Alright, so its been about a year and a half (perhaps two years) since RankBrain has been feeding itself with all the search queries that us mortal humans have been typing into Google.
Google has been tracking all our activity on its site and as we went about visiting websites… so it could secretly build its big data sets that is being fed to RankBrain to power the search algorithm.
I’m sure most people who know what happened and how Google is playing the game is calling this an amazing development.
And, some of you are probably running scared.
The search results to the queries you feed in, are getting so amazingly accurate and relevant in recent times, it either amazes you… or scares the crap out of you if you’re a somewhat of a thinker.
If you look under the hood and get into the philosophical aspects of technology and science – you’ll probably realize Google is (really) creating a monster.
A “monster machine” that’s still in its infancy, but one that will (exponentially) grow up, sooner than you and I can imagine. Perhaps, in another 5 years, it will surpass the collective intelligence of ALL humans put together on this planet. And, whats scary is that there is no single red button to kill this monster machine.
But, I’ll leave this ethical debate for another post. I will make some attempt to lay down my viewpoint on how at some point in the future, the human race may be forced to kill Google one query at a time (if the few human controllers at Google refuse to push the “red button of death” on RankBrain).
And, I know you’re NOT here today not to debate this point.
You’re here today, because you want to slay RankBrain.
You are the David that is losing against the big G… and you want your slingshot.
You desperately want to win back your profession… your bread and butter that some dumb machine stole from you.
You’re here because you want to learn how you can start ranking sites again.
You’re here because you don’t want to waste your time on SEO methods that are being taught and shared around the interwebs, that don’t stand a chance against RankBrain – and that have caused you to lose hope doing SEO.
You’re here because you don’t see the rank jumps that you were once so used to seeing.
You’re here because you want to get back into the game of SEO.
So, if you read my recent blog post and saw my video on SEO in 2016 and Beyond you’ll see that Google’s RankBrain has recently changed SEO forever, because they control some key aspects of the game…
(1) RankBrain (Hummingbird + AI)
(2) Chrome that spies on your activity all the time (and even in incognito mode)
(3) Some serious and massive amounts of data that they scraped from all of us innocent Googler’s.
It all started a couple of years ago, when Google went out shopping for startups and companies that have powerful Artificial Intelligence software and tools that are patented to them. Just look at their acquisitions of Dark Blue Labs,Vision Factory and more recently… Deep Mind.
So, is SEO Dead for all of us?
Is it now impossible to game Google and get top rankings anymore?
Not At All.
In fact, one could argue that its not that difficult, IF you have….
- The right tools
- Access to the right data
- Access to a human brain 🙂
That is the key…. Tools + Data + Human Brain
Yeah, we’re going to war against an autonomous machine that controls itself, with our own machine, our own data and our ability to access one or more human brains.
So why are bloggers and SEOs shouting all around that “SEO is Dead” when it really is NOT?
Firstly, because most SEOs have run away and changed their career path because what they were doing stopped working with the algorithmic updates.
That’s plain stupid.
If technology has taught us techies and business peeps anything… its that you need to evolve with it.
In fact, I can be guilty of thinking of almost throwing the towel in and quitting SEO myself many times over. Things only became worse as the learning curve and the rapid rate of changes surrounding SEO got so steep, that it became almost impossible to keep up AND continue to have spare time to stay positive.
However, I soon realized that this is exactly what Google really had in mind.
They wanted to lash out at all us SEOs in one fell swoop, and knock out 90% of the SEO industry.
And they got what they wanted. That’s exacly what happened as SEOs started scaling down on their teams (I scaled down my 85 people team in Mumbai to a handful).
SEOs started looking around at other channels to generate traffic.
Heck… they almost got me too.
Until, I started reverse engineering some of the sites that were ranking in a whole bunch of niches. Things changed when I started understanding how machine (deep) learning works and how some of the big SEOs were analyzing big data to dig deep into copying real footprints to feed RankBrain.
And, some of the stuff that I saw, was crazy.
Simple stuff… ranking with just a few backlinks and not much activity.
Why?
Because, the AI (RankBrain) can be fooled… if you know what to feed it.
For starters you need to know what to do in your niche.
SEO tactics are not going to be constant across every niches and keywords.
The RankBrain has completely taken over all the 500 or more SEO variables and dials that were at one point of time tweaked and controlled by human engineers at Google.
So, for starters, you just have to figure out some of the data that is being fed to RankBrain as it turns the dials in your niche or for your set of keywords.
There is no one constant ranking method across all niches anymore.
Some of the stuff has changed.. but thankfully most of the tactics remain the same.. you just have to figure out what tactics to use in your niche.
Know this one thing… stuff is not generic anymore across niches.
Figure out how RankBrain is analyzing your niche, and you’ll be laughing all the way to the bank.
I’ll repeat myself for those who missed the point –
You CANT just follow a generic strategy and rank anymore. You need to see whats working in your niche… more so, for the keyword you want to rank.
Analyze that properly, and you’re on your way to some serious rankings and big money.
But where do you start?
How do you analyze the top competition when they’re using bot blockers and tools to hide their activity and strategies?
Well, for starters.. you cant “hide” everything from everyone online. You may be able to hide from a few bots here and there and cover up some of your SEO activity, but the surviving SEO gurus who have years of experience in SEO can pull out a few tools… and they could hack your entire SEO strategy… and eves drop on mostly everything you were doing pretty darn easily.
You see, that’s the beauty of doing SEO nowadays.
There’s so many tools out there to help you, if you know how to use them. The problem really is figuring out how to apply them to the insights and tactics that you come up with.
And, that’s exactly what I’m going to be talking about in some of my upcoming posts.
The tactics and methods I reveal is some of the stuff big SEOs serving Fortune 500 companies are tight lipped about.
So, stay tuned.
I’m sure you’ll enjoy how we can all disintegrate RankBrain, without Google knowing it.
They created the “dumb” monster machine. Its now our turn to use our intelligence and fool it into its own death.
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