Gift Focus - May/Jun 2018 (Issue 107)

Imagine playing a game where the rules aren’t published, it costs you money every time you lose and you are more or less obliged to play in order to survive. I’m going to call this ‘The Google Game’; it’s something that Online Marketers like myself know how to play very well. Until quite recently, the actual rules for playing ‘The Google Game’ were hidden from view. Google wouldn’t tell you how to play properly, there were various (sometimes conflicting) third party opinions on what Google meant when any information was actually published and there was always the question ‘can you really trust what Google is saying?’ – a very valid question when you realise that Google is run for shareholders, not to play fair for retailers. While I personally will always be on the cynical side where Google is concerned and continue to question motives of the search giant, I’m glad to see that Google is continuing to expand its guide for search quality raters, giving at least some insight into how it ‘thinks’. What is the Google Search Quality Rating Programme? To be brief, the Google Search Quality Rating Program was set up to aid Google to identify the quality of pages out there on the web in order to push the development of more robust search engine algorithms. The program is backed by a set of guidelines, which can be found at http://goo.gl/63m09m , detailing what should be considered factors for assigning quality ratings to a web page or website. The guidelines document is fairly lengthy at 158 pages, with many abbreviations to keep in your head whilst reading, but it does give a fair insight into what Google is looking for when assessing the quality of a page of content. Google first introduced the Search Quality Rating program back in 2005, but until recent years the workings and methodologies of the programme have been hidden. It was only since 2011 and the Google Panda update that the program has really been ‘out in the open’, although there was a leak of an early release of the rating document back in 2008. The Search Quality Rating Program relies on a large group of manual page reviewers. In the early days, these were Google employees, however, reviews are now farmed out to external companies. The program works by manually reviewing the Google game David Fairhurst of Intelligent Retail explains how to play ‘The Google Game’ in order to maximise the visibility of your e-commerce store giftfocus 107 retail technology