Decoding Google's Search and Ranking System

A2O Digital meets with hosts Tim Coleman and Justin Bencsko to review SEO as discussed by Google's VP of Search Pandu Nayak. He revealed at the Google antitrust trial how Google Search and ranking works including indexing, algorithm updates and more. Listen to this episode to hear our debrief into the topic of SEO and specifically cover what factors shape Google's Search results.

Transcript

Justin  00:01

All right. Welcome back. My name is Justin Bencsko. If this is your first time listening. I'm the director at A2O Digital, and I have Tim here as well, who is the managing partner at A2O Digital. How's it going, Tim?

Tim  00:16

Doing good, Just.

Justin  00:17

 All right. So today we've got an interesting topic that we wanted to talk about. It's related to SEO, search engine optimization. So a few months back, Google was put under some hearings by the Department of Justice.

Tim  00:37

Antitrust, the antitrust trial.

Justin  00:39

Antitrust related things going on. So one of the people that got put on the stand is a man by the name of Pandu Nayak, and he's high up in, you know, Google and their SEO and how all that works. There was a lot of interesting things that were learned there, when he was, you know, under oath in this trial that was revealed that, you know, a lot of things may be speculated, but a lot of new information that all relates to SEO and how we think about how it works. So we want to kind of break that down, talk about it a little bit. What did he say? How does that affect SEO? How are we thinking about things? You know, with learning that new information, that's kind of what we want to dive into. So, yeah, Tim, let's, let's, let's go into it. So yeah, there was kind of six things that he mentioned when he was, you know, on the stand, relating to search engine optimization, the things that they like look at, right? 

Tim  01:43

Yeah, there's a lot that they talked about, and he was on the stand a long time, but I think, for our sake today, and to keep this topic manageable, he said there were six key signals that the Google algorithm used, and they were the document itself, topicality, localization, reliability, and nav boost. So there were, there were six things. And I think what we could do to be the most helpful thing for everybody today just is just kind of break down what each one of those six things is what we can learn from it and apply to our own websites and all that type of stuff. So the first thing is the document itself. Just when we talk about SEO and other our clients ask us about SEO very often that the first thing, the first topic that comes up is keywords, right? And then if they know a little bit more, the topic might go to title tags, H1s, headers, all of this type of stuff. And that's what the document is about. That's what, what what Pandu Nayak was referring to here when he says the document itsel. It's the title tag, it's the headlines, it's what this page itself is about. 

Justin  03:20

Yeah, that's how they're determining what this thing is about and what you would want to it to show up for our first search result, right? Like the actual content itself. that's, yeah,

Tim  03:29

Exactly, exactly. So then the next thing is topicality. Now this is a huge thing we never think about in Google, but like, if you're a home service business, let's say you're a plumber. Wall Street Journal could write an article about plumbers, and they could even mention a city, but if a person is searching for plumbers in that city did they would they want to find a Wall Street Journal article or New York Times article? And it's no because that site's not about that topic, right? So topicality means, what is the overall flavor of that website? Right? You're not looking for a news thing. When you type in plumbers or HVAC, you're really looking for that. Google's going to narrow it down to that topic.

Justin  04:21

What so like is this, like, what's the intent of the searcher? Right? When they search for plumber in their town, they're looking to have a plumber come out to service their home, right? So show plumbers that can service their home. Don't show a Wall Street Journal article that can't accomplish that, right?

Tim  04:37

Right, right. So it's not just keywords, it's keywords, and then the whole site, Google will look at the whole site and judge it. That's right, and that's what Google does, right? For garage doors or any home services, if you go search, you know, plumber and Pompton Plains New Jersey, which is, you know, where we're located, right? They're doing that, right? If they didn't give that result, that would be a bad result and then people might not use Google, right?

Justin  05:05

right.

