What is Google Website Rater?

What is Google Website Rater? Google Website Rater
Google contracts with over 10,000 search quality raters worldwide to evaluate its search results. Raters are given actual searches to conduct, drawn from real searches that happen on Google. They then rate the quality of pages that appear in the top results — hence the “quality rater” name.

Google’s Quality raters cannot alter the search results directly. A rater marking a particular listing as low quality will not cause that page to be banned or lose ranking.

Instead, the data generated by quality raters is used to improve Google’s search algorithms, an automated system of ranking pages. Over time, that quality rater data might have an impact on low-quality pages that are spotted by raters, but the algorithm will also impact pages weren’t reviewed.

After 10 months since the last update to the Search Quality Raters guidelines (PDF), Google has pushed out another update. The update came out Wednesday night. The Search Quality Raters guidelines document is now 175 pages, up from 168 at the last update on December 5, 2019.

What is new? Here is a change log of what is new in this document:

* Added note to clarify that ratings do not directly impact order of search results.

* Emphasized ‘The Role of Examples in these Guidelines‘ as an independent section in the introduction.

* Added clarification that Special Content Result Blocks may have links to landing pages; added illustrative example.

* Updated guidance on how to rate pages with malware warnings and when to assign the Did Not Load flag; added illustrative examples.

* Changed the order of Rating Flags section and Relationship between Page Quality and Needs Met section for clarity.

* Added ‘Rating Dictionary and Encyclopedia Results for Different Queries‘: Emphasizes the importance of understanding the user intent and query for Needs Met rating; added illustrative examples.

* Minor changes throughout such as updated examples and explanations for consistency; simplified language regarding raters representing people in their locale; fixed typos; etc.

Read more here.