Google’s Ranking Factors Are Trending Towards Human Interest

Google Ranking FactorGoogle continues to evolve. Likewise local search marketing services and SEO specialists must evolve with it. Google’s recent Penguin and Panda updates, along with other changes in its search algorithm have sought to put an end to the relevance of unnatural links and sparse content.

With the explosion of Social Media and locally targeted search results Google is trending towards including human interest as a ranking factor in its algorithm. What is the secret to boosting the usage of your website and gaining naturally created links in a human interest driven Google results environment? The answer, as it has been for some time, is content. The creation of engaging, quality content is the key to attracting and keeping human interest.

Understanding the Quality of Your Content

There are factors that will help you better understand the engaging quality of your content.

  • Authorship – With authorship you can establish trust that you or your website are a trusted authority in your niche.
  • Social Media – Are people posting and tweeting about your content to share it with others? If it is quality, people will talk about it.
  • Links – If other websites and pages are naturally linking to your content, then that is a good sign that it is considered to be of value.
  • Bounce Rate – If people are landing on your content and immediately leaving, then that is a good sign that your content is of little use to those visitors or of low quality.

Page Use is a Good Measure of Human Interest

Google is getting better and better at determining the human experience on a web page. Google’s position for ranking has always been that if the webpage is considered of value to them, then it will be of value to humans, and conversely, if the page is considered of value by humans, then it will be considered to be of value by Google. If the content on your website and pages is considered to be of value by both humans and Google, your page will rank very well. Real, human, on-page usage is a realm, in which Google has begun to venture, as part of their trend towards using human interest in your content as a ranking factor.

If You Listen, Google Will Tell You What Is Quality Content

Many people try to “beat” Google. The way to real success on Google is to “listen” to what Google is telling you to do and do it. Currently, Google is saying that quality, engaging content is a major factor in ranking well. To improve the quality and human interest in your content, you should build author rank, measure social signals surrounding your content, measure traffic on your web pages, and measure quantity and quality of comments. By themselves these are not major ranking factors for Google, but together they can greatly enhance the credibility, authority, and quality of your content in Google’s eyes.

The main thing to focus on, whether you are looking at local search marketing services, or implementing a large SEO strategy, is the creation of quality, engaging content. Google is getting better and better at recognizing what is truly quality content and what has been artificially elevated through shortcuts and blackhat tactics. Google wants the quality of your content to be recognized and shared naturally, because of human interest in what you are creating.

13 thoughts on “Google’s Ranking Factors Are Trending Towards Human Interest”

  1. Great post Chris, i’m looking for how to improve page rank on Google. Can you write a post about Tips for that

    Reply
  2. Hey Chris, all are perfect for me but got bit confused about this “Bounce Rate – If people are landing on your content and immediately leaving, then that is a good sign that your content is of little use to those visitors or of low quality”. What exactly that does mean? Bit new in blogging but thought something wrong with that line 🙂
    Regards.

    Reply
  3. Getting rank on major search engines is one of your objective in order to get sales and of course generate income for your websites. So, web marketers employ the use of marketing tools like social media to build online reputation and disseminate info about their websites around the web.

    Reply
  4. This is good post, but I don’t think that human factor is going to change anything. Google still needs to find another and better way for ranking pages. Because spam can duplicate and imitate shares and likes, then what? We’re going to need to fight against spam in order to get better rankings, it’s already harder.

    thanks for sharing

    Reply
  5. A good post Chris. I must keep these things in mind. Moreover, can you provide something about how to improve the Google page rank ?

    Reply
  6. Vaibhav, there are many strategies to implement to improve your Google page rank. The number one thing to keep in mind is that people are now becoming links, rather than content as links. One of the first actions to take is to make sure you have established Google authorship. This links your Google+ profile to all of your content throughout the web. The next thing to keep in mind is to focus on social media. Your presence on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have a huge influence on your Google Search rankings. Hope this helps!

    Reply
  7. It’s getting exhausting trying to keep up with Google. Authorship sounds like a great idea but I have a lot of interests, blogging is one of them, furniture another and the list goes on and on. Seems like Google only wants me to be one kind of person to everyone.

    Reply
  8. Some interesting ideas you have here. So glad Google is moving forward with this. Hopefully people will get the idea and focus more on quality writing and less on producing tons of crappy content.

    Reply
  9. yes it’s true a long article with spinning keyword more useful. short article worth less compare to long and article must be proper summarized.

    Reply
  10. From my experience the word count is important. It looks like google likes long articles that are about 1,000 words. I know that is a lot but that is what i’ve noticed. I have low bounce rate but I don’t think that matters. It displays very thin sites above mine often.

    Reply

Leave a Comment