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Video: Google Speaks About Search Quality Raters

Barry Schwartz on May 1, 2012 at 3:00 pm

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:

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

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 SEM topics.