Google’s John Mueller suggests referring to Google’s quality rater guidelines when looking for information about how to create good content.
This topic came up in a recent Google Webmaster Central hangout where a site owner was concerned about the lack of updates to Google’s webmaster guidelines.
Specifically, this individual was looking for more recent information on how Google’s algorithms assess content quality when ranking web pages.
After some back and forth between Mueller and the site owner, eventually this question was asked:
“Has anything really changed with how you guys perceive good content since those [webmaster] guidelines were written years ago?”
That question prompted Mueller to refer the site owner to Google’s quality rater guidelines.
Mueller made sure to clarify that the quality rater guidelines are not directly related to ranking factors.
However, the document still contains useful information that can help site owners figure out what to look for with regards to maintaining good quality website content.
Google updated its quality rater guidelines in July, and I wrote a detailed recap of changes made to the “low quality” content section. You can view the full article here.
Mueller suggested maybe Google should tie in the quality rater guidelines with its webmaster guidelines.
So perhaps that’s something that may happen in the future.
Hear Mueller’s full response in the video below, starting at the 1:13:02 mark:
“The one aspect I’m thinking of at the moment are the quality rater guidelines, which aren’t directly ranking factor-related. But there’s also a lot of good information in there on what we think people could be watching out for with regards to good websites, or maybe websites where the quality is not so good.
Maybe that’s something that we should really be tying in together with the webmaster guidelines so it’s easier to find these additional types of information. So that’s it’s not just for those of you who already know about this but also those who kind of are stumbling on this for the first time.”
