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

Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors:
Content, Links & RankBrain
Patrick Stox & JR Oakes

Google uses over 200 ranking
factors, some of which have more
than 50 variations.
Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakesGoogle'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

An experience
Something that fulfills an intent
Something you need to trust
Something you won’t wait for
Content is. . .
Content

Useful and informative
More valuable and useful than other sites
Credible
High-quality
Engaging
Make sure your Content is:
Content

Broken links
Wrong information
Grammatical mistakes, Spelling mistakes, Reading level
Excessive distractions
Page load speed
Website features
Intent (Know, Know Simple, Do, Device Action, Website, Visit-in-person)
Authority and Comprehensiveness
Content quality signals you control:
Content

Links

“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

Good links Bad Links
Links

Internal vs External
Location matters
Citations
Redirects
Anchor text matters
Relevant
Authoritative
The Good
Links

Buying/selling links
Link networks
Reciprocal links
Comment spam
Forum spam
Article directories
PBNs
Generic directories
Press releases
Guest posts
Social 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

“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

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

● 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

The End
http://bit.ly/3-ranking-factors
Slides available above

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

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