Is Artificial intelligence works faster than us for SEO? YES!

The future of SEO and artificial intelligence

As we can see from the previous discussion on the Law of Accelerating Returns, RankBrain and other forms of artificial intelligence will at some point surpass the human brain. And at this point, nobody knows where this technology will lead us.

Some things are certain, though:

• Each competitive keyword environment will need to be examined on its own;
• Most sites will need to stay niche to avoid misclassification; and
• Each site should mimic the structure and composition of their respective top sites in that niche.

In some ways, the deep learning methodology makes things simpler for SEOs. Knowing that RankBrain and similar technologies are almost on par with a human, the rule of law is clear: There are no more loopholes.

In other ways, things are a bit harder. The field of SEO will continue to become extremely technical. Analytics and big data are the order of the day, and any SEO that isn’t familiar with these approaches has a lot of catching up to do. Those of you who have these skills can look forward to a big payday.

The field of SEO will continue to become extremely technical.

But for lesser-known entities, what will happen? The answer is, “Who knows?” Presumably, this machine learning process has an automated way of classifying each site before attempting to compare it to other sites. Let’s say a How-To site looks just like WebMD’s site. Great, right?

Well, if the classification process thinks this site is about shoes, then it is going to be comparing the site to Nike’s site structure, not WebMD’s. It just might turn out that their site structure looks a lot like a spammy shoe site, as opposed to a reputable WebMD site, in which case the overly generalized site could easily be flagged as SPAM. If the How-To site had separate domains, then it would be easy to make each genre look like the best of that industry. 

SEO has changed forever

Before we get into predicting the future, let’s take inventory on how RankBrain has already changed SEO. I sat down with Carnegie Mellon alumnus and friend Scott Stouffer, now CTO and co-founder of Market Brew, a company that provides search engine models for Fortune 500 SEO teams. As a search engineer himself, Stouffer had a unique perspective over the past decade that most professionals in that industry don’t get to see. Here are some of his tips for the SEO industry when it comes to Google’s new emphasis on artificial intelligence.

Today’s regression analysis is seriously flawed

This is the biggest current fallacy of our industry. There have been many prognosticators every time Google’s rankings shift in a big way. Usually, without fail, a few data scientists and CTOs from well-known companies in our industry will claim they “have a reason!” for the latest Google Dance. The typical analysis consists of perusing through months of ranking data leading up to the event, then seeing how the rankings shifted across all websites of different types.

With today’s approach to regression analysis, these data scientists point to a specific type of website that has been affected (positively or negatively) and conclude with high certainty that Google’s latest algorithmic shift was attributed to a specific type of algorithm (content or backlink, et al.) that these websites shared.

However, that isn’t how Google works anymore. Google’s RankBrain, a machine learning or deep learning approach, works very differently.

Within Google, there are a number of core algorithms that exist. It is RankBrain’s job to learn what mixture of these core algorithms is best applied to each type of search results. For instance, in certain search results, RankBrain might learn that the most important signal is the META Title.

Adding more significance to the META Title matching algorithm might lead to a better searcher experience. But in another search result, this very same signal might have a horrible correlation with a good searcher experience. So in that other vertical, another algorithm, maybe PageRank, might be promoted more.