Tim  05:05

Right. So topicality becomes a big part of it. The next thing is page quality. So how is Google going to develop, going to determine page quality. What Pandu says is, does the page set out to, does it do what it set out to do? And if you're a plumber or a home service business, a garage door guy, you know, we have a garage door repair page, and we want it to rank, is it a good page for somebody to land on? Do we meet the intent of that person? I think that's the first thing. And then the next piece of that would be authority. Are there any links pointing at that site? And I want to stop and just talk a little bit about it. This is maybe a little bit beyond the scope of this. But for some people, this might be helpful. There's a difference between authority, popularity and trust and when Pandu Nayak is referring to page quality, I think he's referring here to authority, and meaning when other sites on the internet link to your site. Google thinks about that as authority, and some people think that's popularity, but that's really authority, and popularity is a little bit different.

Justin  06:30

And that's something that we've known about for a long time, right? Like links and people linking to your business, that's been something that's kind of been known throughout time as something that can help your you know, SEO performance. It feels like over time that dials been turned down, right, more than you know, if you looked at it 10 years ago, right?

Tim  06:52

Yeah, when Google first came out, was all about getting links, all getting back links other people to link to your site. That was the whole name of the game with Google and what made them so different. And you're right in the last since Google, in the last few years, it does feel like that's been turned down. And this year, Gary Illyes said it's not even a top three signal anymore, but back when we still have to consider to be important. 

Justin  07:17

And who is Gary Illyes ,Tim. just so the

Tim  07:19

Yeah, he's a Google employee who handles a little bit on the PR side. So he'll give SEOs a little and if anybody's interested in a little insight into what he can in the Google algorithm and such. And he'll answer questions. So first 3  were the document, topicality, page quality. The next one is reliability. 

Justin  07:43

Tim, before we go on to that again, well, those three again, you know, I just said this with like page authority or page quality and links, we kind of known these things, right? Like those have been around for forever, right? As we start to go down this list, you get into some more things.

Tim  08:00

The next thing you're going to know about too, and that is reliability, and that is "Just, you could determine this yourself." You look at a website, would you trust the information on it is, are there a bunch of misspellings? Is the design old? Was the trust? Was the site slow to load? Google has, this is a little bit newer. Google has a web page experience algorithm. It, you know, is it going to load well on a mobile device, is there a special mobile page, are you going to use HTTPS? All of the things that might make the site more trustworthy, more reliable, we can think about as reliability. And the next thing is localization. This, too is pretty old. This is from the Venice update in 2012, and here you want to think about before you do any SEO. I actually had an experience working with an SEO that most people have actually heard of, if anybody's in this industry, they've heard of him. And I talked to them about the Venice update, and they actually hadn't heard about it. I was really surprised, considering it happened 12 years ago. But whenever you want to optimize for a keyword on your website, you want to determine whether Google thinks that's a local search or not. And to give you an example, if somebody were to search for a dentist, Google's going to see that as a local search, and they're going to bring back to you dentists. If you type in that you want to do some teeth whitening or something like you want to get a service like that. Google is probably going to see that as a local service, that one you might want to check right? Because if the results are all over the country, you want to optimize for the keyword that Google is going to localize.  If you advertise, if you want to optimize for how to floss forget about it. That's going to be a national result, and you want to know if Google is going to localize the results and the type of query you're optimizing first. Always type into Google. See if you get the Google Maps come up, see if you'll see local websites, or see if, if it comes from all over so they're going to localize the results. So then I think the sixth thing on the list, then we went through the first five, I think this was the big one, right? This is the one that most surprised you, right Just? 

Justin  10:39

Yep, absolutely. I feel like this is the one that there's been a lot of speculation about. Does Google use these things and we will talk about it in a little bit here. And people have speculated that Google uses it, but they haven't come out and said it. So no one really knew for sure and so this is kind of the revealing.

Tim  10:56

In fact they denied that it was part of their algorithm, many, many times. 

Justin  11:03

Why do you think they would do that? You think it's because it could be abused? Why would Google deny something like that?

