Observing & understanding the technical side of the Google algo

[goodroi]

What scientific observations have you made on the Google algo? What aspects do you think are misunderstood. What theories about the Google algo are you currently researching?

Mods Note:
This thread is a technical discussion about understanding the Google algo. Off-topic comments (including SERP fluctuation, Google business decisions, politics, etc) will be removed without notice, and may be moved to another discussion.

[goodroi]

I'll start, changes to the serps used to center around Google manually changing their secret algo. Now, that still happens but there is now another cause - Google's machine learning and its impact seems to be growing. Even when Google doesn't manually change their algo, the serps can experience movement as Google's AI consumes & processes more content.

This increases the importance of the semantic structure of pages. It is important to write the right way. We want to engage the users to drive conversions but we also want to be SEO friendly. To be SEO friendly that means creating content that meets the KISS principle for googlebot. Choosing the right keywords, synonyms, anchor text, subheadings, etc to make it easy for Google to correctly understand the content.

For a better understanding of how AI can judge content, use Grammarly or a similar content assistance service. They can recognize typos, plagiarism, tone, and so much more. Imagine what Google can be doing, especially with their preference for EAT.

I am not saying content is more important than traffic-generating links (that is a bigger debate), but the pendulum is swinging back towards the middle ground after years of backlinks being a bit overweighted in their influence on the SERPs IMHO.

[randle]

"What aspects do you think are misunderstood."

The variance in where you rank for particular key words, when viewed in different geographic locations where the query is being made. The ranking factors that go into this, and what gets displayed, and where, on the results page.

We all have relevant thoughts on how to optimize, but its been challenging to understand what really goes into the factors impacting where you rank, and how your property is displayed, across regions (say the continental US). Statements like, "I rank 3rd for such and such a term..." makes me think, "ok, but what does it look like, to the person running the same query who is 1,000 miles away?".

Generally speaking Google thinks it knows better than the person searching what they really want, and location is something they lean on more heavily to ascertain this than most optimization efforts contemplate, and one of the reasons for that is its so murky to understand.

[aristotle]

A possible positive signal:
Total traffic to a site is steadily growing, but it's mostly non-search traffic. This is TOTAL traffic, including traffic from backlinks, social media mentions, and advertising. This doesn't refer to a short-lived burst of traffic, but steady sustained growth over a fairly long period. In other words, this is a site that has steardily gained traffic (without much help from google) until it's TOTAL traffic is quite large..

I saw this case mentioned one time many years ago, and it stuck in my mind, for I believe that google's algorithm very likely uses it as a positive signal. But my impression is that it is rarely discussed as an SEO topic.

[aristotle]

P.S. I should have included bookmarks as an important non-google source of traffic for some sites. As more and more people discover a site, some of them will bookmark it and begin returning on a regular basis. As a result traffic from this source will steadily grow.

[lammert]

The value of a being a brand. People don't search for a sweetened caffeinated carbonated soft drink. Instead, they type in the brand name of the product in the search box. Instead of focusing on keywords, focus on becoming a brand related to those keywords.

[aristotle]

The value of a being a brand. People don't search for a sweetened caffeinated carbonated soft drink. Instead, they type in the brand name of the product in the search box.

There actually may be two ways that being a brand could help search engine rankings:

-- First, As lammert said, people frequently type the brand name into the search box, which is very likely a positive signal for the algorithm.

-- Second, there's an old theory that big brands climbed to the top of the search results because they consistently got more clicks than the sites ranking above them.