One SEO professional asked John Mueller about user feedback. Their main question was: what makes user feedback eligible enough that Google decides to tweak its ranking algorithm based on that feedback?
John explained: taking a step back, every website that cares about their users in the long term should watch out for feedback and work to improve over time.
Your users can help you to spot issues early on, and they can also guide you to new opportunities.
And if you’ve been treating them correctly, they often have an interest in helping your site to improve. You want to listen to feedback and work to improve over time.
When it comes to a broadly-used service such as Google search, John said they get a lot of feedback.
Sometimes, it’s tricky to prioritize this feedback.
Like any larger system, there will always be things to improve and change.
It’s more a matter of finding the critical areas for improvement and focusing on them.
The most direct way to give Google feedback in search is to use the feedback link on the bottom of the search results.
This feedback goes directly to a team at Google to be reviewed, organized and prioritized. There’s also a help community for Google search if you would like to bring up issues for the experts there to double-check .
While sometimes the solution can be to search slightly differently, it is still useful for Google to hear about what things that the user initially tried.
After all, search should be able to help users even when they don’t know all of the ins and outs of search.
Experts in the help forum can also escalate discussions to Google when it is necessary.
You can watch the entire video here:
John Mueller AskGooglebot Transcript
John 0:03
Today Praveen is asking what makes user feedback eligible enough that Google decides to tweak its search ranking algorithm. Taking a step back, every website that cares about their users in the long term, should watch out for feedback and work to improve over time. Your users can help you to spot issues early on, they can guide you to new opportunities.
And if you’ve been treating them right, they often have an interest in helping your site to improve. Listen to feedback, and work to improve over time. When it comes to a broadly-used service like Google search, we get a lot of feedback. And it’s sometimes tricky to prioritize that. Like any larger system, there will always be things to improve and to change, it’s more a matter of finding the critical areas for improvement and focusing on them.
The most direct way to give us feedback in search is to use the feedback link on the bottom of the search results. This feedback goes directly to a team at Google to be reviewed, organized and prioritized. There’s also a help community for Google search if you’d like to bring up issues for the experts there to double-check. While sometimes the solution can be to search slightly differently, it’s still useful for us to hear about what you initially tried.
After all, search should be able to help users even when they don’t know all of the ins and outs of search. Experts in the Help Forums can also escalate discussions to Google when needed. If there’s something that’s very problematic, perhaps objectively incorrect, misleading, offensive or otherwise wholly inappropriate.
It can also be worthwhile to forward that to the public facing Google accounts on social media like Twitter. Let us know so that we can work to improve as quickly as possible. Regardless of the contact method, make it easy for us to recognize the scale and the scope of the problem that you’ve run into. Give us at least one common query that you suspect many users might use and that highlights the issue as clearly as possible.
As I mentioned before, we do try to prioritize issues reported to us in various ways. Some things will need to be worked on as soon as possible. Others might need to wait until we work on a specific part of our systems again. In practice, it makes little sense to manually tweak the search results. The web is so gigantic and ever changing, and users ask us new questions every day. Because of that, our goal is generally to improve the algorithms that pull together the search results overall, and not to tweak things for individual queries.
This may take a bit of time, but it makes search better for everyone worldwide for the large number of searches that are done every day. So in short, we appreciate all of the feedback that we can get for search. Your feedback helps us to continue to make search better. So please keep that feedback coming. And that’s it for this time.
I hope you found this useful and insightful. See you in one of the next episodes of AskGooglebot and don’t forget to subscribe to see them all.
