Google Human Editors - Common Misunderstandings

[mboydnv]

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System: The following 35 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4820506.htm [webmasterworld.com] by goodroi - 9:04 am on Oct 10, 2016 (utc -5)

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It's ugly here too. Lots of new ranking gains #11 (never #10) but no conversions.

It's really sad what Google has become. What i wouldn't give to see 2 other engines cutting into their pie.

What is also happening is the money begets money principle. I see so many niches being dominated by those making the big $. They in turn pay for ads then are rewarded with #1 organic rankings. It's happening everywhere it seems. Tourism Las vegas is filled with the big money. A new company comes along with a few million behind them, pays $50K in ads for the month, then wind up becoming #1 in local and #1 below the ads in rankings. They reap in all the money from being #1 and keep feeding the Google machine.

I have no desire to do any more SEO or yoast BS. It doesn't work. I've done it all. Believe me. The only thing that works is spending big money on ads. Don't believe in the slick SEO garbage.

Even Amazon is becoming a toilet. People think they can give a way their product at a discount for an honest review and are finding people turning against them for not having verified reviews.

So hard to have any energy in the mornings to battle my competition. I've been doing this 12 years too. I also believe Google human editor has us filtered to not go #10. any rankings we ever get stop at #11.

So where are the conversions. Just how can they take that away? Facebook ads, Google ads, organic traffic, nothing is converting...

[westcoast]

mboydnv says "So hard to have any energy in the mornings to battle my competition. I've been doing this 12 years too. I also believe Google human editor has us filtered to not go #10. any rankings we ever get stop at #11."

Does anyone know how this "google human editor" penalty stuff works? I know Google in the past has said that these raters can't directly affect rankings, but clearly they can, because they wouldn't exist otherwise.

So how does Google account for sites that have improved over time? If a "quality reviewer" sticks an F on your site in 2007, are you doomed forever? Are there checks and balances in place to deal with the idea that a site can improve over time? If some of your pages get filtered because of crappy "reviewer" ratings 10 years ago, how do you get them back in if they are now good quality?

How does one get these invisible/stealth manual "quality reviewer" penalties lifted, if in fact it's possible to do so? Manual penalties at least give you some feedback mechanism. Where is the mechanism for "quality reviewer" penalties? What stops a couple of competitors from becoming "reviewers" and just smashing your site downward with poor quality reviews?

There are so many "hidden penalties" at this point that it's incredibly frustrating not knowing what's going on when your site traffic declines week after week, month after month, year after year, even though you have put a lot of time and effort into improving the user experience and site quality.

[superclown2]

So hard to have any energy in the mornings to battle my competition. I've been doing this 12 years too.

Please don't take this the wrong way, I've shared the same pain many times - but competition is a way of life in every business not just this one. To beat the competition what we all have to find out is just what is going on and react in the proper way to it. At the moment there seems to be so much turbulence that it's very difficult to make much sense of it. My own theory is that this is early stage machine learning and that it will be some time before the fog clears so I intend to just sit tight for a while.

However at the moment I have a .me site that has been in the top ten for it's chosen key phrase for years but which has disappeared off the face of the earth for no apparent reason; perhaps G has decided they don't like .me's. I have sites with next to no links or other citations staying in high positions; perhaps Storm Google hasn't reached their search terms yet. I have superb sites with good link profiles and lots of unique pages which have nosedived for the targeted key phrases but minor pages with no incoming except internal ones have risen for key phrases I never dreamed of. Not only are titles being re-written but the sites are showing for key phrases that match those new titles; the algo is, I'm sure, deciding for itself what a page is all about rather than relying on the usual signals of title, description, anchor text etc.

Is Google experimenting with an AI algo that doesn't rely so heavily on links? Is it so active that it re-calculates several times a day, resulting in some sites changing position constantly? Would I see more stable results if I didn't delete cookies so regularly? I don't know but it wouldn't surprise me.

