Page Quality rating
Also called: PQ rating, page quality, page quality rating
Page Quality (PQ) rating is the Lowest-to-Highest score that Google's human quality raters assign to a page in the Search Quality Rater Guidelines, based on how well it achieves a beneficial purpose. Raters do not set your rankings; their scores are used to test and calibrate Google's ranking systems.
How raters score a page
Raters work through the Search Quality Rater Guidelines in three steps: judge the page’s true purpose, judge whether it could cause harm, then judge how well it achieves that purpose. The verdict sits on a slider, Lowest, Low, Medium, High, Highest, with half-steps like Low+ and High+. Pages that are harmful, deceptive, or spammy (including scaled content abuse and expired-domain abuse) go straight to Lowest, no matter how polished they look.
For everything else, the guidelines weigh a familiar set of quality signals: the quality and originality of the main content, a descriptive title, clear information about who is responsible, reputation research, and E-E-A-T. Google is blunt about the last one: “Trust is the most important member of the E-E-A-T family,” because an untrustworthy page has low E-E-A-T no matter how expert it seems.
One thing people miss: a strong brand buys no pass. The guidelines tell raters to check every page for harm, “including pages on government websites, academic institutions, reputable online stores, charities.” A single thin or deceptive page on an otherwise trusted site still earns Lowest. PQ rating is a page-level judgment, not a domain-level one.
How it affects your traffic
Raters cannot rank or derank you directly; their scores train and audit the algorithms that do. That makes the PQ checklist the closest thing to Google's published grading rubric, and most of it is on-page work: sharpening the main content, writing honest descriptive titles, and making authorship and purpose obvious. A page stuck at Medium because its purpose is muddy or its content is thin is exactly what On-Page SEO is built to fix, and that fix is what moves a page toward the High and Highest band Google's systems are tuned to reward.
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