Have you ever spotted a Google quality rater visiting your website? It is not as uncommon as you thought. I even saw it on this website. You can spot it by searching your analytics from raterhub.com referral traffic.
Here is a screenshot from Glenn Gabe on Twitter that shows this one health/medical site getting 444 users and 478 sessions from raterhub.com:
When I looked at which pages raterhub.com looked at on this site in the past year, it was of these two stories:
- Greg Sterling Is Leaving Search Engine Land
- Google Bug Fix Returns Traffic To SlashFilm & Other Movie Blogs
Makes you wonder why those two pages but hey, raters be raters.
The first time I covered these raters and the Rater Hub was in 2005, believe it or not. Note, the quality raters guidelines are also hosted on ratershub.com. The last time Google updated those guidelines was in December 2022.
Here is Glenn's tweet on this:
You can often see quality raters show up across sites focused on YMYL topics. This is health/medical. 444 users, 478 sessions. I can't reveal the articles, but they are about sensitive topics. pic.twitter.com/EeQVLx4AE9
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) July 14, 2023
Just to be clear, quality raters do not have any direct influence on how you rank in Google Search. These folks reviewing your web site does not mean anything SEO-wise.
I know. I've had quite a few conversations with companies that thought quality raters visiting their content, reviewing a few articles, etc., could impact their site's rankings directly. There's still a lot of confusion about how quality raters work, what their role is, etc.
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) July 17, 2023
Forum discussion at Twitter.
