Google’s Quality Rating Guide Leaked Again; Here Is Version Five

Google’s Quality Rating Guidelines document has been leaked once again! Version 5.0 was leaked a few days ago, where Google has reportedly completely revamped the guidelines. Jennifer Slegg has documented most of the new guidelines on her blog.

You can also read the full new 160 page guidelines on scribd.com. I am actually surprised the document has not yet been pulled down yet.

Jennifer explained the new guidelines put “a high emphasis on sites that are considered to have a high level of expertise, authoritativeness or trustworthiness.” This is known as the acronym, EAT: expertise, authoritativeness or trustworthiness.

Hasn’t Google already published this Google quality raters guideline? Yes, in March of last year they released the document but not until gutting much of the details. You can view that version still online at this URL.

Originally the document was leaked back in 2008, 2011, 2012 and other times, when finally they said they were considering going public with that document. They went public with the document in 2013 but clearly have been updating a different version for internal use.

Search quality raters are third-party people Google hires through a third-party agency to rate the search results. It is not used to rank search results, but rather, to measure the quality of the search results. We have interviewed a search quality rater in the past.