If you use the web to surf, purchase, play, or read, it’s likely you’ve come across a “doorway” page.
They’re bad news all around. How so? Doorway pages are web pages designed for the sole purpose of helping websites improve their traffic. They’re designed to rank well for particular phrases or keywords and often feature spammy, keyword-stuffed content and little to no user value.
In addition to clogging up the Internet, doorway pages are obnoxious and frustrating for users. Imagine coming across a piece you thought was “a thorough DIY guide on grooming your dog” just to find it was a landing page selling you dog food with a tiny blurb that wasn’t really helpful titled “how to groom your dog.”
Yeah, bad news. Fortunately, Google is trying to fix the issue. Last year, the search engine released an algorithm update meant specifically to kill doorway pages across the web.
Here’s what you need to know–and keep reading for five ways to make sure you aren’t hosting any so-called “doorway page,” unbeknownst to you.
Why Doorway Pages Are Bad
There are dozens of SEO tactics designed to boost search results, but doorway pages are a particularly frustrating one. Doorway pages often masquerade as a single page on a site or as a selection of distinct domains. They’re a problem because, when a Google user enters a search query, it’s possible that he or she will receive a complete list of results that all point to the same site. This creates a negative experience for Google users and makes it difficult for them to find the information they need.
Short Answer: If You Are Investing in High Quality Content, You Won’t Have to Worry
Remember, in 2015, Google released a massive Search Quality Evaluator guide. They have real people who evaluate every site based on these standards. We talked about these standards here, in a massive 3,000-word blog.
And this ties into doorway pages.
I know this sounds simple, but it really matters: overall, things boil down to the quality of content you have. If it’s high; you’re in the clear. If it’s low; you’re not. Is your site messy? In both design and content? Poor in wording? An empty page or two? You probably have doorway pages and Google isn’t going to like you.
Or is your site and written content on it really good? You’d be proud to read it off to your newest client? That kind of quality. Per Google’s guidelines, things boiled down to these two standards:
Key Ways to Instantly Recognize Telltale Doorway Pages
If you’re still unsure whether you might host a doorway page or not, luckily, Google offers several pretty clear guidelines on how users can identify doorway pages, so you’ll never create them or let someone else create them for you.
Website owners beware of these key following telltale signs of a doorway page:
If the purpose of a page is to rank for a search term or funnel visitors to a particular portion of a site, the page is probably a doorway page.
If the page is targeting generic search terms, but is filled with specific body content, it’s likely a doorway page.
If the page collects and aggregates things that can be found on the website, such as locations and product descriptions, it’s likely a doorway page.
If the page exists for the sole purpose of funneling users or harvesting affiliate traffic without offering valuable content or functional design, it’s likely a doorway page.
If the page makes it impossible to navigate to other portions of the site, it’s likely a doorway page.
What Google’s Anti-Doorway Update Actually Does
The update Google put out, which currently doesn’t have a name, categorizes doorway pages as possessing three traits:
Doorway pages often have multiple domain names or funnel users to a specific page
Doorway pages are pages that seek to funnel visitors to relevant or usable portions of the site
Doorway pages are similar pages that run parallel to search results rather than a “browse-able hierarchy.”
Within its press release surrounding the topic of the update, Google states that “doorway pages that are created solely for search engines can harm the quality of the user’s search experience” and goes on to say that large sites that use doorway campaigns are likely to be impacted by the impending algorithm change.
In addition to helping Google users get a feel for what doorway pages are, these guidelines can also help webmasters determine if they have doorway pages on their sites and remove them in order to avoid being penalized by Google.
5 Ways to Protect Your Site from The Worst of Google Doorway Penalties
If you’ve been using doorway campaigns on your site, there are several things you can do to avoid Google penalties.
1. Destroy empty pages
If you’ve got empty pages sitting around on your site, it’s time to take them down. Because these pages don’t add what Google calls “clear, unique value,” they’re likely to be interpreted as doorway pages and can harm your site’s overall ranking. With this in mind, only publish new pages when you have content available for them.
