SMX West 2016 Takeaways

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Jered Higgins| Manager, Search Strategy 2/18/22 SMX 2016 Takeaways

Transcript of SMX West 2016 Takeaways

Page 1: SMX West 2016 Takeaways

Jered Higgins| Manager, Search StrategyMay 1, 2023

SMX 2016 Takeaways

Page 2: SMX West 2016 Takeaways

Overview

• Ranking Signals – The

good, the bad, and the ugly

• RankBrain – Google adds AI

to Algorithm

• Fulfillment Adaptation –

Survival of the fittest

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Ranking Signals

• HTTPS - small ranking signal but increasing over time • RankBrain - more on further slides• Keyword in Title - less important in the future with RankBrain • Word Count - less important than topicality/relevance with RankBrain • Mobile - more important in the future • USER EXPERIENCE - what will inevitably rank the highest is content or pages that

offer a unique and topically relevant user experience. • Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) -recently launched, but more

important in the future • Schema/Open Graph Tags - more important in the future • LSI Keywords (conversational keywords) - more important in the future• Content matches user/query intent - more important in the future • Specific usage of mobile - There are more and more devices connected to the

internet where search data is unavailable. e.g. Amazon Echo, Siri, etc.

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RankBrain - What is it?

• RankBrain is mainly used as a way to interpret the searches that people submit to find pages that might not have the exact words that were searched for using artificial intelligence

• RankBrain is part of the overall Hummingbird algorithm

• Rank Brain not used on every query, but when it is it is the 3rd most important ranking factor

• Google told Bloomberg that a “very large fraction” of queries are being processed by RankBrain

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RankBrain - How it Works

1. Rankbrain concentrates on relevant content

2. RankBrain uses thought vectors to map relevant results to queries

3. This relevance score is then used to help order rankings

This chart shows how well it can learn the concept of capital cities, just by reading lots of news articles -- with no human supervision

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Adaptation – How can we adapt?

RankBrain targets non-understandable queries and those using colloquialisms. However, we can’t create confusing content and we can’t target specific long-tail keywords.

What we can do is insist on optimizing our content using best practice SEO strategies and in-depth analysis, in order to help Google understand the context of our content and the meaning behind the concepts and entities we are writing about.

"Topical relevance isn't for a single page, it's for an entire website"

"Make websites for users, not Search Engines"

"Humanity fuels the new economy"

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Jered Higgins| Manager, Search StrategyMay 1, 2023

THANKS!!!