Google May Rework on the Impact of Existing RankBrain Search Ranking Signals

March 22, 2016 Nashaat Quadri 0

RankBrain is in the limelight again. This time it is about some coverage on it around Google not fully understanding it, as well as RankBrain not impacting crawling or link-replacement.

So, Gary Illyes took to Twitter and clarified that “RankBrain lets us understand queries better.” He added that there is “no affect on crawling nor indexing or replace anything in ranking.”

Following this Rand Fishkin shared a query which said, “So RankBrain isn’t allowed to use a new factor that wasn’t previously an algo-input, but might reweight existing inputs?”

Gary replied-“To the best of my knowledge that’s the case, yes. (I am on the search quality team, but not rankbrain, so I don’t know EVERYTHING).”

Based on the twitter conversation between the two, it would be safe to assume that that RankBrain itself cannot be counted as a ranking signal; but based on the query; it may affect how the existing signals are being weighed.