From Google Official: The 3 Most Influential Factors of Ranking

There are many factors that affect Google’s ranking, and there are more than 200 (or even more), large and small, such as web page loading speed, image ALT tags, H1 headlines, etc., which you must know.

But which elements most affect Google’s rankings? Which elements, as long as they are in place, can significantly improve the ranking of the website? If you often follow Google’s official news, you know the answer is obvious.

There are 3 factors that most affect Google rankings, namely:

EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness);
YMYL (Your money or your life);
Beneficial Purpose;

It doesn’t matter if you don’t understand it now, this article will slowly expand with you from the following dimensions:

There are 3 factors that most affect Google rankings, namely:

EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness);
YMYL (Your money or your life);
Beneficial Purpose;

It doesn’t matter if you don’t understand it now, this article will slowly expand with you from the following dimensions:

Google’s “Search Quality Evaluation Guidelines”.pdf

If we understand what Baidu is doing poorly and compare it with Google, we can know what Google is doing well.

In 15 years, due to a small accident, Google released a manual for internal employee evaluation web pages – “Search Quality Evaluation Guide”.

This manual is not published for people who do SEO. Google is tight-lipped about its ranking algorithm. After so many years, there are not many factors that will actually affect the ranking. Most of them are guessed by the webmaster like me. .

This manual is for Google’s own internal employees. Google employs many people to manually check the web pages. Their daily task is to assist Google AI in ranking. If it is unreasonable, AI will improve the algorithm by itself, and finally make the ranking more and more perfect.

This principle is not difficult to understand, just like training AlphaGo to play GoSimilarly, as long as there is data and corrections, AI itself can obtain results far exceeding human expectations based on some super complex elements.

Ke Jie, who played against AlphaGo, knew that he would lose, and couldn’t help crying.
Hey, on that day, human beings suffered a crushing defeat…

So we can understand the “Search Quality Evaluation Guidelines” as an external means for Google to train AI.

Things like website opening speed and whether the page title is attractive will not be recorded in the manual, because this is something that AI has to consider. As staff who manually evaluate the quality of the page, they only need to do their job well to evaluate what AI can’t elements of the assessment.

In the 168-page manual, it is not difficult to find that Google will elevate the following three elements to a very high level when ranking:

Whether the content of the web page has enough “EAT”;
Whether the content of the web page is linked to “YMYL”;
Whether the content of the webpage is helpful to readers, that is, “Beneficial Purpose”;

The primary factor affecting rankings – “EAT”

What is “EAT”? EAT is an abbreviation of three words – Expertise (professionalism), Authoritativeness (authoritativeness) and Trustworthiness (reliability).

These three elements can hardly be measured by data. All elements that cannot be measured by data can only be solved by relying on sensibility. If you are not careful, it will become metaphysics. So why do I have to start with Baidu’s poor search experience? It is because it prevents the “EAT” we understand from turning into metaphysics.

Compared with Baidu, we must admit that the reason why Baidu’s search results are crushed by Google in all directions is because the two have completely different attitudes towards “EAT”. , Whether it is reliable or not, it is not as good as Google.

For example, if I search “How to build a website” in Google, the first result is “websitebuilderexpert.com”:

Click to enter, and I saw a 40,000-character heroic essay, this article explains in detail from the perspectives of domain name, space, and website building tools.

Are you professional? Very professional, at least I, a veteran of website building, can’t fault it.

authoritative? I checked its external links, and at a glance, they were all top experts in the industry.

Is it trustworthy? This article was written by Hannah Whitfield, and previously contributed to RankMagic, WP Reset, Business Insider, and SmallBizDaily.

By the way, when Google judges your “EAT”, it does not require you to take a doctorate first, as long as you meet the so-called “Everyday Expertise”, it can also be counted as a major.

Like me, I don’t have a Ph.D. in Internet marketing, but I’m still qualified to write about Internet marketing because I practice it every day.

For example, I plan to make a blog related to pet dogs. Although I have never taken a veterinary exam and have no dog training certificate, but because I have a border collie myself, I will share my experience through the blog. any problem.

Inspiration from “EAT”

So from the perspective of “EAT”, it is very important to link the About page of a website to the author of an article.

Take the inquiry free website as an example, you will find that all articles on this website will emphasize who wrote this article. For example, at the beginning and end of the article, I will put the author information and links:

Click on the avatar, and there will be an introduction page dedicated to me. On the dedicated page, I will also put homepage information such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

This is actually creating the “EAT” of Inquiry Free Network.

If you observe carefully, you will find that the vast majority of websites made by Chinese people never emphasize the author of the article, and the website does not have a separate page to introduce the author.

This is very bad for accumulating the “EAT” of the website, because Google can’t tell who wrote the article.

In addition to the About page and Author page, the “Privacy Policy (Privacy Policy)” page and “Terms of Service (Terms of Service)” page of the website are also very important. There is a link to the foot position:

I won’t go into details about other details. In fact, around “EAT”, we can do a lot of things, such as answering questions on Quora, being active on Reddit, having fans on YouTube, and so on.

“YMYL” that affects ranking

Since the “Wei Zexi Incident”After that, I was very wary of Baidu. I always felt that the pages searched by Baidu were not credible. After all, the cost of cheating is too low. Anyone can call himself an expert and talk nonsense.

