Google’s Quality Rankings May Rely On These Content Signals via @sejournal, @martinibuster

The average SEO strategy begins and ends with keyword research, with keyword volume as the deciding factor in what topics will be written about. It’s an outdated approach that fails to resonate with users and no longer reflects how modern search engines evaluate content. Content that delivers a meaningful experience across the factors that matter most to users earns trust, signals quality, and attracts links, shares, and higher rankings.

User Behavior Has Always Been A Part Of Search Ranking

User signals play a central role in Google’s ranking algorithms and the recent antitrust lawsuit against Google revealed how important these are.

One of the exhibits in the recent DOJ antitrust trial against Google featured a confidential presentation called Ranking For Research where Google noted that user behavior signals are noisy and that it takes a lot of data in order to see the patterns.

They wrote (PDF):

“The association between observed user behavior and search result quality is tenuous. We need lots of traffic to draw conclusions, and individual examples are difficult to interpret.”

Another Google document stated that user interaction signals are important to search rankings (PDF):

“…not one system, but a great many within ranking are built on logs. This isn’t just traditional systems, like the one I showed you earlier, but also the most cutting-edge machine learning systems, many of which we’ve announced externally– RankBrain, RankEmbed, and DeepRank.”

Google has used many kinds of user behavior signals for ranking purposes:

• The Google Navboost patent ranks pages based on user interaction signals.
• Google’s Trust Rank patent describes an algorithm that relies on user trust signals to identify trustworthy sites and then identifies sites that are linked from those user-trusted websites.
• Google’s Branded Search patent describes an algorithm that uses navigational queries as implied links for ranking purposes.

PageRank is commonly thought of as just a link algorithm but it’s actually a way to leverage user signals in the form of the links they publish on websites. It’s also a model of user behavior because the linked nature of the web can be used to indicate which sites a user is likely to visit.

Google’s PageRank research paper explains:

“PageRank can be thought of as a model of user behavior.”

Do Keywords Matter Anymore?

Yes, keyword still matter. But it’s been a long time since exact match keywords were a major factor that determined which sites are ranked. Look at virtually any search result and you’ll see that many top ranked sites do not contain an exact match for the keywords in a search query.

Content strategies that rely on keyword-based hubs or silos should be given a second look. Those kinds of strategies originated in the earliest days of search engines when adding exact match keywords into titles and headings was a sure way to be ranked.  That’s no longer the case, so why are SEOs still stuck with keyword-based strategies that map keywords to a hub and spoke content strategy.

Logical site structure is a part of a quality user interface and makes it easy to find content. Focus on that and interlink in ways that make sense to users.

Try thinking in terms of topics that users are interested in and see how far that takes you.

Write With The Purpose To Be Understood

I’m going to share an advanced concept about writing that helps sentences, paragraphs and entire web pages reach an audience more effectively.

Cognitive Load

There is a scientific concept called cognitive load. In the context of reading, cognitive load is the amount of mental effort used to process information.

For example, sentences with confusing instructions or jargon can take extra effort to process. When the load exceeds a certain threshold, the person’s ability to understand or learn from what they’re reading suffers.

Cognitive Dissonance

I have my own theory that’s similar to cognitive load that I call cognitive dissonance. It’s not something scientific that I read, it’s just my own theory.

Dissonance means a lack of harmony, when sounds clash. Poor writing can be dissonant due to the choice of words that are abstract (lack a clear meaning or have multiple meanings) , using jargon, or simply using words that aren’t commonly understood.

Another source of dissonance is writing a paragraph that rambles rather than builds up to an idea.

Cognitive dissonance causes a reader to lose track of what they’re reading and consequently engage less with the content.

Here’s the same sequence of paragraphs you just read, with an explanation of their purpose:

1. Define the idea: I explain that I have a personal theory

I have my own theory that’s similar to cognitive load that I call cognitive dissonance. It’s not something scientific that I read, it’s just my own theory.

2. Explain my idea with a definition and metaphors

Dissonance means a lack of harmony, when sounds clash…

3. Apply the metaphor to writing:

Poor writing can be dissonant due to the choice of words…

4. Expand the definition to paragraph structure

Another source of dissonance is writing a paragraph that rambles rather than builds up to an idea.

