Google VP Said ‘Relevancy is King’ at SMX London

At SMX London, Amit Singhal, VP and Google Fellow said that “Relevancy is King”. As we all know that he also rewrote the actual Google algorithm upon his hire in 2000. He also added that Google looks at a combination of three signals like social, links and user actions and how these signals are supporting to build the organic result set.

At the time of waning to “whiteboard the algorithm for you”, he also gives hints of where Google is going and what they are looking for with the current algorithm. Everything came back to “relevancy”. Google always want to give its user the most pertinent result and Google is also using whatever data sources they can to determine that.

From Sinhal’s talk I found five points very interesting:

• Author Rank: Amit Singhal also mentioned that the author of a page influencing rankings and it may seem common knowledge, but it’s not something I had heard confirmed. You also have to keep in mind that Google is not looking at all signals in combination, not just one signal by itself.
• Deviations in Ranking Signals: In all signals, the algorithm seems very closely at deviations. So, purchasing that 1000 tweet package for $10 probably isn’t the best bet.
• Search Plus your world redesign holding up International releases: Singhal also revealed that search plus your world was getting a bit of a repair in design and that until that was complete it would not be rolling out globally.
• In testing algorithm changes, Google uses human quality raters lengthily: In the conference, Singhal also discussed how Google tests new algorithm developments and once an engineer writes an improvement, it first foes out for A/B testing to Google human quality raters before coming back to Google to potentially run live, real Google search traffic tests of the change.

In more searches, Google direct answers results: In the audience, a webmaster asked a question “Why to give Google our content if you are just going to offer answers to users without sending them to our websites? Singhal replied that they found an increase in searches by users that get served a Google answer set and therefore send out more traffic to website as users have huge time to excavate deeper with higher queries once their early basic query answer is found.