Internal Google Document Shows Google Look at User Signals (Again) like Clicks and More

Rand Fishkin unpacks some of Google’s anti-competitive behaviour from the internal Google docs available from the Hearing on “Online Platforms and Market Power: Examining the Dominance of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google.

From an SEO point of view, these ones were quite interesting.

• Continued investment in our core ranking via query and document understanding.
• Continued investment in user signals, like clicks. Our search users create the first level a network effect for search quality and we are investing in this heavily.
• Hard queries: Queries for which users are frustrated even when they have told Google all they could, there is a strong effort to improve user experience for such queries.
• Query structure analysis: identify different types and look at past usage of those queries to improve ranking
• Suggestions for popular queries
• Rankboost, continue developing our learning system to take human rating data as input and predict new ranking signals
• Low link and small corpus ranking, important for integrating new deep web and mom & pop and international content
• Non-web ranking in preparation for universal search: improve and standardize ranking for other properties by applying tried and true web search techniques, augmented with domain information

There has been other instances where Google has documented the use of clicks as a ranking signal but each time it happens, everyone is surprised.