google's top 3 ranking factors - content, links, and rankbrain - raleigh seo meetup 2016
TRANSCRIPT
![Page 1: Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors - Content, Links, and RankBrain - Raleigh SEO Meetup 2016](https://reader035.vdocument.in/reader035/viewer/2022062900/58ced8251a28abd4098b5ced/html5/thumbnails/1.jpg)
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links &
RankBrainPatrick Stox & JR Oakes
![Page 2: Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors - Content, Links, and RankBrain - Raleigh SEO Meetup 2016](https://reader035.vdocument.in/reader035/viewer/2022062900/58ced8251a28abd4098b5ced/html5/thumbnails/2.jpg)
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
![Page 3: Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors - Content, Links, and RankBrain - Raleigh SEO Meetup 2016](https://reader035.vdocument.in/reader035/viewer/2022062900/58ced8251a28abd4098b5ced/html5/thumbnails/3.jpg)
In March of this year, Google identified 3 as the most
important.
Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain
![Page 4: Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors - Content, Links, and RankBrain - Raleigh SEO Meetup 2016](https://reader035.vdocument.in/reader035/viewer/2022062900/58ced8251a28abd4098b5ced/html5/thumbnails/4.jpg)
Content | Links | RankBrain
Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain
![Page 5: Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors - Content, Links, and RankBrain - Raleigh SEO Meetup 2016](https://reader035.vdocument.in/reader035/viewer/2022062900/58ced8251a28abd4098b5ced/html5/thumbnails/5.jpg)
Content
Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain
![Page 6: Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors - Content, Links, and RankBrain - Raleigh SEO Meetup 2016](https://reader035.vdocument.in/reader035/viewer/2022062900/58ced8251a28abd4098b5ced/html5/thumbnails/6.jpg)
Content is more than words on a page.
Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain
Content
![Page 7: Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors - Content, Links, and RankBrain - Raleigh SEO Meetup 2016](https://reader035.vdocument.in/reader035/viewer/2022062900/58ced8251a28abd4098b5ced/html5/thumbnails/7.jpg)
Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain
![Page 8: Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors - Content, Links, and RankBrain - Raleigh SEO Meetup 2016](https://reader035.vdocument.in/reader035/viewer/2022062900/58ced8251a28abd4098b5ced/html5/thumbnails/8.jpg)
Relevance and Experience are important to Rank
Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain
Content
![Page 9: Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors - Content, Links, and RankBrain - Raleigh SEO Meetup 2016](https://reader035.vdocument.in/reader035/viewer/2022062900/58ced8251a28abd4098b5ced/html5/thumbnails/9.jpg)
Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain
Content
![Page 10: Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors - Content, Links, and RankBrain - Raleigh SEO Meetup 2016](https://reader035.vdocument.in/reader035/viewer/2022062900/58ced8251a28abd4098b5ced/html5/thumbnails/10.jpg)
Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain
Content
![Page 11: Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors - Content, Links, and RankBrain - Raleigh SEO Meetup 2016](https://reader035.vdocument.in/reader035/viewer/2022062900/58ced8251a28abd4098b5ced/html5/thumbnails/11.jpg)
An experienceSomething that fulfills an intentSomething you need to trustSomething you won’t wait for
Content is. . .
Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain
Content
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Useful and informativeMore valuable and useful than other sitesCredibleHigh-qualityEngaging
Make sure your Content is:
Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain
Content
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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:
Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain
Content
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Links
Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakesGoogle's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain
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“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?
Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain
Links
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Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain
Links
![Page 17: Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors - Content, Links, and RankBrain - Raleigh SEO Meetup 2016](https://reader035.vdocument.in/reader035/viewer/2022062900/58ced8251a28abd4098b5ced/html5/thumbnails/17.jpg)
Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain
Links
![Page 18: Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors - Content, Links, and RankBrain - Raleigh SEO Meetup 2016](https://reader035.vdocument.in/reader035/viewer/2022062900/58ced8251a28abd4098b5ced/html5/thumbnails/18.jpg)
Good links Bad Links
Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain
Links
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Internal vs ExternalLocation mattersCitationsRedirectsAnchor text mattersRelevantAuthoritative
The Good
Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain
Links
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Buying/selling linksLink networksReciprocal linksComment spamForum spamArticle directoriesPBNsGeneric directoriesPress releasesGuest postsSocial bookmarking
The Bad
Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain
Links
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Create your own opportunities for links by opening up opportunities to
write for others.
Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain
Links
![Page 22: Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors - Content, Links, and RankBrain - Raleigh SEO Meetup 2016](https://reader035.vdocument.in/reader035/viewer/2022062900/58ced8251a28abd4098b5ced/html5/thumbnails/22.jpg)
RankBrain
Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain
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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
Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain
RankBrain
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“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
Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain
RankBrain
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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
Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain
RankBrain
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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
Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain
RankBrain
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● 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
Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain
RankBrain
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● 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
Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain
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The End
Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain
http://bit.ly/3-ranking-factorsSlides available above