Rand Fishkin, Wizard of Moz
| @randfish | rand@moz.com Ranking Signals of the Future A look at what inputs search engines may adopt in the future and how it impacts the marketing we do today.

Find These Slides Online at:
bit.ly/futuresignals

#1 Usage Data of Pages
and Sites

10,000 visits/day +50% growth last
6 months 3.7 pages/session 3 visits/unique user/month 6,000 visits/day -10% growth last 6 months 1.2 pages/session 1.4 visits/unique user/month

Maybe I should send searchers
to the page w/ the greater visitor loyalty & engagement.

Patent, Analysis on SEO by
the Sea

Ha!

This type of ranking input
could be behind the strong performance of popular brand sites on queries where classic SEO elements are lacking Poor keyword targeting, crap relevance, few links, but the sites probably have stronger traffic/engagement than the competition.

Via Searchmetrics’Ranking Factors Click-Through-Rate showed
a 0.67 correlation This May Explainthe High Correlationof CTR w/ Rankings

#2 Accuracy vs. Popularity of
Information

Nailed It! Rank ‘em high,
boys.

As Google’s research showed, PageRank
and accuracy of information have a poor correlation on the web.

By looking at multiple sets
of data across sites & pages, an algorithm could determine the consistency of accuracy shown by a site.

Paper from Google Researchers, Analysis
by NPR

Consistently accurate facts could raise
a site’s rankings, especially in areas (like health) where Google weights accuracy more heavily. Less likely to rank. More likely to rank.

#3 Query Structure as an
Anchor-Text-Like Signal

Many searchers using query structures
in a particular fashion could connect brands and modifiers to keywords

Looks familiar

Popular searches around a brand
could indicate associations that manifest in ranking inputs.

That ranking might be at
partially, causal, rather than mere coincidence.

#4 Brands as Entities, Entities
as Answers

More and more brands are
becoming entries in Google’s Knowledge Graph

IMO, these brand dropdowns suggest
an implicit bias toward accumulating brand associations and showing them off to searchers

In many competitive SERPs, there
seems to be a correlation between brand dropdowns and ranking higher.

Some brands get so tightly
connected to keywords, they become nearly analogous with the query

Suggest also shows us brand
queries that earn strong connections to URLs

Even some generic queries bring
back branded domain suggestions

an experiment!
Let’s try

Call Out Your Answer: What
site would you expect to see when you searched for this?

Yup.
Yup.
Yup.
Yup.
Weird.

Call Out Your Answer: What
site would you expect to see when you searched for this?

Yup. Yup. Yup. Yup. Yup.
Yup. Yup.

Call Out Your Answer: What
site would you expect to see when you searched for this?

Maybe?
Yup.
Yup.
Yup.
Maybe?

Call Out Your Answer: What
site would you expect to see when you searched for this?

Maybe?
Yup.
Yup.
Yup.
Yup.

Best Way to Rank in
2018? “Yup.”Find a way to be the first on everyone’s mind.

#5 Tracing the Visit Path
to an Answer

Problem-solving on the web often
looks something like this: Broad search Narrower search Even narrower search Website visit Website visit Brand search Social validation Highly-specific search Type-in/direct visit Completion of Task

Google wants to do this:
Broad search All the sites (or answers) you probably would have visited/sought along that path Completion of Task

If Google sees that many
people who perform these types of queries:

Eventually end their queries on
the topic after visiting: The Ramen Rater

They might use the clickstream
data to help rank that site higher, even if it doesn’t have traditional ranking signals

They’re definitely getting and storing
it.

Google was just granted an
interesting patent that suggested a similar process Patent Application from Google, Analysis by Bill Slawski

#6 Weighting Elements of User
Experience

Patent Application from Google, Analysis
on SEOByTheSea Ever since Panda, Google’s been trying to surface not just quality content, but “high quality websites.”

If they aren’t already doing
it, Google’s at least thinking about how to measure UX and rank sites that do it better, higher.

#7 Replacing Flawed Humans w/
Deep Learning Machines

Jeff Dean’s Slides on Deep
Learning Are a Must Read for SEOs

Google’s Deep Learning system studied
YouTube clips and eventually invented its own classification/concept of “cats”

Replace YouTube with the Web
and cats with any given search query, and it’s not hard to imagine Google creating a deep learning ranking algorithm

Google knows there’s two, but
based on my footprint, it biases to the one matching my behavior, past queries, geography, etc.

In the future, even Google’s
search quality engineers may have no idea why something ranks or whether they’re using a particular factor in the ranking algorithm. The machine will simply ask “what algorithm produces results that searchers engage with best?” then make it.

strange path… Google seems to
be going down a

Total searchers, number of searchers,
& searches per searcher are all going up Via RKG’s Quarterly Digital Marketing Report

Is Google sacrificing ad impressions
to make searchers happier?

Are they willing to take
away queries that provide revenue? These searches could have created revenue, but Google’s pre-empting w/ direct navigation to URLs

I am too.
Skeptical?

IMO, Google’s thinking long term.
They want addicted searchers providing data about themselves so they can charge more per ad unit. Via Search Engine Land

Via RKG Report Facebook has
shown Google that more data about users yields more dollars per impression and click.

I think Google will chase
better UX to almost any extent in order to keep searchers & get data, even at the cost of their existing model. Almost unreal that Google does this w/o AirBnB paying for an ad. Via Tom Anthony’s Post

Google will chase better UX
to almost any extent in order to keep searchers & get data, even at the cost of their existing model My Guess:

Rand Fishkin, Wizard of Moz
| @randfish | rand@moz.com bit.ly/futuresignals