Default Google Quality Guidelines April 2014

Google has completely rewritten the Quality Ratings Guideline, the resource that their team of quality raters uses to rate websites for Google. This one is a brand new version, rewritten from the ground up, so it isn’t just a refresh of the old one (and most doesn’t even resemble any of the old Guidelines that SEOs scrutinized in detail whenever one got leaked). It has some great new insights into how Google is approaching the search results and what it takes to be a top ranked website.

The new version 5.1 is from 22. April, and shows how Google is placing much more emphasis on their knowledge graph style results that seem to be taking over the Google search results, as well as reputation, authority, and of course, the case of advertisements on a page.

Google is now putting a high emphasis on sites that are considered to have a high level of expertise, authoritativeness or trustworthiness. This is something that Google has been working on in their algorithms for some time, and shouldn’t be much of a surprise for webmasters to see this.

You can download the document here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/234703324/General-Guidelines-April-2014