RankBrain Is Here to Stay: Will Your Site Survive?

RankBrain is Google’s new ranking algorithm, and it is designed to help Google provide better answers for those obscure queries that it has never seen before. There are a few thousand queries that are searched for thousands (or in some cases millions) of times per day, but then there are other queries that see only one or two searches – and Google needs to find a way to understand the quality of the results it serves up for them.

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Answering the Right Questions

It’s important to understand that RankBrain doesn’t make Google ‘think for itself’ in the way we understand thinking, but it does help Google learn the markers of a high-quality website so that it can provide better answers the next time one of those queries is searched for, and provide better answers for other unique queries too.

Google’s Machine Learning tries to understand how certain words tend to come together to create context – Google and Android, Apple and iPhone, or Japan and sushi, for example. Sometimes it gets things wrong, but it has come a long way in the last few years.

Google rankings are based on hundreds of factors. You can’t control them all, but you can control the content you post and help to create the right context around your posts. If you want to be seen favourably by RankBrain, then information-rich (not keyword-rich) articles are definitely the way to go, and they will rank you for keywords you haven’t even predicted yet.

Surviving in a Learning World

If you want your website to succeed, then you need to make sure your content, design and hosting are on point. If you’re targeting an audience in the South East, for example, then a website designer in Cheltenham such as http://www.16i.co.uk/ could be perfect for their combination of local knowledge and UK hosting.

In terms of content, think about the long tail – the questions that users will really have, and what they will want to know. RankBrain isn’t about high-competition keywords; it’s about those things that only someone in your area with one specific problem will type into a search engine. If only you can solve that problem, and if you can get yourself noticed by Google in that sort of context, your website will do well.