Snapped up by a few in late october was this gem of a leak from Google after a similar fiasco in 2007 – The rating guidelines that are handed out to their Quality Raters. First mentioned by potpiegirl and was later removed from the face of the web. We have also had an in-depth read and will be giving key facts to what this document contains.

Makes a great read and allot of insight, but most of it was what we already assumed. Read-on an grab the 125page document for yourself.

1. No Secrets
   Nothing to make us go WOW! or that secret SEO formula that some people are chasing, none of it here.
2. What users want, not what they think they want!
   Type in “apple” and dose the user want to know about the fruit apples or the company apples, the quality rating is based on relevancy to the user based on their intent. Hence it’s alarming if your a huge company not ranking for your brand. Brand Terms/Companies/Actors/Songs – These are “vital” terms that should be top position.
3. Relevance can still be spam
   Google is looking for relevancy but this dosen’t stop you for being mark down for spam, here are a few things they mentioned that could be classed as spam.- Chained-up redirects
   - Keyword Stuffing
   - PPC Ad’s which are not relevant to the query
   - Parked Domains
   - Scraped/Copied content
   - Doorway Pages
   - Fake Blogs used to drive traffic to ads
   - Thin Sites that are used only for money
4. More than one rater
   Google seems to be using a multitude of raters to insure fair ratings.
5. Google Raters use Firefox
   How ironic.

So thats a few points are to what was in this document, few things to take away and a great way to see how things work in the world of the big G.

Link Taken Down for Legal Reasons