This ties into the overall theme of “is your content good? is it high quality? does it help people?” Empty pages obviously don’t!
2. Improve your site navigation
This plays into design. Work on both the appearance and navigation abilities of your site. One trait of doorway pages is that they make it difficult or virtually impossible to navigate to other portions of the website. If you’ve got a page that isn’t integrated into the navigation of your site, consider improving your navigation so that the page in question is easier for users to find and to navigate away from.
3. Pay attention to customer-generated content pages
Pages that get most of their content from customers or staff are at a high risk of sitting idle and damaging your site’s ranking. These pages include things like open-to-contributors review pages and galleries. To avoid getting dinged by Google’s recent update, be sure that if you have these pages, they have enough content (and enough regular content) to justify their presence. If the pages are sitting idle, consider consolidating them, removing them until you have enough content to fill them, or running a campaign to fill them with valuable content. This will help Google understand how the pages add value and relevance to your site and will help prevent damaging penalties.
4. Do away with duplicate content
Now, this should go without saying. If you are letting duplicate content slide onto your site, I just have one thing for you: Antoine Dodson.
This algorithm update is obviously not the first to target duplicate content, and while that’s not its main focus, duplicate content is always something that can damage your site.
To avoid penalties, be sure that any given content on your site only appears on one page and use no-index tags on any necessary duplicate pages.
5. Watch out for multiple domains
Multiple domains are one of the biggest giveaways of a doorway page. If you’ve got multiple sites working on SEO, be sure that each site features unique and original content and that you have solid reasoning behind why you need separate domains rather than a single, centralized site.
Looking Ahead: The Future of the Google Doorway Algorithm Update
As Google continues to become more advanced, content marketers can continue to expect updates like this one.
The purpose of the “doorway algorithm update” is to improve user experience and make it easier to locate valuable content without jumping through hoops.
While the update is likely to affect sites that have been using doorway campaigns, it’s easy to prevent your site from incurring penalties by doing things like altering duplicate content, destroying empty pages, and improving the navigation of your website.
Plus, since these are all things that improve SEO, it’s easy to give your site a ranking boost in the process. Have a thought or two on doorway pages? I’d love to hear it in the comments!
If you’ve been paying attention to the news in SEO lately, you’d have noticed news stories like “Four Ads on Top: the Wait is Over.” These headlines are referring to Google’s recent decision to alter its SERPs to display four ads at the top of the page, and remove sponsored ads in the space adjacent to the search results on the right-hand side.
While it may not seem like this is big news in the world of SEO, it is. The new SERP layout is much more inbound-friendly and much less welcoming for traditional, cold advertisements. This creates a better user experience and produces SERPs that are more useful, relevant, and easy to navigate than they’ve ever been before!
To see exactly where the ads used to be, refer to the below screenshot, question mark referring to the empty space where sponsored ads were:
Google Says Goodbye to Right-Hand Sponsored Ads: What This Means for Marketers
So what’s this “Huzzah!” attitude all about? How does this change affect marketers and their rankings in the SERPs? How will it affect you and your content? Here’s what you need to know about this new change.
What the New SERPs Look Like
If you’ve searched for a high-volume keyword lately, you’ll notice that the SERPs look a bit different. Before this recent Google update, ads appeared at the top, bottom, and right side of organic search results.
Now, however, they look like this for competitive search terms, with a clean slate on the right side. Cheers, Google – you look so tidy!
While the change didn’t affect the ads that appear below the search results, it did do away with those to the sponsored ads to the right of the search results. This leaves more room for organic search rankings and throws inbound marketing into a whole new world of importance.
Why Google Made the Change
As far as most content marketer experts can guess, the primary reason behind this new feature is user convenience. Displaying ads in two places rather than tree creates a simplified user experience and makes mobile search easier than ever, which is something Google now sees as a major priority (As evidenced by recent algorithm changes).
