Google's John Mueller addressed a long time topic of interest in the SEO industry around does Google have specialized ranking algorithms for different industries, niches, categories and so on or not. So for the adult industry, or pharmaceuticals, health, finance, etc - does the algorithm work differently. John said Google doesn't think about it that way, they look from the query - not the industry.
John explained at the 17:57 mark into this mornings hangout that Google looks at types of queries and if they see that the query isn't showing relevant search results, they may release algorithms to improve what they show for those types of queries. John said it is "So it's not so much that we focus on the industry but rather we focus on the these searches that people make."
He said "So from our point of view it's usually not the case that we would say we need to do something specific to make the search results better for one particular industry but rather we look at it I had the other way around and try to think about ways that we can improve search results with regards to relevance for users with specific types of queries."
He shared an example that makes it ring medic update to me...
So that I mean they're obviously they're kind of related. If we see for example that people are getting confusing information for medical queries and maybe we need to improve how we recognize the relevance of search results for medical queries. And it's not so much that we would target the medical industry and say like we need to improve that the way that these particular 10 sites are shown in the search results. But more that we see users are confused with this type of query, it's something that's confusing a lot of people, we need to find a way to improve the relevance and quality of for those results for those queries.
I believe the question was triggered based on a white paper that discussed how Google detects YMYL queries and adjusts for it.
Here is the video embed:
Transcript:
When the team pushes out algorithm changes are there times where the changes are aimed at just a specific industry or are the changes made and they just happen to affect one industry more than others?So I guess this is an interesting question with regards to generally how we would work on our search results.
So from our point of view it's usually not the case that we would say we need to do something specific to make the search results better for one particular industry but rather we look at it I had the other way around and try to think about ways that we can improve search results with regards to relevance for users with specific types of queries.
So it's not so much that we focus on the industry but rather we focus on the these searches that people make.
So that I mean they're obviously they're kind of related. If we see for example that people are getting confusing information for medical queries and maybe we need to improve how we recognize the relevance of search results for medical queries. And it's not so much that we would target the medical industry and say like we need to improve that the way that these particular 10 sites are shown in the search results. But more that we see users are confused with this type of query, it's something that's confusing a lot of people, we need to find a way to improve the relevance and quality of for those results for those queries.
Forum discussion at YouTube.
