Human -> Machine -> Human: Ruth Burr Reedy MozCon 2019

Let’s Talk About...
Discourse in the SEO fandom is really heating up, along two notable axes:

@ruthburr #MozConShould SEOs be “chasing the algorithm”? In other words, when Google updates one of its many, many algorithms, is it a good use of our time to
try to figure out what’s changed?

@ruthburr #MozConAnd, more recently (and arguably more heatedly): are Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines worth paying attention to? Or are they a bunch of smoke
and mirrors on Google’s part?

@ruthburr #MozConI don’t find this conversation very interesting TBH! But I get it – SEOs are busy, and it’s really frustrating to see advice being put out there that
you know isn’t going to help people do SEO. It hurts to watch busy people waste their time. I think what both these conversations are missing is
where these activities might fit in to a larger framework or approach to SEO. How do we know where to spend our time?

Real Company Stuff
Wil Reynolds
@ruthburr #MozCon
https://www.slideshare.net/wilreynolds/do-real-company-stuff-mozcon-2012-version
People in the “that stuff is a waste of time” camp often point to Real Company Stuff – the idea that, as SEOs, we should be focusing more on
doing great marketing at a big-picture level and less on things like making tweaks to title tags and anchor text. I don’t disagree with any of that…

WHEN THE $50M AD CAMPAIGN
POINTS TO A MICROSITE
@ruthburr #MozCon…but it’s entirely possible to do these things in a way that does not create SEO success, which is a wasted opportunity. RCS is not an excuse not
to learn SEO fundamentals or technical SEO.

@ruthburr #MozConIf we focus solely on Google, we lose sight of our actual customer. But if we ignore Google to focus solely on the customer, we’re missing out
on opportunities to connect with that customer online. It’s both! It has to be both.

@ruthburr #MozCon
Icons made by Freepik from Flaticon
My personal framework for approaching changes in our industry is: we are humans, creating things for humans, with a machine serving as the
intermediary between the two.

@ruthburr #MozConHow do you “just create good content”? You figure out what information people need to complete their task and provide it. Where do you get
that information? User testing is useful, but expensive – and you don’t always have access to your clients’ users.

@ruthburr #MozCon
Source: Sparktoro.com
Thanks to their giant, scary, problematic market share, Google has more data than anyone on how people use search engines to find
information.

@ruthburr #MozCon
Source: Learning Semantic Textual Similarity from Conversations
They also have more data than anyone on how people talk about things (entities, topics, and the connections between them) using written
language.

@ruthburr #MozConParamount Pictures 1993
Google wants humans to find what they’re looking for when they search, which means Google spends a lot of time and money on helping their
machine try to understand what people are looking for when they search.

@ruthburr #MozConWhat do we mean when we say “Google”? Google is a COMPANY – humans making and communicating decisions about (among other things)
search

@ruthburr #MozCon
Source: Multi-stage query processing system and method for use with tokenspace repository
And Google is also the ALGORITHM – or, more accurately, a whole bunch of algorithms running consecutively and concurrently. At its very, very,
simplest, an algorithm takes inputs (information), processes them, and then returns some sort of output.

INPUTS OUTPUT
Link volume
Crawlability
Keyword use
Metadata
As SEOs, we tend to focus on optimizing algorithmic inputs – because that’s what we can control. For success, we tend to focus on the output,
i.e. the SERP. Hence the constant SEO chatter over whether or not something is a “ranking factor.”

@ruthburr #MozConBut Google is focused on results - do people find what they want? The SERP is only a means to that end. We should be looking at Google’s
outputs not as an end in and of themselves, but as information of how to achieve those results.

@ruthburr #MozCon
One way to understand Google is to leverage Google’s huge body of user data to understand the human-readable quality signals that Google (as
both a company and an algorithm) have deduced are important, and then to create that quality, while optimizing machine-readable equivalents
or proxies of those signals.

@ruthburr #MozCon
How can I demonstrate
quality in ways that are both
human-readable and
machine-readable?

