Gary Illyes responded to an interesting question on Twitter which questions whether Google puts more focus on keywords with higher search volume over those keywords with a lower search volume.

In some respects, I could see why some would think this is a possibility.  After all, some keywords are definitely more “important” than others, not to mention many high volume commercial keywords tend to get spammed a lot more.  This also would not scale very well for practical reasons, especially when you consider all the different languages Google serves search results in.

That said, there has never been any evidence in the SEO community that Google treats some types of keywords any differently than others, simply because of their search volume.

The only thing we have seen is when Google goes after a specific spammy search vertical, as we have seen with things like the payday loan algo and the pirate algo.  But again, that is not specifically going after higher versus lower keywords.

When Illyes was questioned a bit further, when someone said he was suspicious of such a short answer, Illyes responded… in slightly more detail in Google fashion.