Search quality ratings are a type of experiments run by Google to measure the quality of webpages based on user ratio and many other factors to rate the pages better. It is important to note that search quality ratings do not have any impact directly on ranking a page. For example a webpage with low search quality ratings might still rank higher. The important purpose of these ratings is for Google to calculate the importance of a page through various experiments and understand its popularity based on which it assumes certain characteristics of the page.
The idea behind the ratings is also to make sure the pages that are most useful to users are given much more importance than the pages that are created for other purposes than serving the purpose of helping the user accessing to get vital information they are looking for. Pages which aren’t relevant and do not serve the exact purpose for a user can create a negative user impact. Google by these experiments look at identifying such pages and assign them lesser importance so that the pages with real quality are easily accessible to different user with different requirements.
Recently there has been a change made by Google in this search quality ratings guidelines where the documents which were originally of 160 pages have been reduced to 146 pages. The most notable changes in these guidelines have been made in lesser importance to supplementary content, more importance to “visit-in-person” and more relevance to mobile.
The basic idea is that Google does not want low quality pages to rank higher for the areas for which they carry content, rather give importance to pages that have higher quality thus being more helpful to the users.
