Google Revamps Search Quality Raters Guidelines Yet Again
Sep 12, 2019
10 min read
Before we get into discussing the changes in Google’s QGR, let us understand briefly what it is all about. As we know, Google’s search algorithm is updated numerous times during the year. Suffice to say that updating the entire search algorithm for the biggest search engine in the world is no easy task. This is why Google employs dedicated teams of search quality testers, who follow a predefined search guidelines to test each web page and rates them accordingly. This pattern of quality ratings is then translated into Google’s search algorithm which enables Google to perform automated tests and rate each page that we can see in Google’s search index.
The first glimpse of significant updates to these guidelines came about back in May 2019. With the recent push on EAT & Page Quality gaining more and more importance for Google, these updates laid special emphasis on how each content and advertisement media is presented on a website. For instance, the pop-ups, information and page relevancy to where the ad is shown, user readability or navigation hindrance due to information obstruction (ad size exceeding specific sizes, incomplete or misleading information, etc).
This leads to a very important question for a lot of marketers and webmasters alike.
How Does This Affect My Website?
Unlike core search algorithm updates like Panda or Penguin which had direct impact on search rankings for website, Search Quality Raters Guideline is more of an instruction manual from Google for websites and Quality Testers alike, to see how Google wants to rate the quality of a website or page.
So, this update may not have a direct impact to your overall search positions. However, it still should be treated as a strong checklist to make sure your site content adheres to it to get a strong preference from Google.
If Google rates your site content high, then that quality parameter would go a long way in boosting your site’s visibility on the SERP.
To summarize, you can say that quality guidelines doesn’t impact the ranking signals but rather helps in predicting algorithm trends. This makes these updates a lot more important as it can help you identify the change in trends for any core algorithm updates that have or will be taking place in the near future. This is because the algorithm changes affecting ranking signals or site evaluation for search engine positions, would be governed by these QRGs.
What Changed in QRG
The major chunk of changes this time round has been centered around YMYL, EAT and Main Content (on the website) and it is quite significant for all marketers and seo professionals. These changes are bound to keep SEO experts and online marketers on the edge as they can use these updated guidelines to predict the next set of changes that could be coming in the Google’s core algorithm.
Let’s take a closer look at the changes and updates in the recent Quality Rater’s Guidelines.
Your Money Your Life (YMYL)
The first set of changes can be noticed in section 2.3 of the QRG under YMYL section. With special focus on the News and Government topics available online. The news topic section now gets its own section as against earlier when it was clubbed under Public/Official Information Pages.
With this latest update it becomes clear that Google wants to emphasize information available on news sites and evaluate it more consistently based on the merit of the content and information sources.
“Civics, Government & Laws” were also categorized under their own category further reflecting Google’s intention on evaluating these sub-sections separately than just as another news and information content. Some of the other significant categorizations in the YMYL sections are:
- Shopping and Finance to get separate categories
- Medical Information section has been renamed to Health & Safety
- Groups of People has been added as a new section
‘Main Content’ Evaluation
Content quality guidelines across the world have a subjective nature to it when being evaluated by human beings. But for a machine or program to set the benchmarks, a specific set of guidelines needed to be administered. This time round, the QRG has been updated with new paragraphs about evaluating and rating content across various industries.
News
For any news based sites, Google has indicated that it will be looking at the source, relevancy and bibliography of citations that can verify the authenticity of a particular news article.
Creative Content
Focusing on content like videos, photographs, vlogs, infographics, etc. Google would ascertain the quality of the content, uniqueness and skillset of the content creator/publisher posting these content. Google algorithm is programmed to evaluate visual content quite capably.
Research Content
Setting examples of scientific research papers & a simple stamp collection article in terms of given weightage of evaluation, Google has signaled it would rate these types of content on the basis of consensus and expertise to validate the claims and information being presented in the article. Adding to this Google would also set different evaluating parameters for each of the content depending on nature, purpose and importance.
