You Want To Do SEO – Be Authentic, says Google!

Google has come up with a major update in Jan 2025 that changed the SEO dynamics. A major update to Google’s Search Quality Raters Guidelines (QRG) clarifies and expands on multiple forms of deception that Google wants its quality raters to identify. This change continues the trend of refining the guidelines so that quality raters become better at spotting increasingly granular forms of quality issues.

TL/DR

Authenticity should be the core principle for any SEO and content strategy.

Quality Guidelines Section 4.5.3

Section 4.5.3 has essentially been rewritten to be clearer and easier to understand but most importantly it has been expanded to cover more kinds of deception. One can speculate that the quality raters weren’t overlooking certain kinds of website deception and that these changes are addressing that shortcoming. This could also signal that Google’s algorithms may in the near future become more adept at spotting the described kinds of deception.

The change in the heading of section 4.5.3 reflects the scope of the changes, with greater detail over the original version.

The section title changed from this:

4.5.3 Deceptive Page Purpose and Deceptive MC Design

To this:

“4.5.3 Deceptive Page Purpose, Deceptive Information about the Website, Deceptive Design”

The entire section was lightly rewritten and reorganized for greater clarity. It’s not necessarily a new policy but rather a more detailed and nuanced version of it, with a few parts that are brand new.