Thinking about SEO? If not then you need to wake up! You need to think about Google’s RankBrain.
And why is that?
Google announced RankBrain as their Third Most Important Ranking Signal which was confirmed by Google on 26 October 2015. In 2016, Andrey Lipattsev a Senior Strategist from Google was interviewed, conducted by Search Engine Land . He stated that content and links were the two top ranking factors. The other one was Rank brain which is the third most important ranking signal according to Google. Google’s old algorithm was hand coded before RankBrain was introduced.

So let’s dive into RankBrain details.

What is RankBrain?

RankBrain is an AI based search algorithm. When Google is not sure about any search/query then it uses RankBrain Algorithm to show us the best/filtered result. Google processes 15% new queries everyday which was not searched before by anybody and are completely unknown terms to Goggle.

Therefore we can say that Google handles these unknown queries using RankBrain.

How Does RankBrain Work?

Let’s say you are searching for Orange. And you are expecting Google to show you the fruit Orange. Google already knew that Orange is a fruit with orange color and it will show you the best match results.

 But if you meant “orange” is not a fruit you are looking for rather by searching “orange” you are looking for a Telecommunication Company. If Google is not sure what you meant “orange the fruit” or “orange the telecommunication company”, it will throw some substitute results against your query.

So instead of 1 fruit related results, you might get 8 fruit related and 1 or 2 telecom related, or opposite.

This is how RankBrain Works.

Behind the curtains
RankBrain does not process our query with NLP-Natural Language Processor. Google Uses NLP to process query using “BERT” which rolled out in October 21, 2019. Will tell you details on BERT in another article. Machines do not understand words/text. Google uses a Toolkit name “WORD2VEC” to convert words in vectors to make the machines understand the words/text. It processes the words into vectors. Then the words are inserted into a huge database. Vectors are a list of numbers that represents the meaning of the words.
Should You Go For RankBrain Optimization?

Gary Illyes Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst talks on RankBrain Optimization.

“Optimizing for RankBrain is actually super easy, and it is something we’ve probably been saying for 15 years now, is – and the recommendation is – to write in natural language. Try to write content that sounds human. If you try to write like a machine then RankBrain will just get confused and probably just pushes you back.

But if you have a content site, try to read out some of your articles or whatever you wrote, and ask people whether it sounds natural. If it sounds conversational, if it sounds like natural language that we would use in your day to day life, then sure, you are optimized for RankBrain. If it doesn’t, then you are ‘un-optimized.’”

Wrapping Up

If your content is good then you are optimized for RankBrain.

If your content is natural you are optimized for RankBrain.

Good content is the King.