Secret Google "Quality Labs"

In keeping with the theme of the past few posts regarding targeted website traffic, honest website marketing and marketing tools, and legitimate work-from-home income, I want to reprint some insightful articles. We have been talking about "fingerprinting" and how that can be damaging to to directory sites, such as those created by Traffic Equalizer.

By the way, let me repeat that search engines do not necessarily think that site created by TE and other directory software such as Traffic Hurricane or Directory Generator are bad. There has been a lot of talk to the effect that these site are spam. There are various schools of opinion. One school holds that TE sites are spam because they use TE. However, opinion aside, the fact of the matter seems to be that regardless of opinion, whether or not the search engines consider such a site spam depends on how the webmaster used the software. In some of the earlier posts I go into this in a bit more detail.

In this post, I want to print an article from the Axandra SEO newsletter on the Google Human Quality center and what that means for website owners. I have shown this article before, but it has been a bit, and I think in light of the last several entries that this continues to be relevant.

Do humans change Google's search results?

It has turned out that _eval.google.com is some kind of quality center. Google pays people from all over the world US$10 to US$20 per hour to check Google search results every day.

These people, called International Agents at Google, seem to have been recruited through universities. There is also a job posting for Google quality raters on Monster.com:

Google Inc. is recruiting part-time, temporary, home-based workers to help with work on a search quality evaluation on a project basis. [...]

Candidates will evaluate search results and rate their relevance. Thus, all candidates must be web-savvy and analytical, have excellent web research skills and a broad range of interests. Specific areas of expertise are highly desirable.

An official Google spokesman has confirmed that the quality center exists and that real people rate the quality of search results.

What does this mean to your web site?

As long as you didn't optimize your web site with shady tricks, this means nothing to your web site. The human reviewer try to filter web pages that use unethical search engine optimization methods such as cloaking, hidden text, etc. from the search results.

We've said it before in our newsletter: ethical search engine optimization is about everyone winning.

Search engines: They win as they are provided with pages that are easy to understand and that contain the quality information that their visitors search for.

Searchers: They win as they are getting what they ask for from the search engines. They search for "green widgets" and get a page about green widgets.

Web site owners: They win as they are getting quality visitors who are interested in what their web site has to offer.

As long as you optimize your web pages with ethical search engine optimization methods, you don't have to be afraid of human reviewers.