Tim  11:09

Yeah, I think they are worried about abuse. We just talked about links, and when they announced, you know, 25 years ago, that links are a big part of their algorithm, they spent the next 15 years, trying to minimize the abuse. So they don't want this abused, and it would be hard to abuse. But I mean people are smart, right? You can do it, but I think it would be hard to abuse. So what are we talking about here? We are talking about an algorithm that actually has a name. They call it Nav Boost. I have read some different things about this. Google sorts the world into three different types of queries, navigational, transactional and informational. So I think Nav Boost was a metric that Google originally, or I'm sure still does, use to identify and navigate, to identify the best results at a navigational query.

Justin  12:20

So what are those three different types of queries are. 

Tim  12:26

So, Sure, so an informational query, how to floss, how to tie a tie? That's be an informational query. Dentist is transactional. Plumber, transactional. Garage Door Repair, transactional.

Justin  12:41

So informational, they're looking for information on some subject,  Transactional is commercial. Commercial query. Commercial query is another way to look at it. I'm looking for this thing. I'm looking for this product, for this service. I want to find someone to give me that product or service, right? 

Tim  12:59

Yeah. So that's informational, that's commercial, and then the other one is navigational. So a lot of people, myself included, if I'm going to go to a browser, I'm probably not going to type in amazon.com or facebook.com I'll just type the word into Google. I'll wait for them to pull it up, and then I'll click on the link. That's a navigational query. And if you're a home service business. This is huge for you. These types of queries are huge because we call these brand searches, right? And for us, a navigational query is a brand search. So you know, we manage Precision locations, so if somebody goes into Google and types in the brand Precision Door instead of garage door repair. We consider that a big win. We want to make sure we rank number one for that. We want to, we want to have an ad that shows up for that, and that's much cheaper and easier to get high quality score. So another way to think about a navigational query. Is a branded search. So now you say, Okay, how does Google figure out my brand? Is it just by keywords? I mean, anybody could put the keyword Precision on their website really right? So what this trial revealed is that Google is using search and behavior and actually using what people type into the search box and then what they click on when they type that in, and it's actually a memorization using, you know, obviously artificial intelligence. They recall and accumulate clicks over 13 months. And by doing that they are able to gauge what is the best result for that query. Which is huge knowledge for us to have. It's been speculated for years, but you can start to think about the implications of this a lot more. And the first thing that he said about it, which Justin and I in the past have talked about, could this be done by location? And that's the first thing Pandu Nayak said, it said nav boost is sliced by locale. The first thing he said when he talked about it, so that means that Google can tell when your brand is typed into the search box, and they're going to tie the location to that.

Justin  15:55

So to think about this from like, the perspective of you know, and that the Precision Garage Door, which is a national franchise, they can, in theory, tell how strong of a brand Precision has in each metro area, and then potentially rank, you know, someone who has a stronger brand. And some of those signals in, let's just say, you know, Columbus, Ohio. But the signals aren't as high in, let's say, northern New Jersey, right? And they're able to discern the difference there and figure out, you know, where to, you know, I guess, show more or things like that, right?

Tim  16:35

That's exactly, right. And this is you know, there are videos of Google employees in the past talking about the difference between authority and popularity and SEOs, we tend to think in terms of just backlinks, because that's what we were weaned on. Backlinks were everything, and the more, the more just get more and it's better, and it's that's still true, as long as they're good and they're legit, and you're not spamming Google and all that type of stuff, more is better. But Google had also a problem that the most authoritative sites were not always the most popular sites, and so bringing popularity into the algorithm is something I think they've been working on for a long time. And in fact, they've had it for a long time, this nav boost, they've been denying this for a long time, but it goes back, I think, to 2005. So they figured out this Authority and Popularity was a problem a long time ago. They just didn't tell anybody, right? It's been in place for almost 20 years now. So when you when you think as the owner of a home service business, you want to do SEO, you're not ranking as well as you'd like to rank. What can you do about it? What I would say is, if you go to your niche now, you're an HVAC guy, you're a plumber, you're a garage door, whatever it is, go and type in you're physically located. Just type in the keyword, and you'll get results for where you physically are. If you want to check a certain city, add that, you know, type in plumber, Timbuckto. What you will most likely see, come up first is the brand that is the most popular in that location. Not always. It won't always happen, because there's other there's those other five things, and if they don't, they don't get the other five things right. This makes a lot harder for Google to do that, but if they do a lot of times, it will be the person, like the biggest company in the area. You might if, if you're somewhat sophisticated. We talked about links and backlinks. You can literally get a tool and see how many links are pointing at that site. That's ranking number one, or ranking two and maybe there's not a lot of links there. So why is Google ranking that there?

