Apr 15, 2013 at 1:24pm ET by Amy Gesenhues

In a recent study by SurveyMonkey examining SEO assumptions, respondents were given two search result pages, one with a page header labeled "Google" and the other with a page header labeled "Bing," and asked which page of results they preferred. Even when the page header labels were swapped, more users preferred the Google search results. Of 641 survey respondents, 379 participants received a survey asking which of two search result pages they preferred. One page of results for the term "file taxes" included true Google results and the other page included true Bing results. The Google page [...]

Google Gutted Its Search Quality Rating Guidelines For Public Release

Mar 1, 2013 at 4:08pm ET by Matt McGee

As part of today's big "How Search Works" reveal, Google also took the big step of sharing its Search Quality Rating Guidelines for the first time. This is the document that Google's human search quality raters use when grading Google's search results. But the new, public document is actually an edited version of the old one that circulated quietly several times amongst webmasters and SEOs. In fact, "gutted" is more accurate than "edited" -- where the most recent non-public version of the document was 161 pages, the public document released today is only 43 pages. What's Changed The bi [...]

Google Publishes Its Search Quality Rating Guidelines For First Time

Mar 1, 2013 at 12:43pm ET by Barry Schwartz

As part of the How Search Works interactive infographic Google released today, they have decided to publish their search quality rating guidelines publicly to the world. You can access the 43-page PDF document over here. It was most recently updated November 2, 2012. As you may remember, the document has been leaked back in 2008, 2001, 2012 and other times, when finally they said they were considering going public with that document. Today, they have. Search quality raters are third-party people Google hires through a third-party agency to rate the search results. It is not used to ra [...]

Google Releases Interactive Infographic: “How Search Works”

Mar 1, 2013 at 11:58am ET by Danny Sullivan

Ever wondered how Google Search works, finds pages from across the web and decides how to list them in response to a search? If so, Google's got a new resource designed to answer questions. Called "How Search Works," the new area announced today is an interactive infographic that explains more about the search process, including how Google deal with spam issues. The new area was inspired by Google's The Story Of Send, an interactive infographic that Google released last year to explain how it handles email. "We were looking at this site [The Story Of Send], Matt Cutts [Google's chief [...]

Google May Go Public With Its Human Search Quality Rater Guidelines

Oct 30, 2012 at 3:12pm ET by Matt McGee

Google is considering offering its search quality rating guidelines to the public. The news comes near the end of the latest webmaster video just posted today on YouTube. In it, Google's Matt Cutts answers a question about how Google uses the data it collects from its human search evaluators -- in short, "those folks don't influence our algorithm in any direct sense," Cutts says. But near the end of the video, Cutts talks about the possibility of sharing its search quality guidelines with the world. It comes at about the 2:20 mark: "We might be able to make those human quality rater guidel [...]

Google Search Quality Raters Instructions Gain New “Page Quality” Guidelines

Sep 7, 2012 at 4:07pm ET by Matt McGee

In the wake of Google's Panda algorithm update, its cadre of human search quality raters has a new task: giving Google specific quality ratings for individual landing pages. The new "Page Quality Rating Guidelines" section adds a whopping 32 pages to the handbook that Google provides to those human raters (via contractors like Lionbridge and Leapforce). An existing section on "URL Rating Tasks with User Locations" has been expanded from 12 to 16 pages, so that what was a 125-page document in early 2011 is now 161 pages long. Version 3.27 of Google's guidelines for search quality raters - [...]

Video: Google Speaks About Search Quality Raters

May 1, 2012 at 3:00pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Google's head of web spam, Matt Cutts, has published a video talking about a topic that Google has never really talked about publicly before - Google Quality Raters. The video goes through the process used by Google with these Quality Raters. Matt Cutts specifically says these quality raters have no direct impact on the Google search results. He explains how what they do is used in the overall Google search quality process: Google Quality Raters rate URLs if they are good, bad, spam and other classifications Then when the Google engineers changes the algorithm The engineers can run q [...]

An Interview With A Google Search Quality Rater

Jan 20, 2012 at 1:42pm ET by Matt McGee

Since at least 2005, Google has been using a large, worldwide focus group to help review its search results and the quality of the web pages that rank well in its algorithm. The people in this program are called Quality Raters and, as you can imagine, the work they do is important to search marketers everywhere. Google was actually advertising Quality Rater jobs in late 2004, but today the Quality Raters don't actually work for Google; they work for contractors such as Lionbridge, Leapforce, Butler Hill and possibly others. According to Lionbridge's Internet Assessors Program job page, it h [...]

Google Quality Raters Can’t Cause Site To Drop In Rankings

Dec 7, 2011 at 10:27am ET by Barry Schwartz

Pot Pie Girl has been busy the past couple months, first by publishing the Google quality raters guidelines and then by analyzing the forums to see how they rate things. One thing she said was that she believed these quality raters can raise a red flag at Google and lead to a downgrade in your site's rankings. Truth is, no it won't. Google's Matt Cutts debunked the "misconception" yesterday by leaving a comment: Hi, I need to dispel a misconception in this post. In the section "Can ONE Quality Rater Change the Ranking of a Url?" Scott Huffman is quoted saying that our search quality rat [...]

Google Quality Raters Can Rate Your Site Without Seeing It

Nov 18, 2011 at 9:51am ET by Barry Schwartz

PotPieGirl, the one who posted the latest Google quality raters handbook has come back with a new post on Google Raters - Who Are They? She looks into a discussion forum devoted to these quality raters, where they discuss day to day topics that come up for the job. She points out one post where a quality rater said they can rate the quality of the site without actually seeing the site, instead they can rate it based on the search result's snippet. One rater said in the forums, "When I was doing 20 I did a lot based just on snippets." Are you surprised? Does the rating a Google qua [...]

Download The Latest Google Search Quality Rating Guidelines

Oct 18, 2011 at 9:02am ET by Barry Schwartz

We have been tipped off to a revised Google Quality Rating Guidelines handbook that has been leaked. It has been over three and a half years since we last saw a leaked Google Quality Raters Handbook and that document was from back in April 2007. Pot Pie Girl found a copy of the March 30, 2011 version 3.18 of the Google Search Quality Rating Guidelines handbook used by Google Search Quality Raters around the world. It's 125 page long, and you can find it linked off their post here. We'd had it posted earlier ourselves, but Google said that it was a copyrighted document, and since he hadn [...]

The Google Quality Raters Handbook

Mar 14, 2008 at 9:30am ET by Barry Schwartz

Brian Ussery has discovered a revised copy of the Google Quality Raters Guidelines, which he archived on his own site. The documents are used by Google Quality Raters to aid them in classifying queries, measuring relevancy, and rating the search results. To do so, the Quality Rater must understand how Google works and this document has a bunch of that. Let me pull out some of those details in easy to read bullet points. Three Query Types: Navigational: someone searching for a site, such as a search for IBM.Informational: someone searching for information on a topic of interest, such [...]

Google & Human Quality Reviews: Old News Returns

Dec 19, 2007 at 2:53pm ET by Danny Sullivan

A quote from Google's director of research Peter Norvig in an article at Technology Review about how human reviewers assess Google's search quality is starting to pick up play on the web and will no doubt grow. Problem is, it's not news. Still, I suppose it's interesting to those who are new to the space or missed the attention it got back in 2005. Some history follows. Back in June 2005, Henk van Ess put out information about how Google uses temporary employees to review search results and rate the quality of them. He picked up a little hype by calling it the "Google Secret E [...]

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