By now you guys have heard of Artificial intelligence and its usage in digital economy, AI is changing SEO entirely different way and many of us might not have realized how fast the SEO industry is changing.
So if you still follow old SEO rules to promote your business/site then it’s high time, you better get rid of them because old SEO rules are no longer applicable. You need to update your SEO rule book to stay ahead in SEO industry.
RankBrain
Before we go deep down on AI and SEO, I would like to talk about RankBrain from Google, the new artificial intelligence machine learning algorithm that process the search results.
As we all know, every search result has a different mixture of algorithms and RankBrain is literally customizing the algorithms for each search result.
It means some search results, RankBrain might learn that most important signal is the META title and in another search results META title is the least signal and maybe Pagerank gets more signal.
How RankBrain operates?
RankBrain is being taught what good and bad sites look like. Each industry vertical has different examples of “Good” and “Bad” sites as different verticals have different templates and different structure of data altogether.
When RankBrain operates, it is essentially learning what the correct “settings” are for each environment. As you might have guessed by now, these settings are completely dependent on the vertical on which it is operating.
So, for example, in the marketing technology, Google knows that a site like Telloquent.com is a reputable site that they would like to have near the top of their searchable index.
Any site that looks like the structure of Telloquent’s site will be associated with the “good” camp. Similarly, any site that looks like the structure of a known spammy site in the marketing technology vertical will be associated with the “bad” camp.
So the Good and Bad site will be benchmark for other sites in a vertical and based on this search results will get process, RankBrain will give importance to those sites which matches to Good site.
Backlinks also smell fishy
SEO guys are very smart with getting backlinks that ultimately provides link juice (power and equity) to the site.
Now it’s time to stick with in linking neighborhood as RaknBrain will find out if something is different from backlinks profile in your verticals.
Let’s take an example of a company which has the site related to marketing technology. RankBrain will compare every aspects of this site with the best and worst sites of the marketing technology industry. So, naturally, the backlink profile of this site will be compared to the backlink profiles of these best and worst sites.
Let’s say that reputable site has backlink from the following neighborhood – Marketing, Technology and Advertising
If the site decides to get backlinks from an Auto site, RankBrain is going to see this and notice that this backlink profile looks a lot different than the typical reputable site and lots of spammy sites also have backlinks from the auto site. Your website rank and traffic may take hit.
Few things are certain in SEO, like:
- Most sites will need to stay niche to avoid misclassification
- Each site should mimic the structure and composition (not exactly) of their respective top sites in the vertical.