Justin  19:12

Because there's a lot of people searching for them, right there's a lot of people that are, you know, when they type in whatever that plumber, they see them, and they're clicking on them, right?

Tim  19:21

That's what I think, Just. Now they didn't explicitly say that in this but, like, if you read between the lines, I think that's what's being said.

Justin  19:30

Yeah, they're trying to figure out in the real world. They're trying to take the reality from the real world and put it on, you know, Google search engines, and that's a way that they can determine that right?

Tim  19:40

Right now Google is the only one who knows what gets typed into a Google search box. Why wouldn't they use that information? I mean, if anybody thinks they're not using that information.

Justin  19:56

Yeah, I mean, we've talked about it for for a long time, right? And speculating there. There is no definitive proof. But kind of looking at multiple, you know, example after example after example, you start to kind of see, it's cool that it's kind of confirmed at this point. Let me ask you this. What about part of this? Is part of this? Are they you know, the term pogo sticking, right? You click on a site, you go to it, and then you come back because you didn't get what you want. That's something that they're probably measuring here too. We're speculating.

Tim  20:27

Yeah, I think they still are saying that they don't do that, but they have to be doing that, right? So like they are trying to judge whether, and I know that this is they say they don't do it because it's too hard to do it, like they in the example that I've heard Google say in the past is like, let's say you're on the site for two seconds and then you leave. Is that because the result was terrible and that's why you left, or is it because the site was so good you got the answer right away.

Justin  21:01

Well, if I'm Google and I went back to the search result, if you kept, if I kept looking and clicking on more results after that, that would potentially be an indication, if you look at that over a big period of time, right are a lot of people going to a site, backing out and then clicking on four more things because they didn't get what they wanted. So that would be an indication, if they go and then they back out and they got what they wanted, right? They're not going to go and do more searches. And you know, if you, you know, look at that and compare with every single search result, and, you know, over a large data set, you could probably start to determine, hey, who's answering the question of the searcher the best and giving them what they want. So they didn't like straight flat out say that. He didn't say that. But it's like a little bit more speculation of you know, that's probably something still that they're looking at, right.

Tim  21:55

Right. So, search and behavior is being used by Google, this anti trust, hearing absolutely confirmed it. The algorithm has a name and it's great for us to know and to and to try and work to understand better. So let's talk a little bit about what you would do Just if you are going to open a garage door repair company, a plumbing company, HVAC company, you're going to be an electrician, whatever it is. First thing we're going to do is our website. What are we going to do there?

Justin  22:35

I mean you're going to have to, obviously, you're going to want to look at the first five things we talked about, right? And make sure that all that all makes sense, and you know is set up correctly, and you know you have good content and all those things that would be like the fundamentals from the beginning, right.

Tim  22:51

Right. So now the two things that you can control that are on your website that are going to show up on a Google search results page are called the title tag in the meta description. So in the title tag, that's a ranking factor. Google will use title tag in rankings. So you want the title tag to include your main keywords, which are going to be to me, brand keyword, so the name of your company, what you do in the location, and then you know a user is going to see that, and clicks are going to matter. So there's anything else you want to say in there? 24/7, whatever it is you want to say, use that to sell. If you if you don't have anything more keywords, use that to sell and then the meta description is not is that that's the meta description is a little text you see in a Google search result under the under the blue link, which is called Title Tag.  Right reasons to do business with you. Maybe explicitly describe your service area. Anything that you think is going to help that searcher to click on you more often use for the meta description. Organize your website, each page is a separate intent, and put each intent in the global navigation. That's your job from the website perspective, get links, distributors.