Humans
and
Robots
Don’t think the
same way
@ruthburr #MozCon

What is
this page
about?
@ruthburr #MozCon

Topic
modeling
TF-IDF
Keyword use
Synonyms,
stems, close
variants
@ruthburr #MozCon

On-Page SEO for 2019
Britney Muller
@ruthburr #MozConhttps://moz.com/blog/on-page-seo-2019

Is this a
good page
about this
topic?
@ruthburr #MozCon

Related topics/
supplemental
content
Natural Language
Processing
Links
@ruthburr #MozCon

@ruthburr #MozConhttps://twitter.com/dannysullivan/status/1044276
380098158593

“Fits your industry and business processes
Deploy a solution that delivers built-in best
practices specific to your industry, the most
flexible customer data model on the market
today, and a highly configurable, tightly
integrated platform, ensuring that solutions
will be fast to implement.”
@ruthburr #MozCon
Keyword: customer
relationship
management
Rank: 19
Understanding how well Google’s NLP AI can understand your content gives you insight into whether or not that content is sending strong
“good page on this topic” signals. This is great because humans are actually terrible at creating readable content that’s clearly about what they
think it’s about.

@ruthburr #MozCon
Clear
Concise
Accurate
To-the-point
Avoids jargon
Covers subtopics
Fortunately, optimizing for machine-readability has a lot in common with optimizing for human-readability.

https://cloud.google.com/natural-language/ @ruthburr #MozCon

@ruthburr #MozCon
Google’s NLP API extracts entities and assigns them a “salience score” between 0 and 1 based on how relevant to the piece of content as a
whole they’ve determined each entity is. In the example above, you can see that the NLP API has successfully found “customer relationship
management” to be the entity of the page, but without much confidence. Probably part of why this page ranks on page 2.

On-Page SEO for NLP
Justin Briggs
@ruthburr #MozConhttps://www.briggsby.com/on-page-seo-for-nlp

Can this
site be
trusted?
@ruthburr #MozCon

Ownership signals
HTTPS
Topic and author
authority
Positive link
signals
@ruthburr #MozCon

@ruthburr #MozCon
> <
>
Icons made by Freepik from Flaticon
Link valuation is an example of a machine-readable equivalent of a human information-gathering experience. How would a human decide
whether or not someone was credible, using social signals? Lots of people saying it is better than just one person; if all those people are related,
we trust that less than if unrelated strangers all say the same thing; and an expert’s opinion carries more weight than some rando’s.

All Links are Not Created Equal
Cyrus Shepard
@ruthburr #MozConhttps://moz.com/blog/20-illustrations-on-search-
engines-valuation-of-links

Is this site
pleasant
to use?
@ruthburr #MozCon

Page speed
Crawlability
Information
architecture
Engagement
metrics
@ruthburr #MozCon

@ruthburr #MozConWhat’s interesting with Lighthouse is that we can see Google trying to evolve its understanding of page load time to more closely mimic the way
a human would experience it - this is why metrics like time to interactive have become important alongside total page load time. The machine-
readable and human-readable signals are the same.

How to Run Lighthouse Reports
at Scale
James McNulty
@ruthburr #MozConhttps://www.upbuild.io/blog/lighthouse-reports-
multiple-pages/

Quality
Rater
Guidelines
For humans, by
humans
@ruthburr #MozConThe QR Guidelines were written by humans, for humans. They do not give insight into the algorithm(s), but they DO give insight into the quality
signals Google is intending to send, and are useful through that lens

@ruthburr #MozCon
Source: How to Build Your Own Search Ranking Algorithm with Machine Learning
Feedback from Quality Raters is likely used in two ways: to beta test changes in the algorithm and verify that returned results are relevant, and
to create a data set of High Quality, Needs Met pages that Google use as a training set for machine learning.

