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Seven Insights Into How Google Ranks Websites

by WarriorForum.com Administrator
1 replies
A new article on Search Engine Journal reports that you can level up marketing success with these seven insights that focus on how Google ranks websites today and how they may impact SEO.



Google's algorithm is built around understanding content and search queries and making the answers accessible to users in the most convenient manner. The seven following insights show how to develop a winning SEO and content strategy by leveraging what we know about Google's algorithms:
  • Insight 1: Follow the Correct Intent: Some people who have used the software have told me that the information isn't always helpful. And that's not surprising because mining all of the top-ranked webpages in any given search results page (SERP) is going to result in a noisy data set that's inaccurate and is of limited usefulness. For instance, researchers discovered that 45% of people who search for Jaguar are looking for information about the automobile, and 35% are looking for information about the animal. If your content is about selling a product and the top-ranked pages are about how to make that product, then it may be possible that the popular user intent for that keyword is how to make that product and not where to buy that product.
  • Insight 2: Link Ecosystem Has Changed: Many people were going online to churn out content and link out to interesting websites. Aside from the recipe niche, that is no longer the case, and that may be affecting the link signal that Google uses for ranking purposes. There are fewer people searching for blogs. There may be many reasons why blogging has declined in popularity. It could be social media or it could be the introduction of the iPhone and Android changed how the public interacts online. One thing that is indisputable is that fewer people are blogging, and the link ecosystem has suffered a strong decline. What caused it is beside the point.
  • Insight 3: Link Drought Link Building Strategy: Because there are fewer natural links being freely given it's time to rethink the race to obtain the right anchor text and massive amounts of links. While a freely given link with a relevant anchor text is useful, it's rarely going to happen naturally. So maybe it's time to move away from old traditional link building focused on anchor text and guest posting (which today means paid links). Instead, it may be useful to cultivate links from news and magazines, relevant organizations, and some educational organizations.
  • Insight 4: Search Results Show What People Want to See: Google is showing the results that are most likely to satisfy users. Sometimes, that means showing newbie 101 level answers. Sometimes that means showing something incredibly racist and sad. For example, in 2009, Google had to apologize for showing an image of Michelle Obama that was altered to resemble a monkey every time someone searched on her name. Why did Google show that result? Because most people searching on the name Michelle Obama were the kind of people who were satisfied seeing an image of her that resembled a monkey. Satisfying user intent is what Google means when they talk about showing relevant results. In the old days, it meant showing webpages that contained the keywords that a user typed. Now it means showing the webpage that most users expect to see.
  • Insight 5: Expand the Range of Content: Google's search results are biased to show the content that users expect to see. This is why Google shows YouTube videos in the search results. It's what people want to see. It's why Google shows featured snippets, it's what satisfies the most people today who use mobile phones. It's not entirely accurate to complain that Google's search results favor YouTube videos. People find video content useful, particularly for the how-to type of content. That's why Google shows it.
  • Insight 7: Click Data Helps Determine User Intent: Many people want Fruit Loops and Captain Crunch breakfast cereals. The supermarkets respond by giving consumers what they want. Search algorithms can operate in a similar manner. That's not keyword relevance to search terms you're looking at -- it's relevance to what most users are expecting to see. Sometimes that is expressed in how many links a site receives. But I'm fairly confident that one of the ways user intent is understood is by click log data. The general assumption under such an approach is that searching users are often the best judges of relevance, so that if they select a particular search result, it is likely to be relevant, or at least more relevant than the presented alternatives.
#google #insights #ranks #websites
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