Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors - Content, Links, and RankBrain - Raleigh SEO Meetup 2016

Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links &

RankBrainPatrick Stox & JR Oakes

Google uses over 200 ranking factors, some of which have

more than 50 variations.

Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes

Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain

In March of this year, Google identified 3 as the most

important.



Content | Links | RankBrain



Content



Content is more than words on a page.



Content



Relevance and Experience are important to Rank



Content



Content



Content

An experienceSomething that fulfills an intentSomething you need to trustSomething you won’t wait for

Content is. . .



Content

Useful and informativeMore valuable and useful than other sitesCredibleHigh-qualityEngaging

Make sure your Content is:



Content

Broken linksWrong informationGrammatical mistakes, Spelling mistakes, Reading

levelExcessive distractionsPage load speedWebsite featuresIntent (Know, Know Simple, Do, Device Action, Website, Visit-in-

person)Authority and Comprehensiveness

Content quality signals you control:



Content

Links

Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakesGoogle's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain

“We have run experiments like that internally, and the quality looks much, much worse. It turns out

backlinks, even though there’s some noise and certainly a lot of spam, for the most part, are still a

really, really big win in terms of quality of our search results. So we’ve played around with the idea of

turning off backlink relevance, and at least for now, backlink relevance still really helps in terms of

making sure that we return the best, most relevant, most topical set of search results.”

- Matt Cutts 2014

Can Links Be Done Without?



Links



Links



Links

Good links Bad Links



Links

Internal vs ExternalLocation mattersCitationsRedirectsAnchor text mattersRelevantAuthoritative

The Good



Links

Buying/selling linksLink networksReciprocal linksComment spamForum spamArticle directoriesPBNsGeneric directoriesPress releasesGuest postsSocial bookmarking

The Bad



Links

Create your own opportunities for links by opening up opportunities to

write for others.



Links

RankBrain



RankBrain does not affect crawling or crawl budgets (source)

RankBrain is part of the overall Hummingbird algorithm … Hummingbird also contains other parts with names familiar to those in the SEO space, such as Panda, Penguin and Payday designed to fight spam, Pigeon designed to improve local results, Top Heavy designed to demote ad-heavy pages, Mobile Friendly designed to reward mobile-friendly pages and Pirate designed to fight copyright infringement. (source)

RankBrain is one of the “hundreds” of signals that go into an algorithm that determines what results appear on a Google search page and where they are ranked (source)

What We Know



RankBrain

https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/710057616752377857

http://searchengineland.com/guide/what-is-seo

http://searchengineland.com/guide/what-is-seo

http://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-panda-update

http://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-penguin-update

http://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-payday-update

http://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-payday-update

http://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-pigeon-update

http://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-pigeon-update

http://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-top-heavy-update

http://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-top-heavy-update

http://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-mobile-friendly-update

http://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-mobile-friendly-update

http://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-pirate-update

http://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-pirate-update

http://searchengineland.com/faq-all-about-the-new-google-rankbrain-algorithm-234440


“It’s especially helpful on long-tail queries, such as the 15% never seen before each day.” (source)

RankBrain has become the third-most important signal contributing to the result of a search query (source)

While Google didn’t give groups of searches, the Bloomberg article did have a single example of a search where RankBrain is supposedly helping. Here it is: What’s the title of the consumer at the highest level of a food chain (source)

What We Know



RankBrain




One fresh example: “How many tablespoons in a cup?” Google said that RankBrain favored different results in Australia versus the United States for that query because the measurements in each country are different, despite the similar names. (source)

“Can you get a 100 percent score on Super Mario without a walk-through?” There is a negative term there that is very hard to catch with the regular systems that we had, and in fact our old query parsers actually ignored the “without” part. (source)

Gary Illyes used a water bottle to explain RankBrain. How do you know it’s water? Things like it’s clear, in a bottle, liquid, refreshing, it even says water.

What We Know



RankBrain


https://www.stonetemple.com/gary-illyes-virtual-keynote-the-transcript/

All learning that RankBrain does is offline, Google told us. It’s given batches of historical searches and learns to make predictions from these. (source)

Google reconfirmed to us that there is a component where RankBrain is directly contributing somehow to whether a page ranks. (source).

What We Know



RankBrain



● Click-through data has proven to be a critical resource for improving search ranking quality … in which the conditional probability of a click on a document x given position i is predicated on the marginal probability of the document x being relevant to the query and the marginal probabilities of documents at positions 1,...,i (source)

● Language Modeling, a task central to language understanding. We extend current models to deal with two key challenges present in this task: corpora and vocabulary sizes, and complex, long term structure of language. (source)

● Glove vectors / Word2vec / query and entity disambiguation important.

Important Concepts



RankBrain

http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/45286.pdf

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02410.pdf

● Google’s SEO Starter Guide (source)● Google Search Quality Rating Guidelines (source)● Google Webmaster Guidelines (source)● Moz Beginners Guide To SEO (source)

● Northcutt Google Ranking Factors (source)● Backlinko Google Ranking Factors (source)● Moz Search Engine Ranking Factors (source)

Resources



https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en/us/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//insidesearch/howsearchworks/assets/searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en&ref_topic=6002025

https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

https://northcutt.com/wr/google-ranking-factors/

http://backlinko.com/google-ranking-factors

https://moz.com/search-ranking-factors

The End



http://bit.ly/3-ranking-factorsSlides available above

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Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors - Content, Links, and RankBrain - Raleigh SEO Meetup 2016