Does Google Hand-Edit Search Results?
The question has been raised often (on a lot of forums) whether or not Google uses humans to rate the search engine results pages. Some people say yes, some people don’t care, and other people try to avoid getting a “hand-job” that will lead to their site getting de-indexed.
There should be no question that they do indeed use actual living human beings to look at the SERPs and either change the rank of a page, edit the result showing a certain page, or just plain delist it or even deindex it. Wanna see some evidence that they do it? Well, one thing you could do it do some cloaking and then keep track of the bots that visit your site along with the IPs. When you later get deindexed and your domain is banned, go back and you’ll probably see a non-bot visitor somewhere in there from the same IP class as the bots…that’s one way to know Google does it.
Here’s another bit of (more interesting) evidence: The Secret Lab of Google. (By the way that entire site and the author’s other site are excellent. I wish he’d actively blog…) This is an old video from 2005 or so from what I could find, but interesting nonetheless.
More current (and also interesting, just “less”) is this thread.
Also, if you do some searched for “eval.google.com” and URLs related to the stuff you’ll come across if you do a search on “EWOQ” and related terms.
So yeah people do indeed rate the rankings. That’s why good content (and good SEO) should really pass the human test for it to be truly good.
