandas eat a lot of bamboo.  Bamboo is the best food for a Panda bear.'"

Although many webmasters will find this tasteless, it provides a simple example of bad content. Reading sections 6.0 – 6.3 of the guide is probably the best thing you can do right now to confirm whether your content creation strategy is up to scratch.

SEO Lessons from Lazy Students

Of course, you still see a lot of pages carrying this type of bad “panda” content ranked within the Top 5, especially in the celeb and tourism niches. Google is still learning.

Not everyone will emerge as a winner in this major reshuffle, however, sorting out your content by following this Quality Guide will also boost your site’s performance outside the remit of the organic traffic source. For example, making your content more focused is likely to reduce your direct traffic bounce rate and make visitors more compelled to share your content on social media channels.

Sam Levenson used to say: "You must learn from the mistakes of others. You can't possibly live long enough to make them all yourself." I think he had a good point. Read page 29 of the guide for more details on this.

 

Can your content meet a need?

Another part of the report worth reading (page 76 onwards) deals with a relatively new concept introduced to the quality raters – “Needs Met” rating. It’s a scale of 1 to 5 with 1 being “fails to meet a need” and 5 being “fully met”.

Do you think your landing page would score at least 4 on this scale? In other words, imagine you sell "red widgets" and if I search for “red widgets comparison” and end up on your page, how likely is it that I’ll be so amazed by your content that I will have no reason whatsoever to hit the back button and proceed with the next Google result? The real takeaway point from this is that the webmasters should understand the intent of the visitors and serve them content that they will find difficult to resist!

A complete understanding of how to meet the needs of your visitors not only improves the way you create content, it also leads to better conversions. Check page 76.

 

What can zombies tell google about quality

The dreaded zombie traffic! Especially if you’re running an e-commerce website, you might have noticed that you occasionally get days where the conversion rate tanks while the unique visits remain the same. All the conspiracy theories aside, Paul Haahr, Google’s veteran software engineer, shedded some light on this subject during the recent SMX West event.

If you have a free 30 minutes, watch the video – it’s a great source for understanding how Google works and how it determines quality. He talks about user behaviour and click patterns on the SERPs and admits that some traffic that comes to your site may be part of an active experiment.

[embed width="630" height="373"]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJPu4vHETXw[/embed]

That's why so many webmasters report Zombie traffic - high bounce rates and zero conversions. After all Google is yet another website, albeit a massive one, and it's supposed to do A/B testing to determine the best way (or the most profitable way) of arranging their SERPs layout.

Yes, zombie traffic can be annoying, however, if in terms of benchmarking (i.e. how your site compares to other sites within the same niche) you score better than your competitors, you have nothing to be worried about in the long run.

As the number of zombie traffic cases reported on various SEO forums keeps increasing, I can only assume Google is up to something. From my research this something is likely to be related to Panda and how Google is trying to re-establish what quality content actually means in a wider context of the “needs met” concept.

Competitive intelligence was important during the Space Age. It is even more important now. You should keep an eye on your competitors and develop an internal benchmarking process that helps you understand how your website stacks up against your competitors’ websites. Watch the video referenced above.

 

How the Quality Rater Guidelines help prioritise content?

The older versions of the Quality Rater Guidelines seemed to favour supplemental content, whereas this new version is putting much less emphasis on supplemental content. Some SEOs would even say it is marginalizing it. And why not if it is getting in the way of the main content and becoming a distraction. If you’re a blogger, you might have already noticed that all the amazing stuff in your sidebar is getting fewer and fewer clicks. Oh, you no longer have a sidebar! Congratulations and welcome to the future of the web.

I’m not telling you to give up on all the fancy widgets, calculators and navigation bars that you’ve created to make your site stand out, however, it’s a good time to re-evaluate if all this supplemental content actually adds value. The best way to accomplish this is to carry out a quick A/B test – create an alternative version of a page without the sidebar and compare the conversion rate.

Scrutinising this aspect of your site also gives you an opportunity to check that your website is mobile friendly. Is it as helpful on a small screen as it is on a big one? Do the widgets and calculators get in the way and obstruct too much of the main content? Or do they distract users from the main event?

At the end of the day, it’s your page’s main content that should drive the conversions, so if you really want people to use some of your supplemental content (such as a calculator, for example) maybe it is a better idea to make it part of the user journey. As mentioned previously, you will want to do some A/B testing to be able to make a decision based on facts and stats.

The key takeaway points from this is that Panda is still evolving. It’s important to remember that Panda updates are no longer in-your-face like they used to be back in the day when people used to lose half of their traffic overnight due to a Panda update.

If you’re new to the game, you might not even realise that your website is affected by the Panda element of the Google’s search algorithm. The good thing about having access to these guidelines is that you can learn together with Google’s Panda and implement changes that will improve the user experience of your website on whichever device they are using it on.

Rethink the way you design pages. Is supplementary content really helping or has it become a distraction? Check page 30.

 

Time to deploy a focus group

You don’t need to be a Fortune 500 company with a multi-million marketing budget to attempt to implement some of the key points and improve the quality of your website. Why not take the Quality Rater Guidelines, deploy a focus group and ask them to evaluate a sampling of websites within your niche? It’s not as expensive as it sounds.

As you might have already guessed, yourself, your friends, employees and in fact anyone who is familiar with your website, shouldn't be included in the focus group. You need a bunch of anonymous people who are given 10 competing websites to evaluate and they have no idea which of these websites is yours.

The most accessible channels for creating a focus group are Fiverr, oDesk freelancer exchange and the Amazon’s mTurk. All these sites can help you find people who would be happy to perform short tasks for a surprisingly little.

The location of the focus group members doesn’t matter much, as long as they have a reasonable command of English because some parts of the Guidelines document require certain linguistic proficiency. This content evaluation should be carried out on a per-page basis.

Let’s say you have five landing pages serving five distinct key phrases and preferably different user intentions (finding basic information, finding in-depth information, buying etc…). You’d need to scour the competitors’ sites identifying pages that correspond to your landing pages in terms of purpose. In this example you’d end up with 50 pages that the focus group members would have to compare and evaluate. Who is going to come out on top? Is your website going to stand the Quality Rater Guidelines test?

Would you’d like us to review your website content against the Google quality guidelines? Request a FREE SEO quality assessment. Available to businesses based in South England with an annual turnover of £1m+.

Call 01202 788333 now or complete the form below.



  

 

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