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

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 raters do not directly affect our rankings. That’s correct.

PotPieGirl goes on to speculate: “However, I do believe that if a certain percentage of raters mark one url as spam or non-relevant, that it does throw up some type of flag in the system that can cause something to happen to that url. Now I naturally do not KNOW this, but I get that sneaky feeling.”

That feeling is unfounded. Even if multiple search quality raters mark something as spam or non-relevant, that doesn’t affect a site’s rankings or throw up a flag in the url that would affect that url.

So there you have it, these quality raters have no say in if your site should rank well in Google or not.

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• Download The Latest Google Search Quality Rating Guidelines
• The Google Quality Raters Handbook
• Google & Human Quality Reviews: Old News Returns
• The Human Side To Google: Search Evaluations
• Google: We’re Better Now Than 2000. Okay, Let Us Test It!
• How The “Focus On First” Helps Hide Google’s Relevancy Problems