Search quality rating guidelines

A few years ago, Google updated its algorithm to make it harder for information that was related to medical or financial decisions. They call this YMYL content: your money, your life.

The idea here is that someone has a serious medical condition or is in a precarious financial situation, and they make an important decision based on information they found online. Google probably wants to limit its liability here and tightened the requirement for this kind of content.

I was surprised to learn this because I read through Google’s webmaster guidelines a few times, and I’ve never heard anything like this.

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/overview

Then I realized that these finer guidelines around search content aren’t in the webmaster guidelines, they’re in the guidelines for search quality evaluators.

https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/hsw-sqrg.pdf

Google works with ~14,000 external Search Quality Raters that manually go through sites and grade them according to a detailed list of guidelines that are constantly being updated. This human review process becomes one of many factors that determines a site’s rank.

Here’s a link latest guidelines, it’s 172 pages long, so this is a whole new level to the rabbit hole for me.

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterhub.com/en//searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf