I have covered Google saying that its quality raters, which are third-party consultants who are not even employed by Google directly, do not have any direct influence in Google search rankings. I reported Googlers saying this countless times and I didn’t report Googlers saying it as well because I covered it countless times.

Here are some, not all, of my stories on this topic from the past:

Google Search Quality Raters Don’t Directly Impact Rankings
Google: Quality Raters Help Us Understand If Our Signals Produce Good Results
Google: Quality Raters Guidelines Are Not One-To-One With The Ranking Algorithm

Heck, Jennifer Slegg and I even discussed it in the vlog and she is an expert on the quality raters. Oh, and by the way, Bing has the same deal.

In any event, Danny Sullivan wrote a detailed blog post on the Google blog about this again. And even when he wrote it, people still asked about how these raters influence the search results.

Google wrote:

Then you have people read this and go off on how Google uses raters, manual humans, to adjust rankings. But Google said no, it does not.

I am kind of tired of reporting on it…

Forum discussion at Twitter.