As Artificial Intelligence evolves, SEO strategies changes as well: Google has already started to implement some Artificial Intelligence tools within its algorithm, including RankBrain. It's a challenge but also an opportunity to re-think the way we formulate SEO strategy ;) Why is AI such a big game-changer when it comes to SEO? How can you adapt to remain in the top results despite these changes? Philippe Yonnet, is the general manager of Search Foresight, a fast-growing SEO Agency specialized in helping companies to define successful search and inbound marketing strategies. Philippe has more than 10 years experience and will give all the tips you need to rock your audience ;)

1. SEO & ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE:
THE NEW RULES TO STAY ON TOP!
BY PHILIPPE YONNET
#TFWORKSHOP

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4. #TFWORKSHOP
SEO & ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: THE NEW RULES TO STAY ON TOP!
PHILIPPE YONNET
GENERAL MANAGER OF SEARCH FORESIGHT
@CARIBOO_SEO

5. Search Foresight
SEO & Artificial Intelligence:
The new rules to stay on top!
STARTUP WORKSHOP
8 march 2016
The Family

6. SEARCH FORESIGHT
Search and inbound marketing agency

7. - 3 -
Our team of senior consultants help brands and major websites to increase
their visibility on search engines. We’re specialized in giving support for
international companies, and/or complex organizations. Our expertise cover
both technical and marketing areas, including all inbound marketing
channels.
/ SEARCH FORESIGHT IN A NUTSHELL
24
Seasoned SEO /
SEA
experts
+1000
Managed
projects
+80
Active clients
Double
expertise

8. / WHO AM I ?
PHILIPPE
YONNET
• Philippe YONNET, 50, has 13 years of experience in SEO, and
has been in the web marketing business for 17 years.
• He has served as a consultant for numerous high traffic
websites (Pages Jaunes, Rue du Commerce, Pixmania,
Cdiscount, Dailymotion, AuFeminin, LeGuide, Twenga,
Allociné, Ebay, Nokia, Fnac, SFR, Facebook, La Redoute…)
• Deputy General Manager at Aposition-Isobar (Iprospect)
from 2007 to 2010.
• In 2010 he moved to London, and joined Vivastreet, then
Twenga in 2011, as International SEO Director
• He then founded the Search Foresight Agency in 2012

9. And didn’t change a lot before 2007
- 5 -
Google was launched in 1998

10. And devices too…
- 6 -
But since 2008, the web has changed a lot !

11. 7
The amount of data to process is getting larger and
larger
8 Zettabytes = 8 x 10^21 !

12. - 8 -
And indexing the web is a real challenge

13. And they are more and more used to search things
- 9 -
Smartphones are everywhere

15. There are more and more connected devices
- 11 -
And mobile phones aren’t alone

16. - 12 -
The urge for real-time information

17. - 13 -
Google vs Twitter ?

18. But perhaps you didn’t notice
- 14 -
So Google has adapted quickly since 2008

19. - 15 -
SEO was about optimizing landing pages on popular
keywords
People spend a lot of time figuring out which
keywords are popular, and optimizing their pages
for search engines by including these keywords
inside the text copy.
In all SEO books, you’ll find comprehensive
guidelines and methods to optimize your landing
pages to rank on specific keywords
SEA / Adwords is based on keywords, and popular
queries as well.

20. Google is getting less and less stupid
- 16 -
Well, keywords are still important but…
Popular Search Engines like Google and Bing
used to be very stupid systems…
Their purpose was just to compute
Which documents included occurrences of the
keywords you entered in the input box
And which documents were the more similar to
your query, and which were the most important
ones
And in return to a query (formulated using
keywords, which is an awkward and unnatural
way of asking a question), they delivered 10 blue
links, and it was up to you to
Click on a blue link
Read the page to see if you can find the
information you’re looking for, and if not :
Click a link again
Read the page …
….

21. Google has become an « answer search engine »
- 17 -
Google wants to provide the information you want
What’s the answer for life, the universe, and
everything ?

22. Google has become an « answer search engine »
- 18 -
Google wants to provide the information you want

23. / The era of information extraction (IE vs IR)
- 19 -
The « Knowledge Graph »
500 millions entities, 3,5 billions « facts », 35000 different types of relationships
Well, that’s a lot, but answers are only available for a tiny percentage of informational queries!