5. The big idea I was building up to: What it all means

Cognitive dissonance causes a reader to lose track of what they’re reading and consequently engage less with the content.

SEOs like to talk about hooks and other little tricks to writing, but good writing is not about tricking the user. It’s about clear communication. It doesn’t always come out right the first time the words spill onto the page. Sometimes it helps to step away and come back to it for the errors in sentence and paragraph structure to become visible.

Crafting Content Around the User Experience

Publishers who build sites around keywords face an uphill struggle obtaining links, and since links remain an important ranking factor, it makes sense that the SEO strategy works together with obtaining links. This is where user experience marketing shines.

Nobody links to a keyword-based site because the keywords make them feel good about the site. Keyword-based sites feel sterile because they are optimized for keywords, not people. That approach also results in a made-for-search-engine website structure. Nothing screams “made for search engines” like sitewide title tags with keywords ripped from Google’s People Also Asked keyword lists.

What I would suggest is to acquaint yourself with who you’re writing for by speaking to people who are interested in your topic, joining some Facebook groups, checking out popular forums, listening to podcasts about the topic, watching YouTube videos about your topic, and reading the comment sections of those videos. This will not only give you an idea of what people are talking about, it will show you how they’re talking about it and quite possibly give you ideas for your business, whether that’s selling things online or writing about a topic

Users Share Experiences, Not Links

Perhaps the best kind of link is the kind created because of a positive experience (learning, usefulness, fun). Scientific research has discovered that experiences motivate sharing and that positive experiences are shared the most.

Insight: Those aren’t just links that people are sharing.  Links from one website to another website or even on social media, are the expression of the experiences people had with a website.  Cultivate positive experiences and people will begin linking and sharing your website.

Insight: Devoting time to the user experience is a pragmatic approach to promoting a website because inspiring site visitors with emotional resonance, a feeling, is a sure way to encourage more sales, more links, and more traffic. And that’s why we optimize, right? To make more money.

Make Visitors Want To Return

• Make your content (even if they’re products) easily viewable from the top of the fold
• Make your content easy to scan (with headings)
• Offer related articles at key points where visitors tend to become disinterested
• Encourage messaging opt-ins

Post-Transaction Experience

Successful entrepreneur Justin Sanger pointed out that everyone knows about the sales funnel, but less well known is the funnel that opens up after the sale. He calls this upside-down funnel the Post-Transaction Funnel. The Post-Transaction Funnel represents all the things you can do to send a signal back to the search engines that site visitors had a good experience at your website. This activity includes:

• Encouraging social sharing
• Cultivating good reviews
• Encouraging word of mouth referrals
• Cultivating relationships with non-competitors in your space

I believe it is a good practice to consider the post-transaction funnel because those are the kinds of activities that tend to cultivate more sales. Post-transaction marketing is something to consider outside of the Classic SEO box.

Watch Justin Sanger Discuss Post-Transaction Funnel

Takeaways: User Experience Marketing

1. User-behavior signals are used within Google’s various algorithms and machine learning systems as evidence of page quality and trust.

2. Logically considered, visitor-friendly sentence, paragraph, page, and site architecture that makes it easy to understand information supports strong quality signals.

3. Content that uses clear, jargon-free sentences and paragraphs that build logically enables readers to process information effortlessly and helps build a better user experience.

4. Content planned around user experience rather than exact-match keywords makes pages feel more human-centered and less like they were made for search engines, which contributes to greater trust.

5. Positive emotional experiences that motivate natural sharing and backlinks act as strong indicators of authority and trust.

6. Page design that includes above-the-fold visibility, scannable headings, related-article prompts, and opt-ins helps keep visitors engaged, active, and returning, reinforcing external content quality signals.

7. Post-transaction funnel actions, such as encouraging reviews, social sharing, and word-of-mouth referrals, feed satisfaction signals back to search engines and strengthen trustworthiness.

