Google Gives Third Day Keynote at Pubcon

November 1, 2016

Technology conferences are the thing to do when you want to launch a product, advertise a new business, network, or get a general consensus about the tech industry.  There are multiple conferences revolving around different aspects in the tech industry held each month.  In October 2016, Pubcon took place in Las Vegas, Nevada and they had a very good turn out.  The thing that makes a convention, though, is the guests.  Pubcon did not disappoint as on the third day, Google’s search expert Gary Illyes delivered the morning keynote.  (Apparently, Illyes also hold the title Chief of Sunshine and Happiness at Google).  Outbrain summed up the highlights of Pubcon 2016’s third day in “Pubcon 2016 Las Vegas: Day 3.”

Illyes spoke about search infrastructure, suggesting that people switch to HTTPS.  His biggest push for HTTPS was that it protected users from “annoying scenarios” and it is good for UX.  Google is also pushing for more mobile friendly Web sites.  It will remove “mobile friendly” from search results and AMP can be used to make a user-friendly site.  There is even bigger news about page ranking in the Google algorithm:

Our systems weren’t designed to get two versions of the same content, so Google determines your ranking by the Desktop version only. Google is now switching to a mobile version first index. Gary explained that there are still a lot of issues with this change as they are losing a lot of signals (good ones) from desktop pages that are don’t exist on mobile. Google created a separate mobile index, which will be its primary index. Desktop will be a secondary index that is less up to date.

As for ranking and spam, Illyes explained that Google is using human evaluators to understand modified search better, Rankbrain was not mentioned much, he wants to release the Panda algorithm, and Penguin will demote bad links in search results.  Google will also release “Google O for voice search.

It looks like Google is trying to clean up search results and adapt to the growing mobile market, old news and new at the same time.

Whitney Grace, November 1, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph

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