Google's John Mueller was asked in this morning's hangout at the 13:05 mark into the video about disclosing the number of quality algorithms they have running in search today.
John Mueller said Google doesn't talk about this number outside of saying there general statement that they "have 200 factors when it comes to crawling, indexing and ranking." But he said the number of algorithms is not useful for webmasters and SEOs to know, so why bother.
I love how he said that some algorithms are about displaying a letter on the search results page. I made that point so many times when Google comes back to us, the ones who report algorithm shifts and updates and say "we update our algorithms all the time." Well, sometimes you just update the way things look, or are displayed, or how things are rendered, but not the core ranking algorithm - so please stop using that excuse or be consistent when asked about it the reverse way here.
Here is the transcript:
Question: When you refer to Google’s quality algorithm, can you explain how many algorithms you are referring to?
Answer: In general we don’t talk about how many algorithms we have that are running. Publicly we say that we have 200 factors when it comes to crawling, indexing and ranking.
But in general, the number of algorithms is kind of an arbitrary number. Like one algorithm could be used to display a letter in the search results page. It is not something where counting the number of algorithms we use is really useful.
From that point of view, I don’t have any numbers that I can give you with regards to how many algorithms are running on Google’s side for search.
Forum discussion at YouTube.
