Yesterday I got a hit from this URL: https://www.google.com/evaluation/search/rating/task-edit?task=6389736 to my site www.best-wallpapers.com . Today I found that my Google SERP is terribly damaged. For some keywords I was in the 2nd/3rd page of the results for the last 6 months, now I am in the 8th/9th page and for some keywords I am out of the results. My google traffic has become about one-fifth than the previous. So, how can anyone optimize his site for google evaluation? How can anyone prevent such disaster?
that link doesn’t work… what the heck is this evaluation?
Evaluation is Google’s human side; a bunch of people just go around, evaluating results, making sure things look the way they intuitively are supposed to.
I doubt there’s too much you can do to “optimize” for them, besides just making a good site. There would be nothing different than optimizing for them as you would for optimizing for your regular user.
You can’t optimize for this as it is a manual review, all you can do is make sure that your site is clean and useful to visitors with no dodgy tricks.
So, it seems to me: this ‘Evaluation’ is the most important factor in Google SERP, any site with good number of quality backlinks, anchor texts, good PR & good keywords may have poor SERP just because of evaluation.
Tried logging in with my regular google account.
Forbidden
The user ############ is not a member of EWOQ. Please contact the ratingprojects###@google.com for access.
I doubt it. I don’t think anyone knows what the formula’s like in that regard. But I doubt that Google would go to such a heavily-human side of their rankings. I’m sure they know the example of DMOZ.
A human review will generally be worth more than factors that can be easily gamed like the above.
If you have gotten good honest backlinks due to the quality of the information on your site and not just through link exchanges and the buying of links then you will have nothing to worry about.
The key is the unlikelihood of ever being evaluated, there are billions of webpages out there and a finite number of people evaluating them for google.
As far as the DMOZ comment goes, you can’t compare the two.
DMOZ are volunteers who specialize in a certain subject area. Thus you run into issues with people blocking sites that compete with theirs, the potential for bribes, etc…
Google sends their reviewers to random sites that are evaluated against their evaluation rules (there was a copy of the manual floating around a few months ago). The google reviewers have no financial interest in the industries that they are reviewing websites on and there is no way to bribe one because you can’t tell which one is going to review your website.
Is it possible to get access to the evaluation rules? It would be interesting to check if my pages would get good evaluation by google’s evaluation rules.
I was more alluding to the fact that humans are, well, objective. Placing everything in the hands of humans probably isn’t the best way to go, no matter how you do it. Yahoo was human-powered at one time too, remember. I think it’s a really good idea to use human evaluation, just in respectable doses (which is how I believe Google is using it- as a way to stop blatant spam while still retaining the majority of the weight of their algorithms).
I have two comments to add:
- I have seen people talking about this evaluation that it does not penalize a site, but suggests to change the algorithms in order to produce good results. But in my case, my site is seriously penalized. It is ranking very very poor for each & every keywords and not for only the index page, but for all pages. And, after viewing the SERP for those keywords I coudn’t find any visible change for other sites that might indicate any algo change.
- The aim of evaluation is to stop blatant spam, but my site wasn’t related with any kind of spam at all. I have done a lot of link exchanges, but only with relevant sites. And there are lots & lots of spammy sites, still there in good position.
Yes, I cannot compel Google to give me a good ranking. But I can try to do what can be done to have a good ranking in a decent way and avoid what should not be done. Then, what happens? One evaluation and all my efforts over the years are ruined.
my rank just went down from 5 to 4…what a tragedy 
How a human ranks your site through eval.google.com does not directly impact your ranking. It is merely a way for Google to test the effectiveness of various algorithms, and spam filters. See:
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2005/06/07/googleguy-dumps-google-leaks/
You may be seeing lower rankings because of the latest Google update:
This is absolutely the crux of the matter. Google want to provide useful results in the SERP or Google users won’t keeping using Google. So, quality is paramount to them and while their automated systems do a good job of identifying genuinely useful resources, that algo system can be fooled (or there wouldn’t be an SEO profession) so a manual evaluation is always going to be better.
I’m sure occasionally the baby might get thrown out with the bath water when a human thinks that your site doesn’t actually justify the SERP positions it holds but most of the time it works.
Question is, why did you site merit a manual review? Did someone make a complaint about it?
the evaluation rules were leaked awhile back. theres a pdf floating around-- check digital point forums, but i don’t think its that helpful
Dont make your site for Search Engine bots, Make your site for visitors. That would do the enough and you need not worry abt this Google evaluation at all when u structure your site for visitors.