It is important to recognize that the foundation of a successful website is the user experience. Even a successful PPC landing page is crafted with the principle of a quality end-to-end user experience, from the layout and ease of data delivery to convenience.

User experience marketing is about moving beyond simple keyword phrase optimization, with a content strategy built on understanding what that content means to the user. Is it important? Is it entertaining? Does it rock, and does it roll?

Relevance is still king, but the definition of relevance is now focused on the user, not your keywords.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Andrii Nekrasov

Internet Marketing Ninjas Acquired By Previsible via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Internet Marketing Ninjas has been acquired by SEO consultancy Previsible, an industry leader co-founded by a former head of SEO at eBay. The acquisition brings link building and digital PR expertise to Previsible. While both companies are now under shared ownership, they will continue to operate as separate brands.

Internet Marketing Ninjas

Founded in 1999 by Jim Boykin as We Build Pages, the Internet Marketing Ninjas consultancy story is one of steady innovation and pivoting in response to changes brought by Google. In my opinion, Jim’s talent was his ability to scale the latest tactics in order to offer the services to a large number of clients, and his ability to nimbly ramp up new strategies at scale in response to changes at Google. The names of the people he employed are a who’s who of legendary marketers.

In the early days of SEO, when reciprocal linking was the rage, it was Jim Boykin who became known as a bulk provider of that service, and when directories became a hot service, he was able to scale that tactic and make it easy for business owners to pick up links fast. Over time, the ability to provide links became increasingly harder, and yet Jim Boykin kept on innovating with strategies that made it easy for customers to attain links. I’ve long been an admirer of Boykin because he is the rare individual who can be both a brilliant SEO strategizer and a savvy business person.

Jordan Koene, CEO and co-founder at Previsible, commented:

“Previsible believes that the future of discovery and search lies at the intersection of trust and visibility. Our acquisition of Internet Marketing Ninjas brings one of the most experienced trusted-link and digital PR teams into our ecosystem. As search continues to evolve beyond keywords into authority, reputation, and real-world relevance, link strategies are essential for brands to stand out.”

Previsible and Internet Marketing Ninjas will continue to operate as separate brands, leveraging Boykin’s existing team for their expertise.

Jim Boykin explained:

“Combining forces with Previsible kicks off an incredibly exciting new chapter for Internet Marketing Ninjas. We’re not just an SEO company anymore, we’re at the forefront of the future of digital visibility. Together with Previsible, we’re leading the charge in both search and AI-driven discovery.

By merging decades of deep SEO expertise with bold, forward-thinking innovation, we’re meeting the future of online marketing head-on. From Google’s AI Overviews to ChatGPT and whatever comes next, our newly united team is perfectly positioned to help brands get found, build trust, and be talked about across the entire digital landscape. I’m absolutely stoked about what we’re building together and how we’re going to shape the next era of internet marketing.”

Previsible’s acquisition of Internet Marketing Ninjas merges long-standing experience in link building while retaining the distinct brands and teams that make each consultancy a search marketing leader. The partnership will enable clients to increase visibility by bringing the expertise of both companies together.

Google Explains Why Link Disavow Files Aren’t Processed Right Away via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Filing link disavows is generally a futile way to deal with spammy links, but they are useful for dealing with unnatural links an SEO or a publisher is responsible for creating, which can require urgent action. But how long does Google take to process them? Someone asked John Mueller that exact question, and his answer provides insight into how link disavows are handled internally at Google.

Google’s Link Disavow Tool

The link disavow tool is a way for publishers and SEOs to manage unwanted backlinks that they don’t want Google to count against them. It literally means that the publisher disavows the links.

The tool was created by Google in response to requests by SEOs for an easy way to disavow paid links they were responsible for obtaining and were unable to remove from the websites in which they were placed. The link disavow tool is accessible via the Google Search Console and enables users to upload a spreadsheet with a list of URLs or domains from which they want links to not count against them in Google’s index.

Google’s official guidance for the disavow tool has always been that it’s for use by SEOs and publishers who want to disavow paid or otherwise unnatural links that they are responsible for obtaining and are unable to have removed. Google expressly says that the vast majority of sites do not need to use the tool, especially for low quality links for which they have nothing to do with.