Linguistic Change in “Hate Pages”
Some of the changes in language of their evaluation checklist for websites/pages that promote hatred or violence.
- Citizenship, Socio-economic, political beliefs, victims of atrocities were removed from their evaluation parameters.
- Gender was renamed to Gender or Gender Identity
- Ethnicity was changed to Ethnic Origin
Reputation Checks for YMYL Content Creators
Let’s take an example of ecommerce sites to best explain this point. Based on the updates on QGR, Google is suggesting that it would evaluate the authenticity of the site based on user reviews of people who have made a purchase on the site. This small instance would apply according to each service or product based business or informational website available online. However the degree and nature of authenticity would vary depending on the details that are on offer and value proposition of each site.
Reviews, Testimonials and trustable citation sources will become strong parameters that validates the quality of a site which should be a food for thought for all content creators across all domains and industries operating online.
Journalist Quality Parameter Expands
Uptil the last guidelines, Pulitzer prize was the predominant benchmark based on which any journalistic piece was measured on the basis of credible citations or accreditations to Pulitzer prize winning authors or publishings. This has now been revamped with significant change to the language of the guidelines now suggest “...Newspaper (with an associated website) has won journalistic awards. . . . “ where as previously it didn’t feature extension of the newspaper in terms of its association with one or other award winning site.
Source
Outcome
While it is still early to comment on these changes as they don’t reflect directly on your websites performance as of yet, but we are sure to see some incoming changes and patterns of shift in terms of the overall content and trust evaluation of each website and thereby its’ positioning by Google.
Popular influencer Glenn Gabe has taken to twitter to highlight some of the more indepth changes and sections and shared his opinion with his followers that has been sparking constructive debates.
Source
With these latest updates, Google has cleared the shroud of ambiguity on content quality evaluation and reinstated that it is going to give importance to YMYL and EAT parameters for evaluating the quality and trust of the website which consequently could have a long term impact on your site’s visibility on SERP.
If you’re concerned or even worried about what these updates could mean for your business, you can schedule a free consultation call with our SEO experts today.
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Questions That You Should Ask to Hire a Powerful Inbound Marketing Agency in India
Since the onset of the digital age and the marketing platform moving towards the digital marketing, it is very important to know how to source the right agency that meets your needs. Even if you google your search typing “popular inbound marketing agencies in india”, you are bound to get 3,44,000 results! This is very obvious that to shortlist one agency out of these is going to be a nightmarish task for anybody. Even if you use the HubSpot platform, they might whittle down this list to a mere thousands, but that’s not enough, is it? So we are going to provide you some questions that will give you a fair idea to shortlist that one agency that you are looking for. If we miss out on any of the questions that you feel like must be added to the list, then provide us with your valuable comments and we’ll modify this blog according. We also want you to share this blog as much as you can so that other businesses in need get the hang of what to do next in hiring an inbound marketing agency. What Makes You Hire The Inbound Marketing Agency 1. Marketing Did you like the agency’s marketing work done in the past? If a marketing agency struggles to find leads and customers for itself then probably same is the thing that they are going to do for you! 2. How did you find this agency? SEO:Was the agency’s website rank well for the keywords that I’ve searched? After clicking on the website, were you efficiently directed to the products/services page? Social Media:How engaging is their content on social media channels? Do they have enough of following and does the fans like what the agency posts? Email:The landing page where I gave them my email ID was it enticing? Did the emails from the agency help me move closer towards a decision? Design: How does their website look? Are the graphics used on the website catchy? Website Content: How well is the website designed? Does it helps me in understanding about their inbound practices? Is it just like every other agency? How engaging is the blog's page on the website(if any)?When was it last updated and what is the frequency? Lead Generation: How effectively did the agency contact you(if they did) even after looking at their products or services page and not making any sales? Was the landing page form catchy to give your contact details? Did they offer you anything to convert you into a lead? Are they similar to the other agencies?Let’s say you are convinced with one of the agencies and have become a marketing lead for them. Now is the time to look at their sales process. 