Google Page Quality Rating Scorecard
Use this scorecard to evaluate your site on quality.
I secretly worked as a Google Quality Rater, evaluating search results and personally scoring 1000s of websites according to Google’s guidelines. Based on this experience, I’ve created a scoring card based on Google’s Quality Rater guidelines that you can use yourself to evaluate websites.
Use this scorecard to evaluate your site on quality.
The Importance Of Page Quality Scoring
As you may know, Google improves its search algorithms by working with over 10,000 human Quality Raters around the world. The raters manually evaluate both search results and individual web pages for quality.
Google regularly publishes its 100+-page Rater Guidelines, which instruct Quality Raters on how to evaluate web pages. According to the guidelines, raters ultimately assign two scores to every page they are assigned:
Page Quality (PQ): Raters assign a PQ rating ranging from Lowest to Highest, with many possible scores in between
Needs Met: Raters assign a Needs Met rating ranging from Fails to Meet (FailsM) to Fully Meets (FullyM)
While Google stresses that no single rating directly impacts a site’s ranking, Google uses the ratings to gauge the quality of its results and, perhaps more importantly, as valuable data points to train Google’s machine learning algorithms at scale.
Google says that understanding how Quality Raters work can help you to improve your content and do better in search.
So, to many SEOs and publishers, Google’s Raters Guidelines is a valuable document.
It’s also extremely difficult to use if you want to score your own site.
Because of my own part-time work as a Quality Rater, SEO clients occasionally ask for private evaluations of their websites, which I oblige.
The challenge is that because of strict NDAs, I can’t simply use the same forms and documents provided by Google to do the job. Years ago, internal Google scoring cards leaked online, but those are now far outdated.
If we only had something like this today, site owners could more easily evaluate their own pages against Google’s quality guidelines.
That’s why, along with Graphic Designer Dawn Shepard, we created a new Google Page Quality Rating Scorecard.
How The Quality Scorecard Works
This new scorecard is 100% based on Google’s own publicly available Rater Guidelines. It’s also organized into a format that makes it far easier to determine a Quality score for your web pages.
