Posted on by Bob Ottaway

TOP GOOGLE RANKING FACTORS: TRIAL TESTIMONY

We research extensively to keep our clients on Page One of Google for as many keyword phrases as possible, so the testimony of Pandu Nayak, Head of Search at Google, at the anti-trust trial of US v. Google has caught our attention.   As we dissect the trial, we will bring you some previously undivulged data and facts from Google:

  1. HOW MANY RANKING FACTORS ARE THERE?  “Maybe over a hundred,” according to Nayak’s testimony.
  2. WHAT ARE THE KEY SIGNALS ACCORDING TO NAYAK:
    1. The document (“the words on the page and so forth”)
    2. Topicality
    3. Page Quality
    4. Reliability
    5. Localization
    6. Navboost (Google product)
  3. NAYAK’S FULL QUOTE FROM THE TRIAL:
    “I mean, overall, there’s lots of signals.  You know, maybe over a hundred signals.  But for retrieving documents, the document itself is perhaps the most important thing, to get it down to tens of thousands.  And then after that, there are many factors, again.  There are sort of code IR (information retrieval) type, the information retrieval type algorithms which cull topicality and things, which are really important.  There is page quality.  The reliability of results that’s another big factor.  There’s localization type things that go on there.  And there is navboost also in that.”
  4. WHAT IS NAVBOOST?  It is trained on user data.  It memorizes all the clicks on queries from the past 13 months.  It helps reduce documents to a smaller set for Google’s machine learning systems— but it can’t help with ranking for any “documents that don’t have clicks.”

Our acknowledgment to Danny Goodwin for his December 5, 2023, article on this topic in Search Engine Land, where he wrote about much of the above findings.  This is just the beginning.  There is still much more to unpack.

Onward & Upward!

For more information: https://superiorhomeservicesmarketing.com/blog/about-us-page-is-vital/