OK, I think there are two kinds of "hand editing" people are referring to. I agree that sites can be removed from the search results (and even removed from the index itself) on the basis of human judgements. In other words, for sites that are clearly breaching the Google site guidelines, or sites with copyright or other legal issues - Google may manually remove them from the results or index. BUT - I don't see any evidence that the search ranking of a site or page has ever been tweaked manually. In other words, Google employees don't see a search result for www.somesite.com and think "this should be higher" and bump it up - that doesn't happen. The quality raters help create numerical data that different algorithms can be tested on, but that's a different story. The end result is that the search rankings are automatically determined. Howard
I agree they don't manually bump up or down certain sites because a reviewer may think its good or bad, they just use their knowledge to improve the algo. Manual reviewers are probably used to ensure sites only appear in results where they should be appearing, and for things like assigning adult filters etc.
There are people manipulating search results through blackhat methods . So there is no wonder why Google edits search results , and may be this for maintaining the quality ..
well i think those editors are not doing a very good job, if you will for a moment goto google and type : link:www.ink2u.co.uk now look how many links they have which are picked up by google and that have nothing todo with that subject. i mean they are not even proper websites, but they are now on top position for the keyword "ink cartridges" which is a very competitive. i have contacted google and have told them of this link scam a long time ago and google has done nothing, all that has happend is they have moved up the search engine to position 1. so google's rank team are s__t.
I don't really see anything so bad about their link profile? Plus google has better things to do then sift through hundreds of backlinks to see if someone is spamming or not. They also don't look at it because they have no proof that the person complaining isn't the one actually doing it and then reporting them to google try and get them in trouble. If people could do that, they would just start spamming their competitors and then they would move up as they eliminate their competition. They only look on ON PAGE stuff.
A whole host of things offsite, unnatural anchor manipulation, backlinks on same IP block, Link Growth, Whois data (Google is a registrar), backlink types and percentages such as sitewide, footer, blogroll, predominantly WP Themes etc. Google have a link graph of the whole internet, and the link profile of every site. They also have toolbar data, SERP click-thru and bounce rate data and the list goes on. Have a read of their search patents to get an idea of the "mechanics" behind it all, i recommend Bills SEO By The Sea. Believe me, i've lost track of the amount of sites nailed for off-site "issues" and they were 100% compliant on-site.