According to New Scientist, “Google wants to rank websites based on facts, not links.” The idea is to identify key facts in a web page and score them for their accuracy by assigning a trust score.
Sound Familiar? Go back five years to the birth of Panda and Penguin. Google wanted websites with content. They wanted new content published as often as possible. The more you published the easier it was to rank.
What this means is that Google is still working hard to try and get their duplicate content filter working, something they won’t have up and running in the near future. They are working to make Penguin and Panda work properly so they can leave them turned ‘on’ full time. They are also working on a second-generation system of getting rid of those filler articles, or poorly written articles that no one wants to read.
Why Doesn’t Popularity Work?
Google thought that people could pick the most popular websites, but this has backfired on them. Now the gossip and review sites are ranking high, but the sites that help people buy are still buried on page #5. Yes, it helps when personal search finds relevant sites based on what people have been searching in the last few hours (or days), but that isn’t enough for Google.
Google is learning that popularity doesn’t mean accurate information. Under the current system a celebrity gossip website on ‘Florida Travel’ will rank higher than a website offering information to Florida tourists.
Google’s artificial Intelligence is learning to understand content without relying on third party signals. Knowledge-Based Trust will help identify the websites that offer good information, new information, and are educational.
How Does This Affect SEO?
The average unskilled SEO and business owner tends to see new ranking factors as replacing the old ones. SEO businesses jump on every new thing hoping it will give them the edge. In reality we are still using the same algorithm that replaced the Google Caffeine Algorithm. Instead of being replaced, the algorithms are evolving and developing. So what was right in SEO eight years ago is still right today, it has just advanced and evolved.
The Knowledge-Based Trust factor is the next step in Google’s attempt to put the websites people want at the top and to eliminate SEO scams. What does this mean to for small businesses?
You can rank #1 if you have good information without having high Page Rank
People who pay $2 for a garbage article full of irrelevant noise will see their websites drop. Google is using the new algorithm to eliminate the overload of articles online that no one wants to read.
We can assume that Google is already trying the knowledge base out in different areas. I believe it is trying to mathematically understand the information collected by Google’s artificial intelligence, which has been floating around in cyberspace for two to three years. However, I do not think it will be up and running soon. There are too many factors that need to be taken into consideration and issues that need to be fixed before this algorithm will be functional.
The one thing we need to realize is that we don’t see the future. Only the top dogs at Google know what the end algorithm will look like – if it will ever reach an end.