Video: Jennifer Slegg on Google’s search quality raters guidelines

At SMX West earlier this year I asked Jennifer Slegg to talk to me about a topic she is very passionate about, Google’s search quality raters guidelines. Jennifer has been in the SEO industry for over twenty-years, and she has helped the community through her writing, forum moderation, social media involvement, speaking and much more.

When the quality raters guidelines began to leak out, even before it was a public document, Jennifer was breaking these 160-plus page PDF documents into something the industry can consume and use. Now she is one of the few who do a great job breaking down what has changed in the document when Google pushes out an update.

One thing in that document that she feels gets too much attention is the section on E-A-T. The document is a good overview of which types of web sites Google wants to see rank highly in search, but you should not focus on one individual thing. Don’t get too engrossed in a single section or single bullet point when reviewing these guidelines.

We also briefly talked about Google algorithm updates and how it isn’t always healthy to follow them too closely. Jennifer and I reminisced a bit about the early days of the community, when Google launched AdSense and much more. You can follow Jennifer @jenstar.

Here is the video:

I started this vlog series recently, and if you want to sign up to be interviewed, you can fill out this form on Search Engine Roundtable. You can also subscribe to my YouTube channel by clicking here.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz 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. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.