RankBrain and Google 2017

RankBrain cannot be considered a new algorithm.

Rather, I would say it includes several factors for displaying top results.

One year ago or two, Google announced an important change to its algorithm: introducing a new program called RankBrain (still a secret where and when this happened). What is RankBrain, how influences your searches and how can we use this to attract visitors from Google search?

It says that the focus is still on content, links to your site and popularity in the media. Moreover, the number 200 appears in writings about Google factors. Practically, mentally, statistically, I used all my SEO expertise to convert 1 page for a keyword and I ended up to be #1 for another keyword relevant to the original one. See below possible answers.

About RankBrain

An answer would be that RankBrain is an algorithm for interpreting user searches. In other words, through RankBrain, Google is trying to understand exactly what a user is looking for when typing something in Google.
For example: cat food price, how much does cat food cost, price food for cats

All of the above searches actually mean the same thing, and I mean a user wants to know how much the food for cat costs. Google tries to understand what each user actually wants and provide the best pages according to their quality, not according to how well they match exactly a few words.

What does RankBrain

No matter how advanced it may be, ultimately, RankBrain is just an algorithm and analyzes a series of parameters that Google monitors and attempts to make correlations between user searches and those parameters. It looks sophisticated, right? Actually, a (large) piece of code does all this.

For example, for the above searches, RankBrain might see that the time (spent by users on pages where many products and prices are displayed) is higher than for some items. In this case, Google will understand that users are looking for product information (cat food in this case) and will then try to provide pages with as much product and information as possible, including prices.

It would be possible to appear huge correlations between cat and food and prices and currency. After all, you want to see prices, right? And so Google could offer more pages with prices (numbers) even if the figures are not included in the initial searches.

Google tracks many parameters such as user physical location, internal and external links for a webpage, time spent on the page, CTR, content size, the presence of multimedia content, how new is the information and so on. As I understand, RankBrain wants to be an algorithm that correlates better these parameters with what each user is seeking online.

How to optimize for RankBrain

From the start, one thing is becoming clearer and this is the significance of matching words as accurately as possible will decrease. For example, for the search- cat food it will be much more effective to have a single page with rich content than having three pages, each built for a specific search.

My point of view, keywords will always remain vital – I do not see how otherwise a search engine might work. If I make a page titled “cat food” and talk about cat food, then that page can only be interpreted as a cat-food-page. The words used are and will remain important.

However, we will have to be a bit more creative when it comes to SEO, site content and page building. Each activity has a great number of searches, many of them different as words, but it means the same thing. Rather, I would be attentive to texts and media items inserted.

Start with users you want to attract. You know what they want, what and how they are looking for, and only after you build a website. Make an extensive keyword study, which has been and will be the starting point for anything that means making a site and SEO. Yes, the study of keywords was important, but from now on, you will have to think more about the logic of searches rather than their semantics.

Creativity and imagination of SEO doers have to grow. More than ever. And better than ever. If they want to get results, obvious.

Frankly, the SEO industry still uses articles with poor content, with exact-matched keywords, and a lot (and I mean a lot) of text and links. Yes, in some cases, still it works, but the best results will come when other signals are taken into account (pictures, video, time on the page, and so on).

Read about Google Brain, now part of Google Research.

Conclusion

RankBrain is no more than good content, good links, good popularity. This content is posted without any link, without any correlation with other posts or pages, without any intention for a specific keyword. What do you think, what position and for which keyword will be displayed in search results?