Are You Lowest or Highest?

byDianeScorpio

17.9K followers

5 years ago

So, yesterday, we learnt that Google uses real people to assess the quality of a page, not just robots! Today, we are going to look at the overall page quality rating. There are actually nine different ratings your posts/pages/articles/reviews could be given, on a sliding scale from lowest to highest. Below, I have copied the section from the evaluator's manual which begins to discuss how to assign a rating.

"3.0 Overall Page Quality (PQ) Rating

At a high level, here are the steps of Page Quality rating:

1. Understand the true purpose of the page. Websites or pages without any beneficial purpose, including pages that are created with no attempt to help users, or pages that potentially spread hate, cause harm, or misinform or deceive users, should receive the Lowest rating. No further assessment is necessary.

2. Otherwise, the PQ rating is based on how well the page achieves its purpose using the criteria outlined in the following sections on Lowest, Low, Medium, High, and Highest quality pages.

On Page Quality rating tasks, you will use the Page Quality sliding scale (slider) to assign the overall PQ rating.

You may also use the in-between ratings of Lowest+, Low+, Medium+, and High+. Please interpret the “+” as “+ ½,” meaning that the Lowest+ rating is halfway between Lowest and Low, Low+ is halfway between Low and Medium, etc.

In the following sections, you will learn about characteristics of Lowest, Low, Medium, High, and Highest quality pages.

3.1 Page Quality Rating: Most Important Factors

Here are the most important factors to consider when selecting an overall Page Quality rating:

● The Purpose of the Page
● Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness: This is an important quality characteristic. Use your research on the additional factors below to inform your rating.
● Main Content (MC) Quality and Amount: The rating should be based on the landing page of the task URL.
● Website Information/information about who is responsible for the MC: Find information about the website as well as the creator of the MC.
● Website Reputation/reputation about who is responsible for the MC"

So, here we see that Google can instantly give the lowest rating to some websites, without looking into them further. Other than the obvious ones such as those which spread hate, note the use of the phrase "no attempt to help users". And that backs up what is taught here at WA - your content should be written with the aim of providing a solution, a way of helping someone.

Another thing they are apparently checking for, is who is responsible for the website? So, your "about me" page is not only a nice way of gaining trust with potential customers, but appears to be somerthing that Google expects to see.

Well, I hope this is of some use, and you are not throughly bored as yet, with my new series! I think it is beneficial to see the actual Google manual, but allow me to break it down into simpler terms.