GOOGLE’S SECRET WEAPON AGAINST SEO – “RANKBRAIN”

In 2013, an update was made to Colibrí, which was the algorithm for Google at the time. This change led to major changes in the landscape and gave greater attention to the search intentions of users, as well as the context.

This gave rise to the implementation of RankBrain for machine learning. However, this was not new for Google, since its Panda (Google’s algorithm during 2011) had also done it. With Panda, it was possible that through the interactions on the web, to know if the content published on a website was of quality or not.

On the other hand, with RankBrain, it is intended that the search engine not only considers what words are used, but it also detects if the words are well written or not.

Its purpose in technical terms is that words become vectors, i.e., mathematical entities to be understood by the machine. You yourself should, at some point, use ambiguous or colloquial terms to do some search on Google.

That is why RankBrain is expected to come up with the search responses because it has already learned from searches that have been made previously. That is, it automatically learns from past experiences with other users and refines the search more and more.

It has also been said that this artificial intelligence system can almost reach the level of ANI (Artificial Narrow Intelligence), which refers to a limited intelligence but without becoming aware.

And although the subject is quite interesting, you will not stop wondering how this will affect all of the SEO and the content that you have already posted for your brand or that you plan to post.

So stay with us to learn more about Google’s algorithm.

What is RankBrain?

RankBrain is an artificial intelligence system that has been in Google since 2015, as part of the search algorithm Colibrí.

According to Google, of the three million searches that they have each day, 15% deal with words and combinations that are not easily understood or in the form in which they were written by the algorithm since they are usually colloquial expressions.

Through the automatic self-learning, RankBrain is nourished with knowledge with the totality of the searches that have ever been made on the search engine. So, RankBrain’s way of working is to interpret the words or sentences of each search in order to deduce the intentions of the users.

How does the new Google algorithm work?

RankBrain’s way of operating is to select a database of more than one billion gigabytes in the Google index, but this goes further than the simple collation of words since Artificial Intelligence is used.

The semantic search is that the words are not only seen in a static way, but that the algorithm finds their meaning, and Google was already implementing this with Hummingbird, as we mentioned previously.

However, RankBrain uses the knowledge acquired in other searches to find the meaning of words.

With this algorithm, you can know what the user’s intention is by registering the semantics of the query, with a global sense.

In this way, RankBrain deduces what the user is looking for through what has been learned, with previous experience, and predicts the words by solving ambiguities or unknown terms.

The idea is that this algorithm can give consultants the best search results.

Although Google does not reveal how this algorithm manages to do all this; experts can deduce that it is about the use of vectors that allow the engines to make semantic relationships.

And this conclusion is reached because, during 2013, Google launched Word2Vec, which is an automatic learning software with open codes that lets you compare and measure the semantic relationships of the words entered.

For this, the use of a multidimensional vector space is made in which each word of the linguistic corpus is represented by a vector; therefore, the more dimensions that are selected, the more word relationships the software can recognize.

After this, the vectors are introduced into a neural network that, with the support of automatic learning, allows relating the words that have been placed in the same vector context.

Therefore, the similarity between these vectors is calculated by a cosine distance between -1 and +1.

This is how the neural network achieves its learning: by providing any linguistic corpus to the software as input, the corresponding vectors will be given as output, and this allows us to evaluate the proximity or semantic distance of the words that are in the said corpus.

In this way, if the software were to face a new input, the learning algorithm will provide the ability to readjust the vector space and create new semantic connections or return previous results.

This is why many experts say that RankBrain operates in a similar way, with quite similar mathematical operations.

How does RankBrain modify the SERP?

Search Engine Result Page has been modified or affected by RankBrain, and after what we have seen, it should be obvious to you. We know that the RankBrain operates with artificial intelligence and, therefore, this will know if you are cheating the system.

If you fill your website or blog with keywords, but nobody clicks on it, RankBrain will penalize you and leave you isolated in the web positioning.

With its automatic learning, you will understand that your content is not what your users are looking for and thus modifies the SERP.

This is useful, then, the search engine will know exactly what we are looking for, but at the same time it is worrisome for many websites, so paying special attention to your content should be one of your priorities.

Conclusion

Artificial intelligence (AI) is not a subject that should be taken lightly. It is fascinating, as well as disturbing. The sites must be designed so that Google’s new algorithm, instead of separating them, favors them, which should not necessarily be difficult.

Start by thinking about how to generate more specific content for more specific audiences and, if you are an SME, we believe that RankBrain falls to you like a glove.

If you use local terms and start thinking as your audience thinks, your chances of success in the SERP will increase.