Links or content: what is more important for Google? Translation of Matt Cutts Video Responses (Part I)

Today we have prepared a translation of a small selection of videos from the official Google Video Tools blog for Webmasters. These are answers to questions from users who sounded like the official position of a search engine in the current, 2014, and were voiced at the time by Matt Cutts (who left this post a little later). The questions are about ranking and its links to links. Users, like us, are interested in how relevant the links are and what other than links may affect the order of ranking pages. The translation and commentary are provided by the analytical department of the ALTWeb Group and the SERPClick project team , a tool for working with behavioral factors to improve ranking.

How is content ranked if it is not driven by many links [from external sites]?

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We already got acquainted with the next report of Yandex in our blog, which was devoted to the topic of indexing new pages. What are the chances that your new page will be indexed and noticed before others? During the study of the report, we concluded that the important factors will be the weight of the domain, as well as the data directly from the browser toolbar - the first visits. After the page is noticed, it will be in the queue for indexing and the question - what place will it take in this queue? - will be solved by predicting both the popularity of this page and the likely decline in this popularity. First you need to select the page that is relevant right now. This report was issued as a separate study, here we are dealing with the question of users roughly speaking in the "support" of Google.



Matt avoids complex designs and tries to explain everything as simply as possible on his fingers. In short, according to Matt, for a new page that is not yet hosted, the quality of the content will be a decisive factor in its ranking, as well as the request for which this page will be searched. According to him, if the request is quite rare, then it will be necessary to show the page that answers it.

It can be concluded that the links are relevant and the desire to get them to the new page is very justified. However, in addition to working on links, you can add behavioral factors that can work as a trigger for the search engine: most often, saying “quality of content”, search engine representatives directly or indirectly confirm the idea that this quality is expressed in the number of visits, the length of the session and the absence of return to search for the same query. We already spoke about it earlier .



Video text:

Today's question came from India. Ashish asks: “How will Google assess the quality of the content, if there are no links leading to the post [from other sites]? This is a good question. In principle, this sends us back to the period when search engines have not yet begun ranking based on links. In this case, we have to judge based on the text on the page itself.

And here Google has enough opportunities. The first time we see a [keyword] word on a page, we consider it. Having met him again, we again pay attention to him, but this is not the decisive moment. After a while, we say [to ourselves] “But perhaps we have already seen this [key] word. Maybe this page on this topic. But repeating a keyword again and again will not help you much. And at some point [if you overdo it with keywords], we can regard it as “over-optimized” and then the page is ranked worse, not as good as if you use a moderate amount of references to a word in one text.

So we have other ways [to rank the page if there are no links leading to it from other sites]. Theoretically, for example, we may ask: is the new page located on a domain with a good reputation?

There are various ways to determine the quality of the content. But in principle, if a user types a rare phrase and there are no other pages on the network with this phrase, and even if there are no links to this page, however, this page will be shown in the output, because we can assume that it is relevant. It may reflect what the user is looking for. Therefore, it can be difficult, but from this point of view, we seem to take a step back and only build on the quality of the content, which is determined by the text itself, the page itself.

Do links ever lose relevance for ranking?

No, and no, we are in a hurry to answer, and these words are confirmed by Matt’s answer to this question. Links still remain a decisive factor in ranking the entire domain as a whole, in determining the degree of its credibility and importance. However, in the light of new algorithms, the user's behavior with respect to the content again comes to the fore. Here, Matt embarks on a vast and rather lyrical explanation of how Google would like to be like a Star Trek supercomputer.

Honestly, such an explanation, repelling from UX in the search, does not give an answer to the question of what we actually should do in order to “come to an agreement” with the supercomputer. In this case, referring to behavioral factors, we can talk about strengthening links with user transitions , as well as working with behavioral factors , which together allow the search engine to evaluate the most important parameters of users' responses to your content based on their own logs: the user found you in search, went to you and did not return (go from the search, time on the page, no return for the same request).



Video text:

Today's question came from Lea from New York and it sounds like this: “Google changed the search engine market in the 90s when it began to rank websites according to the number of links leading to them instead of only evaluating content, like other search engines did. Algorithm updates such as Pandy and Penguin have shown a shift in attention back to the content. Does this mean that links will not be needed? "

Well, I think that the links will continue to be relevant for many, many years. Of course, it is inevitable that we are trying to understand whether an expert user [in some field] decides on a given, [proposed to him] page, as far as it meets his needs. And sometimes backlinks help to understand this.
It is also useful to know the reputation of this domain or page. Although in most cases, people care about the quality of the content on the specific page they are on.



I think that in time the links will lose some of their importance. If they could accurately determine, for example, Danny Sullivan (chief editor of Search Engine Land - approx. Transl.) Wrote this article or Vanessa Foxx (optimizer, worked at Google Webmasters Tools in 2005-2007) wrote another article - something in this spirit, it would help us understand. That is, we have an expert [who created the page content], an expert in a particular area. In case we don’t know who the content author is, Google begins to understand better and better what is written there.



Therefore, one of the rather extensive issues that we plan to deal with in the coming months is an attempt to understand how to do something similar to the super computer from Star Trek, this is an interactive search. This is a type of search where you can talk to the car. And she can understand, that is, you do not just use keywords. So that you can understand what someone says, for example, as [in the question] “how tall Justin Bieber is” and then “when he was born”, and for this you need to understand what is being said. It's about Justin Bieber.

Here, to do this well, we need to better understand natural speech. And I think as we get better at understanding who wrote what, what is the true meaning of the text, then, inevitably, over time, external links will be given less importance.

I would expect that in the coming years we will continue to rely on links in order to determine the main reputation of the pages and the sites themselves.