3. Sales Questions to ask about the sales process of the agency: How was I contacted by the agency? Did I like it? What was the understanding for the sales people about the Inbound Marketing? Were they able to convince you that how how their agency was different from the other agencies? Even if you hired this agency will they be able to convert leads into sales for you?First Impression is the last impression! 4.Writers Inbound Marketing is all about generating curiosity for readers and help them understand how your product is gonna solve their problem. For this purpose, the writers hired by the agency should be able to generate content that actually convinces someone how your product stands above the products offered by your competitors. Questions for writers: Does the agency has in-house writers or does it outsource the writing part? Will your company get a dedicated writer or you will get the one whoever is available at the time? Have the writers written any piece of content related to your industry? 5. Marketers Same thing goes for while shortlisting any marketer from the agency: Who will be assigned your company’s project? What kind of experience he or she has? 6. Client Management Will I personally blend in with the people at the marketing agency? This is important to know because you are going to work with agency for at least 8- 12 months to make the inbound marketing success. 7. Proposal and Contract After all the back and forth of communications, you are bound to get a proposal. Now it is as per your liking that how good a proposal you get from the agency. It should be able to provide you with answers for questions like: how is the company planning to report on the tasks that they did for you, how will they handle the scope of project that are not included in the contract, will they be able to meet deadlines. If you do get a convincing answers then we believe that your search for the right agency is over. We hope that this article should be able to guide you in the right direction for hiring the most powerful inbound agency. Good Luck! ...
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How To Build a Successful B2B Inbound Marketing Strategy in 2025?
In B2B business, building strong relationships with your target audience is important. You also know that reaching them at the right time is essential. A strategic inbound marketing approach helps you attract, engage, and retain clients by providing valuable content that resonates with their needs. Let’s explore a few inbound marketing statistics first. Inbound leads acquired after five months of consistent inbound marketing are 80% less expensive than outbound leads and cost $14 less than traditional marketing for each newly acquired customer. So, if implemented correctly, inbound marketing can turn prospects into loyal customers and increase revenue over time. What is B2B Inbound Marketing? B2B inbound marketing is a strategy that focuses on attracting, engaging, and delighting business customers through relevant and helpful content. The goal is to create a customer experience that feels personal and non-intrusive, allowing prospects to find and engage with your brand on their terms. The inbound marketing process is based on three key stages: Attract: Bringing the right visitors to your website with informative and engaging content. Engage: Nurturing those visitors and providing them with the information they need to decide. Delight: Continue engaging with your customers even after the sale to encourage loyalty and referrals. Inbound marketing builds trust with potential customers by offering content that addresses their needs and challenges. Essentially, you are helping them solve problems rather than pushing a product. What is an Example of B2B Inbound Marketing? Consider a company that provides project management software to other businesses. Instead of reaching out with cold emails or making unsolicited sales calls, the company uses inbound marketing to attract potential customers by creating content that addresses common problems in project management. For example: Blog posts on how to improve team collaboration Whitepapers about the latest trends in project management software Webinars discussing how to streamline workflows By offering these resources in exchange for information (like a name and email address), the company begins to build a relationship with the lead. Over time, this relationship is nurtured with additional content such as case studies, demo requests, and product updates, ultimately leading the prospect to purchase. In this example, inbound marketing helps position the company as a trusted advisor rather than a salesperson. When the lead is ready to buy, they are already familiar with the company’s expertise and products, making them more likely to convert. How to Create a B2B Inbound Marketing Strategy? Building a successful inbound marketing strategy takes time and effort, but the right approach can yield significant long-term results. Here's how to create a B2B inbound marketing strategy: 1. Define Your Buyer Personas Before creating content that resonates with your audience, you need to understand who you are speaking to. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. To build accurate personas, gather data about your current customers, analyze their behaviors, and look for common traits. Consider factors such as: Job roles and responsibilities Industry challenges Goals and pain points Decision-making processes Clear buyer personas allow you to create targeted content that speaks directly to your audience's needs and interests. 2. Create High-Quality Content Content is the most important part of inbound marketing. However, not all content is created equal. You must create high-quality, valuable content addressing your audience’s pain points to attract and engage potential customers. This content could include: Blog posts: Answer common questions or provide in-depth insights into industry topics. Case studies: Showcase how your products or services have helped other businesses. eBooks and whitepapers: Offer detailed guides or research reports that provide in-depth solutions to problems. Webinars: Host live events where you provide expert insights and answer questions. 3. Optimize Your Website for Conversions While creating valuable content is crucial, ensuring your website is optimized to convert visitors into leads is equally important. Key tactics for improving your website’s conversion rate include: Clear Calls-to-Action (CTAs): Make sure each piece of content has a clear CTA that guides visitors to the next step, whether signing up for a newsletter or downloading a whitepaper. Landing Pages: Create specific landing pages for each content offer. These pages should be simple and focused and include a form where visitors can submit their contact details in exchange for the offer. Forms: Use forms to collect information from leads. Keep them short and straightforward—ask for only the essential details. Lead Nurturing: Once you’ve captured a lead’s information, nurture them with personalized content and follow-up emails. 4. Promote Your Content Content promotion is essential for driving traffic and increasing visibility. Some ways to promote your content include: Social Media: Share your content on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook platforms to reach a broader audience. Email Marketing: Distribute your content to your email list. To keep your audience engaged, you can use newsletters, drip campaigns, and personalized emails. SEO: Optimize your content for search engines to improve its visibility. Use relevant keywords, optimize meta descriptions, and ensure your website has a clear structure. 5. Measure and Analyze Your Results Inbound marketing is an ongoing process of improvement. You must continuously monitor and analyze your results to ensure effective strategy. Key metrics to track include: Website Traffic: Are more people visiting your website due to your content promotion efforts? Lead Generation: How many leads are you capturing? Are they qualified leads? Conversion Rate: What percentage of leads are converting into customers? Engagement: Are your leads engaging with your content? Are they downloading resources, attending webinars, or sharing your content? Streamline your inbound lead generation systems We help you find the best inbound strategies to generate more customers so your inbox is always filled with sales-ready leads. Get Free Consultation 5 Key B2B Inbound Marketing Checkpoints By creating valuable, tailored content and strategically guiding prospects through the buyer’s journey, B2B inbound marketing helps businesses build trust and establish lasting relationships. It’s not just about driving traffic—it’s about attracting the right audience, generating high-quality leads, and nurturing them into loyal customers. 1. Your Website’s Internal/External Linking It’s quite funny to notice that some websites have more than 500+ External links within them. But maybe before one would say “Jack Robinson,” the links are nowhere to be found. What do you have to say about this evidence of quality backlinks? I guess not. It's advisable to ensure that your internal links are factors that would not break your site into boundless strands. Ensure that your link structure is strong and genuine (both internal and external). On the other hand, using automated means to enrich your website with links will not help it grow or mitigate the problems but would rather incur more search engine penalties. Also, splitting up your content into 400 to 500 pcs of non-related articles makes it difficult for search engines to categorize it. 2. Duplicate Content Does your site have duplicate content therein? This is another inbound marketing checkpoint to verify your website’s health status. Many businesses prefer letting professionals handle their websites in their best practices, while some believe magic would occur in a twinkle of an eye. Nonetheless, there are so many failure stories even so, more are flooding in by the day. Notify your website management on the issue of copied content and give reasons why you wouldn’t tolerate the practice (this does not mean they engage in such practice, but it alerts them of your awareness). 