Additionally, top-placed ads seem to simply perform better in terms of clicks and traffic than side-placed ads. In light of this, Google’s new change streamlines a page and focuses traffic while also enhancing user experience.
How The New Ad Placement Will Affect Organic Search
The introduction of four ads above SERPs will have an effect on search, but primarily for marketers who are paying for sponsored ads rather than creating valuable content. Because the new ad structure places more importance on organic search, it stands to reason that marketers who focus their attention on creating quality content and optimizing their material for organic search success will perform better in the new environment. While this new change has shocked many content marketers, it’s clear that it is simply one in a series of Google changes (including Knowledge Graph and Featured Snippet) that are meant to provide users with relevant, quality results without intrusive advertising.
4 Ways Content Marketers Can Cope With Google’s Sponsored Ad Changes
Again, Google’s most recent changes really only present a challenge to people who have been relying heavily on sponsored ads. For everyone else, it’s more of a pivot than a change. In light of Google’s new ad placements, the importance of organic, quality content is going to be more important than ever. Here are a few steps you can take to ensure that you appear prominently in the new SERP layout.
1. Review your sponsored ads now
If you’re a content marketer that has invested in Google’s sponsored ads, and you’ve got live campaigns going on, check on their position and appearance from your dashboard. If your ads aren’t where you want them to be, it’s important to consider how you can alter them to perform better. While you can do this a few different ways (increasing your bid, boosting your position for the keywords you’re targeting, or increasing your quality score), the best way to go about it is to take a comprehensive approach to increase your ad’s performance. Don’t jump to increase your bid first thing. Instead, seek to make changes that will improve your quality score. This means making your text more relevant and helpful and ensuring that you’re targeting keywords properly.
2. Shift your focus to content
Google has made it painfully clear over the last several years that content is the king of the game and that’s especially true with this recent change. While sponsored ads used to rank on the same level as organic ads, the tables have turned and sponsored ads have left the building. In light of this, it’s important to shift your company’s focus to how you can create quality content Google will want to rank well. Content marketers focusing on just that–content marketing–will do well to boost and improve the quality of that focus.
A Little Case Study From Moi
Yours truly, Julia from Express Writers speaking here: we’ve been in business for five years and we’ve never used a sponsored ad. Instead, we’ve taken all of the money we could have poured into purchasing ad space and we’ve allocated it to creating content. By hiring quality writers, focusing on publishing relevant, long-form content on our blog, and creating guidelines that genuinely answer our reader’s questions, we’ve gained more than 300 positions in Google rankings through organic content alone.
We’re proof that it is possible, and you can get there, too!
If you’re a little unsettled by Google’s new SERP structure, consider how you can re-allocate your resources. If you’ve been purchasing sponsored ads with the majority of your marketing budget, focus on creating content instead. Guides, in-depth, long-form, how-to content, and relevant blog posts are all sure-fire ways to draw more readers to your content and gain SERP prominence without spending money on sponsored ads. Because the new layout of Google’s SERPs is much more geared toward inbound marketing, relevance, and organic search, it’s clear that the companies who embrace their users’ desire for relevance, quality, and information will come out on top.
3. Research
If you read Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines, you know that the importance of E-A-T (Expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) in content has skyrocketed lately. From the demand for expert content to Google’s astonishing willingness to dock sites that don’t have it, information is everything today, so it’s important for companies and content marketers that want to succeed in the new SERPs to comply.
One of the things I believe contributed to our huge boost in rankings is research. We research everything we write and we take the time needed to ensure that it’s all factual, relevant, and backed-up. And research doesn’t stop with your content. By researching topics in places like Quora and Buzzsumo, you can ensure that you’re providing relevant, quality content that your readers will love, and which will help you rank well. By bringing heavier research and analysis of all your topics, content, and information, you can also ensure that you continue to rank prominently in the SERPs, even in light of the recent changes.
