In part one of my interview with Udit Mhatre, the Senior SEO Manager at DuMont Project, we talked about doing SEO in India vs the US.
How Artificial Intelligence is Transforming Google SERP
Now Udit said he is spending a lot of time studying how RankBrain and BERT work and he is seeing the quality of content is adapting to satisfy Google’s new algorithms. He said it is now more about content than building links. He said content is more important to Google’s ranking algorithms more so because of RankBrain and BERT. He also said linkless mentions (citations without hyperlinks) do matter because it builds sentiment with Google.
Google did say that there is no way to optimize for RankBrain and BERT. But the type of content that Google matches on for the most relevant for searchers. We then dive into a bit on the history of links vs content. Content won out by the way. He also brings up some examples of how passage indexing might help.
UI/UX Dark Pattern Hacks:
There are some brands that make it very difficult to terminate your account with them and consumers do not want you go through all those steps to terminate. So anything that a brand can do to not impact their website publicly but help their brand, from a UI/UX perspective, is called a dark pattern. Companies sneak items in your cart or subscribe you to a service without you knowing, it is sneaky. Google did come out with methods to check some of this behavior for merchant center. Also, using various colors and text to push your website visitors to click on buttons, but some sites are using these methods to trick people into actions they do not want to take.
Right now, he said most of this is not hurting SEO right now but he thinks one day it will hurt your SEO and rankings. Here is the example of the story of the site who mistreated its customers to get negative reviews.
You can learn more about Udit Mhatre on LinkedIn.
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Forum discussion at YouTube.