I suggest that you also have a good understanding of the Wei Zexi incident from the beginning to the end, which is very beneficial for you to understand Google’s “cautiousness”. If you understand the Wei Zexi incident, you will have more awe when you do SEO in the future.

In the whole incident, Wei Zexin did nothing wrong. The mistake was that he used Baidu to search for information, but was deceived by paid advertisements to the black heart hospital. He spent a lot of money, and finally died of ineffective treatment.

If Baidu could give more valuable suggestions at that time, Wei Zexi would not have died.

This incident caused a lot of trouble at the time, and Baidu was once pushed to the forefront by public opinion, and many paid medical advertisements were forced to suspend. Until today, Baidu has never displayed medical advertisements on many diseases.

For example, when I search for “myofasciitis”, Baidu gives me the following results (is it a bit like Google “EAT”?):

On this issue, Google has almost made no mistakes. In the “Search Quality Evaluation Guidelines”, Google emphasized that all content related to “YMYL” will be very cautious when ranking.

What is “YMYL”? YMYL is the abbreviation of “Your money or your life”, that is to say, all rankings related to “money or human life” will be very careful and prudent, because if one is not careful, there will be poor people like Wei Zexi in this world People give money and die.

For example, when I search for “How to cure fasciitis pain” on Google, the website that ranks first in Google is “WEBMD”.

I am not familiar with this website, but an American friend of mine said that this website is the most trusted medical website in the United States. Anyone who has a physical problem will search it on it.

Scroll down a few pages, and most of the search result pages you see are big industry websites or government websites, and you can hardly see small websites ranking in the front.

To be able to rank so high under this type of search intent , the authors of these articles are either authoritative doctors, or the organization behind him has a strong medical background, otherwise it is difficult to get the ranking.

Google’s attitude on “YMYL” is very firm, because once it relaxes, the world will repeat the tragedy of Wei Zexi.

Inspiration from “YMYL”

The most important information we can get from Google’s attitude towards “YMYL” is:

If the article does not involve money or human life, try not to write about this topic, because the difficulty of ranking articles written on such topics is ten times and a hundred times that of non-“YMYL”.

For example, if you are a medical device manufacturer, then when you write an article, you should try to avoid talking about patients or surgery-related topics. You should write about how your medical device is produced, the production process and process. Class topics are fine.

In addition, any content that will cause spiritual loss to readers should be avoided as much as possible. The whole picture of “YMYL” is as follows:

The “Beneficial Purpose” that affects rankings

Google released the “Search Quality Evaluation Guidelines” in 2018, and then updated a version in 2019. In the updated version, Google emphasized the concept of “Beneficial Purpose”:

In other words, if the original intention of a webpage’s content creation is not to benefit readers, it will not get a good ranking, and the evaluators will manually correct the ranking data.

So what is “Beneficial Purpose”, that is, beneficial to readers? The Search Quality Evaluation Guidelines also give examples:

share information on a topic
share personal or social information
Share pictures, videos, or other forms of multimedia content
express personal opinion
entertainment purpose
sell a product or service
Allow users to ask questions
Allow users to share or download files

Lessons learned from “Beneficial Purpose”

When many friends know about “EAT” for the first time, they will ask, sir, I am not an expert in this field, and I am not authoritative, so am I unable to do SEO?

Many friends will feel panic when they first know about “YMYL”, and they will ask, sir, can I not even sell my own products in the future? Because I want to sell products, I must let customers pay.

But the Search Quality Rating Guidelines reassure us because it clearly states that it’s OK to “share information about a topic,” “express your opinion,” or “sell a product or service.”

I have seen many blogs. When her blogger introduces herself, she will clearly say: I am a novice in this field. I have just entered this field. To share with you.

The ranking of such blogs is generally not bad… Look at the following blogger, her self-introduction is as follows:

When I moved out of home and renovated my own house, I ran into a ton of questions that I couldn’t find answers to online, so I wrote this blog to share what I learned along the way.

Many bloggers really have no experience at all, but their blogs can still get traffic and get good rankings. This is because their original intention of creating content is “Beneficial Purpose”, even if their “EAT” is mediocre , but still can compete with other major stations.

Written at the end: Baidu vs. Google

The following is Baidu’s financial report for the past five years:

It can be seen that the attitude of the capital market towards it has gradually become indifferent.

Many problems can be reflected through Baidu’s stock price, and compared with Google’s stock price in the past 5 years, we can clearly see that the five-year trend between the two is completely different, and we can also understand how big Baidu’s current problems are:

I personally don’t hate Baidu. Baidu accompanied me throughout my childhood and helped me solve various problems.

But it is precisely because Baidu failed to do well in all aspects of “EAT”, “YMYL” and “Beneficial Purpose” (at least far less than Google), Baidu, which once drove Google out of the Chinese market, has been reduced to this day.

If Baidu does not make drastic reforms in search results and search experience, Baidu’s search market share will continue to shrink. Although it has won big battles in the PC era, it will not go far in the mobile era.

Regardless of Baidu and Google, if you want to get rankings and traffic in Google, you have to take Baidu as a lesson. When creating content, you must take into account the three elements that Baidu did not do well, because when Google ranks, These three elements are the first to be considered.