What Does Sentiment Have to do With Artificial Intelligence and SEO?

Google is using artificial intelligence (AI) to determine page rank. And to an amazing degree it’s working! There are those that grumble about the fairness of judging page rank by using a computer algorithm but I would submit that it’s the most equitable method of vendor selection in our human history. After all, just three decades ago we were all using a big yellow book and basing our selection process on the alphabet.

The emotional and often subtle conveyance of human sentiment is where the artificial intelligence algorithms fall short. Pairing synonyms and simple modifiers can completely throw off a mathematical application. For example if you wrote “Hillary Clinton’s video announcement wasn’t the worst presentation in the presidential race this year.” Would Google Artificial Intelligence understand that you were actually sort of complimenting Hillary? It couldn’t possibly capture the sentiment of that sentence because no two humans would interpret it the same way. One might think it inferred that all the candidates were poor this year. Another might think that it was in defense of Hillary and offered a measured amount of praise. Still another might believe that it was in defense of using video as a method of communication.

The take away here is to apply good SEO methods by using sentiment, sarcasm, irony and humor alongside of content written specifically for the algorithm. This marriage of content written for human consumption and algorithm consumption is difficult at best. If you read the “instructions” from Google they never recommend writing for an algorithm but then their bottom-line does not depend on page rank does it? Until Google Artificial Intelligence can discern how I “feel” about a particular subject matter then I would advise refining content to meet Google AI where it falls short.