Google Raters Guide Roundtable

Directors Cut: David and I have been doing these deep dives on the raters guide for many years and have found them very useful in making, to a lesser degree, adjustments to our SEO techniques, however, it is a big part of the content strategy because if Google is saying to raters rate this lowest if you see this on the website... I think it is a good idea not to do that on your website! I hope you enjoy the video or audio as much as we did making it! The Hangout Video:

Highlights

Introductions: Jennifer Slegg of The SEM Post, Bill Slawski blogs on SEO By the SEA and Director of SEO Research at Go Fish Digital and Doc Sheldon Doc is the owner and editor of Search News Central and copy and technical SEO company Intrinsic Value SEO and Ammon Johns.

Are these Ranking Factors: The panel discussed how they explain to clients and other SEO's what the raters Guide is and what is it used for.

7:24 - Jennifer Slegg's Executive Summary of Changes: Like many on this panel Jennifer has been analyzing the Guide for years. What is the purpose of the page and reputation of main content creator/authors as well reputation of site were at the top of her list. Terry mentioned that they had added sharing as purpose of a page. 13:24 - Ammon Johns on copy, usability and Machine Learning: Ammon discussed how Google uses the raters assessments for use with in their Machine Learning systems to improve and assess the Machine learning Algos. Bill and others discussed how the raters are part of the machine learning framework.

20:58 - Discussion of Authorship: New stress on expertise and reputation of content creators not just the website. Bill talks about knowledgebase trust. There are a lot of tips for establishing reputation for authors

30:45 - Low Quality Pages: YMOYL pages need more trust and expertise. No expertise should be almost always low quality. Safety has been added to the YMOYL pages because of misinformation about safety (fake medical info). New emphasis on POP (Purpose of Page) and accessing clickbait title accuracy (likely to filter fake news).

48:55 - Deceptive page design and low page quality traits: Jennifer started the discussion outlining some of the deceptive tactics like disguising ads or affiliate links, distracting content, copied content

101:50 - List of Most Important Factors: Jennifer details the changes indicated in this new list which led to a discussion of beneficial purpose of page and value add. Terry and Dave took the position that value add was a page to page comparison whereas beneficial POP was about intent of user and website.

1:15:00 - Raters Guide For Future Proofing Your SEO: The discussion turned to how the Panel uses the rater guideline to adjust their SEO activity which Dave & Terry have been advocates of Future Proofing stressing its importance in the Dojo from the first day forward. Basically SEO future Proofing is taking info like the raters guide and using it to adjust your SEO activity going forward because as Ammon pointed out our recommendations should be useful for years not months.

Resources You may find helpful for knowledge and future proofing.

• Google Raters Guide 2018 PDF
• Jennifer Slegg's Post on SEM Post
• SEM Post Archive of Rater Guide Posts Including Raters Guides for International Search and Voice Search
• Dojo Videos & Hangouts:Insights from 2016 and Google Raters Guide 2014 - Deep Dive
• Knowledge-Based Trust: Estimating the Trustworthiness of Web Sources
• Agent Rank, or Google Plus as an Identity Service or Digital Signature

The Hosts

• Terry Van Horne
• Dave Harry

iTunes and the Dojo Radio iPhone App!