Google and Fact Ranking: Close but No SEO Cigar
June 3, 2015
Based on my experience gleaned in rural Kentucky, home of Pappy Van Winkle, Google ranks more than Web pages, people, news stories, and links. Google ranks with lots and lots of factors. The Googlers are busy lads and lasses in the ranking department. There are many reasons. One of them may be ad-centric.
I read “Beyond Links: Why Google Will Rank Facts in the Future.” In my opinion, the write up is close by no cigar and certainly no an SEO cigar. Here’s a passage I highlight in dramatic orange:
Since web pages can be littered with factual inaccuracies and still appear credible because of a high number of quality links, the Google team is pursuing a future where endogenous signals carry far more weight than exogenous signals. In short, Google may soon be more concerned with the information your website contains than the level of trust people have in your website. New websites could immediately be ranked higher than established competitor sites just by hosting content that is more factually accurate than theirs.
I have quite a bit of confidence in the GOOG; however, there is one sticky wicket: What is a fact? Facts can be tricky in math; for example, infinity or zero, fact or fanciful notion. One whiz kid went crazy noodling the infinity issue, infinities of infinities, and sets of infinities on the left and the right of the good old decimal point.
Rah rah for the Google Knowledge Vault. There are some statistical tools to rank a fact as more or less correct. Will the SEO crowd be able to game the system so their clients’ Web pages are more factual? Will Google use facts to drive ad sales? Will the user know what is and is not correct? Is there a factual answer to this question: Which is more sophisticated technically? Facebook or Google. What does the Knowledge Vault think?
Stephen E Arnold, June 3, 2015
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