With the ever-changing landscape of SEO, it can take a lot of work to keep up with Google’s algorithm updates.
Knowing what factors influence your website’s ranking is essential for any successful SEO strategy. But with so much information out there, it can be challenging to know what works and what doesn’t when trying to optimize your website for search engine rankings.
In this blog post, we’ll look at the latest news about Google’s algorithm after Yandex leaked over 17,000 lists of ranking factors in early 2023. We’ll discuss how this information can help you create an effective SEO strategy that will get you the results you’re looking for!
What We Know So Far
Here’s a quick overview of what we know so far about Google’s ranking algorithm.
PageRank
PageRank is an algorithm that Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed in 1996 while they were working on their dissertation paper at Stanford University.
The algorithm has been used by Google since its inception and is one of the most important algorithms used to determine rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Though PageRank isn’t as heavily involved in ranking content in Google search results as it used to be, its algorithms are still very much alive and well. The leaked documents showed that Yandex uses its own version of Google’s PageRank technology to determine which pages should appear at the top of SERPs.
This explains why pages with more backlinks tend to rank higher than those without.
Multi-distributed Crawling
Both Google and Yandex use a stratified crawling system — meaning they analyze websites by crawling through different levels of web pages — to index websites.
However, there are differences between how these two search engines crawl websites.
For example, while Google’s crawling system is tripartite (meaning it divides web pages into three categories), Yandex is dual (dividing web pages into two categories). This allows for a more comprehensive analysis of each website and helps ensure that only relevant content appears in SERPs.
BERT
Both search engines also use BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) to understand better and process queries. BERT is an open-source natural language processing (NLP) framework that can be used to generate more nuanced results when users type in complex queries.
This ensures that users get the most accurate results possible when searching online.
Google Uses More Advanced NLP for Indexing
When it comes to indexing content, there’s no question that Google has a leg up on Yandex.
While Yandex can only index through bigrams and trigrams (two or three consecutive words), Google employs n-grams or phrase-based indexing, allowing for even more precise searches by using phrases instead of individual words or terms.
This leads to more accurate results when searching for complex topics or questions since it considers the full context behind each query.
What It Means for SEO and Digital Marketing
So, what does all this mean for your SEO and digital marketing strategy?
Confirmed Suspicions but Still a Lot Unexplored
Honestly, the leaked information only gives us a glimpse of what Google’s algorithm may look like.
However, based on this information, we can make some basic assumptions about Google’s algorithm.
For starters, it’s essential to focus on building high-quality backlinks, as they are still an important ranking factor in Google’s algorithm. This means that you should be putting effort into developing relationships with other websites and online influencers to get featured or linked from their content.
It’s also essential to ensure your website is optimized for desktop and mobile platforms, as this will help your rankings in the SERPs. Additionally, using BERT will help you create more targeted content that will be more likely to appear in search results.
Keep Your Content Usable, Relevant, and Authoritative
The most important thing to remember is that content should be valuable and useful for the reader. Even if your content passes all of Google’s ranking factors, it will still not rank well if it doesn’t provide any real value or information to the user.
Therefore, always ensure your content is informative, relevant, and authoritative to give people a reason to click through and read it.
Additionally, use on-page SEO techniques such as adequately formatted headings and internal linking to improve your website’s visibility.
Utilizing these methods and keeping up with the ever-changing landscape of search engine optimization, you can ensure your website stays visible and highly ranked in the SERPs.
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Our team can help design custom campaigns for you by developing targeted content or optimizing your website for the best performance.
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Written By: David Carpenter
