iGB Affiliate 55 Feb/Mar | Page 14

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 10 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