Google’s Information-Based Ranking Shift

This month, Google scientists published a paper proposing a shift in Google rankings. Traditionally, Google has ranked sites based, in part, on the links on a site that connect to the relevance of the search term. With this shift, Google's algorithm would expand beyond just links to the quality and accuracy of the data on the site. This is known as Knowledge-Based Trust (KBT) and would primarily affect searches on people, events, and places.

Sites providing inaccurate or outdated information would be impacted by this change. If implemented, Google will cross -check and evaluate onsite facts with their internal Knowledge Vault, a Google database that has already accumulated over 1.6 billion facts (each correlated with an accuracy confidence score). Websites would not only be evaluated and ranked based on popularity, but also on accuracy and trustworthiness.

This reinforces and further validates the need to supply accurate content. Today, providing erroneous facts or statistics might go unnoticed by Google. Moving forward however, those lapses could not only affect the reliability of your content, but could directly impact the rankings of your site on the most popular search engine.

If you're concerned about the accuracy of your content, now is the time to audit your site and see if any changes need to be made to ensure optimal online visibility. To learn more about how Onboard can help, reach out to us or leave a comment below.

To view the original article, visit the Onboard Informatics blog.