Google’s John Mueller said in this morning’s webmaster hangout at the 6:18 mark that he has not yet reviewed or read through the updated search quality raters guidelines PDF. Why am I bringing this up? Well, one might think that someone who communicates with webmasters about search and SEO issues would have been given advance notice of these changes and maybe even a summary email of what fundamentally changes with the guidelines? But it seems like not.
Of course, the people who do these quality raters guidelines are separate from John’s team. They do not directly influence the ranking. There isn’t specific SEO stuff in this document. It really talks about how to check if the results are relevant to the query. As John said numerous times, there is no direct influence in this PDF with ranking your web site. A quality rater cannot flag your site as spam or push it down in rankings.
But in any event, it is interesting that John did not read it. He said “I haven’t actually looked at those updated quality rater guidelines.”
He explained why:
There are debates all over Twitter now, just like whenever Google updates the doc, if it is even worth caring about:
I do think reading this document will lead to people building better sites that Google would be proud of having in their search results.
Anyway, here is the video embed:
Do I blame John for not reading it? Nah – his answers to people’s questions in the webmaster community won’t change based on him reading the updated document.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
Update: In 2022, this is no longer true:
