Barry, in
Google On Salience Score Matter For SEO [seroundtable.com], 26-December-2019 asks
Have you seen SEOs talk about salience scores before? Hi Barry, nothing new to see here, except once again SEOs are jumping on, running after a bandwagon going where they know not...
See Dixon Jones aka WebmasterWorld Moderator dixonjones (sidejob as Global Ambassador for Majestic :)) 26-February-2019 YouTube video
Improve content salience using using Google's NLP AI [m.youtube.com]
Note: yup, 10 months ago, folks!
Content salience (also described as content relevance) is a major factor in SEO. Google has a tool that helps you see how they measure this metric. This video shows you how you can use it to improve your content without the need to code.
And he made the video because of Google’s API. The actual topic of salience in sociolinguistics and NLP/U is far from new. Even older than the API. Even older than Google :)
Given that SEOs are still genuflecting to keywords when search generally (Google specifically since 2010) have been shifting to entities (but not SEO tools; tools driving mindset rather than reality)... the only saving grace for most SEOs will be yet another limited Google tool that they, once again, will largely misapply as misunderstanding the underlying theory/purpose... tool shiny, tool good...
I first encountered NLP in the 1980s while playing about with natural language data base interfaces... read Peter Trudgill’s 1986 book
Dialects in Contact learned
...greater salience is assumed to cause greater meta-linguistic awareness... The overarching view has been that as a concept salience is difficult to define and therefore hard to quantify.
Google has released several papers et al since at least 2012 (earliest I have):
A New Entity Salience Task with Millions of Training Examples [static.googleusercontent.com] (PDF) by Jesse Dunietz and Dan Gillick.
Googles Natural Language API has several analysis options: trust SEOs to ‘suddenly’ overheatedly fixate on one particular output that has been discussed publicly for, ummm, quite some time already...
Note: Google appears to have a specific constrained definition of salience; sensible but may make it harder for those who might conflate the broader sociolinguistic usage with Googles... assuming anyone else likes to understand just what they are mucking about with... and goes a researching...
Ah well the New Year looks fair to spontaneously generate a deluge of bloggerati explanations followed by a spate of conference slide shows... I must get in an extra supply of popcorn...
