Google Invest In Artificial Intelligence & Remove Rich Snippets
Google Buy Into Artificial Intelligence
Representatives of the world’s largest search engine have long considered it a priority to develop a comprehensive understanding of people’s online requirements and desires. They have developed increasingly sophisticated means of returning personalised search results in accordance with geographical location and digital behaviour. However, the most recent development involved the purchase of the DeepMind artificial intelligence system.
Google were so encouraged by the prospects of artificial intelligence that they paid a reported £400 million for DeepMind. A spokesperson for Imperial College London said ‘DeepMind was generally interested in reinforcement learning, and in deep learning, which is very useful in mining so called ‘big data’, something Google has a lot of and is interested in processing.’
Matt Cutts Discusses Social Media Signals
There has been some debate about the potential impact of social media signals upon search engine rankings in recent times. Some webmasters have revealed that they spend time on social networks as a means of gaining SEO benefit. However, Matt Cutts has revealed that Google don’t pay special attention to activity on sites such as Facebook and Twitter. He claimed that Google had taken account of Facebook likes and popular tweets in the past. However, their crawlers had subsequently been blocked.
Matt Cutts also revealed that Google were planning on paying particular attention to digital authorities in the future. He gave the example
of an author who built an excellent reputation for the creation of articles about SEO. There would be some SEO benefit for those forums or websites which featured comments made by such a respected authority.
Matt Cutts Advises Against The Use Of Article Directories
Anybody who’s been involved in SEO for some time will realise that a number of the traditional tactics are now thoroughly outdated. Google have introduced various penalities for the production of keyword stuffed content and paid submission of articles featuring do-follow links. It is hardly surprising that Matt Cutts has opted to reinforce Google’s stance by advising against the use of article directories such as Ezine.
Matt Cutts said that webmasters had previously opted to feature articles on the directories as a means of gaining backlinks. However, he revealed that ‘we certainly have some algorithmic things that would mean it is probably a little less likely to be successful now compared to a few years ago, for example … so my personal recommendation would be probably not to upload an article like that’
Google Moderates The Inclusion Of Rich Snippets
A number of webmasters have realised the value of adding rich snippets to Google listings in recent times. They’ve included personal pictures and extra text as a means of encouraging website click-throughs. This tactic has proved quite effective. However, Google have made the decision to reserve rich snippets for respected, high authority websites. They have also reserved the right to remove rich snippets featured by websites which don’t meet the required standards.