4. Ramp up your content production
Content marketers: hear, hear! If you’re only creating thin, occasional content, you’re missing out. According to HubSpot, companies that publish 16 or more blog posts each month get three times as much traffic as those who publish 0-4 posts a month. While blogging often isn’t the secret weapon that will get you everything you desire in ranking and SEO, it is a powerful start. In addition to helping you establish a constant web presence that gives your readers something to look forward to, blogging often also helps you hone your writing skills, develop your brand, index more pages with Google, and create substantive, dense content that is actually helpful for readers.
Keep in mind that blogging often doesn’t matter at all if you’re letting your quality fall by the wayside. Creating relevant, unique, high-quality guidelines, how-to articles, and blog posts will draw readers to your site in an organic and sustainable way.
The Verdict: This Change is Good for Marketers
While you may feel compelled to panic over Google’s SERP update, don’t. While the change has certainly decreased the importance of sponsored ads, it’s really only served to increase the importance of the things we should already be doing well, anyway: content, research, expert information, and relevance.
When brands stop focusing so much on purchasing ads and start focusing more on creating quality content that provides value for readers, the quality of the overall brand increases and the content therein is suddenly more valuable and more relevant for readers. Google’s recent changes send a clear message to content marketers (and really, all marketers everywhere): inbound is in, so get onboard the content train. To learn more about how we create quality content for our customers, or to check out our services today visit our Content Shop!
Trying to find out how social media affects SEO is a little bit like staring through a really dirty window: it’s unclear and often frustrating.
While business owners know that social media is important for many things, including building and maintaining visibility on the web and driving customer engagement, it can be tough to tell just how much (if at all) social media affects SEO ranking. This is justified, of course, as in 2010 Google’s Matt Cutts released a video saying that social signals were a SEO ranking factor. In 2014, however, Cutts released another video saying that social signals weren’t actually a ranking factor.
(This was addressed late 2015 in a Stone Temple article: “Does Social Media Effect SEO? Matt Cutts answers”. I’d definitely recommend this read: it addresses this topic well from an SEO standpoint.)
In the new version of the video, Cutts clarifies some of the ambiguity that’s plagued SEO for years and gives us a final (if not drastically more clear) answer to the question: does social matter for SEO rankings?
I’m going to take a look. Keep reading.
How Social Factors Play into SEO: 3 Key Points
There’s been hot debate over whether or not social signals matter for SEO rankings. Here’s what we know:
1) Social signals on Facebook and Twitter are treated like web pages in SEO
When a search engine crawler looks through Facebook and Twitter feeds, it can pull out individual pieces of content and select the ones that are valuable. This does two things: first, it helps Google cut down on the unimportant social signals out there, of which there are many considering the fact that Twitter users generate more than 500 million tweets per day.
Secondly, this helps Google be more selective in what it indexes and where that content is indexed, which can be a good or a bad thing for marketers depending upon the strength of the social factors that do matter (more on this later).
2) Google’s crawlers can’t cover the entire social universe
While they may be studious, even Google’s crawler bots aren’t capable of evaluating every social page on the web. Part of this is because the bots sometimes get blocked from doing this work, as Barry Schwartz claims they were from Twitter.
While Google’s crawler bots can still see every Tweet that is posted on the platform, they are inherently limited in their ability to index every Tweet. According to a study released earlier this year, Google actually indexes less than 4% of all Tweets issued. That said, Google doesn’t appreciate social signals it can’t fully index and, because of this, it’s possible that signals like individual Tweets don’t influence SEO as much as one may think.
3) Drumroll please… Google says it does not use Facebook or Twitter followers to rank pages
This has been a long-debated topic and one that has been fraught with misunderstanding and confusion. According to Matt Cutts, though, Google doesn’t use signals like Facebook or Twitter fans or followers simply because they don’t have “a high confidence in the meaning” of those signals.
This is because Google’s bots are simply incapable of crawling all of Facebook and Twitter, which means that there is no way they can glean all of the connections and signals they would need to make a complete and well-rounded assumption about the content on those sites. Additionally, Facebook and Twitter followers are fluid and ever-changing and it’s possible that a bot that visits a page in the early stages of its existence, for example, may not visit it again for a very long time, which may inappropriately skew the page’s rankings.
