Google EWOK
EWOK is a Google platform used to evaluate the quality of websites. Created several years ago, the recent leak suggests that the data and scores generated by EWOK quality evaluators are used in Google's search systems.
While it is unclear how influential these rater-based signals are and what they are specifically used for, it has been shown that some elements evaluated by EWOK are directly integrated into the search system. This means that human evaluations of website quality could directly influence search results, rather than just being used as training data for experiments.
According to the anonymous source who shared the leak, Google classifies its link indexes into three categories : low, medium, and high quality. Click data determines which category a document falls into. As Fishkin explains:
If a page on Forbes.com/Cats/ does not receive armenia number data clicks, it is ranked in the low quality index and its link is ignored.
If a page on Forbes.com/Dogs/ has a high verified click volume (based on Chrome data), it ranks in the high-quality index and the link transmits ranking signals.
Once a link is considered “trustworthy” because it belongs to the high-quality index, it can transmit PageRank but also be filtered out by link spam detection systems. Links from the low-quality index do not harm a site’s ranking; they are simply ignored.
Site authority
King argues that Google claims not to use “domain authority” to avoid confusion, but this doesn’t mean they don’t measure a site’s authority. This ambiguity allows them to dodge the question of whether they calculate or use general authority metrics.
Google’s Gary Ilyes and John Mueller, two of its top spokespeople, have reiterated that they do not have an authority score for websites. However, leaked documents reveal that Google does have a metric called “siteAuthority” that is used in the Q* ranking system. While it is not known exactly how it is calculated or used, it is now clear that Google does measure the overall authority of domains.