Human Raters and Penguin
To add to my previous post regarding Google utilizing analytics and other social metrics in their new Penguin algo, I also believe that human raters may have palyed a part in this algo. Google has publicly stated that they do use teams of human reviewers or raters:
In this video they state that the data from human raters is not utilized to individually penalize or promote websites, but instead is used to improve the algorithms.
He does mention in passing that there are other teams of human raters, and he also mentions in passing that the other teams are the ones that address web spam. And since he mentions at the end that, as part of THIS initiative, websites are not devalued or promoted individually, it’s quite possible that he’s stating that because in the case of fighting web spam, raters can increase or devalue rankings.
Again, this makes sense because there are no consistencies amidst sites that lost rankings or sites that gained rankings. Manual intervention would explain the inconsistencies. Also, sites that are still ranking well with spam in their anchor and backlink data could be simply because they havne’t been reported and/or reviewed.
If this is the case, then it’s important to create backlink profiles that will pass human inspection.
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