Similarly, a page that has a huge number of followers when a crawler bot visits may then lose a huge number of followers (this is far from impossible and it actually happened to many high-profile Instagram users when the site destroyed millions of spammy profiles in what is now known as “The Instagram Rapture”), but since the crawler bot will not reflect that loss, it’s impossible for the bot to make these social signals an accurate representation of the site itself.
Cutts also put to bed the Moz and SearchMetrics studies that claimed Facebook likes were one of the most important factors for sites that rank well in Google’s SERPs. While many people believed that these studies proved that social signals in fact caused high-level search rankings, Cutts explained that this was simply due to the fact the the sites which produce high levels of fan engagement are also the sites that attract a high number of inbound links and other authority metrics that do have a direct effect on SEO ranking.
What this Means for Social and SEO: 3 Things Marketers Need to Know
So – what’s the answer? Does social matter for your SEO? The answer is complicated and two-fold: it does and it doesn’t. We’ve just addressed the reasons it doesn’t – some social signals are too instable to be reliable ranking metrics and others are simply impossible for Google to attain. But what about the ways in which social signals do affect your SEO?
Right now, one of the most important things in the world of great SEO rankings is content that meets search user needs. Despite the confusing back-and-forth of “SEO or no SEO?” some social signals are indeed important for SEO and, moreover, sites that pay attention to the following things are more likely to rank higher in SERPs.
1) Social links matter
While we’ve established that social signals don’t matter for SEO, social links might. Consider the following: when a post goes viral on Facebook or Twitter (As Mark Manson’s “7 Strange Questions That Help You Find Your Life Purpose” blog post did, for example) and thousands of people are sharing and searching for it, does that affect search rankings?
Many marketers believe that it does. We know that Bing pays attention to viral posts and, according to the 2014 Cutts video, Google treats individual pages on social sites the way they would any other web page – which means that viral pages may well help search rankings. Clear as mud, right? While it turns out that the overall authority of a page probably doesn’t impact SEO, individual links and posts probably do.
2) Sites are doing more with content than ever before
To add fuel to the aforementioned fire, many social media platforms are offering more vessels for content creation and distribution than they ever have before. Take, for example, the impending death of Twitter’s 140-character limit or the introduction of Facebook articles, which allow content creators to whip out interactive articles for their followers. Think, also, about platforms like Periscope and Vine, which have been designed solely to function in concert with social media. This, of course, lends authority to the assumption that creating high-quality social media content certainly can’t harm your SEO ranking and may, in fact, help it.
To take advantage of this and to capitalize upon the high probability of going viral with fantastic social media content, it’s important to utilize social sharing and to treat social media content creation exactly as you would if you were creating content for a website or blog: treat it like it matters because it probably does.
3) Social media channels act like search engines
95% of millennials expect brands to have a Facebook page and will search them using the social media platform. That said, we’ve long since passed the days of heading to a search engine and a search engine alone to find information. Today, people treat social media platforms almost exactly like they do search engines, and this means that SEO has to by virtue extend into social media.
There are hundreds of ways for consumers to discover or engage with brands on social media and, once that engagement takes place, the likelihood that the consumer will then purchase from the company, share the company’s content, talk about the company on social media, or link back to the company’s information is incredibly high. All of these things contribute to positive SEO rankings and, as such, social media channels should be treated like the soil from which lots of good SEO springs.
That said, marketers can do well to produce lots of quality visual content, occupy space in several different social media spheres, optimize content for social sharing and keep updating content often. Considering the fact that Twitter gets more than 19 billion searches per month and Facebook gets more than 1 billion per day, it’s obvious that these simple steps have the potential to make a huge impact on SEO.
Conclusion
If you’re still confused – it’s okay. SEO and social signals are confusing to no end but here’s what we can tell you for sure: while it isn’t safe to dismiss social media’s effect on SEO entirely, it’s clear that certain things (like Facebook friends or Twitter followers, for example) don’t matter.