How Google Processes The Link Disavow Tool

A person asked Mueller on Blue Sky for details about how Google processed the newly added links.

He posted:

“When we add domains to the disavow, i.e top up the list. Can I assume the new domains are treated separately as new additions.

You don’t reprocess the whole thing?”

John Mueller answered that the order of the domains and URLs on the list didn’t matter.

His response:

“The order in the disavow file doesn’t matter. We don’t process the file per-se (it’s not an immediate filter of “the index”), we take it into account when we recrawl other sites naturally.”

The answer is interesting because he says that Google doesn’t process the link disavow file “per-se” and what he likely means is that it’s not acted on in that moment. The “filtering” of that disavowed link happens at the time when a subsequent crawling happens.

So another way to look at it is that the link disavow file doesn’t trigger anything, but the data contained in the file is acted upon during the normal course of crawling.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Luis Molinero

Human-Centered SEO: How To Succeed While Others Struggle With AI via @sejournal, @martinibuster

It’s been suggested that agentic AI will change SEO from managing tools to managing intelligent systems that manage SEO tools, essentially turning an SEO into a worker who rides a lawn mower, with the machine doing all the work. However, that prediction overlooks a critical fact: user behavior remains Google’s most important ranking factor. Those who understand the human-centered approach to SEO will be able to transition to the next phase of search marketing.

Human-Centered SEO vs. Machine-Led Marketing

Many people practice SEO by following a list of standard practices related to keywords, including following the advice of third party optimizer tools. That’s in contrast to some who proceed with the understanding that there’s a certain amount of art to SEO. The reason is because search engines are tuned to rank websites based on user behavior signals.

Standard SEO practices focus on the machine. But many ranking signals, including links. are based on human interactions. Artful SEOs understand that you need to go beyond the machines and influence the underlying human signals that are driving the rankings.

The reason there is an art to SEO is because nobody knows why the search engines rank virtually anything. If you look at the backlinks and see a bunch of links from major news sites, could that be the reason a competitor surged in the rankings? That is the obvious reason, but the obvious reason is not the same thing as the actual reason, it’s just what looks obvious. The real reason could be that the surging website fixed a technical issue that was causing 500 errors when Google crawled it at night.

Data is useful. But data can also be limiting because many SEO tools are largely based on the idea that you’re optimizing for a machine, not for people.

• Is the SEO who acts on “data,” actually making the decision or is the tool that is suggesting it? That kind of SEO is the kind that is easily replaceable by AI.
• The SEO who literally takes a look at the actual SERPs and knows what to look for and recommends a response is the one who is least replaceable by AI.

Strategic Content Planning Based On Human-Centered Considerations

The most popular content strategies are based on copying what competitors are doing but doing it bigger, ten times better. The strategy is based on the misconception that what’s ranking is the perfect example of what Google wants to rank. But is it? Have you ever questioned that presumption? You should, because it’s wrong.

Before Zappos came along, people bought shoes on Amazon and at the store. Zappos did something different that had nothing to do with prices or the speed of their website or SEO. They invented the concept of liberal no-questions asked return policies.

Zappos didn’t become number one in a short period of time by copying what every one else was doing. They did something different that was human-centered.

The same lessons about human-centered innovations carry forward to content planning. There is no amount of keyword volume data that will tell you that people will respond to a better product return policy. There is no amount of “topic clustering” that will help you rank better for a return policy. A return policy is a human-centered concern and it’s the kind of thing that humans respond to and, if everything we know about Google’s use of human behavior signals holds true, then that will show up as well.

Human Behavior Signals

People think of Google’s ranking process as a vector-embedding, ranking factor weighting, link counting machine that’s totally separated from human behavior. It’s not.

The concept of users telling Google what is trustworthy and helpful have been at the center of Google’s ranking system since day one, it’s the innovation that distinguished its search results from its competitors.

PageRank

PageRank, invented in 1998, is commonly understood as a link ranking algorithm but the underlying premise of PageRank is that it’s a model of human behavior based on the decisions made by humans in their linking choices.

