Balancing Page Level and Website Level Questions to Assign an Overall Page Quality Rating

For some page quality rating tasks, the page level questions (i.e., the questions about the landing page) will be the most important questions to consider. For other tasks, the website level questions (i.e., the questions about the website) will play an equally large or even a larger role. As always, use your best judgment.

Important: If either page level or website level questions reveal a significant quality concern, the page should get an overall Low or Lowest rating. Please give a high rating only if both the page level and the website level questions can justify a high rating.

Website level questions play the biggest role (and you should use an overall Low or Lowest page quality rating) when:

• The website is harmful/deceptive/malicious. In this case, all pages on the website should be rated overall

Lowest quality.

• The website has an extremely negative or malicious reputation. If so, all pages on the website should be rated overall Lowest quality.

• The website obviously or significantly violates the Quality Guidelines of Google's Webmaster Guidelines
If so, all pages on the website should be rated overall Lowest quality.

• The website clearly completely fails one or more of the website level checks in this document. If so, all pages on the website should be rated Low or Lowest quality. The overall rating depends on the purpose of the site and the check which revealed the quality concern. For example, all pages should be considered Lowest if the website is a store and there is absolutely no contact information, customer service information, or ownership information. For a store, this is an extremely important quality check!

Website level questions play a medium to large role in determining the overall page quality rating when:

• The content on the site is very uniform, i.e., when all content is produced by the same organization and there is little variation in the content or quality of pages. An example is a medical website produced by a reputable physician group where each page on various diseases has a similar amount of high quality content.

• The content of the website is produced by different authors or organizations, but the website has very active editorial standards and guarantees a level of accuracy/quality. An example 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 authoritative sources on the topic.

Page level questions are most important when:

• The website clearly "passes" all website level checks. If the website checks are "cleared," the overall page quality rating will usually depend almost entirely on the content of the page.

• The website has many different authors/contributors, or there is a large variation in the quality of the pages.

Even if a website is popular and has a good reputation, you should rely on page level checks when the content is produced by different people. Page level questions are particularly important when the website has little or no active editorial standards, i.e., anyone can publish any content on the website.
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