Gary Illyes,
Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst since 2011, is kind of a big deal.
Many in the world of search are dubbing him the new Matt Cutts, but
whether or not this is the case, there are few people on the planet who
know as much about what’s going on at Google as Mr. Illyes.
By: Woj Kwasi
When he’s not (quoteunquote) “creating a better search experience for users by helping webmasters create amazing websites”, crunching data or reinventing search, you might find Gary helping (or trolling) users on Twitter, jumping out of moving planes, or talking about chowing down on an Australian marsupial or two. Culinary tastes aside, Gary’s the man with all the answers on Google’s algorithms.
We caught up with Gary at Big Digital Adelaide to try to trip him up and spill the beans.
By: Woj Kwasi
When he’s not (quoteunquote) “creating a better search experience for users by helping webmasters create amazing websites”, crunching data or reinventing search, you might find Gary helping (or trolling) users on Twitter, jumping out of moving planes, or talking about chowing down on an Australian marsupial or two. Culinary tastes aside, Gary’s the man with all the answers on Google’s algorithms.
We caught up with Gary at Big Digital Adelaide to try to trip him up and spill the beans.
This
post has been lightly edited for clarity. Gary’s opinions are all his
own and don’t necessarily represent those of Kwasi Studios or Google.
Woj: Welcome to Australia, Gary.
-------------> Gary: Thank you for the very warm introduction.
Woj: No problem. So let’s go back to the beginning. Well, not too far back.
What’s your first memory of the internet?
Gary: 28K modem sound
Woj: *Beep boop boop*
Gary:
Yeah, exactly. With my brother, we learned to sing that, to whistle it
because we realised that it always followed the same pattern and except
when there were troubles with the line and then the beeps were
different. But yeah, that’s my first memory. And of course we were
teenagers and we had to download pictures and how the pictures were
rendering on the computer. I mean, pictures of cats.
Woj: Yeah, of course.
Gary:
They took a very long time to load and I remember how frustrating that
was. But we were mostly living in Romania and they have amazing
internet.
Woj: Really?
Gary:
Yeah, for a very, very long time, probably for 20 years by now. The
first time I was in the U.S. they were still struggling with half a
megabit DSL and by that time in Romania, 100 megabit synchronous
connection was pretty common.
Woj: Oh, wow. And your background is being an online journalism teacher.
Gary: Yeah.
What are your thoughts about Google Podium?
Gary:
Personally I think it’s an interesting way to present content. It’s a
very cool idea, I think, and it can easily satisfy the information needs
of the users. I don’t know where it will it go or what will happen to
it. We like to experiment with these kinds of things and just see how
it spins out.
Woj: What will happen to old content (e.g. news) with Google’s Podium instant articles feature? Do you see the content published direct to the search results as having potential value beyond its initial seven day lifespan, and will it be searchable at all?
Gary: I would
hope that, in some sense, the posts would be archived. I think that
it’s very good for humanity to preserve knowledge. We wouldn’t know much
about history if that wasn’t humanity’s priority to archive things. So I
hope that we are continuing with that.
Woj: We’ve got to make sure that future generations have access to all these wonderful historical snapshots of our lives.
Gary: Yeah, it’s not like I’m publishing stuff about what I was doing in the early morning after coffee.
Woj: Yeah – and also, as per the earlier disclaimer: these thoughts are Gary’s and not representative of Google.
Gary:
I mean, some of them are but in many cases, probably I will not have a
good answer from Google’s side because I just don’t work on the product,
for example, like Google Post. In
those cases, instead of saying that I don’t have an answer and then
stop, I would prefer to just say something that is my personal opinion.
Woj: Sure. So Google’s mission is to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Aside from minor punctuation, this mission statement has not changed since the company’s inauguration in 1998.
What
has changed is the search engine has grown into a colossal
machine learning monolith, almost always delivering the right answer and
in one eighth of a second.
This implies that Google doesn’t want low quality in their results, and
the technology they use to separate the wheat from the chaff has
improved.
What are some ways that webmasters can change their behaviour to focus on providing a better user experience?
Gary: Our
goal was always to provide the most relevant results to our users and
that hasn’t changed over the years. The correct answer…well, not
correct, but the relevant answer could be from a local site as well. It
doesn’t have to be from a high quality site, but in most cases it will
be.
In general, I hope that publishers will try hard to
create high quality sites instead of trying to sell Viagra in a
Canadian casino without a prescription, and we will try to reward those
sites by presenting them in our search results.
Basically you want to create high quality sites following our webmaster guidelines, and focus on the user, try to answer the user, try to satisfy the user, and all eyes will follow.
Woj: Which doesn’t include manipulation and all of these sort of tactics that SEOs often want to take as shortcuts.
Gary: Going
out and buying 5,000 links from a Russian spammer, it’s not a good idea
in general; but sure, it could work for a few hours.
Woj: Google’s very good at detecting patterns. The way I see it, Google is trying to replicate the real world. The real world is full of entities and relationships between them.
How important is it to give Google clues via semantic markup or is Google pretty good at working out the clues themselves?
Gary:
I think the answer is both. We are pretty good at triangulating answers
or facts in general. We have multiple sources of information to
validate its correctness for the knowledge vault. Schema Markup, for
example, is also a very important part of search.
Woj: Is that a signal that, if found, kind of precedes other signals? Is that advantageous?
Gary:
It’s not very visible in general. For a rich submit, for example, it
is. For recipes, it is. For movie reviews, it is. But other than that,
typically webmasters or content producers will not see a clear benefit.
It’s more about making sure that search engines understand the
content well.
So for example if you are talking in your
pages about Apple, then that’s quite ambiguous unless you specify
somehow which entity are you talking about. Are you talking about the
fruit or the company? And one way to do that is to have Schema Markup on
your pages.
Woj: So it’s beneficial when disambiguating terms?
Gary: Yes, it can be. Yes. And generally, it’s good for search engines because they will better understand the content of the page.
Woj: RankBrain has been mentioned as the third most important ranking factor. You’ve said that it lets Google understand queries better. No effect on crawling or indexing or ranking.
Can you explain how RankBrain lets Google understand queries better? And how it fits within the core algo?
Gary: Is that all?
Woj: Yes.
Gary: You want fries with that?
Woj: Yes, please. Do you have a diagram?
Gary: So yes, RankBrain.
Its importance depends on which way you look at it. It’s an
important ranking factor because it affects pretty much all queries. In
many cases, it will not do anything for the query stack because the
results are already ranked by the core ranking algorithm. But for
queries that we haven’t seen before – really long complex queries – it
can produce very good predictions about what will work best for the
user.
What it does is look at the query based on previously fed training data and try to make a prediction from the results set in order to provide results that work best for a specific query. It’s also really good at getting negative queries right.
So for example, “Can I beat Mario
without using a walk-through?” Traditionally, for our algorithm, it was
quite hard to understand “without” in the query and typically it was
dropping it. With RankBrain, we do a better job at these kinds
of queries.
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