I feel like Google has to spend more time telling SEOs to stop obsessing about specific details then helping with technical SEO issues and I called it with this one. Google's John Mueller had to say in this mornings hangout "quality rater guidelines is not one-to-one our ranking algorithm."
Like I said weeks ago it is better than SEOs are focused on EAT, YLYM, the quality raters guidelines over being focused on PageRank or Domain Authority. But it can still be a problem.
John Mueller is dealing with it now with all the BBB debates and trust debates. Like we reported years ago, quality raters who are not even employed by Google as employees, they are outside consultants through a third-party company - these people do not make up the algorithm - they just test the current outcome of the current algorithms and search results. That feedback goes back to the engineers and the engineers may or may not tweak the algorithm to make more improvements to the algorithm.
John Mueller said at the 42:13 mark in this morning's video that while it is useful for folks to read and understand the quality rater guidelines, it is also important to realize that what is written in that document is not directly associated on a one-to-one relationship to the actual ranking algorithm. Just like a mention of the BBB in the guidelines doesn't mean Google uses BBB in their ranking algorithm - they don't.
John said "It's not the case that we take the quality rater guidelines and one-to-one turn them into a code that does all of the ranking." "So quality rater guidelines is not one-to-one our ranking algorithm," he added.
Here is the video embed:
Here is the transcript:
So EAT comes from our quality rater guidelines. And in general, I think it's very useful to look at those quality rater guidelines because they give some idea of where we would like to hit with regards to search. But it's important to realize that the quality rater guidelines are just some guidelines that we give our quality raters when we try to evaluate algorithms.It's not the case that we take the quality rater guidelines and one-to-one turn them into a code that does all of the ranking.
So quality rater guidelines is not one-to-one our ranking algorithm.
So instead of focusing on these things in minor detail. It probably makes more sense to focus on the bigger picture. And think about so Google thinks about authority and expertise and trust when it comes to websites therefore maybe I should work on those things because I know I'm not showing any authority on my website because I maybe I don't have any names on my website or maybe it's just all content that I happen to have published long ago and I never really got around to actually showing users where this content is actually coming from.
So these are things I would take as general feedback for a website to help improve it but it's not something that you would want to implement one to one. And say well I need to have exactly this factor exactly like that and then I will rank number one. That's not going to be the case.
Take that in - it really is important.
Forum discussion at Google+.
