Rule Details

An editorial policy page documents how your site creates, reviews, and maintains content. Google's Quality Rater Guidelines (opens in new tab) and site-level trust signals both benefit when that process is visible rather than implied.

Code Examples

❌ Avoid — no editorial policy linked anywhere

<!-- Footer with no link to editorial standards -->
<footer>
  <nav>
    <a href="/about">About</a>
    <a href="/contact">Contact</a>
    <a href="/privacy">Privacy Policy</a>
  </nav>
</footer>

✅ Correct — editorial policy linked from footer and About page

<footer>
  <nav aria-label="Legal and policies">
    <a href="/about">About Us</a>
    <a href="/editorial-policy">Editorial Policy</a>
    <a href="/contact">Contact</a>
    <a href="/privacy">Privacy Policy</a>
  </nav>
</footer>

✅ Article byline linking to author and editorial standards

<article>
  <header>
    <h1>Understanding Type 2 Diabetes Risk Factors</h1>
    <p class="byline">
      By <a href="/authors/dr-jane-smith">Dr Jane Smith, MD</a>
      · Reviewed by <a href="/authors/dr-robert-jones">Dr Robert Jones, PhD</a>
      · <a href="/editorial-policy">Editorial standards</a>
    </p>
  </header>
</article>

✅ Sample editorial policy structure

<main>
  <h1>Editorial Policy</h1>
 
  <section>
    <h2>Our Mission</h2>
    <p>We publish evidence-based health information reviewed by licensed
       medical professionals to help readers make informed decisions.</p>
  </section>
 
  <section>
    <h2>Author Qualifications</h2>
    <p>All health content is written or reviewed by practitioners with
       relevant clinical credentials. Author profiles include credentials
       and areas of expertise.</p>
  </section>
 
  <section>
    <h2>Corrections Policy</h2>
    <p>Factual errors are corrected within 24 hours of notification.
       Corrections are noted at the top of the updated article.</p>
  </section>
</main>

Why It Matters

• E-E-A-T: Google's quality raters explicitly look for editorial standards when evaluating Trustworthiness. A published policy is direct evidence, especially when it aligns with Google's guidance on helpful, reliable, people-first content (opens in new tab).
• YMYL sensitivity: Health, finance, legal, and safety sites are held to higher standards. A missing editorial policy on a YMYL site is a significant trust deficit.
• Differentiation: A detailed editorial policy distinguishes your site from AI-generated content farms that lack any editorial oversight and complements the page-level protections covered in disclaimers.

What to Include

A strong editorial policy page covers:

1. Editorial mission — what topics you cover and who the audience is
2. Author standards — qualifications required to contribute (degrees, experience, credentials)
3. Research methodology — primary sources, peer-reviewed studies, expert interviews
4. Review process — who reviews content before publication (editors, subject matter experts)
5. Update policy — how frequently content is reviewed; how errors are corrected
6. Conflict of interest disclosure — advertising, affiliate relationships, funding sources

Exceptions

• Necessary utility or compliance pages can be intentionally brief and should not be judged by the same editorial-depth expectations as ranking-focused content.
• AI-assisted drafting is not a failure by itself; flag unsupported claims, missing editorial review, or low-originality output instead.
• When a page has both trust-signal issues and crawl/index problems, make the page eligible to rank first and then improve the content quality signals.

Standards

• Use these references as the standard for the final search-facing HTML, metadata, and crawl behavior.
• Check the implementation against Google Search Quality Rater Guidelines before treating the rule as satisfied.
• Check the implementation against Google Search Central: E-E-A-T and quality content before treating the rule as satisfied.

Verification

Automated Checks

• Inspect rendered HTML and HTTP headers to confirm the expected metadata or crawlability signal is present.
• Test the affected URL with Google Search Console or equivalent tooling where relevant.
• Re-crawl a representative page set after deployment.

Manual Checks

• Confirm the change does not create conflicting canonical-url, robots, or structured-data signals.