TRAFFIC
RANKING IS AN
ENGAGEMENT GAME
SEO is morphing from gaming Google to helping Google, and delivering the most satisfying websites
possible, argues Nick Garner of Oshi bitcoin casino. Here he maps Google’s multi-faceted efforts on
this front, and asks why he seems to be one of the few people talking about engagement and user
satisfaction driving rankings.
PSSST… I HAVE a secret for you.
Ranking on Google is an engagement
game.
There it is, now you know. I could
stop here, but I guess you want more
explanation and background?
OK, I’ll dig into what’s going on
with Google’s search algorithm around
engagement and talk about how you, as
an affiliate can become more engaging to
a user.
Google algorithm
The micro executive summary:
●●links don’t work like they used to
●●you can’t easily rank sites which have no
real value to users
There are a number of components to
think about when looking at the overall
picture with Google and its algorithm. By
putting all these things together, you’ll get
a better sense of the scale of change that is
going on right now.
By the way, I use the term satisfying a lot
in his article, because it’s what Google uses.
If you look at the definition of satisfying
as being ‘“to fulfill the desires, expectations,
needs, or demands of (a person, the mind,
etc.); give full contentment”, you can see it’s
a pretty good word to use in this context.
Quality Rater Guidelines
As covered by my article in the last issue
of iGB Affiliate, Google have voluntarily
released a set of guidelines which are
used by their team of quality raters. These
people evaluate websites and assess them
for quality. In this case, ‘quality’ is based on
user satisfaction.
The guidelines are the clearest and most
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iGB Affiliate Issue 55 FEB/MAR 2016
thorough set of instructions for anybody
who wants to build a website that users
want. One fascinating aspect of these is
there is no talk about on-site optimisation
or links.
If you’re familiar with artificial
intelligence, you’ll know that in order to
the celebrity or the hotel in the city?
RankBrain’s job is to make sense of this
and serve up the right website related to
that question. What this means for the rest
of us is that Google now has a much more
holistic understanding of what a website is
about than ever before. A consequence of
“It Is commonly accepted that Google disavow was its
fairly ‘evil’ way of duping the Webmaster community into
supplying it with vast training sets of data to help identify
the kinds of sites which supply low quality/paid-for links.”
make ‘intelligent’ software knowledgeable,
it has to have a set of training data, and
it’s pretty obvious that the quality rater
program is all about training their artificial
intelligence algorithms.
that is websites don’t have to be as well
“on-site optimised” as they were in
the past, simply because Google can
understand the inference and meaning of
content, much like you or I.
Penguin
Panda
On the theme of algorithms and artificial
intelligence, it is commonly accepted that
Google disavow was its fairly “evil” way
of duping the Webmaster community into
supplying it with vast training sets of data
to help identify the kinds of sites which
supply low quality/paid-for links.
As we know, Penguin, the algorithm
behind Google’s aggressive culling of bad
links, is driven by artificial intelligence and
only improves over time.
Panda has recently been rolled into
Google’s core algorithm. Its job is to assess
the quality of websites and pull out sites
which have too much duplicate content
or don’t appear to offer user satisfaction.
I am personally of the view that Panda
was trained through the Quality Rater
Guidelines dataset.
As an aside, I understand the Panda
refresh won’t be real-time, but will be
more frequent.
RankBrain
Engagement driving rankings
This is now the third most powerful ranking
signal there is, and I bet many of you may
not have heard about it. Again, it’s driven
by artificial intelligence and makes sense of
unambiguous search queries. For example
if I said: “Paris Hilton”, am I talking about
There has been a lot of evidence showing
how Google’s rankings are massively driven
by engagement metrics. In other words,
sites that users seek out and click on from
search results, typically end up ranking
better. Of course there are other factors, but