I must have covered this topic a few times but here we go again, Google has said numerous times that the search quality raters they hire as consultants do not directly influence their search rankings. An article was highlighted yesterday but some folks in the search community implied that after a rater visits your site your rankings can immediately improve or drop down - that is not true.
Google's John Mueller clarified for those second guessing Google on Twitter "They don't evaluate & penalize sites."
This post fundamentally misunderstands how Google uses raters for search quality -- we've talked about that a lot of times, eg https://t.co/OMyWje5gPM and https://t.co/0PA6w6c1bM . They don't evaluate & penalize sites.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) March 12, 2019
Former Googlers, Pedro Dias, also chimed in with a bit more detail:
Also, most evaluators will tend to use proxies that strip referrers.
— Pedro Dias (@pedrodias) March 12, 2019
To be fair, the only reason Aleyda shared it was for the way to find the Google Analytics segment, not for the myth around these evaluators directly impacting your rankings:
But then I saw many people saw it as an endorsement! Will need to start including one of those “Tweets not endorsement” some people shows in their profile I guess 😐 anyway, thanks for the clarification on the proxies! It makes sense ☺️
— Aleyda Solis (@aleyda) March 13, 2019
But then you have the skeptics who don't want to take Google's word for it:
They "indirectly" influence them... Oy vey.
— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) March 12, 2019
Forum discussion at Twitter.
