This topic is covered in the latest installment of the Ask Googlebot series on YouTube.
In the video, Google’s John Mueller addresses the following question:
“What makes user feedback eligible enough for Google to decide to tweak its search ranking algorithm? Does Google consider that feedback in the future?”
Mueller responds by discussing how user feedback is handled internally, and explains the best ways to submit feedback to Google in the future.
Google On What it Does With User Feedback From Search Results
Google tries to prioritize issues reported by users in various ways.
Some things will need to be worked on as soon as possible, while others might need to wait until Google works on a specific part of its systems again.
Google organizes user submitted feedback based on what’s most urgent. Its team may go in and manually fix issues that need addressing immediately.
However, Mueller says it makes little sense to manually tweak search results when it comes to a majority of problems. For the most part, issues with search results are corrected algorithmically.
“The web is so gigantic, and ever-changing, and people ask us new questions every day. Because of that our goal is generally to improve the algorithms that pull together the search results over all 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.”
How to Send Feedback to Google
The most direct way to send Google feedback about the quality of its search results is to use the ‘send feedback’ link at the bottom of the search results. This feedback goes directly to a team at Google to be reviewed, organized, and prioritized.
Mueller also recommends the Google Search Central help forums, where there’s a community of search experts available for assistance. The experts in the help forums can escalate discussions to Google when needed.
If users come across something problematic, or objectionably incorrect, it can be worthwhile to forward that information to the public facing Google accounts on social media sites like Twitter.
When sending feedback about search, Mueller says it’s useful to know which query produced unsatisfactory results. Provide at least one common query that many people might use which highlights the issue as clearly as possible.
Regardless of the contact method, make it easy for Google to recognize the scale and the scope of the problem.
See the full video below:
