Interesting post on Search Engine Land where Google says that RankBrain is the third most important rank factor just after content and links.
We knew last year that RankBrain was said by Google to be the third most important ranking factor, but Google refused to say what the first two were. Yesterday, in a Q&A with Google, Andrey Lipattsev, a Search Quality Senior Strategist at Google, said the other two factors were links and content:
I can tell you what they are. It is content. And it’s links pointing to your site.
He wouldn’t say which was more important, so the top three list now looks like this:
1 & 2: Links & Content
3: RankBrain
In the vodcast the discussed moment is around the 30 minutus mark.
Interesting and exiting too because we do not understand yet how RankBrain translates exactly towards actions or quality checks that site owners, SEO-s or webmaster can do. If there are any. RankBrain is mostly about beter understanding of the intention of what a Google user is looking for while using a more complex query. Like in a query in natural language.
Als interesting is the discussion on “Interaction” like CTR in the video. Rand Fishkin tels about experiments he ran where he asks his audience to click on the number 7 result (it often quickly rises and also resides to its normal position in a few days).
