Google using RankBrain Machine Learning for all search queries

Google is using RankBrain machine learning system to every search query they process. Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand has recently written an interesting article that declares RankBrain as the third most important ranking signal. Google has announced the Content and the Links as the critical ranking factors a few months back. And now RankBrain is the third most important factor that every Webmaster needs to focus after Content and Links.

The news of RankBrain being a critical ranking signal emerged from the Steven Levy’s this week’s post on Backchannel. That story talks about the machine learning efforts at Google. He wrote, “Google is characteristically fuzzy on exactly how it improves search (something to do with the long tail? Better interpretation of ambiguous requests?) but Dean says that RankBrain is “involved in every query,” and affects the actual rankings “probably not in every query but in a lot of queries.”

What’s more, it’s hugely effective. Of the hundreds of “signals” Google search uses when it calculates its rankings (a signal might be the user’s geographical location, or whether the headline on a page matches the text in the query), RankBrain is now rated as the third most useful.”

RankBrain is Google’s Machine Learning Algorithm that uses the data from the billions of search queries, who’s searching, who clicks, what geo location etc. to determine the search result for the specific search query. Google has introduced the algorithm back in October 2015. It was used to process the large fraction of the 15% of the searches that were never searched on Google before. This algorithm doesn’t actually significantly change the ranking of all search queries. But it shuffles the result for most of the search queries.

Google’s RankBrain algorithm has been the mystery for the Webmasters and even for the Googlers. But the thing is that Google has shown a great confidence in its machine learning ability and now processing every search query on Google through RankBrain Algorithm. That makes it the third most important ranking signal after Content and Links.

Google has made some interesting announcements about the RankBrain Machine Learning AI System. Though RankBrain is an important ranking signal, it doesn’t have the ‘RankBrain Score’ like page speed, Panda, Penguin or other ranking signal have. So, RankBrain is actually a ranking signal that doesn’t act like other ranking signals. It is really very confusing. To make the things even complicated, Gary Illyes from Google has told in the SMX event that ‘you can’t actually optimize for the RankBrain Algorithm.’

The mystery of the RankBrain Algorithm gets more complicated more you try to solve it. One thing you can do is just focus on the quality content, user experience and the long tail generic search terms. That can help you get an edge over your competition when it comes to RankBraning Machine Learning algorithm.