It’s quite shocking that Google released search quality elevator guidelines for the first time in history and this guideline has 160 page of SEO Gold. If you want to look how Google algorithms work, these guidelines reveal the most extensive and insightful about the information. Search quality elevator guidelines are mainly about quality assurance rules that Google employees use when performing human-based evaluations and quality control testing of the algorithm.
Even though, the search engine still has yet reveal its algorithm, but with this guidelines Google now sharing how by internally testing the algorithm to improve the previous version and make sure that the algorithm works as it wanted to. Because Google’s algorithm is and will always be a top secret to anyone outside search engine’s border, but with this guideline Google has opened the backdoor and give its users a full view of how internally it testing the components of the algorithm.
With many webmaster have found pieces of small guideline from Google’s blogs and patents, leaked versions of previous search quality elevator guideline, various speeches and publications of Google engineers, but this guideline single-handedly is the largest official release of information correlation to Google’s algorithm.
With this 160-page of guidelines, the information divided into an overview of the process document, next is 4 compressive parts which one of them is about dedicating entirely to mobile. With the rising of mobile search, of course it’s no longer a surprise that a part of these guidelines dedicated for mobile information, and this one part has proved that Google is aggressively refining the mobile search algorithm, crawling functionality for mobile and snippets of mobile search result.
Beside guide for mobile, other parts of guidelines are focusing on trust and reputation, which is an update from previous release of guidelines that leaked over the years. This is great information on how to determine if a website is trustworthy and has a positive reputation and by taking one step back from Google’s official testing procedures, users will be able to pick up larger concepts about what they are expecting the algorithm can do.
Optimizing mobile, the guidelines mentioning screen sizes, horizontal scrolling, navigation, and unsupported media types (like Flash). What it means is that Google recognizes that all devices and all mobile operating systems are different, but there is no ‘one size’ solution to determines if a page is mobile-friendly or not.
Since Google released Mobile-Friendly Test tool, many users has gotten a positive test result that their website is mobile-friendly and no need to do more mobile optimization. On the other hand, search quality elevator guidelines suggest that website must be thoroughly tested across devices and operating systems. But the positive result from Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test often can be a false hope and doubting a website is friendly on all devices.
