A few weeks back, the SEO world was rocked as Google announced that they were blocking keyword referral data. This was around the same time that MC Hammer announced that he is working on his own search engine and plans to battle with giants such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing. Going back to the topic, to help you with your SEO endeavours, you need to learn more about Google’s philosophy of quality. This is because the key to SEO success is to understand how Google thinks. Here are some useful insights that can help you achieve

SEO success:
Relevance and Spam Are Independent
Basically, relevance is an important rating while spam is a flag. This means that in the point of view of Google, even a useful site can be “spammy” or a useless site can still be free of spam. This philosophy is seen in the algorithm that Google uses for ranking. Content can either be relevant or not but spam is all about the tactics used and the intent of the site owner.

Local Intent Can Be Automatic
Even in cases where queries are generic in nature, it can still imply local intent. The example of Google is a query for “ice rink” which should have results that are local. Obviously, results that are not local should be rated as useless or off-topic. This applies regardless if the location is in the query or not. This means that you should expect Google to infer intent continuously. Also, local intent is becoming more and more significant to Google.

Relevance Implies Language Match
If a search result doesn’t match the target language used in the query, usually the said result is low-relevance. Also, if a specific country is included in the query and the result doesn’t clearly match that particular country, the result is irrelevant.

Some Results Are Actually “Vital”
Any official entity such as a singer, actor, politician, company, etc. can have a vital result. This is because the “vital” relevance rating is an unusual case. Usually, this is the entities official homepage. This is probably a safety valve for the purpose of checking the algorithm. If these so-called “vital” results don’t appear for entity searches, a lot of people would question the results from Google even though the SEO efforts of these entities are unsatisfactory.

Conclusion
These insights can be very helpful in achieving SEO success. As the saying goes, knowing is half of the battle. This is very applicable in SEO since you will have a good idea of what you need to work on once you understand how Google works. Tune in for part 2 of this article for more insights that can help you succeed in your SEO efforts.