Justin  24:24

Better Business Bureau.

Tim  24:26

Better Business Bureau. is still good. Business Bureau is good for equity, but it's still good. 

Justin  24:31

What I was going to say is local Chambers of Commerce. Often, you know, are good links local community. Sometimes there's other links we've gotten, if there's local colleges or educational places, sometimes you can offer discounts to them, and in turn, they'll give you a link things that are showing you know you're involved in your local community. They should be locally to your you know, to your area. You don't want to, if you're in Columbus, you don't want to get a link to a college. It's in Florida. It doesn't even make any sense. So good to be on topic.

Tim  25:06

Check the site misspellings, you know, like just, is the design pleasing? I don't think the design is like, an enormous part of it, but it should look decent.

Justin  25:21

Yeah, it can't. The design can't be a hindrance, right? Yes, is kind of the way you want to look at it. And then obviously, Page Speed, right? It needs to load in a certain amount of time. And there's all guidelines that Google wants you to be under. Someone clicks on a search result and they're sitting there for 10 seconds for the page to load. They're not waiting, they're going back, and it's not a good result. So you need to make sure you're, you know within, within a certain you know threshold there.

Tim  25:48

Then really, the biggest thing is, is once you could those things are all pretty straightforward. Look, getting links is hard. It is the building of the brand. It is getting folks to type your brand into that search engine instead of the category it. I want them to type Precision Garage Door. You want them to type your brand plus the keyword or and if you have the keyword in your name, like, I think that's super helpful, like, to me, that's what you want to achieve. And you do that through.

Justin  26:30

There's a lot of ways. There's a lot of ways you can do that by, you know, doing a really good job for customers, and over time, more people are coming to you right. Like, that can happen slowly. You can, you know, if you want to, you know, obviously, make that go faster. You can invest in your brand through a million different ways, TV, radio, other things like that. So, yeah, there's, there's a ton of ways to do that, and you think they look at it like, even down to, like, a town level. Like, you know, you're in a metro area, it may be different. There may be a different small local brand in your one particular town that's not necessarily the same as they're not showing the same brand across the whole metro area, per se, right? Like they're looking at it down to that level, right?

Tim  27:19

For sure, and I think, I think if you have it, and we're just talking about the 10 blue links right now, obviously locations hugely important in GMB, but I also think that location plays a role in those 10 blue links. If you are physically located in the town that person searching in, you're not just going to have an advantage in GMB, GBP, you're going to have an advantage in those 10 blue links as well. So that's part of localization of results as well. In my opinion, I would think like that as well. But if you want to, if you want to rank across many different communities, towns and cities in each one of those locales, there's got to be folks searching, actively searching for you all the time, yep, way that I would think about it, and we can see we manage a lot of the same types of businesses in many different metros. So we get to see a little bit of the difference of how Google reacts in a highly competitive area versus a more rural area, the more competitive the area is. We're going to see our customers who do a lot of like, TV, radio, billboards, Facebook, Google ads, AdWords, PPC, whatever you want to call that those, those customers who have big budgets and bigger, more competitive areas are going to are ranked in the Google search results a lot better than our customers in big metro areas that don't quite have that larger budget for advertising we we could see like we felt like this was going on for so long, because we could see that like just in our day to day observations, just doing every day for so long.

Justin  29:13

Yep, for sure. Going back so like, you think keeping them engaged. So it kind of goes back to, right? Does the person get what they want on the website? Keeping them engaged on your site, you think that that plays a factor, right? They go, you know, we've built tools for, you know, in particular, Precision Garage Doors, right? We have an online garage door showroom where people can start to see the different styles of doors and, you know, filter based on what they like. We have a online scheduler where someone can book a job, just on that schedule, not having to call anyone things like that. You know, do we speculate? Play part in this and help, right? If the. Person's going and interacting with the site and finding what they want. That potentially helps.

