Google For The Umpteenth Time: Quality Raters Do Not Directly Impact Search Results

Aug 5, 2020 - 7:35 am 5 by

Google Quality Raters

I have covered Google saying that its quality raters, which are third-party consultants who are not even employed by Google directly, do not have any direct influence in Google search rankings. I reported Googlers saying this countless times and I didn't report Googlers saying it as well because I covered it countless times.

Here are some, not all, of my stories on this topic from the past:

Heck, Jennifer Slegg and I even discussed it in the vlog and she is an expert on the quality raters. Oh, and by the way, Bing has the same deal.

In any event, Danny Sullivan wrote a detailed blog post on the Google blog about this again. And even when he wrote it, people still asked about how these raters influence the search results.

Google wrote:

Ratings are not used directly for search ranking

Once raters have done this research, they then provide a quality rating for each page. It’s important to note that this rating does not directly impact how this page or site ranks in Search. Nobody is deciding that any given source is “authoritative” or “trustworthy.” In particular, pages are not assigned ratings as a way to determine how well to rank them. Indeed, that would be an impossible task and a poor signal for us to use. With hundreds of billions of pages that are constantly changing, there’s no way humans could evaluate every page on a recurring basis.

Instead, ratings are a data point that, when taken in aggregate, helps us measure how well our systems are working to deliver great content that’s aligned with how people—across the country and around the world—evaluate information.

Then you have people read this and go off on how Google uses raters, manual humans, to adjust rankings. But Google said no, it does not.

I am kind of tired of reporting on it...

Forum discussion at Twitter.

 

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