In February 2017, I presented this deck on SearchLove San Diego’s infamous 4:3 aspect ratio projectors, with the slightly melodramatic title “Does Google Still Need Links?” (yes, it does). I talked about how PageRank had originally been intended as a proxy for the popularity (not authority) of a webpage, and Google has a ton of better answers to that question in the form of Chrome, Google search itself, and everything else.
I also pointed out in that presentation that branded search volume was statistically a much stronger predictor of organic rankings than even Moz’s Domain Authority® — not because I thought that either were ranking factors in a causal sense, but because I thought that was an interesting indicator of what Google might be rewarding.
About 18 months later, I wrote this article, pointing out my observation that the top few results for higher-volume terms seemed to exhibit different ranking behavior to the rest of search. “The two-tiered SERP,” I called it, and hypothesized that this could be caused by the availability of click data.
I recall all of this now not to brag — well, maybe a little bit to brag — but more to point out that as SEOs we shouldn’t be (and mostly aren’t) totally surprised by some of these “revelations.” I wasn’t the only one thinking along these lines. Rather, this is often confirming things in which we already were quite confident. Nonetheless, knowing them with near certainty does add significant conviction to the aforementioned tactical implications and allows us to build upon this understanding.
