We asked Google's Gary Illyes what SEOs and webmasters should think about as this year closes.

Every year we like to get a Googler who is close with the ranking and search quality team to give us future thinking points to relay to the search marketing community. In part two of our interview with Gary Illyes of Google, we asked him that question.

After a little bit of coercion, Illyes told us three things:

(1) Machine learning

(2) AMP

(3) Structured data

He said:

Well I guess you can guess that we are going to focus more and more on machine learning. Pretty much everywhere in search. But it will not take over the core algorithm. So that’s one thing.The other thing is that there is a very strong push for AMP everywhere. And you can expect more launches around that.Structured data, again this is getting picked up more and more by the leads. So that would be another thing.

Interesting how Illyes said that the core algorithm will not be taken over by machine learning — that is an interesting point there. AMP, is obvious and structured data is as well.

Here is the transcript:

Barry Schwartz: Gary, one of my favorite parts of Matt Cutts, I guess, presentations at SMX advanced towards the year and some other conferences. Was that one of the slides always gave, I guess, webmasters and SEOs what’s coming, like what the Google search quality team is looking into for the upcoming year. And we’re kind of at the end of the year now and I was wondering if you have any of those to share.

Gary Illyes: Common, it’s early October. I understand that they started like pushing the pumpkin spice thing but it’s really not the end of the year.

Danny Sullivan: I mean you guys take all of December off and work your way from the end of the year. And might I add like December 4th you’ll be like here’s the end. It’s not like in January you go to Google Trends goes, here’s what happened year. there pushed out in Decembers. Well one thing, surely you’ve got one thing one. One forward looking statement that you can give for us to make stock purchases.

Gary Illyes: Actually you are in luck because I have a presentation or keynote for Pubcon and I will have a slide for what’s coming.

Danny Sullivan: Well let’s have that slide. Because this isn’t going to air until after…

Barry Schwartz: Can you share anything, one thing,

Danny Sullivan: One thing, this isn’t, like this isn’t live.

Gary Illyes: Oh sure.

Well I guess you can guess that we are going to focus more and more on machine learning. Pretty much everywhere in search. But it will not take over the core algorithm. So that’s one thing. The other thing is that there is a very strong push for AMP everywhere. And you can expect more launches around that. Structure data, again this is getting picked up more and more by the leads. So that would be another thing.

Author : Barry Schwartz

Source : http://searchengineland.com/google-whats-important-2017-machine-learning-amp-structured-data-261150