Recently, Gary Illyes of Google published another video entitled “How Search Works,” and it’s an inside look into how search queries get interpreted and ranked. This presentation by Gary outlines the ranking process that each SEO professional needs to understand.
Gary commences his presentation by reaffirming what the primary objective of the search is: returning results consisting of high-quality, trustworthy, and relevant web pages.
Later in this video, he continues to explore the concept of relevance makes something relevant to a user is fundamentally different from pure semantic relevance. User relevance involves personalization on a lot of different levels, such as past searches, topicality, and geolocation. In this context, “topicality” would refer to relevancy to current trends and interests.
While many SEOs focus their target on semantic word meanings, Gary emphasizes considering relevance from the user’s perspective and says it is made up of many elements.
Gary then explains the first step that Google takes in ranking the web pages by parsing the search query, including several activities such as cleanup, removing stop words from the query, finding entities for which stop words are needed, and expanding queries when necessary.
Examples include “and,” “in,” “is,” “on,” and “the”; these are stop words because they occur frequently and do not contribute anything significant to the intent of the user. If stop words are removed, aside from cleaning up the query, it helps in database optimization, thus giving way to faster processing times.
Gary also points out that many phrases depend on stop words to make sense. This, he thinks, can be well understood by citing the example of “Statue Of Liberty” where the word “of” is required for clarity and meaning.
The Query Expansion
Query Expansion involves combining search queries with similar ones. For instance, “car dealership” and “auto dealership” are treated as interchangeable, allowing a webpage focused on one to rank for queries about the other, even if the exact phrase isn’t present on the page.
After understanding the query, the parsed version is forwarded to the index for ranking.
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The Ranking
About Ranking, Gary explains that hundreds of thousands of matching webpages are passed to the index for review.
According to him, the main factors to consider include:
- Relevance for the user: This is related to hundreds of aspects.
- The most important factor in relevance would have to do with webpage content.
- Other factors in relevance are location of the user, language, and device type.
- The quality of the webpage or overall site is another important ranking factor. The quality here refers to the novelty of the content and the relative importance of the webpage on the internet.
- The surfaced features of the search vary by query and are considered for ranking.
Gary gives a weightier tone on relevance to the user when it comes to ranking and how appropriate the search result is to the needs of the user. That sounds like a fairly simple statement, but profound ramifications emanated from that. While many SEOs focus on semantic relevance, the level of relevance to the user is very important.
More often than not, there is meaning and even context to the query beyond semantic meaning, which Gary goes into great detail about in the rest of the presentation, and brings up other ways to approach understanding user relevance.
Key points he discusses include:
“Hundreds of factors determine relevance…
…actual contents of the page being the most important one,”
…user’s location, language and device type”
Determining relevance goes beyond factors like anchor text, entity analysis, user intent analysis, and semantic keyword SEO. It’s a multifaceted process that involves considering various aspects beyond these typical SEO elements.
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Uniqueness of Content
Gary’s emphasis on the uniqueness of content is intriguing. Many SEO practitioners interpret “uniqueness” narrowly, focusing on avoiding word-for-word duplication. However, Gary highlights another dimension of uniqueness—being unlike anything else altogether.
It is a big concern when SEO strategies include competitor analysis as a primary step. This approach often leads to creating content similar to what’s already out there, assuming that’s what Google prefers. However, this can result in content that lacks uniqueness and fails to meet Google’s criteria, potentially leading to issues like the “discovered not indexed” status in Search Console.
Uniqueness has long been a focus for Google, and it’s a concept worth contemplating deeply in SEO strategies.
Google displays a wide array of search features, and according to Gary Illyes, their appearance depends on the specific query—different queries can trigger different features.
He mentioned:
“Based on the user’s query, the Search features that appear on the Search result pages may also change.”
Would you like to read more about “Google on How It Determined Quality Content For The Indexing Process” related articles? If so, we invite you to take a look at our other tech topics before you leave!
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