3. Your Website’s Page Speed No one likes to waste time on any non-informational article or piece. They’d rather walk down to the next website or perhaps pinch the search engine for the second time. Here comes the juncture where the word SPEED comes into web development and inbound marketing. A website’s speed determines its conversion rate in general. Potential visitors will leave immediately if they notice the sluggishness in your site's loading speed, increasing your bounce rate. The solution is simple: Optimize the use of tools like Google Pagespeed Insights to analyze your site’s speed. Hence, reduce the size of possible content components like images, page content, etc. Doing this will speedily improve your site’s performance. 3. Practical SEO Understanding practical SEO is an added advantage. This helps to provide clarity to search engine crawlers as to what to translate. Bad SEO techniques for maneuvering search engine crawlers to get a top ranking will undoubtedly fail. However, you may enjoy them for a short period of time. This is an inbound marketing checkpoint that a professional business should combine to tackle. 4. Crawler Issues When Search Engine crawlers fail to pick up your site during its routine indexing, this means your site is suffering from what is known as a “Crawler Issue.” Why does this occur? There are so many things that cause crawler issues… Bad SEO Sitemap Blackhat SEO for your websites Refusal to submit sitemap to search engines Bad website structuring and mapping. Measuring the ROI of Your B2B Inbound Marketing Efforts To understand the effectiveness of your B2B inbound marketing strategy, measuring ROI (Return on Investment) is essential. This ensures that your efforts are not just driving traffic but also delivering tangible business outcomes. Here’s how you can measure ROI effectively: 1. Set Clear Goals and Metrics Start by defining measurable goals for your campaigns, such as lead generation, website traffic, or sales conversions. Each goal should align with your overall business objectives. Common metrics for B2B inbound marketing ROI include: Website Traffic: Track how many visitors your inbound content attracts. Leads Generated: Measure the number of leads captured through forms, downloads, or sign-ups. Conversion Rates: Monitor the percentage of visitors turning into leads and leads into customers. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): Understand the long-term value a customer brings to your business. 2. Leverage Analytics Tools Use tools like Google Analytics, HubSpot, or Salesforce to track and analyze campaign performance. These tools provide insights into key metrics, such as traffic sources, content engagement, and lead tracking, helping you connect marketing efforts with results. 3. Calculate the Cost per Lead and Acquisition Understanding how much it costs to acquire a lead or customer is critical for ROI analysis. Calculate: Cost per Lead (CPL): Total campaign cost divided by the number of leads generated. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): Total campaign cost divided by the number of customers acquired. 4. Attribute Revenue to Inbound Marketing Efforts Use attribution models to determine how much revenue can be directly linked to your inbound marketing strategies. This could involve tracking conversions from specific campaigns, content pieces, or marketing channels. 5. Monitor Engagement and Nurturing Metrics Inbound marketing doesn’t stop at lead generation. Measure engagement through metrics like email open rates, click-through rates, and webinar attendance. These insights help you gauge how well your campaigns nurture leads and move them through the sales funnel. 6. Evaluate Long-Term Impact Inbound marketing often yields long-term benefits, such as brand awareness and customer loyalty. Regularly assess how your efforts contribute to sustained traffic, repeat business, and cross-sell or upsell opportunities. 7. Optimize for Better Results Finally, use the data to refine your campaigns. Identify what works best, reallocate resources to high-performing strategies, and test new ideas to improve ROI over time. By continuously measuring and optimizing your inbound marketing efforts, you’ll ensure that your strategies deliver value and drive measurable growth for your business. Conclusion Building a successful B2B inbound marketing strategy takes time and effort. You can attract and nurture leads by creating valuable content, understanding your audience, and optimizing your website. Regular review and adjustments will help refine your approach over time. If you are ready to improve your inbound marketing, Saffron Edge can help. Our team can develop a customized strategy that delivers measurable results. Contact us today to learn more. ...
