Manual website evaluation by G

Today I received an interesting hit to one of my very well ranking websites with this referer information:https://www.google.com/evaluation/search/rating/task-edit?task=xxxxxxxx
where x is a digit. They only visited the homepage (which ranks for a very competetive phrase usually in 1-2 spot in serps). Other info:
IP: UNITED KINGDOM: 212.219.200.254
Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)

Anybody have any idea whats this?is google manually reviewing sites that rank well for competetive keywords and adjust them with human intervention?

 

Yep, you was investigated

 

I remember they visited once quite a while back.It was from Mountain View, California.

 

This is probably work done by Google's quality evaluation team. As I understand it, they employ a team of people with specialist knowledge in well-defined areas to review websites and give subjective scorings of how relevant a site is to a given query. These subjective scores are not used to make manual edits to the rankings - rather, they are used to build up a database of sites with carefully judged relevance scores for specific queries. This can be used by Google to evaluate possible improvements to their algorithm.

Think about it - if G want to test 10 possible changes to the algorithm, how do they judge if any of the changes actually give better results overall? By doing automated scoring of all the results against a known database. This gives them scores for any alogorithm change in a completely automatic way, allowing them to see if improvements have been made or not. They need human input for the known database, so this is probably what the above visit was about.

Howard

 

i heard that google is employing university students at 10$/hr for manually evaluating your site

 

That would be a good idea (bad news for black hat SEOers), good for use searchers!

P.S: the link doesn't work for me

Forbidden

The user -------------- is not a member of EWOQ. Please ask your EWOQ contact for access.

 

Might also have been someone, perhaps a competitor, reported your site for spamming (regardless of whether or not you were), and someone was investigating.

Whatever it is, it's new. Only one other reference about it out there that I can find, and it was also from this month:

http://www.abakus-internet-marketing.de/foren/viewtopic/t-39080.html

I don't read German, but looks like he's talking about the same thing you are.

Edit: NM, found out more at SEORoundtable:

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/006791.html

-Michael

 

Wow, this could be the sign of some big changes to how sites rank. Interesting.