Google have updated their Search Rater Quality Guidelines document. This set of guidelines gives direction to a global team of search rater testers that analyse the search results and help to determine how useful and relevant the search results are for users. These tests are carried out across multiple sectors, and multiple industries, with a view of ensuring the best user and search experience is offered by the search engine.
Within SEO, its good to be aware of what these guidelines are, and how they can impact your business’ SEO strategy.
Within the 2022 update, the language and explanations used to describe Expertise, Authorativeness and Trustworthiness has been further developed. Page 12 of the document includes a table that gives more detail of what YMYL (Your Money or Your Life factors) could be. To help describe this in more detail, there are now 3 tiers of YMYL examples – categorising examples as either Clearly being YMYL, Maybe YMYL, and Clearly Not YMYL.
The idea behind doing this is to give everyone more guidance on how to evaluate whether a web page qualifies against the YMYL guidelines and offers users an experience in their best interest.
