Machine Learning and SEO

Has anyone attempted to apply machine learning to SEO? I've thought about using something along the lines of Python for this, but I'm not really sure what would be ideal. Opinions?

Well let's start with what we know machine learning can do.

1. Identify unintuitive patterns in large data sets.
2. Use large data sets and patterns to provide insight and model data.

That basically sums up machine learning in a nutshell, a lot of ML is just advanced statistics, not voodoo magic, although the math almost looks voodoo.

Anyway, there's a common denominator, large data sets. You have to be able to collect a lot of data, and more importantly, it has to be "clean", aka not corrupted, but completely accurate.

The holy grail is split testing or experimenting with your own sites to better understand Google's ranking algorithm (good luck with that). But it would take an absurd amount of resources to pull that off. I think what can be done is collecting data on other people's sites and observing what changing events in their link profile or content cause ranking fluctuations.

The problem is collecting data, we know Majestic/Moz/etc don't crawl the web as comprehensively as Google does. Scraping search results can be hard enough of a task and requires way too many proxies as is.

Start with figuring out what data you can reliably collect and think about what insight you could gain from it. Then collect a crap ton of it and figure out how to apply ML.

I am working on adding bandit algorithms into my niche engine to handle the multivariate testing.
there is a great short book by O'Reilly that covers it. All the code is in python.

I think I've just found my phd thesis topic!

Other than doing machine learning just to do machine learning if its truly your passion, would not just going white hat projects be better overall since its going to cost so much to setup a good system to beat google?

Funny there's a thread about this. I was looking at tensorflow at the same time.

There has to be something against this in Google's TOS and good luck collecting enough data to get any sort of an idea that Google doesn't already compile in a millisecond.

There are better ways to make money then compiling a bunch of data that isn't very clear to begin with.

Since google is Using ML / AI to rank pages, it makes sense that you could build your own tool to scrape+crawl websites and then find patterns of sites that rank highly. Basically use ML to reverse engineer the Google Algo.

Dont get caught google will fine you be very carefull

Are hyou good at programming? There is so much to learn in this department - good summary by The Mentalist