Video: Google Speaks About Search Quality Raters

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

google-quality-rater 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 queries to see what changes
Based on the Quality Raters ratings, an engineer would want to see better results ranking higher in their new algorithm compared to before
Then engineer does a side by side (blind taste test) directed to the Quality Raters and the Raters says I like left side or right side
The engineer then can see those test results and if the results to look better overall based on those rating they might want to expand on it
Then Google sends out a live test to a small percent of users and run the tests on live (non raters) people

Here is the video of Matt Cutts explaining this:

More on Google Quality Raters:

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz

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http://www.vincenttobiaz.com Vincent Tobiaz

They’re doing pretty poor job outsourcing it though. What a mess. Bings certainly beating this system according to quality raters.
http://www.askforeman.com/ Stephen Foreman

I must say I didn’t think it was up to scratch either when I used to work for them. There is too much pressure on time over quality. But having that perspective has made me realise the importance of certain SEO techniques.
http://andrey.legaev.com/ Andrey Legayev

As for me there is nothing something bad or good about it. It’s just standard QA process in software development cycle. It’s like external usability testing.