@JS_Harris there is no basis for this. Google does not use Human raters for ranking sites in the serps.
Basis: top ranked pages are indeed evaluated by a human, I'm not sure why you'd think they aren't, especially on some of the most searched for terms. I'm aware of the blind quality testing human raters do that does NOT influence individual rankings and only helps engineers better tweak the algo, I am not refering to those. I am referring to the 10,000+ strong team of outsourced individuals that do evaluate about 60 websites per hour each on average, they tend to be most busy immediately after an update to clean up residual spam that sneaks up.
Personal experience: Some years ago I published a new site that was immediately top ranked, then along came a human who snipped my ability to rank for a specific keyword, without informing me. This wasn't a penalty, my site was new and probably didn't deserve to rank tops in serps but the algo said it did. At the time Google actually showed you the title and description of any page which had received sitelink status. Lo and behold my titles all looked mighty funny in those reports with that one word snipped from all titles and descriptions!
I was in touch with Google at the time and they confirmed my suspicion, that a human had snipped my ability to rank for that specific 1 word term, but within two weeks that block was removed and, mysteriously, I was no longer able to see sitelink titles and descriptions in my dashboard anymore. I've had other experiences that strongly support that a human has been involved in a ranking change(improvement), but so have you! A couple of years ago, when Matt was still on the spam team and actually working at Google, not on extended holiday, Google had a particularly rough update which left obvious spam in front of foremely long standing top ranked sites.
Various widely reposted tweets confirmed that HUMANS were hard at work cleaning up any spam that had snuck into the top spots. They can, and do, do this. The human rater handbook itself suggests that every site has a history that can be looked up to see previous ratings, this is used by the spam team.... anyway, people tend to ignore what they see and stay strong with what they've been told officially so I won't argue with you further but I have had first hand experiences over nearly two decades now that have repeatedly confirmed what I'm saying.
note: don't bother trying to find and bribe a rater, they perform tasks they are assigned and cannot visit your site specifically on purpose. If you wish, however, you can find signs that this mini-army of humans is indeed visiting pages and taking names - [
theguardian.com...]
edit: You'll notice the contradictions even in that article I just linked. The humans were flagging sites for removal yet were not able to actually change rankings. That screams semantics because the flagged sites are all ultimately removed, manually, as has been reported time and time again via the spam team. I understand Google's need to have an algo do ALL the heavy lifting but the fact is that when the algo says THIS is a top ranked site they can't just blindly make that happen, and they don't for the top spots of the most queried terms, period.
To give you a visual, I'm just not going to argue on this but want to be clear.
- Algo: found a top ranked worthy page! No history, requires review, flagged and given lower initial ranking
- Human: review of top rank worthy page, eventually. Algo confirmed, this page/site rocks... top rankings approved.
- Human: review of another top ranked worthy page. Algo denied, this is spam.
- Algo: re-evaluation of these pages performed, human input included in evaluation, actual ranking adjusted accordingly.
So technically the human rater did not manually change a page's ranking but it was indeed a human rater that unlocked the uper ranking potential of said page. Google's not lying, but human evaluaters, over 10,000 strong, spend all day doing a lot of manual reviews and creating a lot of website history for the algo(and for the engineers).
