Gary Illyes from Google said on Twitter "there's more to ranking than just quality." He added a fact, that Google uses "hundreds of signals to offer users the most relevant piece of content for their query." Sometimes other ranking signals can push a lesser quality page above the higher quality page in the Google search results.
What does this mean? Gary explained "sometimes that means that indeed they get the highest quality, other times it may mean that they get lower quality, but much faster."
In short, he said that Google uses "hundreds of signals" for ranking web pages in search. So it is not just about, is this page the highest quality page - there are many other signals Google uses for rankings.
Here are those tweets:
I see. Well, there's more to ranking than just quality. We use hundreds of signals to offer users the most relevant piece of content for their query. Sometimes that means that indeed they get the highest quality, other times it may mean that they get lower quality, but much fastr
— Socially distant Gary Illyes (@methode) May 2, 2020
TL;DR: We use hundreds of signals
— Socially distant Gary Illyes (@methode) May 2, 2020
Forum discussion at Twitter.
