The Secret Life of Queries: Parsing, Rewriting & SEO - bSEO April 2022

What happens to a query when you press Enter? Join Rebecca (and Koray) for a tour through what we know about how Google interprets queries, the supporting evidence for these processes, and — most importantly — the implications for SEOs who want to rank for the right keywords.

Talk given at BrightonSEO

Transcript

1. The Secret Life of Queries: Parsing, Rewriting & SEO Rebecca Berbel | Oncrawl Koray Tuǧberk Gübür | Holistic SEO slideshare.net/Oncrawl @RebBerbel @KorayGubur
2. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur
3. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur ^(([^:/?#]+):)?(//([^ /?#]*))?([^?#]*)(\?([ ^#]*))?(#(.*))? https://www.google.com/sear ch?q=search+engine+keywo rds#anchor
4. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur
5. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur WHAT THAT MEANT FOR SEO #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur
6. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur
7. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur
8. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur NOT ANY MORE. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur
9. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur
10. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur LET'S TAKE A LOOK. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur
11. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur PARSING #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur
12. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur Parsing a query
13. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur REWRITING #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur
14. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur Query segments
15. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur Keyword clustering
16. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur Keywords → Questions
17. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur Question Templates
18. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur Query refinements
19. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur CONTEXT #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur
20. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur User Intent
21. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur User Intent
22. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur Location/Time
23. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur FINDING ANSWERS #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur
24. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur BERT
25. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur Candidate Passages
26. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur Candidate Passages
27. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur Candidate Passages
28. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur PHEW. LET'S TAKE A STEP BACK.
29. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur THERE'S MORE (but we'll stop here)
30. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur GOOGLE DOES NOT USE THE TEXT YOU TYPED TO SEARCH FOR RESULTS. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur
31. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur WHAT THAT MEANS FOR SEO #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur
32. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur
33. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur BUILD TOPICAL RELEVANCE Oncrawl / Koray
34. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur REMEMBER NEURAL MATCHING Danny Sullivan (Twitter)
35. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur GROUP TARGETED QUERIES Stefan Neefischer
36. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur THINK SEARCH INTENT Johanna Maier / Lidia Infante / Lazarina Stoy
37. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur DOES IT WORK? #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur
38. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur
39. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur Semantic networks & topical relevance
40. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur Semantic networks & topical relevance 10K to 70K clicks per month (5 months) 10K to 200K+ clicks per month (5 months) 0 to 330K+ clicks per month (6 months) +400% growth (6 months)
41. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur Thank you! @RebBerbel rebecca@oncrawl.com @KorayGubur Holistic SEO ktgubur@holisticseo.digital #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur
42. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur Appendix - References & further reading Ask the Right Questions: Active Question Reformulation with Reinforcement Learning Bew: Towards Answering Business-Entity-Related Web Questions Bill Slawski - Google Describes a Machine Learning Model For a Searchable Index Bill Slawski - Searching Quotes of Entities Modified at Google Bill Slawski - Adjusting Featured Snippet Answers by Context Bill Slawski - Citations behind the Google Brain Word Vectors Approach Bill Slawski - Featured Snippet Answer Scores Ranking Signals Bill Slawski - New Approaches for Structured Data:Evolution of Question Answering Bill Slawski - Question Answering using Text Spans with Word Vectors Bill Slawski - Weighted Answer Terms for Scoring Answer Passages Bing: Contrastive Multi-document Question Generation Bing: Generating Clarifying Questions for Information Retrieval Candidate Answer Passages Context scoring adjustments for answer passages Corroborating Answers from Multiple Web Sources Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering Detecting spam documents in a phrase based information retrieval system Efficient string matching: an aid to bibliographic search [1975] Generating related questions for search queries Google AI Blog - REALM: Integrating Retrieval into Language Representation Models #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur
43. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur Appendix - References & further reading How to Ask Better Questions? A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Dataset for Rewriting Ill-Formed Questions Implicit question query identification Inferring Search Category Synonyms Indexing Relational Database Content Offline for Efficient Keyword-Based Search K2Q: Generating Natural Language Questions from Keywords with User Refinements Latent Retrieval for Weakly Supervised Open Domain Question Answering Multi-stage query processing system and method for use with tokenspace repository Natural Questions: a Benchmark for Question Answering Research On Faithfulness and Factuality in Abstractive Summarization Query Composition System Retrieval-augmented language model pre-training and fine-tuning Scaling Up All Pairs Similarity Search Scoring candidate answer passages Search Engine Round Table - On Google Passage Indexing vs Featured Snippets Selecting content using query-independent scores of query segments Semantic Search Engine & Query Parsing Summarizing News Articles Using Question and Answer Pairs via Learning Synthetic QA Corpora Generation with Roundtrip Consistency System and method for providing query refinements #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur
44. #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur Appendix - References & further reading TyDi QA: A Benchmark for Information-Seeking Question Answering in Typologically Diverse Languages Understanding searches better than ever Using the Web for Language Independent Spellchecking and Autocorrection Weighted Answer Terms for Scoring Answer Passages What can you do with a Web in your Pocket? #brightonSEO @RebBerbel @KorayGubur