That’s great news for new marketers because it means that you don’t have to be a mega-star to snag top SERP rankings. What we do know about social and SEO, however, is that certain things like high-quality social content, social media presence, and the ability of your social media content to suit user needs is important and should be focused on heavily.
While it’s undeniable that social media and SEO will continue to shift beneath us, one thing is sure: creating great content and maintaining a consistent and varied web presence certainly cannot hurt you.
The other day, I was poking around in my favorite SEO analytic software of choice, SEMrush, checking on our rankings. My team at Express Writers has a Guru subscription there that allows us to see detailed analytics of our site–and I mean detailed. We see a ton of keyword position data down to the most recent keyword ranking change of our site in Google, as of just an hour ago. (If you haven’t already, go check out SEMrush here.)
Well, a couple days ago I was doing my biweekly SEO audit of all of our keyword positions and pulling keyword data for new content. I was shocked to see that the positions changes mapped a huge spike: as of October 28, 302 new keyword gains. In 24 hours. And our traffic had spiked up to the most I’d ever seen: 1,251 people on one day.
What Exactly Are We Doing In Google?
Let me give you a little look at exactly how we’re getting and maintaining our positions with Google before I delve into the recent major keyword growth.
1. Content
We write and publish about 3-4 blogs on our site a week, ranging from 1,000-3,000 words each. So since 2011, we have 642 blogs published on our Wordpress site (this one makes 643):
This isn’t counting the hundreds of guest blogs I’ve placed on places like SiteProNews, Search Engine Journal, Social Media Examiner, and more.
Also, we have about 50-80 website pages, maybe 400-800 words each.
2. Traffic
So, with that insight into just how much we publish, now it’s time to see what the results are. We have some serious organic traffic. I’ve never placed a Google paid ad in all my four years of business; and never will. I believe in great content brainstorming, writing and publishing, and it is what is keeping us strong. And sometimes just this process can take me 40 hours a week. It isn’t easy, but it is thoroughly worth it.
SEMrush puts our traffic at a value of $6,800 (what we would pay if we were paying for ad clicks). We have 3,000 keywords indexed in Google, with over 100 in the top 5 positions of Google. We’re outranking a large number of our competitors in the content creation niche.
Let’s look at the graph on the right a little deeper:
Whoa!
This month we have the most site traffic we’ve ever had, with 1,251 people visiting in a single day the first week of November.
3. How We Gained 300+ Rankings In One Day
Here’s what I saw that stopped me in my tracks the other day. I clicked on Position Changes under Organic Research, in SEMrush:
See that? 302 new rankings in a single day!
Clicking on what was “new,” some of these showed we were position 11 for “modern copywriter,” #3 for “copywriting companies”, and #19 for “website content”:
The orange bar below showed we’d lost 200 keywords. But clicking on that, I saw they were mostly unrelated keywords—like “express for her,” “sprinkles icing,” and more.
Except for a few pivotal ones we’d lost a few positions on (looks like I need to refresh some old SEO content), the “lost” weren’t too bad.
How The Heck Did We Get 300+ Keywords In One Day?
I have a couple theories.
First, Google RankBrain is out. It came out two days before our rankings showed a major spike. Read my blog on RankBrain here. RankBrain is an AI system that basically could be replacing Google’s old way of doing its algorithm, and it exposed 15% of the web that Google hadn’t shed light on before. I’m sure RankBrain is showing a lot more website owners rankings they didn’t know they ever had.
RankBrain means we’ll all be able to see a whopping 15% more in analytics and positions online that our sites and content are ranking for—all the more reason to start publishing great content!
Secondly, Google has still been rolling out Panda, AND, topical trust flow has recently been making big waves (it’s replacing PageRank and focuses on reporting relevant content in higher rankings). Topical trust flow weight could be mostly likely why we lost our unrelated rankings, too. All this is probably tied into the quality of the RankBrain AI.
