According to the analysis reports by the Google team, these ads receive a higher CTR than the ads placed in the right column. This is because the natural tendency of users is to inspect the results of the SERPs from top to bottom and, although they may sometimes omit the results to the right, this new placement will be more difficult to avoid in an 'unconscious' way.

A few days ago, a Google doc was leaked out with guidelines for the manual review tester team on search quality.

As you know, apart from the algorithm, Google has a human team that reviews the search results to improve their quality and does not slip unwanted results, in addition to checking that the algorithm changes work correctly. In the leaked document (dated March 30, 2011) you can see the guidelines that these evaluators have to follow when reviewing the SERPs.

Despite being an internal Google document, this post is not going to tell any SEO secrets either, but after all, SEO is based on thinking like search engines think, and in the document we can find part of the thinking and Google's philosophy on quality.

The document has been removed due to intellectual property issues, and was based on specific queries. Here are some important points of the document, which after all are quality criteria for any website:

1) Relevance

One word that is repeated all the time is relevance, considering that Google's vision of relevance is quite sophisticated and advanced.

The evaluators have 5 options to mark the relevance of a result: Vital, Useful, Relevant, Little Relevant and Off Topic.

Obviously all of this can be very subjective, but there are a number of examples and guidelines in the document.

2) Relevance and Spam are independent

Relevance is a way of rating, but Spam is a "markup." In other words, a site can be useful but spam or not very relevant but not marked as spam. In other words, the content can be relevant or not relevant, but spam is about its intentionality.

3) Rules of interpretation

There are queries that can be ambiguous, for example Apple, which in English would be a fruit apple, and apple as a company or brand. Therefore, there are rules of interpretation and it seems that the dominant interpretation is to favor the brands over the rest of the results, which makes some sense, but is still ambiguous. Still, this would make the evaluators' job easier.

4) Vital results

Vital's assessment is a special case. Any official entity (company, celebrity, product) can have a vital result. In many cases, this vital result is usually the home page, or the celebrity's twitter. A vital result is one that if it does not appear in Google, users would wonder why it does not appear, even if the website itself does not make SEO efforts to appear.

5) Generic queries do not have to be vital

Generic queries do not have to be vital, that is, apple.com is vital for searching apples, it does not mean that autos.com is vital for searching cars. There are searches that are hopelessly generic.

6) Searches can be in 3 ways

According to Google guidelines, searches can be classified into three types, in action (Do), Information (Know), or navigation (Go).

An outcome can come in more than one form. This classification is repeated a lot in the document and can help to understand a little better how to organize searches in general.

The relevance of a result is determined by intention. If a result is action-oriented (“Buy a car”) it can only be relevant for action searches.

7) Utility goes beyond relevance

This can have many interpretations and be very open, but Google says that useful pages (the most after vital) have to be more than relevant. In other words, a relevant page is not valid by itself, but also has to be useful, satisfying the user, authoritative, entertaining, and recent.

8) Relevance implies language

The relevance of the result is associated with the language of the result, therefore if the language of the result does not match the search language, that result is marked as of low relevance. In the same way, if the result includes or implies a certain country and the search is not from that country, the result is not relevant.

9) Local searches

There are searches that in themselves have a local intention. For example, if you are looking for an "Ice Rink" you usually want results close to your location. For this reason, if non-local results appear with a search with local intent, they could be marked as Off-topic.

It seems that local searches are becoming increasingly important.

10) Specificity of the landing pages

A landing page with a specific product with details about it, would be more suitable for a long-tail and specific search. On the other hand, if the search is broad (for example chicken recipes) the broader results will be more relevant, for example a page with a list of chicken recipes.

11) Spelling errors are valued by intention

If a search is misspelled, the relevance of the results should be based on the intent of the search itself. We can see, for example, how when we search with spelling errors, it suggests well-written results or with dominant intentions as they say.

12) The copied content may be relevant

This may come as a surprise in these times of Panda Bears, but in the guidelines it says that copied content can be relevant if it is well structured, useful and not only focused on advertising. Obviously this must be taken with a grain of salt, and the copied content should be given some added value. A site with all content copied and focused on advertising could be considered spam.

13) Some searches do not need definition

Certain searches do not require a dictionary or encyclopedia definition, and other general queries do. According to Google's guidelines, general searches that are normally understood by everyone, results towards encyclopedias or dictionaries would not be considered useful. This goes for wikipedia.

14) Advertising without content value is Spam

There is a phrase that stands out in the document and it is “If a web page exists only to make money, it is Spam”. This can also be very relative, since really almost all websites are made to make money, but really, what it refers to is websites without valuable content created just to generate income from ads. So if you put advertising, there is quality content that supports it.

15) Testers use firefox

The latter and as a curiosity, Google's human evaluators use firefox with the web developer plugin . (In case you want to see how they would see it.

Conclusion:

In general, there is no magic SEO trick, but there is something very important in this article/document, and it is to help us better understand how Google understands search results and to know a little more how this team of human evaluators works.