On June 04, 2016 John Rampton of Tech Crunch posted an insightful article concerning Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) and SEO. I’d like to talk about a few key points of this article.
AI has already been around for a while on the Internet including Google Translate and now Google’s RankBrain artificial intelligence machine learning algorithm. Google has several core algorithms at work including PageRank to determine search results.
According to Mr. Rampton, “Within Google, there are a number of core algorithms that exist. It is RankBrain’s job to learn what mixture of these core algorithms is best applied to each type of search results. For instance, in certain search results, RankBrain might learn that the most important signal is the META Title.
“Adding more significance to the META Title matching algorithm might lead to a better searcher experience. But in another search result, this very same signal might have a horrible correlation with a good searcher experience. So in that other vertical, another algorithm, maybe PageRank, might be promoted more.”
The upshot here is that Google may use a different mix of algorithms for each search conducted.
Since this is that case there are several recommendations that need to be observed. First, stay tightly focused on your website’s niche. Try to emulate the best practices of the reputable sites in that vertical and avoid emulating the structure of the spammy sites.
Also, try to emulate the backlink profile of the reputable sites while avoiding the profile of the spammy sites (avoid the bad neighborhoods).
So, in other words, the tried and true methods of the past still apply even with the complication of Artificial Intelligence used in search. Enough said.
References
http://techcrunch.com/2016/06/04/artificial-intelligence-is-changing-seo-faster-than-you-think/