Section 2.1.2 of the PageRank research paper expressly states that it’s a model of human behavior:

“PageRank can be thought of as a model of user behavior.”

The concept of quality comes from user behavior:

“People are likely to surf the web using its link graph, often starting with high quality human maintained indices such as Yahoo! or with search engines.”

The PageRank paper states that human behavior signals are valuable and is something they planned on exploring:

“Usage was important to us because we think some of the most interesting research will involve leveraging the vast amount of usage data that is available from modern web systems. For example, there are many tens of millions of searches performed every day.”

User feedback was an important signal from day one, as evidenced in section 4.5.2:

“4.5.2 Feedback

“Figuring out the right values for these parameters is something of a black art. In order to do this, we have a user feedback mechanism in the search engine. A trusted user may optionally evaluate all of the results that are returned. This feedback is saved. Then when we modify the ranking function, we can see the impact of this change on all previous searches which were ranked.”

The Most Important Google Ranking Factor

User behavior and user feedback are the core essential ingredient of Google’s ranking algorithms from day one.

Google went on to use Navvoost which ranks pages based on user behavior signals, then  they patented a user-behavior based trust rank algorithm, and filed another patent that describes using branded searches as an implied link.

Googlers have confirmed the importance of human-centered SEO:

Google’s SearchLiaison (Danny Sullivan) said in 2023:

“We look at signals across the web that are aligned with what people generally consider to be helpful content. If someone’s asking you a question, and you’re answering it — that’s people-first content and likely aligns with signals that it’s helpful.”

And he also discussed user-centered SEO at the 2025 Search Central Live New York event:

“So if you’re trying to be found in the sea of content and you have the 150,000th fried chicken recipe, it’s very difficult to understand which ones of those are necessarily better than anybody else’s out there.

But if you are recognized as a brand in your field, big, small, whatever, just a brand, then that’s important.

That correlates with a lot of signals of perhaps success with search. Not that you’re a brand but that people are recognizing you. People may be coming to you directly, people, may be referring to you in lots of different ways… You’re not just sort of this anonymous type of thing.”

The way to be identified as a “brand” is to differentiate your site, your business, from competitors. You don’t do that by copying your competitor but “doing it ten times better,” you don’t get there by focusing on links, and you don’t get there by targeting keyword phrases in silos. Those are the practices of creating made-for-search-engine content, the exact opposite of what Google is ranking.

Human-Centered SEO

These are all human-centered signals and if you use tools for your content it’s the kind of thing that only a human can intuit. An AI cannot go to a conference to hear what customers are saying. An AI can’t decide for itself to identify user sentiment that is indicative of pain points that could be addressed in the form of new policies or content that will make your brand a superior choice.

The old way of doing SEO is the data decides what keywords to optimize, the tool decides how to interlink, the tool decides how to write the article. No, that’s backwards.

A human in the loop is necessary to make those choices. Human makes the choice, the AI executes.

Jeff Coyle (LinkedIn profile), SVP, Strategy at Siteimprove and MarketMuse Co-founder agrees that a human in the loop is essential:

“AI is redefining how enterprises approach content creation and SEO, and at Siteimprove, now powered by MarketMuse’s Proprietary AI Content Strategy platform, we’re bridging innovation with human creativity. With our AI-powered solutions, like Content Blueprint AI, we keep humans in the loop to ensure every step of content creation, from planning to optimization, meets a standard of excellence.

Enterprise content today must resonate with two audiences simultaneously: humans and the AI that ranks and surfaces information. To succeed, focus on crafting narratives with real user value, filling competitive gaps, and using clear metrics that reflect your expertise and brand differentiation. The process has to be seamless, enabling you to create content that’s both authentic and impactful.”

The Skilled And Nuanced Practice Of SEO

It’s clear that focusing on user experience as a way of differentiating your brand from the competition and generating enthusiasm is key to ranking better. Technical SEO and conversion optimization remain important but largely replaceable by tools. But the artful application of human-centered SEO is a skill that no AI will ever replace.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Roman Samborskyi