Cracking Open Google's Black Box with Machine Learning Tools

For roughly a decade, the SEO industry has been consistently moving further away from discussions about the internal workings of the search engines, starting around the time of the first Panda update. This decision to focus on more strategic and long-term SEO approaches has been a positive one, overall. Marketing strategies built entirely on the whims of a search engine aren't built to stand the test of time. However, there's no denying the value that came from understanding and predicting how search engines would react to certain kinds of tweaks to the HTML or to the backlink profile in the early days of SEO. Most of us have assumed that those days ended when Google embraced machine learning.