This look like a guideline for reviewers working for Google to manually fine tune page rank. I guessed and heard of such reviewing team of Google. Likely it really exists, if so, I really appreciate Google's efforts on this.

PL
My URL is now fully archived including images and javascript. Thanks for the post and a big hat tip to http://vizualbod.com/

Philip,
The "Rater Hub" is invalid. Its got an extra l on the end. Removing it makes the link work.

I don't think it's "manually fine tune page rank", but rather the weighting of the various factors used to determined the overall ranking of pages.

I think people get confused between:

A) This result is #3, but maybe it should be #6

B) This is spam, throw it out

C) Let's weight factor X at 0.456 rather than 0.123

Google doesn't do A, but they do B and C

Hi,
I am Frank from vizualbod.com. I can't believe you found my files?

I store there only files I want to read on my IPhone. It wasn't linked anywhere as far as I know.

Sorry guys I had to remove it as it is copyrighted google document (and proprietary and confidentail, authentic and so on.)

Who got the copy? Well, you were lucky :)

Thanks Kirby, URL spelling error fixed now!

Edit: I removed the link to VizualBod now that the page is gone.

Frank

I found it using Google and I've archived it giving vizualbod.com credit and until it was removed a link to the original. I added "Google" to make it easier to find via search and removed someone's name to protect their identity. The word Google was not in the document until I added it. That said, I didn't create the document.

If this is an original Google document and is in fact still proprietary confidential and/or copyrighted please feel free to contact me directly and I'll be happy to remove it.

having worked as a rater before, I can say that you had to sign an NDA saying you wouldn't share these documents.

So putting it out there is technically asking for trouble.

From all of my experience, it has nothing to do with fine tuning pagerank – and although Google didn't tell us what exactly the purpose was, my guess is that it's comparing algorithms and checking spam. Or, it could simply be to get a database of hand rated websites to test future algorithms on.

That is, if a user ranks something as vital, and something else as spam.. the future algorithm when run against those sites, should show the vital result near the top and not show the spam result.

of course, this is all speculation.

Exactly Ryan, it's likely to compare algorithms and then fine-tune them or find out which ones are worth proceeding with. Well, PageRank is affected (at least theoretically, dunno if in practice) in so far as PageRank too is based on algorithms. But Seth's explanation illustrates the tuning is likely more indirect than "push current #3 result to #6 as it's not so great", because that wouldn't be scalable. (Not to say that Google never looks at single incidents when reflecting on their algo tunings, I bet they do. And as we know, in the case of spam they also sometimes manually kick this or that specific site from the results.)

Is not fair you removed a link to my site entirely. It's not everyday I'll get a link form 80% Google :)

(Frantisek, I added you to the credits just now...)

Here's a link to the full PDF: http://www.mauriziopetrone.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/quality-rater-guidelines-2007.pdf
[ via http://www.seobook.com/full-text-googles-general-guidelines-remote-quality-raters-april-2007]

Poor Frank. The document had become a fish gone to the sea. A good lesson not to loose the net (security practice net).

Anyway, those raters are trainer for the intelligence bots of page rank or spam filter.

It's like s3x photos, once on the net... it'll spread like wild fire!

I hope no one gets in any trouble from Google... And most likley this information would have fallen into the wrong hands...SPmers most likely!

But still a great read! I'm glad someone found it...=)