Google had already revealed that RankBrain, its artificial intelligence system, was the “third most important signal contributing to the result of a search query”. Now Google has revealed the top two factors.
Andrey Lipattsev, the Search Quality Senior Strategist at Google Ireland, revealed the answer in a live WebPromo Q&A, answering a question from SEO expert Ammon Johns.
The answer for the top two signals was…
“It’s content and links pointing to your site.”
So there you have it. Perhaps no major surprise, but Google likes to remain opaque in such matters, so it’s unusual for someone from the company to give such an unambiguous response.
We have much more on this on Search Engine Watch today…
You can also check out the full one-hour long video below – the revelation comes in around the 30m mark. It also features Rand Fishkin from Moz, Eric Enge from Stone Temple Consulting and Bill Slawski from Go Fish.