A WebmasterWorld thread brings up a topic that came out of SMX Advanced a month or so ago on something Google's head of search spam, Matt Cutts said.
DS: Does Google have different ranking factors for different industries?MC: We have looked at topic-specific ranking. The problem is it’s not scalable. There’s a limited amount of that stuff going on — you might have a very spammy area, where you say, do some different scoring.
What we’re doing better is figuring out who the authorities are in a given category, like health. If we can figure that out, those sites can rank higher.
DS: How many different categories?
MC: Lots.
The topic of using different algorithms for different industries is not new. It is something some search engines have alluded to in the past but something Google has never confirmed.
Google's Matt Cutts said they looked to do this but instead, as announced previously, they are doing Subject Specific Authority Ranking.
GoodROI, said in the thread:
I have been dealing with different serps for years. Let's not forget about QDF and universal serps. Those changes made me evolve my approach to SEO and enabled me to gain more traffic when my competition didn't evolve with those changes.
Do you believe Google has industry specific search algorithms or no?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
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