Last month, Google’s latest quality rater handbook leaked on this excellent post about how Google makes algorithm changes and hand check their results pages. The handbook contains useful information about how Google rates the quality of a website. Is your website good enough for Google’s requirements?

The summary of the handbook below was copied from an email sent out by Axandra.com

What is the quality rater handbook?

Google employs so-called quality raters. These are the people who manually check Google’s search results to make sure that the ranking algorithm is working as expected.

A quality rater visits the sites that Google returns for a query and then evaluates the results based on relevance. If a website does not fit in the search results, Google’s quality raters can mark a website as spam.

The quality rater handbook contains the guidelines that quality raters use to evaluate web pages. Although Google quickly removed the link to the handbook after it leaked, we could take a look at it.

Here are the most important takeaways from the quality rater handbook:

1. Google uses several levels of “relevance”

Google instructs search quality raters to rate the relevance of a website as “vital”, “useful”, “relevant”, “slightly relevant” and “off topic”.

In

Read more about this here…

We have evidence that not only is Google indexing close captioning on YouTube videos,  but it also increases your search rankings for pages on your site that host the closed captioned videos.

Read more about this here…

From NPR

From local plumbers to luxury hotels, just about everyone selling a service these days has an online reputation. Increasingly, that reputation is shaped by online reviews. Customer ratings on sites such as Yelp and Urbanspoon can, for example, make or break a new restaurant.

It’s no wonder, then, that some businesses are trying to fake us out. On Craigslist and online forums, posters are offering to buy and sell gushing reviews for just a few bucks; potential customers aren’t able to tell the difference.

To help sort the genuinely delighted customers from profit-driven praise, Cornell University researcher Jeff Hancock and his colleagues have developed software that successfully unmasks fake online hotel reviews.

Hancock tells Laura Sullivan, guest host of weekends on All Things Considered, that too many bogus ratings could undermine the system.

“It gets at the very basic idea of what these reviews are about: trust,” Hancock says.

The researchers started by “training” their computer algorithm on both fake reviews written for the study and real online reviews. Their software then went head-to-head against real humans and summarily defeated them: The computer was 90 percent accurate while the humans were correct three out of five times at best.

It turns out

Read more about this here…

Advertisers often wonder whether search ads cannibalize their organic traffic. In other words, if search ads were paused, would clicks on organic results increase, and make up for the loss in paid traffic? Google statisticians recently ran over 400 studies on paused accounts to answer this question.

In what we call “Search Ads Pause Studies”, our group of researchers observed organic click volume in the absence of search ads. Then they built a statistical model to predict the click volume for given levels of ad spend using spend and organic impression volume as predictors. These models generated estimates for the incremental clicks attributable to search ads (IAC), or in other words, the percentage of paid clicks that are not made up for by organic clicks when search ads are paused.

The results were surprising. On average, the incremental ad clicks percentage across verticals is 89%. This means that a full 89% of the traffic generated by search ads is not replaced by organic clicks when ads are paused. This number was consistently high across verticals. The full study can be found on here.

Read more about this here…

When publishing reviews, what your clients say may be less important than how they say it.

Some recent research published NYU Stern Business School professor Panos Ipirotis has found that demand for a product increases if its reviews are well-written and without any spelling or grammatical typos. What’s remarkable is that this holds true regardless of whether the reviews are positive or negative.

Online retailer Zappos.com has been taking advantage of the findings to clean up their product reviews, dramatically increasing each review’s value to the company without altering the reviewer’s content or intention.

If you’re publishing client reviews on your own site, or collecting rating and reposting them on sites like Google Local or Bing, be sure to read through them first with a copywriter’s eye and correct for spelling and basic grammar. And if you’ve been soliciting past clients to review your business on sites like Yelp, star with your best spoken customer, and not necessarily your biggest fan.

Sources & Further reading:

• Original blog post: http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2011/04/want-to-improve-sales-fix-grammar-and.html
• More information on how Zappos used Mechanical Turk to correct over a million reviews: http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2011/04/want-to-improve-sales-fix-grammar-and.html
• More analysis: http://www.slate.com/id/2293544/

Read more about this here…