Oriol Gifra

In the last few weeks the SEO world have had a couple of news that make us (SEO professionals) comment about it.

On one hand, on 18th October Google announced blocking as “not provided” referral keyword information on Google Analytics in those cases when users were logged in (using SSL when searching). Although it only affects between 5% and 10% of the total audience, is not the best way webmasters can improve relevance and user’s experience if we can not access to user’s intent (using the keyword referral).

It is a bit contradictory when Google uses the excuse of “user privacy” abd at the same time is using IP data for the “non privided” line at Google Analytics.

 On other hand, the SEO blogger Potpiegirl wrote a post about How Google Makes Algorithm Changes  commenting a leaked Google document, the Google’s Rating Guidelines.

 Google raters are people at Google who manually review landing pages scoring it:

portant scoring factors for URL Raters (taken from throughout the guide). According to this article on Seomoz, they rate:

• User intent and page utility
• Location
• Language
• Query interpretation
• Specificity of the query and landing page
• Timeliness of the informational need of the query to evaluate whether recent content is necessary
• The language of video content vs. query and landing page content language

It seems the rating scale is based on 5 types:

• Vital – Biographical and personal pages
• Useful – Useful for most of users
• Relevant – Useful for some of users
• Slightly Relevant – Useful for niche users or few users
• Useless – Not useful

Google classifies the users depending on their search intent as a Do-Know-Go, depending if the user wants to do a specific action (E.g. Buy), search of information or go to specific site.

In fact, it seems the document do not reveal any secret the SEO community did not already know. Here is a official Google’ post on how build a high quality sites: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html 

In my opinion, if you work the “K-C” you will rank up:

• Knowldege – Provide fresh and updated knowledge and value to users
• Conversation – Provide conversation, interaction, engagement to users