Short deck with simple and punchy quotations from Google's Search Quality Evaluation Guidelines published November 2015. The idea behind this particular deck was to focus on quoting parts of the guidelines which are: 1. universal; and 2. shine light on the values governing Google in it's pursuit of organising the web's information. Suitable (and hopefully helpful!) for SEO's of all levels :) The reference document can be downloaded from http://goo.gl/sQTVWh Enjoy! @ivanpashov

1. Notes from Google Search
Quality Evaluation
Guidelines November 2015
Put together by @ivanpashov
www.google.
com/insidesearch/howsearchworks/assets/searchqu
alityevaluatorguidelines.pdf

2. Good search engines give results that
are helpful for users in their specific
language and locale

3. A webmaster is the person who designs,
develops, and/or maintains a website

4. Most pages are created to be helpful for
users. Some pages are created merely
to make money, with little or no effort to
help users
The first step in understanding a page is
figuring out its purpose

5. The purpose of a page is the reason or
reasons why the page was created
Every page on the Internet is created for
a purpose, or for multiple purposes

6. Websites and pages must be created to
help users

7. Common helpful page purposes include
(but are not limited to):
● To share information about a topic
● To share personal or social information
● To share pictures, videos, or other forms of media
● To express an opinion or point of view
● To entertain
● To sell products or services
● To allow users to post questions for other users to answer
● To allow users to share files or to download software

8. All content on a webpage can be
classified as one of the following: Main
Content, Supplementary Content or
Advertisements/Monetization (Ads)

9. Main content is any part of the page that
directly helps the page achieve its
purpose
Main content can be
text, images, videos or page features
such as calculators, games, etc.
Webmasters directly create and/or
control the main content of the page

10. Quality of the main content is determited
by how much
1. time
2. effort
3. expertise; and
4. talent/skill
have gone into the creation of the page

11. We will consider content to be low quality
if it is created without adequate time,
effort, expertise, or talent/skill
Pages with low quality MC do not
achieve their purpose well

12. Adjectives associated with colours:
Red: love and passion
Orange: enthusiasm and happiness
Yellow: joy and hope
Green: growth and stability
Blue: responsibility and strength
Purple: ambition and royalty
White: goodness and purity
Black: elegance and power

13. Use as few words as possible to
communicate your idea
Don't use lots of words to communicate
only basic ideas or facts

14. EAT = Expertise, Authority and
Trustworthiness
YMYL = your money or your life
PQ = page quality

15. We have very different standards for
pages on large, professionally-produced
business websites than we have for
small amateur, hobbyist, or personal
websites
All PQ (page quality) rating should be
done in the context of the purpose of the
page and the type of website

16. Look carefully at the SC (secondary
content). If it is unhelpful or distracting,
think about why it is included on the
page
Unhelpful or distracting SC that benefits
the website rather than helping the user
is a reason for a low rating

17. A lack of helpful SC (secondary content)
on large websites with a lot of content
may be a reason for a low rating
To summarize, a lack of helpful SC may
be a reason for a low quality rating,
depending on the purpose of the page
and the type of website

18. Monetised links

19. If a website is not being maintained and
updated enough for its purpose, that is a
reason for a low page quality rating
Websites and pages should be created
to be helpful for users

20. Websites and pages which are created
to harm users, deceive users, or only
make money with no attempt to help
users should be rated lowest

21. Lack of purpose pages
All deceptive pages should be rated
lowest. Use the lowest rating if a
webpage page is deliberately created to
deceive and potentially harm users in
order to benefit the website

22. The quality of the MC (main content) is
one of the most important considerations
in PQ (page quality) rating
We’ll judge the quality of the MC by
thinking about how much time, effort,
expertise, and talent/skill was involved in
content creation

23. Why would a page exist without MC
(main content)?
Pages with MC which is completely
unhelpful for the purpose of the page,
should be considered to have no MC

24. Pages created with the intent of luring
search engines and users, rather than
providing meaningful MC (main content)
to help users, should be rated lowest
Gibberish pages with meaningless
content are useless for users and should
be rated lowest quality

25. Manual curation
Value added for users
If all or most of the MC (main content) on
the page is copied, think about the
purpose of the page. Why does the page
exist? What value does the page have
for users? Why should users look at the
page with copied content instead of the
original source?

26. Copied with minimal alteration
Lacking in purpose