Google Quality Raters Review Algorithms, Not Individual Web Sites

SEOs are somewhat obsessed with the Google quality raters despite Google saying repeatedly that these consultant do not have direct access to change any of the rankings for any of the sites in their index. I liked how John Mueller from Google summed up their job roles in the hangout from yesterday at the 5:13 mark into the video.

John said these Google quality raters are "trying to review our algorithms in general, we're not trying to evaluate individual sites." That is the essence, they do look at individual sites but all of that is aimed at the review of the algorithms, not of the individual site.

Here is the question from Glenn Gabe and John Mueller's answer:

Question from Glen: I know quality raters can't directly impact search rankings but what about website reputation? How is Google looking into that? Can incremental improvements to reputation positively impact a site during future algorithm updates?

For the most part these quality raters are looking into specific things with regards to our algorithms. So for the most part they're not specifically flagging sites with regards to reputation and that's not something that we use there directly. But we do use kind of human evaluation for various different algorithmic ideas that we're thinking about or that we want to try out. And that could theoretically include something like reputation of a website in general. But at least from from what I've seen there's no direct kind of connection there that a quality rater says oh this site has a bad reputation and then it goes down in search.

Because we're trying to review our algorithms in general, we're not trying to evaluate individual sites.

Here is the video embed:

Via @johnmu re site reputation: G uses human evaluation for various algo ideas for testing, could include reputation https://t.co/jJkzeXklBG pic.twitter.com/zP7jLLuSMe

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) August 2, 2017

Forum discussion at Twitter.