Raterhub

If you have a source of referral traffic from raterhub.com then be worried in April 2024.

In most cases, within 10-14 days after raterhub visits your website, the sites get hit big.

Raterhub is where Google employees visit your website to check the E-E-A-T scores. Raterhub.com is triggered when your domain starts to rank for big keywords and predominantly your website getsHIT by the next Google Core Update.

In our analysis, there are SEO case studies in 2024 that have seen domains see huge traffic increases but in 93% of our studies, a domain gets heavily penalised with sudden drops in Google SERP rankings.

In our 2024 raterhub guide, we analyse everything you need to know about the traffic source of raterhub.com.

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What Is RaterHub?

Raterhub is the software used by Google Quality Raters to give feedback to the algorithms.

No single vote from a Google Quality Rater can influence rankings, but usually, the tasks are sent out via RaterTracker to over 30 Google employees.

What Is RaterTracker?

RaterTracker captures the feedback which is sent back to RaterHub software.

Google employees can adjust their payrate in the RaterTracker software and tasks are assigned via a bidding process.

When approved as a Google Quality Rater you need to input appen gmail address and install an SSL certificate for capturing work.

As a Search Quality Rater, you will work on many different types of rating tasks using RaterTracker. This provides guidance on how to use certain features of the Evaluation Platform that you will encounter frequently in Page Quality (PQ) and Needs Met (NM) rating tasks.

The RaterTracker Evaluation Platform is the system used to acquire and rate tasks.

Why Has RaterHub Visited My Site?

Raterhub has visited your website because it has started to rank nicely for some high search volume keywords.

Google employees (aka Google Quality Raters) are checking the E-A-T of your domain.

Google’s Search Quality Raters Guidelines have been recently updated in April 2024 so get in touch if you want the latest updates on how a Google employee rates your domain.

Is EAT Actually a Thing?

E-A-T in SEO stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness.

Many search engine optimisation specialists question whether E-A-T is actually a thing in SEO.

From our data and research E-A-T is only part of Google’s Search Quality Raters Guidelines and is a huge part of when raterhub traffic source hits your site.

As Google employees hit your site via raterhub.com they are checking all aspects of Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness.

This might cause controversy but we do not see E-A-T within the algorithms and the Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness are only calculated from manual actions.

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How To Find If Raterhub Has Visited Your Website?

If your website has dropped suddenly in rankings and traffic organically there is a good chance in Google Analytics you will see the traffic source of raterhub.com.

Here is how to find out if raterhub has visited your website:

  1. Login to your Google Analytics account
  2. Click on “Acquisition” on left sidebar
  3. Click on “All Traffic”
  4. Click on “Referrals”
  5. Expand the Date Range to show the last 12 months data
  6. In the search bar input “raterhub”
  7. Results will show the number of visits from “raterhub” Google Quality Raters

There are other traffic sources of Google’s Search Quality Raters.

Google Search Quality Raters Referrals

The most common referral traffic sources for Google’s Search Quality Raters are:

  • Raterhub
  • Lionbridge
  • Appen (previously Leapforce)
  • Zerochaos
  • iSoftStone
  • RaterLabs
  • WorkforceLogiq

Generally speaking, if any of the referral traffic sources visits your website it has been triggered algorithmically to manual inspect your domain.

The inspections from Google’s Search Quality Raters are usually to confirm what the Google Algorithms have detected as spam.

What Website Owners Say After RaterHub Visited

Here are some statements we received after raterhub.com traffic source hit some websites:

  • Hundreds of keywords have gone from the top 3 to not even being found in the top 100 results after raterhub visited my site
  • Raterhub.com has hit my site in Google Analytics and exactly 10 days later my whole site rankings have dropped suddenly
  • My website has been hit with massive traffic drops after raterhub.com landed on my site
  • All my rankings on Google have dropped massively and I have seen raterhub.com source of traffic show in Google Analytics
  • If raterhub.com has visited my site and caused a Google penalty how can I recover

How To Recover From Raterhub Manual Action Penalties

Here are some ways to recover from post-raterhub manual action search algorithm penalties:

Technical SEO Audit

Carrying out a full technical audit to fix all errors is a great start to improving your crawl budget for Google.

The preferred site audit tool is screaming frog or JetOctopus to highlight all technical issues.

The main areas to fix from a technical audit:

  • Response Codes (fixing 404 and 301 errors)
  • Crawl Depth (all pages are within 3 clicks)
  • External Links (fix all external link status error codes)
  • Orphan Pages (all URLs should have unique incontent links)

Running a full technical audit checklist to fix is the foundation of a successful search engine optimisation campaign.

Content Pruning

To rank your website high in Google SERP you need to be an expert on the topic.

It is unusual for a company to be an expert on “technology”, “gardening”, “finance”, “fitness” and “pets”.

Yet most affiliate marketers are obsessed with trying to monetise every product on amazon.

With our successful content pruning case studies we have deleted articles and seen more traffic to the website.

WAIT! Deleting posts has caused an increase in rankings and traffic.

Stop being a jack of all trades and master of none.

Delete URLs on topics you have not passed the authority wall for OR go out and completely cover the topic in its entirety.

Build Topical Authority

For topics you 100% want to rank for you need to cover the topic in its entirety.

All our 2024 topical authority case studies show bypassing the authority wall with content depth on the topics semantically related is key to success.

A full comprehensive topical authority audit service will carry out keyword research and group keywords for the web pages your website needs to cover.

Our preferred topical authority DFY service is the ranking blueprint by Searcharoo which carry out content gaps and link gap analysis.

The Expertise in “E-A-T SEO” is all related to topical authority and how much of an expert are you on the given topic.

Monitor EAT Signals

The best tool to monitor and analyse how to improve your EAT signals is Page Optimizer Pro with EAT Analysis feature.

PageOptimizer Pro will crawl your website for certain E-A-T signals and then will crawl your competitor sites.

PageOptimizer.Prowill pull out the things that you have which are part of our E-A-T guidelines and things that your competitors have and you can see the things that you miss.

Improving your Expertise, Authority, and Trust is important when Google Quality Raters are looking at your domain via Raterhub referrer in analytics.

Final Thoughts

The majority of websites that have received a sitewide penaltyrecorded visits from raterhub.com.

Google have released statements to say “they don’t direct impact how our search results are ranked” but the evidence says otherwise.

The majority of sites do not get raterhub visiting their website until it is driving enough traffic to be worth checking.

Moving forward in April 2024 you need to pay close attention to E-A-T search engine optimisation and try to improve the trust and ownership of the brand.

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