Google has publicly disclosed its search engine’s guidelines. Here’s what you need to know.

If you work in the tech scene, and have not been living under a rock for the past week, you cannot have escaped the news last week that Google took the unprecedented step of publicly disclosing its Google Quality Rater’s Guidelines & Handbook.

At 160 pages, you wouldn’t be far wrong in thinking that it could put a can of RedBull to sleep, but this still didn’t stop some in the internet marketing world from losing their collective minds and bandying it about as though it were the Holy Grail, wrapped in the Turin Shroud, and the end of the line for SEO (search engine optimization) consultants everywhere.

For once, we got a confirmed look at the “wheels-within-wheels” that power the global internet behemoth that is Google. “At last!” marketers cried, we were handed a peek behind the curtain to see how the magic is made.

Having spent the last decade trying to understand and reverse engineer the Google search algorithm, I have long said, “Build websites for people, not for search engines”, and the search quality guidelines very much reinforces this idea throughout.

What is the Google Quality Rater’s Guidelines & Handbook

The reason Google works so well is that the search engine delivers what users are looking for in a consistent and reliable fashion. A large part of this is because of the technology and software layers that Google have developed to understand the internet and sort the trillions of pages it finds to match the hundreds of billions of queries it handles each month.

At such a scale, reviewing content is only possible by matching the content against templates and formulas to assess the page quality algorithmically.

Whilst the future undoubtedly relies on more use of machine learning, as Google hinted at earlier this year, for now Google cannot hand blind trust of its algorithm to software and formulas, and their inherent failings.

A dark subsection of SEO, known as “Black Hat SEO” or “Spamdexing“, exists on the fringes of the industry and seeks to find flaws in this algorithm and exploit it to rank their content prominently to get a lot of traffic.

Examples of this include: spamming links to forums to trick the algorithm into thinking your site is very popular, or putting keywords on your site in white text on a white page, etc.

Why is it important?

We need to remember that the internet is not static. It is an ever growing, ever evolving network. The way we consume internet content also continues to evolve and broaden across desktop, mobile, tablets, wearables, etc.

Google is faced with the task of evaluating a rapidly moving target, whilst thousands of people continue to poke holes in its algorithm and exploit any loopholes.

To do this, Google employ “Search Quality Raters” to help them understand what is and isn’t a relevant result to a range of search terms. Then, they try to build algorithm filters that can filter pages based on this feedback. Essentially asking users, “Tell us what is good, and what isn’t, and we will make sure our algorithm returns more of the good and less of the bad.”

So if we can understand what these quality raters consider good, and then make sure our website delivers that, we have the best chance of appearing high in the Google results and getting a lot of traffic. Google is incredibly secretive about its actual ranking algorithm (sorry, France) – so understanding how the search quality raters guide this algorithm is as close as we can ever get to understanding it.

So, what do we need to know?

A short summary