Key Takeaways
Recently, Google has made slight changes to its Search Rater guidelines.
There wasn't any major change except for improving consistency across the entire document and providing a little more guidance in a few sections.
Google has recently made an update to its Search Quality Rater Guidelines. These changes were not as significant as the December 15, 2022 update rather the document was only reduced from 176 to 168 pages.
Anyone who hasn't paid attention to this document previously may find it totally unnoticeable. Perhaps that is the reason most of you people are unaware of that.
For all those who have no idea, what are Google Search Quality Rater Guidelines? These are specifically created to evaluate the performance of the ranking system by third-party search raters. Don’t worry these ratings have no direct part in Google rankings. This is what Google says.
The new guidelines are mainly centred around enhancing the user experience. The main changes you will find in this update include:
Simplifying Need Met scale definitions and providing additional guidance on how to rate its specific types.
Updating examples for most popular platforms and video formats
Removing outdated content
Providing more guidance on how to rate forum pages and updating the language and explanations to make them consistent across different sections of the document.
Overall it is not a big update but the most notable changes can be seen in these sections:
Part 3 - Needs Met Rating Guideline
Section 9.2 - Ratings for Forums and Q&A Pages
Section 12.1 - Important Rating Definitions and Ideas
Section 12.7.4 - Visit-in-Person Queries and User Location
The document is quite long and there may be some other changes as well. Apparently, it seems to have been updated to improve consistency throughout the document.
If any of you are interested in reading these guidelines, here is the link to this document.