9.0 Page Quality Rating: Important Considerations

At first, PQ rating may seem difficult. There are several aspects of the page and the website to look at and think about. This type of rating takes practice. Rereading sections of these guidelines and thinking about the examples may help when you encounter difficult rating tasks.

Important: Do not struggle with each PQ rating. Please give your best rating and move on. If you are having trouble deciding between two ratings, please use the lower rating. If you are torn between three ratings, choose the one in the middle.

Do not consider the country or location of the page or website for PQ rating. For example, English (US) raters should use the same PQ standards when rating pages from other English language websites (UK websites, Canadian websites, etc.) as they use when rating pages from U.S. websites. In other words, English (US) raters should not lower the PQ rating because the page location (UK, Canada) does not match the task location.

These guidelines are specific to “regular” webpages. Occasionally, you may be asked to rate a landing page which is not a webpage. For example, you may be asked to rate a PDF file, a PNG or JPEG image file, etc. When the landing page of the URL is not a webpage, some of the considerations in these guidelines may not apply. In this case, please use your judgment.

Finally, this Page Quality Rating Guideline does not completely cover every aspect of page quality. If you find pages which you truly believe to be High or Low quality, please rate them as such, even if the reason is based on something not covered in this document. Please use the comment section to explain your reasoning. As always, we ask you to use your judgment.

1. Instructions for Rating Page Quality Tasks

The Page Quality task page is broken up into several parts:

1. Some initial questions about the task landing page.

2. A “PQ grid” to record your observations about PQ characteristics of the landing page.

3. The Overall PQ rating slider which records your Overall PQ rating.

4. A comment box to explain your rating.

Some results to the initial questions will end the task early. If the page is Porn, Foreign Language, or Didn’t Load, you will not fill in the PQ grid or assign an overall rating. Didn’t Load should be used for pages where there is absolutely no content on the page created by the website. There is no MC, SC, or Ads on the page. You can see this Wikipedia article for descriptions of different types of error messages.

Similarly, if you respond that the page is malicious, harmful, deceptive, or lacking in purpose, you will also not fill in the PQ grid or assign an overall rating.

The PQ grid is designed to be your "note pad." It allows you to record your observations about the landing page and the website it belongs to.

2. The Top Three pq Considerations

The top three most important PQ considerations are:

• Quality and quantity of Main Content. Examine the MC carefully. Given the purpose of the page, evaluate the quality and quantity of MC.

• Level of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-A-T) of the page and the website. The level of E-A-T is extremely important for YMYL pages.

• Reputation of the website. The reputation of a website is very important when the website demands a high level of trust.

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These “top three” considerations will help you rate many or most pages. High or Highest quality ratings must be supported by evidence from at least one of these top three considerations.

3. E-A-T: Page or Website?

Several PQ characteristics are based on the landing page by itself, such as considerations about MC, SC, and page design, etc. Some PQ characteristics are assessed at the website level, such as contact information, reputation, and website maintenance.

However, E-A-T may be based on either the page alone, or the website, or even both.

Page level checks for E-A-T are important when a website has different authors on different pages. This is the case for article websites or websites like YouTube, which have user-generated content.

Website level checks for E-A-T are important in the following situations:

• All content on the website is produced by the same person or organization. An example is a medical website which is produced by a reputable physician group.

• The content of the website is produced by different authors or organizations, but the website has very active editorial standards. An example of this is a science journal with very high standards for publication.

• The website has an extremely positive reputation from experts in the topic of the website, i.e., the website is acknowledged to be one of the most expert, authoritative, or trustworthy sources on the topic.