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Download The Latest Google Search Quality Rating Guidelines

Barry Schwartz on October 18, 2011 at 9:02 am

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 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.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.