@tjrobertson52

The Department of justice's case against Google finally resolved after 5 years. Even though the court agreed that Google has a monopoly on search, they're not going to break them up. However, as an SEO, that's not why I found this case interesting.

You see, this case forced Google to release a bunch of information of how they rank websites. We've Learned more about the inner workings of Google because of this court case than we have from any other source. So I want to talk about one thing that we just Learned as a result of this case.

If you want a complete breakdown, I recommend Marie Haynes blog. I just want to dive into one part I found really interesting that I think a lot of people are overlooking.

The biggest thing that this court case revealed is that user behaviour is a huge ranking factor for Google. In other words, Google is paying attention to which websites you click on after you do a search and also what you're doing once you land on the website. Google is using this data to determine what types of websites people tend to find helpful.

And then if your website has the same qualities as websites that people tend to find helpful, it will tend to rank higher in Google. Before the DOJ case, SEO's had been arguing about whether user behaviour was a ranking factor. But because of several documents that were released early in a case, we've now Known for a few years that it is.

Now, it might seem like this new information would make it easy for us SEO's to just trick Google into thinking that our websites are high quality and therefore rank them higher. It turns out these specific systems are just a bit too sophisticated for us to game. Because they're based on machine learning, we don't know exactly what the systems are looking for when they're evaluating quality.

In fact, even the engineers at Google don't know exactly what the factors are. However, the reason that I'm making this video today is that we just Learned there's a way to see whether or not Google is evaluating your pages as high quality. Pages that users find helpful.

Pages that are popular and users interact with will be crawled more frequently. And if you have Google Search Console hooked up to your site, you can actually see how often Google is crawling your pages. So take a look.

If Google's crawling your pages more often, that's a good sign that you're aligning with what users find helpful. And if you find that some pages are being crawled less and less often, you might wanna take a look. That's a good sign that Google thinks these pages are low quality because of user behaviour.