Google will replace its Search Quality Rating Guidelines on October 19, 2021

After over a year without updating the Google Search Quality Rating Guidelines – Google made several updates to the document yesterday, October 19, 2021. The last update was on a little over a year ago October 14, 2020. This time the document has been expanded from 175 to 172 pages – i.e. shortened a little.

Google changed the following in the document:

  • Definition of the YMYL sub-category ‘groups of people’ expanded
  • Updated how to research reputation information for websites and content creators
  • Restructured and updated the “Lowest Page Quality” section; reorganized and refreshed examples to reflect the new structure
  • Simplified definition of ‘Incident Offensive’ to remove redundancy with the section with the lowest page quality
  • Minor changes consistently (updated screenshots and URLs, formulations and examples for reasons of consistency; outdated examples removed; typos corrected; etc.)

The area of ​​groups of people has been expanded slightly compared to the old version:

Information on or claims relating to any group of people including, but not limited to, people grouped by race or ethnicity, religion, disability, age, nationality, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, or gender identity.

To the new version:

Information on or claims relating to any group of people including, but not limited to, individuals classified by age, caste, disability, ethnicity, gender identity and expression, immigration status, nationality, race, religion, gender / gender, sexual orientation, veteran status, Victims of a serious violent event and their relatives or other characteristics associated with systemic discrimination or marginalization.

Google made a huge makeover to the “Lowest Page Quality” section so that I would read the new version as I did reported yesterday. Google also made a few other changes listed above.

If you compare the old and new PDFs, there were a total of 3,635 changes with 807 replacements, 812 inserts, and 356 deletions. And there were 1,288 styling changes and 372 annotation changes to the document. So a lot has changed in that. Plus, as mentioned above, it’s a few pages less.

Here are the previous versions compared to the live version:

Here is the updated changelog of this file from Google:

Jen Slegg has her usual deep insight into what has changed on her blog and that’s what Glenn Gabe found out:

YMYL pages, groups of people expanded: pic.twitter.com/oY6RiY0KRK

– Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) October 19, 2021

Reputation research. Removed some things and then edited other parts: pic.twitter.com/JfYf8XyOdk

– Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) October 19, 2021

Untrustworthy pages or websites: pic.twitter.com/W7aCENEksI

– Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) October 19, 2021

Forum discussion at Twitter.

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