Information Gain score in Google SEO

Information gain score in SEO is one of the ranking factors of Google Search results. There are many misconceptions about Information Gain scores. Here, I will try to explain about it in a simple way.

There is information gain in ML (Machine Learning) but information gain score in SEO doesn’t have any relationship with that.

Information gain scores don’t have any impact when a user searches for information for the first time. It comes into effect only when he does more searches on that same topic.

Information gain score is a method to give more information to that user with varied and relevant data than presenting the same information again and again.

Google has a patent for this process called Contextual estimation of link information gain filed in 2018 (Patent ID US20200349181A1).

How information gain score works

A user searches on Google about a particular topic
Google, then picks the documents relevant to that topic & apply their quality, usability and context related algorithms to sort the documents and show it.
The User clicks on one particular document and reads it.
When this user looks for the same information on Google, Information gain score comes into action.
Google observes the documents, viewed by the user as the first set. Then consider all other relevant documents that the viewer has not viewed, yet as a second set of documents.
They compare the content with first data (data already viewed by the user) with all documents in the second set. Their system tries to show more information to the user than presenting the same information.
Based on this information they assign a score to every document in the second set. High score means more information than the first set and low score means almost the same information in the first data.
Google displays the second set of documents in descending order as per the Information score by considering other ranking factors.
Please focus on the above point, that Information gain score is only a factor among many others. It cannot alone change the ranking position.

This is how Information gain score works.

Benefits of Information Gain score system

Users are able to access more unique information than reading the same information in each search.
Google can fight against no-value AI contents which don’t have any new information.
It also helps Google to eliminate the documents written by Article Spinning, content farming and the like methods.

How to improve Information Gain score on our website?

Add more unique information in your documents.
You can present the content in a different way than others.
Methods like content differentiation will help to increase the information gain score.
You have to do more research on the topic to find more insights & unique information.
Always try to add some statistics with numbers, if possible.
Try to add more fresh/latest information.
Refer more contents like PDF, videos and PPTs to fetch more information on the topic.

Thus Information Gain Score can be defined as one of the ranking factors given by Google to score a document, by comparing it’s new and unique information, with the document the user has viewed. To learn more about improving your SEO strategies, check out our SEO course in Malayalam!