Lastly, we’ve been working hard on our content. Over the past month, I’ve revamped and improved our blogging and content publishing quality.
Here are just a few of the changes:
SEO audit of our blogs (I just corrected 35 “bad SEO” blogs, rewrote their meta descriptions and edited the copy, over the last 3 weeks, and took them to green SEO on the Yoast plugin)
More SEO research and keyword planningwith SEMrush for each post
Heavier research and analyzing of topics and what goes into each post
Custom drawings and illustrations, like this one, for many of our posts
At least one infographic written, designed and published per month
Re-purposing of infographics into SlideShares, RSS content to pull guest traffic
Email marketing bi-weekly that sends a blog roundup to our subscriber list
We Know What It Takes To Help You
To end this post, I’d like to emphasize that any one of our clients can see these results. We’re not only writers with pens over here. My team not only writes great SEO optimized content, but we plan it, too—and we use SEMrush! Our team includes strategists that map out monthly editorial calendars for our clients, audit websites to remove anything that could be hurting websites, and similar services.
We’ve seen content success truly happen for us – this post proves that – and we know exactly what it takes to get even a brand new website client onboard with publishing great content that gets both the eye of a reader and Google (albeit if Google, a robotic eye).
If you’re ready to get serious about content and thus, your rankings and readers, check out our Content Shop!
Big news in the Interwebz! Officially on October 26, 2015, Google released news that it has begun using an artificial intelligence page ranking system called “RankBrain.”
This AI (Artificial Intelligence) system is designed to help Google organize and categorize all of its search results and news of it is currently breaking the Internet. For those of you who are unfamiliar, here’s the skinny on the new RankBrain technology.
What is Google RankBrain?
Google RankBrain is an AI system that Google designed to assist in processing search results. The system operates by teaching itself how to complete a task and is currently being used to search the billions of pages in Google’s ranking indexes in order to find the ones that are most relevant and most valuable for a given search query.
Because the release is so new, it’s still a little unclear whether or not RankBrain is a part of the entire Google Algorithm known as Hummingbird, but sources like Search Engine Land believe that it is.
There are dozens of components that make up Hummingbird and many SEOs believe that RankBrain is simply the latest. This is fueled by the fact that Bloomberg Business reported that Google RankBrain won’t handle all searches as the algorithm would, and is only responsible for a portion of them.
According to Google, RankBrain has been live since early in the year and has been fully rolled-out for several months now. RankBrain will affect a huge number of queries and, as queries continue to roll in, the AI system will continue to become more advanced and learn to make predictions about certain search patterns.
In fact, RankBrain is already beginning to get better at predicting a page’s rank than its human counterparts: according to recent information, engineers involved in developing the software were asked to guess where various pages would be ranked according to Google’s ranking signals.
“RankBrain” makes me conjure up this image… remember those crazy Boston Dynamic dog-like bots?
While the engineers guessed correctly 70% of the time, RankBrain got it right 80% of the time. (Better than human?)
People who want to learn more about exactly how the AI properties of RankBrain function can consult this blog post (although the technology is not called RankBrain in the post).
How Does Google RankBrain Work?
The details on this are still foggy but right now the best guess is that RankBrain is used to interpret searches that are submitted to Google and to match them with pages that may not feature the exact keyword phrase that was searched for, but which are relevant nonetheless. This is an expansion on previous Google technologies that allowed the search engine to present pages that didn’t feature the exact search terms entered – so that people searching for “running shoes” would also see pages that targeted the keyword “sneakers” and so on and so forth.
Right now, Google receives over 3 billion searches on a daily basis and, in 2007, the search engine giant reported that 20-25% of those search terms were totally unfamiliar. In 2013, that number scaled down to 15%, which was still significant for such a huge machine (it amounts to about 450 million search terms each day that Google has never seen). The 15% estimation holds true today and, presumably, RankBrain is a way to refine and categorize those queries in order to deliver better results for Google users.
