25 relevance ranking factors to assess relevance<\/strong>.<\/p>\nRelevance factors are different for each keyword, so Tober says they can’t provide a table of all the relevance factors.<\/p>\n
For example, 9 out of 10 ecommerce websites have a keyword “add to cart” function above the fold. Rank #9 does not. However, it has the highest relevance score of the top 30 and that’s why it ranks.<\/p>\n
Another example: If you search for “best bluetooth headphones” then you’ll see:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
See how many internal links for each result and compare their relevance scores.<\/p>\n
And another example, for the keyword “natural detox” you’ll see the word count comparison for two results, with the higher ranking result having fewer words, fewer internal links and fewer interactive elements.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Content with a high relevance score matches user intention, is\u00a0logically\u00a0structured and\u00a0comprehensive, offers\u00a0a good\u00a0user experience, and deals with topics holistically.<\/strong> Holistic means that other topics related to the topic are covered on this page.<\/p>\nKey Findings<\/strong><\/p>\n\n- Top ranking factors are different depending on keyword set.<\/li>\n
- Relevance ranking factors dominate results across all keyword sets.<\/li>\n
- All previous examples can be explained by having a higher relevance score.<\/li>\n
- This score overpowered other ranking factors, meaning that these pages ranked highly.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Outlook for SEO<\/strong><\/p>\n\n- SEO is as important as ever, but it’s changing.<\/li>\n
- RankBrain is not used on all queries. For example, short\/popular queries with well-known results aren’t filtered by RankBrain if your content matches user\/query intent.<\/li>\n
- Relevance is crucial for good rankings, because RankBrain can detect how relevant your content is.<\/li>\n
- Make sure your content matches user\/query intent.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
When Google already knows the best results, RankBrain is not used. He believes RankBrain is filtering long-tail queries. Relevance is crucial for good rankings and RankBrain can detect how relevant our content is.<\/p>\n
The Future of Search<\/strong><\/p>\nTober says we’re in for an abundance of redundancy. He explains that machine learning and Searchmetrics share this philosophy, which he says applies for content creation, too: <\/p>\n
\n- Incremental improvements through powerful data insights<\/li>\n
- Using machine and deep learning to make sense of complex data<\/li>\n
- A data-driven approach is necessary to make sense of all the redundancy online<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Eric Enge: What Is RankBrain and How Does it Work<\/h2>\n
Eric had brain surgery in 2003. Does that make him a RankBrain expert? No, but his company Stone Temple Consulting did a study of Google results\u00a0before and after RankBrain to see\u00a0what’s changed.<\/p>\n
Notable quote from the Bloomberg article announcement:<\/p>\n
“RankBrain interprets language, interprets your queries, in a way that has some of the gut feeling and guessability of people.”<\/em><\/p>\nGoogle is trying to understand the true meaning of queries and do a better job of providing results that are relevant.<\/p>\n
Some basic language analysis concepts figure in here. Take, for example, stop words<\/strong>. Google has traditionally stripped stop words out of a query or indexed page to simplify the language analysis.<\/p>\nBut there are places where this practice doesn’t work. Take the query “the office”<\/em> as an example. Someone wants the TV show, but Google may give results for your office. A more sophisticated language analysis might look for those two words capitalized in the middle of a sentence as a cue that this is a specific kind of “the office.”<\/p>\nAnother example is “coach,”<\/em> which sometimes refers to a brand. Google may have had to manually patch the results if they find poor engagement on SERPs for a query like this. Here’s a way as humans we might find that the Coach brand is being referenced, which Google ultimately wants to be able to recognize algorithmically:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
RankBrain is trying to understand different kinds of relationships in language. On the topic of RankBrain, Gary Illyes told Enge it had to do with “being able to represent strings of text in very high-dimensional space and ‘see’ how they relate to one another.”<\/p>\n
RankBrain gets at the context, what other words are used in the same page, same paragraph, same sentence, etc. It can notice patterns in language usage:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Along with the example of the stop word “the” affecting the query, Enge also shows how certain words were hard for Google before RankBrain:<\/p>\n
\n- “The” \u2014 classic stop word, but in some cases critical to phrase meaning (e.g., “The Office”)<\/li>\n
- “Graphic” \u2014 could relate to violence, language, or design (meaning determined by context)<\/li>\n
- “Without” \u2014 negatives traditionally ignored by Google, but in some cases critical to meaning of page<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Example queries:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This is the example offered the the Bloomberg article.<\/p>\n
Another troublesome example query that Gary Illyes shared in an interview with Enge: “Can you get 100% score on Super Mario without walkthrough?”<\/em><\/p>\nThe word “without” was traditionally taken out of a query, so now the user isn’t getting the answer they were looking for. This is an example of how Google was able to improve the results with RankBrain.<\/p>\n
Stone Temple Consulting’s Study<\/h3>\n
From their database of 500K queries, they looked for examples of queries that in June\/July 205 Google didn’t understand and compared it to January 2016 results.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In the left example, you see that Google doesn’t answer the query about Ragnarok, and in the right we see that Google did answer the question.<\/p>\n
To find queries that Google misunderstood, they removed a number of queries that either were not clear what the searcher meant, or that didn’t make sense in other ways. Here’s their end aggregate analysis:<\/p>\n