1. Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain
Patrick Stox & JR Oakes

2. Google uses over 200 ranking factors, some of which have more than 50 variations.
Patrick | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain

3. In March of this year, Google identified 3 as the most important.
Patrick | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain

4. Content | Links | RankBrain
Patrick | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain

5. Content Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain

6. Content is more than words on a page.
Patrick | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain

7. Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain

8. Relevance and Experience are important to Rank
Content
Relevance and Experience
are important to Rank
Patrick | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain

9. Content
Patrick | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain

10. Content
Patrick | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain

11. Content is. . . An experience Something that fulfills an intent
Something you need to trust
Something you won’t wait for
Patrick | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain

12. Make sure your Content is:
Useful and informative
More valuable and useful than other sites
Credible
High-quality
Engaging
Patrick | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain

13. Content quality signals you control:
Broken links
Wrong information
Grammatical mistakes, Spelling mistakes, Reading level
Excessive distractions
Page load speed
Website features
Intent (Know, Know Simple, Do, Device Action, Website, Visit-in-person)
Authority and Comprehensiveness
Patrick | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain

14. Links Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain

15. Can Links Be Done Without?
“We have run experiments like that internally, and the quality looks much, much worse. It turns out backlinks, even though there’s some noise and certainly a lot of spam, for the most part, are still a really, really big win in terms of quality of our search results. So we’ve played around with the idea of turning off backlink relevance, and at least for now, backlink relevance still really helps in terms of making sure that we return the best, most relevant, most topical set of search results.”
Matt Cutts 2014
Patrick | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain

16. Links
Patrick | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain

17. Links
Patrick | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain

18. Good links Bad Links Links
Patrick | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain

19. The Good Internal vs External Location matters Citations Redirects
Links
The Good
Internal vs External
Location matters
Citations
Redirects
Anchor text matters
Relevant
Authoritative
Patrick | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain

20. The Bad Buying/selling links Link networks Reciprocal links
Comment spam
Forum spam
Article directories
PBNs
Generic directories
Press releases
Guest posts
Social bookmarking
Patrick | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain

21. Links
Create your own opportunities for links by opening up opportunities to write for others.
Patrick | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain

22. RankBrain Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain

23. RankBrain
What We Know
RankBrain does not affect crawling or crawl budgets (source)
RankBrain is part of the overall Hummingbird algorithm … Hummingbird also contains other parts with names familiar to those in the SEO space, such as Panda, Penguin and Payday designed to fight spam, Pigeon designed to improve local results, Top Heavy designed to demote ad-heavy pages, Mobile Friendly designed to reward mobile-friendly pages and Pirate designed to fight copyright infringement. (source)
RankBrain is one of the “hundreds” of signals that go into an algorithm that determines what results appear on a Google search page and where they are ranked (source)
Patrick | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain

24. RankBrain
What We Know
“It’s especially helpful on long-tail queries, such as the 15% never seen before each day.” (source)
RankBrain has become the third-most important signal contributing to the result of a search query (source)
While Google didn’t give groups of searches, the Bloomberg article did have a single example of a search where RankBrain is supposedly helping. Here it is: What’s the title of the consumer at the highest level of a food chain (source)
Patrick | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain

25. RankBrain
What We Know
One fresh example: “How many tablespoons in a cup?” Google said that RankBrain favored different results in Australia versus the United States for that query because the measurements in each country are different, despite the similar names. (source)
“Can you get a 100 percent score on Super Mario without a walk-through?” There is a negative term there that is very hard to catch with the regular systems that we had, and in fact our old query parsers actually ignored the “without” part. (source)
Gary Illyes used a water bottle to explain RankBrain. How do you know it’s water? Things like it’s clear, in a bottle, liquid, refreshing, it even says water.
Patrick | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain

26. RankBrain
What We Know
All learning that RankBrain does is offline, Google told us. It’s given batches of historical searches and learns to make predictions from these. (source)
Google reconfirmed to us that there is a component where RankBrain is directly contributing somehow to whether a page ranks. (source).
Patrick | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain

27. RankBrain
Important Concepts
Click-through data has proven to be a critical resource for improving search ranking quality … in which the conditional probability of a click on a document x given position i is predicated on the marginal probability of the document x being relevant to the query and the marginal probabilities of documents at positions 1,...,i (source)
Language Modeling, a task central to language understanding. We extend current models to deal with two key challenges present in this task: corpora and vocabulary sizes, and complex, long term structure of language. (source)
Glove vectors / Word2vec / query and entity disambiguation important.
Patrick | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain

28. Resources Google’s SEO Starter Guide (source)
Google Search Quality Rating Guidelines (source)
Google Webmaster Guidelines (source)
Moz Beginners Guide To SEO (source)
Northcutt Google Ranking Factors (source)
Backlinko Google Ranking Factors (source)
Moz Search Engine Ranking Factors (source)
Patrick | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain

29. Slides available above
The End
Slides available above
Patrick | JR Oakes @jroakes
Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & RankBrain