Will Google Manually Review Your Site?

Everyone knows Google has a very complicated algorithm to assess the quality and relevance of a website for a particular search. Few people realise that Google also has a team of quality raters who are trained to manually review web pages.

In the last month or so, a recent copy of Google’s General Guidelines for rating URLs was inadvertently posted on the internet. Google’s lawyers have made pretty certain that this confidential document has been removed, but I had a chance to read the rather turgid 125 page document before it was taken down.

When are manual reviews likely to happen?

It seems certain that search queries and websites will have a manual review as a research exercise before an algorithmic change is discussed and applied. In addition, manual reviews are likely to be applied to websites where someone has submitted a spam request to Google. Google may then apply a manual penalty to the site or remove it from the index altogether until the problem is fixed, at which stage a reconsideration request can be made to Google to have the site re-indexed. This penalty may be due to the fact that page contains malware, or ‘may be spam’.

Google will also apply manual penalties to sites that are cheating the system, like the case of US company J C Penney, which was buying text links on a large scale reported here in the New York Times.

What is uncertain is whether Google are applying manual reviews to high ranking websites for high traffic keywords as a matter of course. They could be.

What do the Guidelines Say?

Google’s manual reviewers are rating a webpage according to the following scale of relevance:

Vital
Useful
Relevant
Slightly Relevant
Off-Topic or Useless
Unrateable

In addition, pages are flagged as:

Not Spam
Maybe Spam
Spam
Pornography
Malicious

Any flag other than ‘Not spam’ is going to cause problems for your rankings.

For some types of business and website owners, there is a very subjective difference between ‘not spam’ and ‘maybe spam’ especially with sites designed to earn advertising, commissions, or affiliate sites. There is a fine line between these categories whether the site is human reviewed or algorithmically ranked.

As ever, the key thing is to ensure your own website has high quality original content which is relevant and useful to the user. If in doubt, seek some advice.

Related posts:

1. What Does The Panda Like? Google Runs Its Quality Algorithm Again