[superclown2]

Does anyone know how this "google human editor" penalty stuff works? I know Google in the past has said that these raters can't directly affect rankings, but clearly they can, because they wouldn't exist otherwise.

I know that a few years ago I had several manual penalties and every one was preceded by a visit from Mountain View that lasted several minutes and searched the site backwards and forwards - more likely than not a human. The rules were different then and I haven't had, or deserved, any penalties since then so I can't comment on what's happening now.

[nomis5]

Is Google experimenting with an AI algo that doesn't rely so heavily on links?

In my opinion links have been less important over the last two years. What is more important is a matter that hasn't been settled yet. But, again in my opinion, it's down to on page stats and where viewers go after the initial page view.

There are many who claim links are the "be all" but slowly they are disappearing into oblivion still believing that links are the solution.

[lightnb]

I'm noticing that our rankings have improved for a lot of the important money words that were previously stuck. A phrase that was stuck above 80 is at 39 today. Another phrase that was stuck on the third page is now second page. Several phrases stuck at #20 are now #10. One competitive phrase went from #15 to #6. All of these improvements happened within the last week. All of them are for commercial intent two-word category "money words". (We've always ranked high for long tail, but the most popular categories were always suppressed by a lot without any legitimate competitors between us and the first few results). Also, for the first time, all of our improvements this week were not offset by drops. Usually we gain some and loose about the same each week like a teeter-totter. Today everything is either up, or same, no dramatic drops.

Granted, moving from any page over one to any other page over one doesn't really produce any results except on paper at the point. Sales are still absolute crap. October is our slowest month, but even with a historically slow month and an election from hell, sales seem a bit too slow.

But maybe this is a slow release from Penguin (we were expecting a recovery) and we will just have to see how things play out. I'm not going to OCD with the rank checker, once a week is fine for me!

[EditorialGuy]

Does anyone know how this "google human editor" penalty stuff works? I know Google in the past has said that these raters can't directly affect rankings, but clearly they can, because they wouldn't exist otherwise.

As I understand it, Google's raters are for quality control: i.e., to check or provide grist for the algorithm. They're a separate group from Google's anti-spam team (the people who hand out manual penalties).

[mosxu]

Human ratters are recruited by employment agencies and guess who applies? SEO agencies. God help you if the SEO agency is the same business with you...

[samwest]

So assuming these "human ratters" ;) are applying a penalty, me wonders if it would appear in WMT? or just be a silent penalty? that would not be a good thing. I guess the easiest way to see if Google is dinging you would be to cross check your Bing results to Google...expect some deviation but if it's WAAAAAY off like mine, you've probably been under their microscope.

[mosxu]

Big Seo agencies to be able to succeed need to have own ratters of theirs and competition sites and also be DMOZ editors. This explains why lower quality sites are able to out rank long established sites.

But this does not explain the zombie traffic, if your website has been labelled unlawfully by a ratter as spam and gets bots instead of real visitors this is not a penalty it is a misleading business practice.

[aristotle]

So you're suggesting that one negative signal can nullify 100 positive signals

[martinibuster]

Does anyone know how this "google human editor" penalty stuff works? I know Google in the past has said that these raters can't directly affect rankings, but clearly they can, because they wouldn't exist otherwise.

They exist for other reasons that you should know about.

1. Read the quality ratings guidelines to see what factors are important to Google then make your site conform to how that document defines quality. In the old days we read algorithm documents to understand about anchor text, headings, position of keywords on a page, etcetera. This is no different.

2. Understand that the raters are there to give feedback on the current algorithm and also to provide data for the machine to train on. For example, human quality raters can be given sites to rate and then a machine will take the ratings, examine the conflicting data (where quality raters disagreed) and figure out a way to reach a better judgment and once that's done it's incorporated into an algo (these bits are called classifiers) and the quality rating is scaled up. That's one of the things you do not know but should know.

