Increase Your Website Quality Rating

Google recently released the latest version of its Search Quality Rating handbook.

The handbook provides a summary of all the criteria needed for Google’s in-house raters to effectively determine website quality or the overall character of web pages that come up in search engine results.

Unlike Google’s search rankings, which concentrate more on the mechanics of getting your website onto the first page of SERP (Search Engine Results Page) through title tags, keywords, backlinks, etc., the purpose of Google’s Page Quality rating system is to verify if a web page achieves its stated purpose. By ensuring that their search quality evaluators rate results for different keywords and phrases properly, Google can then provide actual useful results for their users.

Here are some key points that will help you improve your website for search:

Prioritise high quality content

Content is rated according to three qualities: Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (which is referred as E-A-T). In order for your website to get a high quality rating, your content must be thoroughly detailed and written by someone with credibility on the topic. For pages that have “nothing wrong, but nothing special” content, they will be rated as medium quality. While pages that have “unsatisfying amount of content for the specified purpose” will be rated as low quality.

Focus your design around your content

Center your design around your website’s content. It doesn’t have to be flashy or complicated to earn a high quality rating. Google, in fact, stresses “functional page design which allows users to easily focus on main content and use supplementary content as desired.”

Provide supplementary content for your pages

Supplementary content includes related articles, sources, navigation and other pages on your site. For rating pages, the main content is essentially the most important element to be considered but your supplementary content is also taken into consideration.

Maintain a good reputation on other sites

The reputation of both your website and author(s) are also considered so it would be wise to build trust and maintain a good reputation since reputation research is done in the form of news articles, reviews, and blog posts. Google highlights that “when the website says one thing about itself, but reputable external sources disagree with what the website says, trust the external sources”.

Ensure that your website is mobile-friendly

Google evaluators often use mobile devices like smartphones and tablets rather than desktop computers to rate pages and results. Google also points out that “rates should be based on experience” and not just content quality. Mobile usability is considered to play a very huge role in Google’s perception of your website’s quality.

In conclusion, along with remembering the key points above, your website should be able to help supply users with accurate information, provide a clear page design, and deliver a lot of well-written content in order to receive high page quality ratings. Additionally, you should, as much as possible, avoid creating sites that cause harm, make money off of users and generally use them to deceive as you can be penalised and given a low rating.