Can machines learn to create organic answers – outside of what they have been explicitly programmed to do? Ryan answers this question and explains how Google is using machine learning to change the face of SEO.
Ryan Jones of SapientNitro #SEJSummit: The Future is Today
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2. #SEJSummit
@RyanJones
3 Takeaways
1. Focus On Searcher Intent
2. Don’t ask “how do I..” ask “what do they..”
3. Don’t React To Change, Leverage It
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3. #SEJSummit
@RyanJones
• Manager SEO & Analytics – SapientNitro
• 2006 Time Person of the Year
• Chief Evangelism Officer - WTFSEO.com
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17. #SEJSummit
@RyanJones
Go Read Eric Enge’s Post:
stonetemple.com/rankbrain-myth-busting/
Also AJ Kohn’s Post:
blindfiveyearold.com/rankbrain-survival-guide
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19. #SEJSummit
@RyanJones
What RankBrain Does NOT Do
• Anything with links
• Penalize sites
• Change any ranking factors about your site.
Google never said it was a “ranking factor” they said it was the “3rd most important signal
contributing to results.”
That’s because RankBrain helps understand your query – and better decide what sites are
relevant.
20. #SEJSummit
@RyanJones
Crawling
•Discovery
•Finding Pages
Indexing
•Like a book. List of words on pages.
•Paragraph vectors, B+ trees, nofollow, canonical, etc.
Retrieval (relevance)
•How relevant is this to my query?
•Query Understanding, entities (is jaguar an animal or a car?)
Ranking (Post Retrieval)
•Order by pagerank desc limit 10
•Penalties, Speed, HTTPS, Mobile Friendly, etc.
How A
Search
Engine
Works
Note: Google
doesn’t separate
these. This is for
illustration
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22. #SEJSummit
@RyanJones
• 10 years ago we
talked about TF-
IDF
• Relevance was
measured against
the corpus of
results.
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28. #SEJSummit
@RyanJones
Why We Search Doesn’t Change
Stop trying to give
me words on a
page.
Give me a solution.
Help me accomplish
something.
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29. #SEJSummit
@RyanJones
How do we leverage that?
Stop Asking:
How Do I Rank For
“Keyword?”
What Tricks Can I Use?
Start Asking:
What Would People Search for
“Keyword” Find useful? What Are
They Trying To Do?
Then Build Something To Help
Them