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    Download The Latest Google Search Quality Rating Guidelines

    We have been tipped off to a revised Google Quality Rating Guidelines handbook that has been leaked. It has been over three and a half years since we last saw a leaked Google Quality Raters Handbook and that document was from back in April 2007. Pot Pie Girl found a copy of the March 30, 2011 […]

    Google Quality DownloadWe have been tipped off to a revised Google Quality Rating Guidelines handbook that has been leaked. It has been over three and a half years since we last saw a leaked Google Quality Raters Handbook and that document was from back in April 2007.

    Pot Pie Girl found a copy of the March 30, 2011 version 3.18 of the Google Search Quality Rating Guidelines handbook used by Google Search Quality Raters around the world. It’s 125 page long, and you can find it linked off their post here.

    We’d had it posted earlier ourselves, but Google said that it was a copyrighted document, and since he hadn’t done any fair use work with it (such as excerpting it), so that we needed to remove it from our site or we’d get a formal legal request. So head to Pot Pie Girl if you want it, for as long as it’s there.

    Clearly, there are a lot of good tips on what Google considers to be quality versus not quality. What you can learn from documents like this is how Google classifies types of content and pages.

    Understanding how Google quality raters are trained and how they work can be useful for all SEOs.

    Hat tip to E Brundige.

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    About the Author

    Barry Schwartz

    Barry Schwartz

    Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.

    In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

    Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.