Tim  30:06

I have been thinking about so much about that for the past few years, because as Google has spoken more and more about helpful content. Create great content. What does that mean for a home service business, and how do we do that? How do we create a better result on our site than other sites? And we see a lot of SEO right now that is done through what I would refer to as like content marketing, and you write a blog post about a particular topic, and you hope to get some some organic traffic to that. And I think you know that has its place, and it can be really good. And all that type of stuff tends to create pages that aren't, don't rank locally all that well, but they might rank nationally. Well, get a lot of traffic, but not rank locally. Not ranked locally all the way. What I really wanted to think about is those queries that are are bread and butter, that really make us money. How can I create a better result for those types of queries? So, so I will give you some examples. You brought up the garage door showroom, and this was a project that actually Justin and I worked on together, if you wanted to create a result that was better for your customer, who's, you know, people, I could've, we could've created an, like, a garage door insulation tool, right? But, like what searcher you know, insulation isn't something that people are really that interested in, where style is something that people are really interested in. They want to see photos of doors, right? So we created a robust online showroom now that is going to be content that is helpful for our searcher, and then you hope Google that will be reflected by Google, right? I mean, that's kind of the thought process, but almost even if they don't, even if Google doesn't recognize that, it's still a big win for us. 

Justin  32:12

Yeah, it's good for the user. It's what they're looking for, right?

Tim  32:17

So garage doors we were looking for, like, a way to help them with style, I think with service, the thing that people are most interested in is availability. Like, I need you today, if you're a plumber, if I got if it's the sinks, the sinks not working, or your mortar is coming up, or, I feel like everything, whatever plumbing problem. Like, that's an immediate problem, right? Like, I just want to know if you're available. Can you come today?

Justin  32:46

Another one, I would say, like, does someone want reviews on your business and see what other people are saying about you? Right? Like, most people look at that, right? Like they're not going to hire someone. They want to see what the reviews are. What are people saying, so, you know, having that on, you know, on your site is that potentially beneficial? Having reviews, reviews maybe from other sources, not just reviews from your website itself, but Google reviews, Yelp reviews would putting those on your website right wil that help as well?

Tim  33:23

Yeah, so I think, I think it's a it's an exciting time. Google obviously has been pushing down the 10 blue links further and further down the page and focus more and more on paid sources in our industry, with Google Local Service ads and PPC getting taking up more and more real estate in our in our world, the conversation has kind of shifted more to that. And we don't talk as much as we used to about the 10 blue links.

Justin  34:02

It's free. They're still out there. People still go and, you know, click on them. So it's not like it's totally gone away.

Tim  34:10

Yeah, I know high quality traffic for free is, and of course, it's not. It's not 100% free, but it's like that the marginal collect certainly is. So Google's not charging anything for it, so it feels, feels free to me.

Justin  34:25

Yep. All right. Any other thoughts today? Tim, I think we talked about it, you know, a decent amount. Hopefully there are some good takeaways. There any other like parting thoughts or anything that you know, we didn't cover?

Tim  34:39

Yeah, I would say the you know that that testimony and all the updates that we see around Google is SEO used to be about looking good to Google. And everything we did was about things like H1 and site maps and absolute links and all of these things, different ways of looking good to Google. SEO from now on, is doing all the things you can to be most attractive to a Google user, you have to stay organized. You got to get the technology right in terms of not having a crappy website and all that type of stuff. But it's forget about looking good to Google. Now Google can tell now how you look to the user. So build your site for them. Create a great website for the user and Google by and large and build your brand. Yep, build a site for the user and build your brand. And that's how to do SEO now.

Justin  35:55

Awesome. All right. Thank you, Tim, hope, yeah, like I said, hopefully, you know, there was some interesting stuff there. I think that's the the end for today. If you enjoyed today's episode, like and subscribe to the podcast, leave a review, all those things they you know, greatly help us out. And until next time, thanks so much.