Google’s John Mueller addressed a long time topic of interest in the SEO industry around does Google have specialized ranking algorithms for different industries, niches, categories and so on or not. So for the adult industry, or pharmaceuticals, health, finance, etc – does the algorithm work differently. John said Google doesn’t think about it that way, they look from the query – not the industry.

John explained at the 17:57 mark into this mornings hangout that Google looks at types of queries and if they see that the query isn’t showing relevant search results, they may release algorithms to improve what they show for those types of queries. John said it is “So it’s not so much that we focus on the industry but rather we focus on the these searches that people make.”

He said “So from our point of view it’s usually not the case that we would say we need to do something specific to make the search results better for one particular industry but rather we look at it I had the other way around and try to think about ways that we can improve search results with regards to relevance for users with specific types of queries.”

He shared an example that makes it ring medic update to me…

I believe the question was triggered based on a white paper that discussed how Google detects YMYL queries and adjusts for it.

Here is the video embed:

Transcript:

Forum discussion at YouTube.