If you have been frustrated for years because Google has not said how their ranking algorithm works, then you will be thrilled to know that Google has officially stated what the top three elements are. Those three factors are content, links pointing to your site and RankBrain. In a Q & A on March 23, Google's Andrey Lipattsev discussed ranking factors. Lipattsev is a Search Quality Senior Strategist at Google. Lipattsev didn't discuss the order these three factors rank in although in the past RankBrain has been listed as the third-place factor. How does knowing these factors help your site rank better?
Content
For a long time the adage that "content is king" has been tossed around. Certainly, it has always been clear that to reach your prospects and customers, your content needs to meet their needs or answer their questions. In the last few years, Google has made strides in penalizing poor content, spam sites and content farms. These indicators have made it obvious that Google is working to eliminate bad sites from their search engine or at the very least penalize them so much that searchers will not dig deep enough to find them. Therefore, what you should take away from this action is that you need to have good, meaningful and informative content for your site to rank. This news is not new.
Links to Your Site
It is not surprising, but interesting that links pointing to your site are so important. Not so long ago, Matt Cutts announced that Google was frowning on guest posts for the sake of creating backlinks. In other words, guest posts by experts on a topic are fine, but random guests posts are not. The reasoning behind this announcement was because many people were posting randomly around the web to create backlinks. If Google is admitting that backlinks are valuable, then it makes sense that fake ones are bad. What you can take away from this point is that natural backlinks are the best, and you will get those by having (you guessed it) valuable content that other people want to link to.
RankBrain
RankBrain is an artificial intelligence that Google uses to categorize and find sites. RankBrain does not create or maintain the entire search algorithm, although it does have a learning function so that it can continue to better process the search results. It is a tool used to help configure how Google's search algorithm works. Knowing about RankBrain doesn't really offer any clues to how you can improve your own chances of ranking except that it is cool to learn about its artificial intelligence. So far RankBrain is not in charge of the algorithm, so humans are still safe.
Where Does that Leave SEO?
You might think that the knowledge of the top three factors of Google's search algorithm would help define SEO for webmasters. However, in truth this news does not tell us anything that we don't already know. Hopefully, you are already working to provide your readers with the best possible content. And you are already getting links back to your content from relevant sites. Unless you know how to secretly hack RankBrain, you are in the same shoes you were in before knowing all this. And there are many other factors we don't know. To read about other factors, you can take a look at Search Engine Land's The Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors.
