Optimizing the Web for the Artificial Intelligence Era

Here is a summary of my notes for some SEO related news.  

While much of this is based on fact, this post contains my predictions based on the direction that I see the SEO industry going. My goal is that by understanding how the SEO tides are changing, we can convey this information to our clients and continue to crush it in the SERPs. 

Google's quality rater team

Google has a team of remote users who rate the quality of both websites and search engine results.  They call this team their "quality raters".  In the past, the pdf guide for becoming a quality rater has been confidential. I believe it was even protected with a non-disclosure agreement.  While many of these documents have been leaked over the past few years, something was different about how the latest document has been shared.  
...it came from Google themselves.
Google have decided to finally make this guide available to the public, and you can skim through the entire 160-page document here. 

What are my thoughts after reading through the guide?  

• Assumption - The quality raters were the team training the RankBrain artificial intelligence ranking system.  
• I read an article a few days ago that Google has made their artificial intelligence engine open source for anyone to use. It's called TensorFlow.  Google have  perfected their AI platform well enough to share the engine it's built on with the rest of the world.  That is really neat. The AI era is upon us!
• Last Wednesday Moz reported an 83% algorithmic shift in their Mozcast algorithm volatility monitor.  Does anyone else find it coincidental that the same week Google's volatility spiked they share a previously confidential guide on quality? My prediction is that it is because Google won't be needing the quality raters guide anymore because their machine learning AI has already taught itself even stronger indicators for determining a website's quality.  ...SEO is still a quality over quantity game going into 2016.

• Relevance and quality are synonymous in the eyes of Google. Google will likely never rank a page, or app, that is not the highest quality result in the number one position again (or for long). 
• The Rankbrain AI is most likely also rating webpages based on expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness  (E-A-T) just like the quality raters have been.  
  
  

5 questions we should ask ourselves while optimizing pages in the AI era

1. Is there enough information provided that someone would buy from this site?
2. Would this be viewed as a high-quality result?
3. Are the needs of the searcher fully met by this page?
4. Does the mobile version make the page easier to use?
5. What would it take to be the best result for this query?
   
   

So AI is the death of SEO right?

Not at all!  I think the days of being able to focus on only one or two ranking factors have been gone for a while now anyway.  RankBrain is about quality and so is SEO.

Our goal as an SEO goes beyond the search engine.  We are the sculptors of the web!  We extend our chisels, chip away, and begin to uncover the optimal version for what the web could be.  

So where am I going with this?  

If you're working on a site that is already perfect at accomplishing its goal, it wouldn't need to be optimized. If your site is not perfect, you still have some work you need to do.