I hope that shines a light on what's really happening and allows you to move forward away from baseless (and useless) speculation about what the quality raters are for.

Good luck.

Roger

[mosxu]

No
First the SEO company creates bad publicity about your site! Than come the human ratters who may label your site/brand because of bad reputation. It is not possible to easily remove bad comments because of freedom of speech and legal costs involved but by then the ratter has already caused the damage.

And Gary Illyes puts it like this: "quality traffic goes to quality sites"

[aristotle]

mosxu - The human raters don't have the authority to penalize a site. Only someone in a higher position can do it.

[samwest]

glad someone finally caught the spelling of rater (lol). So what IS the effect of a human rater? I thought the human raters were only checking Ads for adwords accounts...not website quality.

[martinibuster]

So what IS the effect of a human rater?

See point two that I posted above. Human quality raters have several purposes, but the ones you are inquiring about, on the algorithms, is on helping the algorithms improve. They check the SERPs to see if the algorithm got it right and they also create a baseline for human judgment that the algorithms try to replicate.

[Cindy_B]

I was a quality rater for a short period of time, about 4 months, about 4 years back. The pay was around $10 per hour, you needed a Bachelor's degree, and it was intensely time-rated. I didn't last long because they also had raters rating the raters, and I wasn't fast enough--too much of a perfectionist, I guess.

Basically, we had tasks to pick from, or that were available to us to choose from, and had to say, rate the quality of the search results, like is this one better or that one, or go to a website page and evaluate it for certain quality guides, or certain trustworthy guides, and the like.

I can't remember a lot, but I'm happy to try and answer any questions that someone might have here. But, again, this was four or five years ago.

[mboydnv]

Hi Cindy,

Can Google filter a website outside of an algorythm to never reach #10 for any ranking no matter what you do for your website? This filter is not shown anywhere in GWT. Basically this filter screws you forever. No matter how hard one works to make their site an authority, you cannot get a head of the players who have big $$ for ads. It's a rigged system.

My 2 theories that hinder small business on Google.

1. Money begets money. If you spend big money on ads, you are rewarded with top organic rankings. Drop those ads and you lose rankings.

2. If a site has traffic to it, then it is rewarded with top rankings. My competition is buying irrelavant (sp?) domains and redirecting those domains to their site. They buy pharama, casino, whatever, foreign etc and redirect to their Las Vegas tours domain. This shows Google they are getting 4,000 visitors a day, so Google puts them in top 3 spot on page. The company makes money from the organic listing and spends on ads which also reinforces their rankings.

We can't compete with this model. It's unfair. We have a great informative site and service, but Google keeps us on 2nd page no matter what we do. Seriously no matter what we do. So frustrating.

Do you think this is happening at Google?

[martinibuster]

mboydnv... read Cindy's post carefully. She was just a body sitting in a chair rating sites and getting paid ten bucks an hour to do it. She did NOT work with the algorithm. She probably didn't even know how her information would be used.

If you want to know what quality raters did, read her post carefully then to understand how that quality rating data was used, compare it to what I have posted twice already.

Good luck,

Roger

[mboydnv]

Ok, thanks so much martin.

[mosxu]

@Aristotle

I did not mention penalty. Gary Illyes says "quality traffic goes to quality sites" which means the quality traffic goes to sites highly rated and not to some sites that have been negatively marked for bad reputation

[martinibuster]

Gary Illyes says "quality traffic goes to quality sites" which means the quality traffic goes to sites highly rated...

No. That's not what Gary Illyes meant. That's a general statement that has nothing to do with quality raters. You are under a misconception as to what the raters do. Go back and read what I have posted in order to improve your understanding and thereby become a better search marketer.

Good luck.

Roger

[mosxu]

Roger,

Quality raters are being used to establish the quality of a site. Other signals are being used as well and I believe that the higher the quality of the traffic the more is going to go to highly rated sites. I am coming from UX side seen many sites including competitors in the same industry I do not need to go and read anywhere just analyse the traffic.