How RankBrain Is Involved in Google’s Ranking Signals
When it comes time to rank a webpage, Google uses a wide variety of so-called “signals” to determine how to rank the page in the index. Things like bolded words, mobile-friendly pages, and local listings are all signals that Google uses to rank a page. These signals are processed by various parts of the algorithm in order to determine which pages show up in SERPs and which do not.
According to Google, there are more than 200 big-time ranking signals used when ranking each page. Many people believe that these 200 signals then give way for up to 10,000 sub-signals. This is important to know because, seemingly out of the blue, Google is now saying that RankBrain is the third-most important ranking signal in existence right now. Although we know that this is a huge development, since we don’t know exactly how RankBrain will look in the coming months, it’s hard to tailor content to this development as it stands now.
The Future of Google RankBrain
Right now, many SEO experts believe that the presence of RankBrain may indicate a future trend toward voice searches.
Because people don’t issue voice searches the same way they issue text-based searches, search engines and marketers alike need to start adapting now.
For example, a person who wants to issue a voice search may ask “Where can I get a bagel in NYC?” while a text search may look more like “bagels NYC.” The fact that RankBrain is capable of learning, adapting to, and predicting a variety of new search queries indicates that the Google engineers may be predicting an AI system that can eventually answer basic questions and even complete easy puzzles.
This, ultimately, is an extension of a program called The Knowledge Graph, which Google released in 2012. The Knowledge Graph was Google’s way to reach toward becoming more intelligent about the connections between words. With the inception of this program, Google moved toward doing what it called searching for “things not strings.” This meant that Google went beyond searching only for information that matched a string of letters and began, instead, searching for pages that provided answers to the questions a person was probably asking through their search queries. For example, The Knowledge Graph allows searchers to enter a term like “when was Nixon born?” and get an answer complete with maps without ever specifying that you mean President Nixon.
As RankBrain becomes more established, it seems evident that the service will combine with other Google technologies, such as rich answers (more on these in a moment) to create an intuitive search experience that allows the search engine to see and predict patterns and decipher complex, long-tail queries that may not target specific keywords. RankBrain is designed to translate those queries and present the correct information to the searcher in a format that doesn’t require him or her to navigate away from the search page. This, in turn, will help decrease the number of search queries that Google can’t understand and will create a more satisfying search experience for searchers and Google engineers alike.
The Future of Search & the Increase of Rich Answers
The trend toward more information with every search has already been exhibited through Google’s rich answers. Instead of displaying a simple response when a query is issued, Google progressively upped its rates of rich answers, which is an attempt by the search engine to answer queries in a way that doesn’t require users to click through a website. Rich answers include things like snippets, charts, tables, maps, forms, sliders, and images. Consider the following example of a rich answer:
Recently, a study conducted by Stone Temple Consulting revealed that of 850,000 search queries entered, a whopping 19.45% of them result in rich answers.
This, along with the introduction of RankBrain may well point to the fact that Google as a whole is leaning toward a more intuitive, intelligent search system that helps users find exactly what they want in a single search while also picking up the slack for 450 million unfamiliar search terms.
Although the scope of RankBrain is not yet clear, it seems evident that the new program is a sliver of the big picture and that RankBrain is primed to make a big impact on search results forever.
Google isn’t exactly an impulsive company and, while the search engine giant tests many things, it only launches huge changes when it’s reasonably certain that they will make a positive impact that aligns with Google’s overall mission and projections. Additionally, the fact that RankBrain is now the third-most important ranking signal in all of Google is a huge deal and serves to further reinforce the idea that Google engineers are gearing up for big changes in the way people search the web.
So How Do We Prep for Search Changes Across all Content?
For marketers, these impending search changes have the potential to offer huge branding benefits if content is designed correctly.
For now, though, we have yet to see exactly what RankBrain will do and how it will affect queries. As always, we will keep you posted as we learn more but, for now, the same thing as always holds true: create original, high-quality content, post it often, do good keyword research, and be active on a variety of social media outlets. That is the key to search query success.
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