24. / Google wants to discover more and more facts
- 20 -
Towards the « Knowledge Vault »

25. From IR to IE
Information retrieval :
– Classical way of looking for an information using a search
engine
« Information extraction »
– Named entity recognition
– Coreference identification (UN= United Nations but same
organisation designed by ONU in french…)
– Relationships extraction
– Extraction of data about events
– Extraction of terminologies

26. Named entities recognition

27. - 23 -
It’s a challenge, but Google gets good at it
People who type the query
Ice Cube, want information
about the rapper, not about
actual « cubes made of ice »

28. Well, Google is occupying the first position already
- 24 -
Fine, how can I rank first on an « answer search engine »
And there’s nothing like a « second
position ». Once the information has
been provided, then… that’s it.
But Google is still displaying its ten
blue links, and you can rank on those.
You may still receive a visit from
Google, if people are looking for
specific information that is not
provided directly on the page
=> A strategy based on middle tail /
long tail queries is more relevant than
before for these websites
Google is sending less clicks to
informational websites than before.

29. Even better : conversational search
/ with anaphora resolution

34. 30
Fine, how can I be first on a conversational search
engine ?
Well, it’s beginning to be tricky.
As far as informational queries are concerned, you
have to hope Google doesn’t know a unique answer
to provide, and will show 10 blue links as usual.
If Google can provide a unique answer, a fact, a
number… then Google will keep this search traffic
for itself.
But there is also the « featured snippets ». If you’re
the chosen source for the fact, and Google quotes
you, then its good… for branding (not sure people
will click on the link).
Of course, being a Google partner is a big
advantage.

35. Google wants to push information to you before you search for it
- 31 -
Even better : predictive search
If you have planned a
flight, then Google Now will
push you :
- The boarding pass
- When you need to
leave home
- Traffic status
- …

36. Well, open your apps and your data to Google Now
32
How can I get traffic from this feature ?
This feature is based upon information that Google
can gather on its own properties (Gmail, Google
Calendar, Google Maps etc…)
But if you open access to the data from :
- Your emails using structured data markups
- Your apps
Then Google Now can provide a nice search
experience for people using your services

37. Answers to questions are « concepts », not « keywords »
- 33 -
Yet even better, concept indexing
Hummingbird archiecture (sept 2013)

38. To understand what people are asking for helps to provide relevant answers
How does it work ?

39. - 35 -
Well, what does it change for SEO?
To rank well, your landing page should be
the best answer to a query.
To be the best answer is not to be the most
similar document to the query. It means,
you shouldn’t rank well on « pizzeria »
related queries, if you don’t cook and sell
pizzas …
Relevancy in search engines is getting
closer to what you find relevant in real life.
So be relevant in real life, create pages
that are good answers (concepts) to rank
well.

40. - 36 -
Artificial intelligence is more and more embedded
in these advanced functionalities
In natural language processing
In web mining and information extraction
In personal assistants
In image and facial recognition
In webspam identification
…

41. / AI features don’t make a machine to think as a human does
- 37 -
« Artificial Intelligence » is a misleading term
AI definition :
AI is the name of the academic field of study which
studies how to create computers and computer
software that are capable of intelligent behavior
AI refers very often to two groups of techniques
• Perception enhancement : neuronal networks, facial or
object recognition
• Machine learning
A piece of software using AI features doesn’t
understand its environment as a human does
Usually, it just mimics very specific aspects of
human intelligence

42. / AI is now embedded in Google’s core algorithm
38
Google is serious about AI

43. - 39 -
An AI specialist is now in charge of Google’s core
algorithm
John Giannandra has replaced Amit Singhal
This scottish scientist used to be chief of machine learning at
Google
Does it mean we’ll see more and more AI at work inside
Google’s core algorithm.

44. - 40 -
How to create spam filters using maching learning
Classifiers : spam, or not spam !
Used to be slow, and used to cost a lot of resources : now
SVM : support vector machines
Finding the formula that will make the same decision a human would, is converted to solving a geometry
problem => finding which « plane » will neatly separate items

45. - 41 -
For the machine, identifying spam becomes a piece of
cake
Everything that’s below the hyperplane is spam

