RankBrain: How Google Is Using Artificial Intelligence To Rank Web Pages

The days of a hand-crafted human search algorithm may soon be over. Google has announced RankBrain, a new artificial intelligence that is now processing a “very large fraction” of searches each day. This new system was reported to Bloomberg and has been implemented, in part, to help Google better understand deal with the amount of ambiguous queries that they receive each day.

RankBrain isn’t replacing the current Google Algorithm (currently nicknamed Hummingbird), but instead RankBrain is one of the “hundreds” of signals according to Bloomberg. Previously Google has claimed up to 10,000 signals & sub-signals. It turns out that the RankBrain signal is pretty important too. Greg Corrado, Google senior research scientist, stated that RankBrain is now the 3rd most important signal in matching results to a search query. When asked about the other two Google declined to comment.

The artificial intelligence of RankBrain comes in the form of mathematical entities called vectors that can be understood by computers. When presented with an unfamiliar word, RankBrain will help formulate a guess at what the query was about and filter accordingly. At Search Engine Land we took a deep dive into RankBrain and were given the following Google authored post on machine learning with some examples for those looking to learn more on the topic.

So now you may be asking yourself, When will I see this RankBrain in my results? The answer is that you most likely have already. The given example of a search query that leverages RankBrain is “What’s the title of the consumer at the highest level of a food chain”.

On Search Engine Land it was pointed out that the lengthy queries may be simplifying the search and making more manageable.

At first glance, RankBrain doesn’t appear as much as a signal as it does a refinement. Google confirmed that RankBrain is a signal, but it is also important to understand the complexity that a signal can be. Things like links or words on a page can be signals and signals can be associated with users as well. There are many possibilities as to how RankBrain could work into being a signal, especially if it takes a variety of additional elements into account to help classify the right content for users.

GDN Converts Text Ads to ‘Richer Text’ Image Ads

Google has added an awesome new feature to the Google Display Network(GDN) – it will now automatically convert text ads to image ads. Google explains: “Richer Text is the most brand-safe ad type within our text ads family. This ad type runs on text + image and image only inventory. A logo (from Google+) is paired with this ad layout to add further brand and aesthetic value. Please contact your account manager if you wish to provide an alternate image. Unlike Simple Text, publishers do not have control over the color of this ad type. Instead, the color is derived from the primary and secondary colors of the logo used by the advertisers.”

The following factors are part of the decision to convert a text ad to image:

• CTR
• Conversions per dollar
• Deep conversion rate
• Landing page dwell time

Across the Google Display Network and AdMob, text ads are optimized across three primary ad types: simple text, richer text, and native text. Google wants to choose how your ads render to optimize performance, because better performance for you = more revenue for Google.

Google Shopping

In most products, the manufacturer will provide a Global Trade Item Number (GTIN) to uniquely and completely identify a product in the global marketplace. Providing GTINs in your product data feed increases the likelihood that your offers are matched to the Google Shopping product catalog. This helps relevant, accurate results on Google Shopping; in fact, early experiments indicate that offers matched to the catalog receive up to 40% more user clicks than those that do not.

That’s why, as part of the 2015 update to the Google Shopping Products Feed Specification shared in June,Google refined the guiding principles and requirements around GTINs. Starting September 15, it requires Google Shopping feeds targeting Australia, Brazil, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom or the United States to submit valid ‘gtin’ and ‘brand’ for all products when the ‘brand’ is a designated brand and the ‘condition’ is ‘new’. At that time, disapprovals are done  that do not meet this requirement or are submitted with invalid GTINs.

Integration of Search and Dictation in Google Docs

Big update is voice typing in Docs. This dictation feature is built upon Google's voice-recognition technology and will be available in 40 languages. Users can simply tap and start talking when they access Docs on desktop, or on Android and iOS devices.
Meanwhile, Docs will provide a "see new changes" button to let users see all the edits in a document since the last time they opened it. If users are working on a document with multiple people, their changes will be highlighted in different colors.
Aside from the above nifty enhancements, Google has also created new templates for Docs, Sheets, and Slides, a refreshed user interface for Forms and a new "explore" feature in Sheets that automatically generates charts out of the data in the spreadsheet.

Website Speed Affects Rankings

Website speed is key to user experience, so if your site is slow, there is no reason to keep it that way. What's the use of getting traffic from search engines, when your visitors have to hang for 10+ seconds before they can see your content – they will have left much before the page has loaded. 

 If you want to improve website speed, there are a couple of steps to be taken. First, you need to measure your website speed – otherwise how do you know it's slow?  

 Measure Load Times

In order to measure load times, you need a good tool. The choice here is quite rich. Pingdom Page Load Time tool and Google Analytics Site Speed reports give a good idea of your site's general performance. WebPageTest is a more advanced tool because it allows to test your site in different browsers and spot slow areas on your site. 

 Move to a Faster Server

 One of the obvious reasons a site is slow is that the server you are hosting it on is slow. The reasons here could be numerous – from a web hosting provider that lacks the capacity to offer fast servers, to the type of your hosting account. 

OptimizeYour Site's Code and Images

Your server might be fast but if your site itself is slow, you will still experience speed issues. If your code and images are not optimized for fast loading, you won't see speed improvements till you fix them. This task could take a very, very long time, especially if your code and images are bloated but you've got to do it. For images, you can use compression and/or smaller sizes. This will speed loading big time. For HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and other Web languages there are tons of tricks (and tools) how to optimize your code. 

The bigger problem with slow sites is that they are not user–friendly, which in turn kills conversions. If you don't want to lose money because of the speed issues of your site, take the time to fix them – it will pay in the long run. 

 

Google Releases Panda 4.2

Google tells  that it pushed out a Google Panda refresh this weekend.The rollout means anyone who was penalized by Panda in the last update has a chance to emerge if they made the right changes. So if you were hit by Panda, you unfortunately won’t notice the full impact immediately but you should see changes in your organic rankings gradually over time.This is not how many of the past Panda updates rolled out, where typically you’d see a significant increase or decline in your Google traffic more quickly. This Panda refresh is rolling out very slowly. Google said this affected about 2%–3% of English language queries.

SEO Audit

The main purpose of a SEO audit is to give you an idea where your SEO efforts have got you to so far. Without this knowledge, it makes no sense to perform any SEO activities, since you don't know what the return from them is. This is why a SEO professional can't do without occasional SEO audits.

Analyze Accessibility and Indexability

·         Analyze Robots.txt

·         Check 404 Errors and Redirects

·         Examine the XML Sitemap

·         Web Design/Development Audit

·         Check the Number of Pages Indexed by Search Engines

Analyze On-Page Ranking Factors

·         User-Friendly Site URLs

·         Page Content

·         Outbound Links

·         Meta Tags

·         Images

Analyze Off-Page Ranking Factors

·         Number and Quality of Backlinks

·         Position with Recognized Ranking Services

·         Presence on Social Media