Important Information about the Page Quality Guidelines

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The goal of these guidelines is to standardize our approach to page quality rating. An important part of this document is the examples, which include images and descriptions of webpages. Please make sure you look at each example. Clicking on the webpage images will enlarge them so that you can read the text on the page.

At first, PQ rating may seem difficult. There are several aspects of the page and the website to look at and think about. As you gain PQ rating experience, you will be able to rate efficiently and with confidence. This type of rating takes practice. Rereading sections of these guidelines and thinking about the examples may help when you encounter difficult rating tasks. Please send feedback if you have a question about a particular rating task. Many examples and explanations have been added on the basis of rater questions.

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 Microsoft Word document, a PNG or JPEG image file, etc. When the landing page of the URL is not a webpage, some of the questions in the rating task or considerations in these guidelines may not apply. In this case, please use your judgment.

Do not consider the country or location of the page or website for page quality 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 US websites. In other words, you should not lower your PQ rating because the page location (UK, Canada) does not match the task location (US).

When you are rating PQ rating tasks, try not to think about how helpful the landing page could be for a particular query. Page Quality rating is query-independent, meaning that the rating you assign does not depend on the page's relevance or utility to a query.

Please 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.

Finally, the questions in the rating template and the quality considerations in the Page Quality Rating Guidelines do not cover absolutely 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 explain your reasoning and include any additional criteria you considered in the comment section. As always, we ask you to use your judgment.
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