Leaked Google Quality Rating information
Potpiegirl.com is current hosting a very interesting document. The leaked handbook contains a wealth on information on the way good makes quality ratings- although it has to be said that human raters are only one small cog in the search engine ranking machine, before anyone gets too excited.
Much of the manual content was pretty much as the SEO community had long suspected but there were a few interesting points. Probably the most interesting is about the way Google assumes intent on the part of a searcher. It’s not just a question of guessing that you’d be more likely to be after local shops and services but a deeper assumption that in order to be relevant to a keyword, you should be relevant to their idea of a dominant interpretation of that keyword, if there is one.
The other biggie is that duplicate content doesn’t necessarily bring up a red flag. There is a more subtle discrination going on. This tallies well with a few things I’ve seen over the last few months and there are probably other analysts who feel the same.
Most people won’t be making major adjustments to their SEO strategy after reading the 125 document (or any of the commentary that’s popping up all over the search community). It might, however, be really useful to anyone who has suffered a big drop in organic traffic and can’t figure out exactly what went wrong.