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7 Tips To Grow Your Business With Inbound Marketing
Today the internet is overflowing with information and your potential buyers are being over-saturated with it. In fact, Sirius decisions has reported a 22% increase in the average sales cycle over the past 5 years because of more involvement of the decision makers in the buying process. To make sales you need to provide these decision makers the content that they are looking for that helps them make a decision exactly why your company is the next stop where they should buy the product from. Giving this informative content at the right time, and on the right platform has become your top job priority. There are simpler ways to use Inbound Marketing to grow your business and we’ll have a look at it. 1. Research To do a research, you don’t need wikipedia go throughs or searching over the internet for case studies or white papers to make your own strategy. All that is needed is you need to know your business and objectives, knowing about the competition and what kind of inbound strategy they employ and last and most important thing is to know your customers. Just ask yourselves these simple questions: Knowing your business How would you measure the performance of your efforts? What are your revenue goals? How do you describe the growth of your business?( revenue generated, amount of leads coming in, customers acquired, etc.) Defining the sales process? (producing content used to educate prospects, what is the length of process, etc.) Knowing your Competition If you think that you know it all about your industry that might be correct for some cases but businesses overlook the fact that they shouldn’t care much about the changes taking place in the industry, updates and innovations. If you want to stay ahead of the herd then continued industry research is a must. What kind of content is posted by your competitors on their website? Is there any major changes taking place, news and updates? Does a business to business marketplace exist for your industry? What is the current scenario regarding your industry stats? Are your goals realistic and attainable? Knowing Your Customer Constantly staying in touch with your sales team is important because they are the ones who are in direct contact with your potentials customers and they are the ones who can provide an insight about what your customers want. Some questions to ask them are: 5 key points that are commonly answered by the sales people? How is your product helpful in solving the customer’s problems? Most responsive customer demographics? What kind of communication the customers respond to the most? 2. SEO Creating content as per the needs of your customers is as important as optimizing it for keywords. Knowing in depth about what keywords your customers are searching for and optimizing each and every page of your website for such keywords is the process that your business needs to follow. When it comes to SEO keeping a tab on these takeaways is helpful: Including keywords in the page content in elements like header and page text Including keywords in the page properties such as URL, meta description and alt tags for images. Most importantly linking keywords in your content to the other pages of the website or to the other websites or landing pages for backlinking. 3. Content Most important and integral part of Inbound Marketing is the content. Creating an Inbound strategy that includes contents like blogs, content on websites, landing pages, on social media or email to which your customers respond the most to should be the area you should focus your energy. To see results you can even ask your customers by creating the premium content and fill out a form that how helpful or informative do they find your content. 4. Blogging Posting blogs on your websites and optimizing them for keywords is the way how you bring organic traffic to your website. It is highly recommended that you use blogging to grow traffic on your website. Some simple tips for a robust blogging strategy are: Writing content around the issues, and challenges that your prospects face and penning their solutions and mentioning about how your products or services can solve your problems. Maintaining the frequency The amount of content that goes out in a day whether it be in any form: blogs, content on social media sites etc., maintain the frequency according to the response you get from your customers. Learning from competitors Your competitors have already been blogging, so learn most of the stuff from them like what kind of content they post, what is the response they get in the form of comments, shares etc. Using call-to-actions Providing call-to-actions at the end of the blog like a button re-directing them to your products or services page after you have addressed their concerns through your blog. 5. Lead Communication After that you have successfully implemented all the above steps and let us assume that you have got some qualified leads, now is the time to actually focus on communicating with them. Based on the type of leads or queries that have been generated by various types of customers: who they are and what is their demographics, what kind of service or product are they looking at, which question they want to be answered by you. All these need to be taken care of while communicating with the customer. 6. Lead Nurturing Lead nurturing is the time when you get to know whether a lead is sales ready or not so that the sales team is not wasting time on unqualified leads. Here are some tips: Refining your messages Giving your customers with the relevant content or asking them more questions to know exactly what they want to know. They exactly need to hear something from you like an offer or something that entices them towards your company. What to give your customers Blogging comes in handy for this purpose. Keep sending them blog posts or updates in the lead nurturing e-mails to inform them or getting them back on your website. 7. Conclusion We hope that these 7 steps in your Inbound Marketing will help you grow your business. Creating the right content, optimizing the content for SEO will attract the right kind of visitors you are looking on your website and certainly generate queries for your products or services. ...
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