Maybe you want to try again with that, i can’t make head or tail of it.

Do you find it normal people place a nofollow tag on external links because maybe Google might find this link not appropriate?
I decide myself which link i trust or not (our which one earned his link through a good comment). Result: All outgoing links have zero value…
🙂

Guess you’re not familiar with the term no follow are you. 😉

I would think they use the raters ratings to determine how real humans are reacting to the algo changes. Quantitative data is cute and all but it becomes far more powerful when qualitative data is added into the mix.

Google isn’t doing anything too crazy (IMO) they are just being good data scientist and getting both sides of the picture before iterating changes that affect the entire world.

“””Even if multiple search quality raters mark something as spam or non-relevant, that doesn’t affect a site’s rankings or throw up a flag in the url that would affect that url.”””
That tells us what is doesn’t do but not what it does do, if anything. Surely “search quality raters” have a purpose otherwise you wouldn’t employ them.

BR

Peter

Pierre, you are/were probably a rater.
IF you say a search result is relevant or irrelevant without looking to the whole page AND reading the content then i think you don’t really understand what searching the internet is about.

Lucky you!
I’m affraid many people are not that lucky!

Off course Tim, that is highly relevant.
Also if you have affiliate links you are spamming, no doubt about that. Use Adsense so you don’t send so much spam in the world…
Google is abusing it’s search engine to push their products. They find all kind of ways to detect spam. Google ways.

Interesting point, I think Google do not really want feedback from experienced online users but more from the average users in order to create and average response from the algorithm. I would think they use the profile of the raters (mainly location) in order to modify what the search engine returns as useful results.

It makes sense that if a large number of raters flag a site as spam that it would be penalised and taken out of the index, though look at my comment at the bottom of this page I beleive raters are not directly responsible for this kind of data evaluation, the amount of data online is far too large for this to be an efficient process.

Google’s manual process isn’t usually talked about in depth, so it’s nice to see the explanation…

Last night I did a name search and it was again on [age 1. I had not done any SEO. It just appeared back in the SERPS after the above posts. So I was manually adjusted – again!

Oh yes I absolutely understand Potpiegirl. The issue is that google’s comments about their services are contradictory. I will leave it at that :).

Hi Janice =)

I am also sorry to hear of your situation – I can only imagine the frustration. Being heard on this great big internet can be very hard – and part of the reason I chose to allow your comments.

Whether Matt did, or did not, ignore your comments is not something that should be handled here – and please hear me with the kindness I am offering. This is not the place for you and Matt to “have it out” or discuss your situation.

Matt came here to clarify a point made about the topic of this post – and I appreciate that. I appreciate all comments and activity here that brings more insight and clarity into the topic at hand.

I empathize with your situation and wanted to give you a chance to be heard if at all possible – and I think I did that. However, I wouldn’t expect Matt to comment on anything you’ve said here on this blog – especially if this is headed to court. Any decent lawyer would tell you to not communicate with that person without counsel, don’t you agree?

I wish you the very best!

Jennifer
~PotPieGirl

I looked at the times on the replies and Mr Cutts did, in fact ignore my posts. This is not surprising. However, he will not be allowed to ignore a subpoena and will have to testify since he commented about investigating ripoff report on his blog.

Jonathon, Hi and thank you so much :). Your post really helped me as this has been a very long and lonely battle. A big thank you to Potpie Girl for publishing my comments. Many of the ‘name’ SEO sites have not published about this case. The exceptions are Frank on Searchengineland after the story hit the media here and SEOmoz (on the anatomy of a ripoff report thread). My comments on the latter are published under ‘interested aussie’ because I was writing under that name before I decided to come out of the closet in October.

You are my second knight in shining armour from NZ. Let me briefly tell you that in 2000 I was in China for a health conference. I gave away all my yuan the night before leaving and miscalculated the amount for departure tax. It is very hard to argue in Chinese but I gave it a go at the airport when trying to explain that I only had Australian currency and credit. The choices were yuan or USD – they wouldn’t accept AU currency then’ although it may be different now. The airport officials were not going to let me board without paying and the situation got a little heated.

A guy standing behind me in what was a long line that was rapidly increasing tapped me on the shoulder, showed me a NZ passport and popped the yuan I needed in my hand. It was only about $2 in AU/NZ but he did something proactive rather than stand there and complain that I was holding up the line (like other non Chinese in the line).

The NZ guy probably saved me from being arrested. I wasn’t going to budge from the line in the airport (as they wanted) for the sake of $2 and I am not going to give up my right to work because of a task that would take Google 5 minutes. We are in court for ‘argument’ on Monday. Google have moved for a strike out. This is just a ‘deep pocketing’ tactic and I have confidence in my legal team. We are asking the court to order them to file a defence.

The court dates take a huge amount out of me on an emotional level and I am stressed for days before. We probably won’t get a decision until February so after this hearing I will be able to focus on putting the rest of the content on the site. I have done a lot of research on the differences in law viz the global nature of the internet and want to be able to provide a resource for others in this position.

Have just spent an hour or so reading everything on your site. Obviously it is a painful situation and an even more painful litigation process, however, the quality content and its presentation puts many so-called authority sites to shame and is a credit to you. I’m sure the irony of Cutts posting here and studiously ignoring your comments was not lost on you or anyone else. As a frequent user of search I can assure you that what google says and what google does are poles apart. Cutts claims that “quality content” and “user experience” are key factors in rankings. That of course is utter BS. By way of example just take any IM product off Clickbank and do a product + review search. Most of the first page ranked sites will have a useless page with 50-100 words basically saying “I haven’t reviewed yet but come back again and one day it might be there” which hardly qualifies for quality content. Have tweeted every page on your site so hopefully that will get you a few more visitors. I will post on this topic on a couple of my sites soon with links to yours.

Best Wishes, Jonathon (across the Tasman in NZ)