[samwest]

Wouldn't we all love to know what's within those quality and trust guides...or if the webmaster guidelines are truly the holy grail?

[martinibuster]

mosxu,

You are partially correct. As I stated already, the quality rater data is used to train the algorithm so that the actual site ratings can be scaled and done by a machine. Yes, sites are being rated (Panda), but no, it's not being done one by one by humans.

If you cannot understand a scientific paper, then maybe this will be easier for you to understand, an interview with two Google engineers [wired.com]:

Cutts: There was an engineer who came up with a rigorous set of questions, everything from. “Do you consider this site to be authoritative? Would it be okay if this was in a magazine? Does this site have excessive ads?” Questions along those lines.

Those are the same questions used by the quality raters, as printed in the quality raters guidelines.

Then here's a description of how those answers were used to create the Panda algorithm:

Singhal: And based on that, we basically formed some definition of what could be considered low quality.

Wired.com: But how do you implement that algorithmically?

Cutts: I think you look for signals that recreate that same intuition, that same experience that you have as an engineer and that users have. ...And we actually came up with a classifierto say, okay, IRS or Wikipedia or New York Times is over on this side, and the low-quality sites are over on this side. And you can really see mathematical reasons …

There are many scientific papers that demonstrate that human quality raters are used in this manner. This is not an opinion. This is a fact that cannot be argued with.

[mosxu]

The rater PDF guide has been "accidently" leaked [searchengineland.com...]

Roger,

We have a mind of our own we do not need to take Cutts advise for granted. It is wrong to think that nothing happens to a site if rated as low quality by a human rater.

[westcoast]

My original question stands... Let's assume a page or your site has been tagged as "low quality" years ago. Since then you have made numerous changes and improvements. Whether a penalty is placed on your site or the algorithm has "learned" to ignore your site is semantics. The fact is the poor ratings are more likely to have damaged your traffic than helped.

So how do you get re-rated? What is the recovery path? How do you tell Google "hey, we are much better now than we were 5 years ago"?

Does Google revisit all rated urls every x years for a new rating? Or if the 2009 consensus is your page sucks, you're just "low quality" forever?

If your URLs have been filtered out and tossed aside because of low quality ratings, how do you ever get re-rated?

Perhaps this explains some of the dilemma of many older sites getting stuck in poor ranking limbo.

[martinibuster]

So how do you get re-rated? What is the recovery path? How do you tell Google "hey, we are much better now than we were 5 years ago"?

If you've cleaned up your site the the algo will see it. But also, make sure your off-page SEO is also clean. Once both of those are in order you'll be ranking where you're supposed to be ranking, provided you're all cleaned up.

Now here's the bad news: Just because you've fixed your issues, this does not mean that your former rankings is where your site is supposed to be ranking. Where you're supposed to be ranking could be further down. But not always.

[mboydnv]

Every site if following the guidelines should have the chance to rank #1. It should not be based on how much ads you buy, or if the site has traffic (garbage traffic via purchased and redirected domains). If raters are influencing the results with a filter/flag that we the owner of the site are not aware of, well that is wrong. Especially if it is done then forgotten about and years pass. I've been in business 12 years. Never seen anything like this. Check my profile and niche if you like, you'll see what I mean.

[Cindy_B]

Hello All: To clarify my quality rater position, it was an online remote job, managed through a subcontractor for Google. We had probably only one minute to do each rating task. And it is my opinion that the tasks were a random sampling of sites, when it was sites that were being rated (for quality and trustworthiness). There would be no way that every single website on the internet could be humanly rated like this--the cost would be exorbitant to say the least.

But I don't know what they did with our rating results, or how they were applied to website reputations.

Like I said--extremely time-sensitive tasks (1 min. each was the goal, I think), and even being college-educated, quite intense job. I didn't care for it, being under the gun like that.