46. Meet Panda & Penguin !
- 42 -
Google, machine learning and spam filters ?

47. The key to the mistery is in an interview from wired
- 43 -
Panda and machine learning
http://www.wired.com/2011/03/the-panda-that-hates-farms/all/
Wired.com: But how do you implement that algorithmically?
Cutts: I think you look for signals that recreate that same intuition, that same experience that you have as an
engineer and that users have. Whenever we look at the most blocked sites, it did match our intuition and
experience, but the key is, you also have your experience of the sorts of sites that are going to be adding value
for users versus not adding value for users. And we actually came up with a classifier to say, okay, IRS or
Wikipedia or New York Times is over on this side, and the low-quality sites are over on this side. And you can really
see mathematical reasons …
Singhal: You can imagine in a hyperspace a bunch of points, some points are red, some points are green, and in
others there’s some mixture. Your job is to find a plane which says that most things on this side of the place are
red, and most of the things on that side of the plane are the opposite of red.
Since the search engineers could not compute a signal for “would you trust this site with your credit card” they
had to look for other statistical measurements that would correspond highly with the answers provided in the
Quality Raters Survey.
Does it remind you of something

48. Google is getting better at identifying spam
- 44 -
What does it change ?
Manipulating off page criteria as the pagerank
has become tricky to do without being penalized
: Google is good at identifying (some) unnatural
links
As a result, inbound marketing strategies has
become the best way to reinforce signals about
importance (linkjuice), because they reinforce your
actual web presence
Sophisticated SEO schemes, or « grey » methods,
are now potentially discovered, and penalized
Example : content farms, thin affiliates
Black Hat methods still work (very) well, but the
risk of using them is now too high to rely on them
for legitimate businesses (you’ve been warned)

49. - 45 -
Integrating machine learning in the algorithm?
A schema from moz.com website (late 2015) :

50. Designed… ten years ago, launched in 2009
- 46 -
AI for search engines : an old idea
A spectacular and already old example : YANDEX
Its Matrixnet architecture is based upon machine learning

51. - 47 -
Even better : neural networks for search !
« classical » approaches have reached their limits (perceptron => but used in Support
vector machines
A promising approach : « deep learning »

52. / 2012 : Google brain
- 48 -
Google masters deep learning
Google brain
2015 : Google Deepmind beats the Go European Champion

53. - 49 -
« Words embedding » a new approach

54. With the vectors obtained, you can guess new information using
- 50 -
Et… tada !

55. / Greg Corrado - The engineer behind Rankbrain
- 51 -
How IA is applied to google’s Algo : Rankbrain

56. / in place since early 2015
- 52 -
How IA is applied to google’s Algo : Rankbrain
By computing an average vector for a group of keywords, it’s possible to compute a vector for a syntagm, a
phrase, a sentence

57. / Alongside the « old » algo
- 53 -
Word2vec is used twice in Google’s algo
1. Query expansion
If a rare query is typed, the query processor tries to find a similar query with sufficent data to decide what kind of result page
is relevant for this query :
Uses query sessions history for known queries, to achieve query intent recognition
2. Similarity computation
The similarity between query and document can be calculated as easily as with Salton cosine.
It seems this approach is good at increasing recall without degrading precision.
Relevancy of SERPs is improved by a supplemental signal (score). This score is computed using a method very close to
pagerank computation.

58. - 54 -
Bye bye keywords ?
Concept indexing
Word2vec

59. - 55 -
What’s next ?

60. 56
Augmented reality as an interface

61. - 57 -
Search via connected objects
Search Foresight 2014 ©
Agence Conseil en Stratégie

62. 58
The universal personal assistant

63. Class of objects recognition
- 59 -
Automatic image tagging

64. / Named entities association with images
- 60 -
Face recognition and object recognition
Search Foresight 2014 ©
Agence Conseil en Stratégie

65. / Monument recognition
- 61 -
Understanding images

66. / extracting texts from images (OCR on stéroïds)
- 62 -
Understanding images

67. Automatic captions
- 63 -
Indexing hidden information from videos

68. - 64 -
What conclusions can be drawn for a startup ?
Google wants to keep more and more traffic for himself : so don’t count too much on tapping into
organic traffic fire hose to get visits in the future. You need to diversify your channels
Google is good at innovation, but as far as search is concerned, they are very conservative. Their old
algo is still prominent (for now).
Old ways of optimizing websites still work
New ways are emerging
• Schema.org markups, featured and rich snippets
• Concept based content creation
Information
retrieval system,
with similarity
computation
Concept indexing
and concept
based retrieval
Artificial
intelligence
Rankbrain
Query Intent
Recognition
Fact, Entities,
Relations indexing
and retrieval

69. Thank you !
Questions ?

70. Twitter : @S4sight
Website
www.search-foresight.com
Email
contact@search-foresight.com
Tel : +33 1 74 18 29 42
Adress SF agency :
55 rue Anatole France
92300 Levallois-Perret
- 66 -
Search Foresight : to contact us

71. www.search-foresight.com

72. QUESTIONS?

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