@ruthburr #MozCon
“[The guidelines] don’t tell you how the
algorithm is ranking results, but they…
show what the algorithm should do. ”
Ben Gomes
Google VP of Search Engineering
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/17/google-tests-
changes-to-its-search-algorithm-how-search-
works.html

@ruthburr #MozConThe big topic coming out of the QR Guidelines lately is E-A-T. SEOs are spending a lot of time arguing about whether or not E-A-T is useful or
important for SEO.

@ruthburr #MozCon
Is E-A-T a ranking factor?
No.

@ruthburr #MozCon
How expert
is this
content?
7!
E-A-T isn’t a ranking factor for the same reason “brand” isn’t a ranking factor – because things like “expertise” aren’t a single, quantifiable
quality that an entity does or doesn’t have. They’re made up of dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of discrete smaller signals.

@ruthburr #MozCon
Is E-A-T a ranking factor?
No. I don’t care.

@ruthburr #MozCon
You don’t know
what you’re
talking about!
I don’t care if E-A-T is a “ranking factor” or not because that’s not how that information is intended to be used. E-A-T is something humans at
Google have said to other humans. E-A-T and its attendent signals are human-readable ways of thinking about the question, “How do we tell if
someone knows what they’re talking about?”

@ruthburr #MozConMarie Haynes is going to talk more about optimizing specifically for E-A-T later in the conference, so I’m not going to go into it here, but what I’m
interested in when I read about E-A-T is:

@ruthburr #MozCon
Which of these signals is
machine-readable?

@ruthburr #MozCon
“High E-A-T medical advice should be
written or produced by people or
organizations with appropriate medical
expertise or accreditation…”
I know how I would go about figuring out if someone had appropriate medical expertise – where might a machine look for that same
information online? This is an area in which actually shelling out for real experts to create your expert content pays off; the difference is clear in
the content itself but also in the expertise signals that you can build online.

@ruthburr #MozCon
“..[and] written or produced in a
professional style and should be
edited, reviewed, and updated on a
regular basis.”
These signals are easy, Google can find all of that on page. Great! We can optimize for that.

@ruthburr #MozCon
How might a machine find
the same information in
another way?

@ruthburr #MozCon
Which of these signals can
we boost? What can we make
easier for a machine to find
and read?

2.6.4 How to Search for
Reputation Information
@ruthburr #MozConDid you know the QR Guidelines contain step-by-step instructions for conducting a link reputation audit? And all of these considerations are
things a machine can do as well. They might not go about it the same way a human would, but that’s fine, because I’m a human, and this is a
great way for me to look for ways to boost reputation signals.

@ruthburr #MozCon
Which of these signals is
easiest to game or fake, and
therefore less valuable?

@ruthburr #MozConPeople are constantly trying to “game the system” - the challenge for search engines is to create a sophisticated enough set of machine-
readable inputs that will separate the wheat from the chaff

@ruthburr #MozConThe easier a signal is to game, the less value it’s likely to pass on its own. It’s likely that certain signals like anchor text are only valuable in
context with other strong quality signals.

@ruthburr #MozConCarolco Pictures 1991So take another look through the QR guidelines and ask yourself: how would a machine look for these same signals?

@ruthburr #MozCon
https://twitter.com/jenstar
If you follow one person on the topic of QR Guidelines, make it Jennifer Slegg. She posts a detailed walkthrough every time an update is made.

Algorithm
Updates
For humans,
using
machines
@ruthburr #MozCon

@ruthburr #MozCon 61
@ruthburr #MozConCarolco Pictures 1991What does it mean to ”chase the algorithm”? If you chase it too much, it’s going to end up chasing you.

@ruthburr #MozCon
Keywords in title
tags are now
0.82% more
important!
Scrutiny of algorithm updates tends to over-focus on optimizing for inputs. If you do that, you’re focusing on the wrong information. But that
doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to be learned from algo updates.

@ruthburr #MozCon@ruthburr #MozConYou shouldn’t be solely reactive to algorithmic changes, but when they happen, it’s worth trying to understand what Google’s going for.

@ruthburr #MozCon
What can this tell me about
changes in my target market?

