Google certainly loves to scare the marketers who spend their time researching the best SEO tactics, and the search engine giant has done it again with the recent announcement of its new “RankBrain” system. But what is RankBrain, and how is it going to affect the way Google ranks websites? While some of the details are still sparse, there are a few important facts that have come to light.
What is it?
First of all, RankBrain is not a replacement for Google’s Hummingbird search algorithm—but it is an important facet that will contribute to how Hummingbird will rank websites. Search Engine Land explains that RankBrain is “a machine-learning artificial intelligence system that’s used to help process its search results.”
Sounds fancy and confusing, right? In layman’s terms, RankBrain is a program that can basically learn new SEO-related information as it has more experience with online search. As more Web searches are conducted, RankBrain can gather data on the words and phrases that are used to make connections so that it can better deal with new searches that haven’t been conducted before.
According to Bloomberg, Google has since reported that RankBrain has become the “third-most important signal contributing to the result of a search query.” And the implementation of this AI has apparently proven effective. In the Bloomberg article, Google researchers explained that turning off RankBrain significantly decreased the quality of search results, damaging the overall user experience. Since RankBrain is able to learn and make new connections between even the most complex of searches, it can deliver better, more usable results to Web users.
RankBrain’s ability to refine results for never-before-done queries is especially important when one considers just how many searches are conducted every day. With literally billions of searches conducted each day, and an estimated 15 percent of said searches being completely new, there are hundreds of millions of new searches each day—which could certainly prove difficult for an SEO ranking algorithm to handle without a tool such as RankBrain.
Why Does it Matter?
Of course, the biggest question on every SEO guru’s mind is how the introduction of RankBrain will impact the effectiveness of their strategies. The truth of the matter is that RankBrain has been impacting online searches since earlier this year—but Google chose not to unveil news about this ranking signal until the end of October (possibly due to the widespread panic that came about when the company announced it’s “mobile-friendly” algorithm update).
In other words, this isn’t something like the “mobile-friendly” update where SEO experts have time to make changes to their Web design and content before the algorithm change starts affecting their search rankings—it’s already taking effect. However, since RankBrain is a learning machine that will continue to adapt the ranking signals it sends to Hummingbird, marketers can be sure that its importance will keep growing.
Of course, since Google hasn’t said much about what RankBrain actually looks for in determining what sites should be highly ranked for a particular search, it’s hard to know for certain what (if any) practices need to change in your SEO strategy.
A good rule of thumb is to continue with the adage “content is king.” Google has stated in the past that it would be putting an increased emphasis on delivering high-quality, relevant content in its search results—and since RankBrain also seems to be focused on delivering extremely relevant and useful results, it stands to reason that the better your content is, the more likely it will get ranked highly for a wide variety of search queries.
Another useful step would be to examine the results of your SEO strategy over the last few months. Since RankBrain was introduced earlier this year, it stands to reason that it will have been affecting your search rankings as well. If your standings in search results have been regressing in recent months, it’s probably a good idea to take a closer look at what your SEO strategy entails and double down on making sure all content you produce—both on-site and for third-party content marketing purposes—is of the highest quality possible.
In a perfect world, Google would not only reveal exactly how RankBrain works, but also what the two other most influential ranking factors are. But since that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon, we’ll simply keep watching the latest marketing trends and adjusting our strategies accordingly.
