Identifying the Purpose of the Page

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In Section 3.2, you learned about identifying the purpose of the page. As a reminder, every page on the Internet is created for a purpose (or for multiple purposes). Most pages are created to be helpful for users. Some pages are created merely to make money with little effort to help users. Some pages are even created to cause harm to users.

The examples you saw in Section 3.2 were fairly straightforward. With the explanations provided, you should have been able to understand which pages were and were not created to be helpful for users.

Here are two examples of helpful pages where the purpose of the page is not as obvious:

1) Christopher Columbus page
: This page looks quite nice, but it starts off with "Christopher Columbus was born in 1951 in Sydney, Australia." This is obviously inaccurate! What is the purpose of this page?
In this case, exploring the website that hosts the page can help us understand its purpose. This website was built by educators to teach about interpreting information found on the Internet. After reading about the website here: About

This Site
, it should be clear that the purpose of this page is to serve as an educational tool. The information on the page is deliberately inaccurate so that it can be used as an example of misinformation on the Internet.
Note: This Christopher Columbus page is actually a High quality page. Once you understand its purpose (to serve as an educational tool), it becomes clear that this page is carefully thought out, well executed, and achieves its purpose well.

2) Here is another example of a page that at first glance may seem pointless or strange: OmNomNomNom page
This page is from a humorous site that encourages users to post photos with mouths drawn on them. The purpose of the page is humor or artistic expression. Even though the "About" page on this website is not very helpful, the website explains itself on its "FAQ" page:
OmNomNomNom FAQ page
.
Why do we care about the purpose of the page? The purpose of the page will help you answer all of the landing page and website questions. All questions should be answered in the context of the purpose of the page. Ultimately, your PQ rating will depend on how well the page achieves that purpose, given everything you have learned from answering the landing page and website questions.

Keep in mind that for almost any helpful purpose, it is possible to find examples of high and low quality pages. The purpose of the page alone does not determine the PQ rating. For example, we will not consider informational pages to be higher quality than entertainment pages, even though they often have more serious content. There are high and low quality informational pages, and there are high and low quality entertainment pages.

Lack of Purpose, Harmful Purpose, and Deceptive Pages

As a rater, you may encounter the following types of pages.

• Lack of purpose: Sometimes it will be impossible to figure out the purpose of the page despite your best effort to do so. Many "lack of purpose" pages are gibberish (nonsensical) or auto-generated. These pages serve no real purpose.

• Harmful purpose: Some pages are clearly harmful or malicious. For example, pages designed to "phish" for the user's government-issued identification number (such as a Social Security number), bank account information, or credit card information are harmful because the purpose is to steal private information. Malicious download pages are another type of harmful page.

• Deceptive pages: These pages are designed to look as though they have a helpful purpose but actually exist for some other reason. Deceptive pages are usually created to make money using ads or affiliate links rather than to help users. For example, some deceptive pages are designed to look as though they have helpful information, but in reality they are created to get users to click on ads.

Here are some examples of pages that were not created to be helpful for users and should always be considered overall Lowest quality.

Type of Lowest Quality Page	Example	Explanation
Lack of Purpose	Lack of Purpose 1 Lack of Purpose 2 Lack of Purpose Lack of Purpose 4 Lack of Purpose 5 Lack of Purpose 6	These pages do not have a purpose.
Deceptive	Deceptive 1	Not only does this page have many ads, but all the helpful-looking links lead to pages full of ads and very little text.
Deceptive	Deceptive 2	The title of this page is "Washing Machine Reviews," but all the content is product information copied from another source and all links are affiliate links. The purpose of this page is clearly to profit from an affiliate program, rather than publish reviews.
Deceptive	Deceptive 3	The title of this page is "Rachael Ray Diet Blog," but the page has nothing to do with Rachael Ray or her diet or her products. In fact, there is a brown-text-on-brown-background section at the bottom of the page (which we consider to be hidden text) that says "Disclaimer: Rachael Ray is not affiliated with nor does she sponsor or endorse this blog." Important: This page is deceptive in spite of the disclaimer!
Malicious	Malicious Example	This page is malicious. It is a shopping page that "phishes" for private information, including the user's Social Security number, driver's license number, and bank account information.

Note: Lack of Purpose pages, Harmful pages, and Deceptive pages all violate the Quality Guidelines section of Google's Webmaster Guidelines
.

In general, any page or website which violates the Quality Guidelines section of Google's Webmaster Guidelines

should be considered Lowest quality.
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