@ruthburr #MozConCarolco Pictures 1991 With that in mind, here’s what I look at in the wake of an update:

@ruthburr #MozCon
https://moz.com/blog/how-often-does-google-update-its-algorithm
First of all, Google updates multiple times per day. You may not even notice most of the changes – but if a change drastically impacts your site,
it doesn’t really matter if the rest of the index is affected. Information on updates is mostly useful at scale, and within your niche.

@ruthburr #MozConFirst question: how did this impact the sites I work on?

@ruthburr #MozCon
Page-Specific or Sitewide?
Is traffic impacted sitewide? If so, it’s likely that Google has devalued something you were benefitting from. If it’s specific pages, you’re
probably not being “penalized.”

@ruthburr #MozCon
Source: https://blog.searchmetrics.com/us/google-june-2019-core-update/
Most of the time it’s not that you lost rankings - it’s that someone else gained them. What does the SERP say? Note that it is not always
possible to regain rankings or traffic for a keyword you’ve lost.

@ruthburr #MozConSometimes it’s that the kind of page, or kind of information, that Google has determined users are looking for has changed.

@ruthburr #MozCon
“Sometimes what users expect evolves
and...the way that we try to determine
relevance, they evolve as well.”
GWC Hangout: June 14, 2019
John Mueller
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0qLJRivdmY

@ruthburr #MozConUnderstanding not the what, but the why of a given algorithmic pattern or change can give you insight into how your target audiences are using
search to make decisions.

@ruthburr #MozCon
What do these changes say
about what my customers
are looking for?

@ruthburr #MozCon
How can I provide these
things for my users in ways
that Google can see and
understand?

There’s a Better Way to Classify
Search Intent
Kane Jamison
@ruthburr #MozConhttps://www.contentharmony.com/blog/classifyin
g-search-intent/

How to Scrape Google SERPs to
Optimize for Search Intent
Rory Truesdale
@ruthburr #MozConhttps://www.searchenginejournal.com/scrape-
google-serp-custom-extractions/267211/

@ruthburr #MozConCarolco Pictures 1991
When an algorithm is focused on improving Google's results quality in a certain respect or fixing an existing flaw, it's almost certainly not the
last time they'll try to improve there. An algo update around content quality probably means they're going to continue iterating on that – look at
what happened with Panda.

@ruthburr #MozCon
Source: https://blog.searchmetrics.com/us/google-core-algorithm-update-march-2019/
Even health sites that weren’t hit by the March update should have taken it as a wake-up call to start ramping up quality signals. Don’t ever
assume that changes in your niche are over.

@ruthburr #MozCon
Does Google look at [X thing]
as a ranking factor when
evaluating pages?
If it’s a machine-readable proxy to a human-readable quality signal, they’ve probably at least tried it. If it’s easy to game, they may have devalued
it or still be working on how to make it less gameable. Optimizing for human-readable quality and then making it machine-readable means you
can care less about “ranking factors” – worst case scenario, you’ve still improved things for humans.

@ruthburr #MozConOptimizing just for the algorithm is too reactive – optimizing just for humans is too inefficient. It has to be both.

Homework
Yes, I know it’s
only Day 1
@ruthburr #MozCon

@ruthburr #MozCon
Re-read the Quality Rater
Guidelines with machine-
readable quality signals in
mind

@ruthburr #MozCon
Consider: What is your site
currently benefiting from that
Google is likely to be trying to
discount or filter out?

@ruthburr #MozCon
Write clearer, simpler, (better)
more machine-readable
content

@ruthburr #MozCon
Improve topic salience using
Google’s NLP API

@ruthburr #MozCon
Examine SERPs to better
understand (and meet) intent

@ruthburr #MozCon
Create expert content and
promote your experts online

@ruthburr #MozCon
Conduct a reputation audit

@ruthburr #MozCon
Stop fighting about this stuff,
it’s boring

Human -> Machine -> Human: Ruth Burr Reedy MozCon 2019

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