Google now ranking passages and moments

Updates from Search on Google 2020 presentation

Hello, and thanks for listening to SEO tips today.

Today we will talk about the SEO updates unveiled in Google’s Search on 2020 presentation, which you can see on YouTube.

The first most significant one is their announcement of “Passages ranking,” which (for SEOs that have been paying attention to mobile indexing) is what Cindy Krum’s labeled“Fraggles” that she has been talking about for the past couple of years.

Here’s the summary:

Google can now rank individual passages from HTML pages (BTW, they can also do this with audio, video, and .pdfs).

Google is still indexing whole HTML pages but can rank just a section.

Barry Schwartz has done an excellent review of the Passages announcement here that you might want to check out: “It is a ranking change, not an indexing change.”  This will improve 7% of search queries across the board.

Spelling: 

Google has continued to improve its ability to understand misspelled words, and for a good reason: one in 10 queries every day is misspelled. Google is introducing a new spelling algorithm that uses a deep neural net.

Subtopics:

Google has applied neural nets to understand subtopics around an interest, which helps deliver a greater diversity of content when you search for something broad.

Key moments in videos: 

Google can now understand the deep semantics of a video and automatically identify key moments. This is also an example of them surfacing a “Fraggle.”By the end of 2020, Google expects that 10% of searches will use this new technology. You can trigger these with timestamps in your YouTube descriptions.

Data Commons now included in Google’s Knowledge Graph

Google uses natural language processing to understand your search intent and map it to the Data Commons’ information. Then Google is presenting the information/answer in a visual format in Google search.

So that’s you’re tip for today is to study up on Cindy Krum’s Fraggles and start thinking about structuring your HTML pages strategically so that they rank for the overall topic and the subtopics included in that broad topic.

Thanks for listening. Come back tomorrow for another SEO tip.

Listen to the previous episode: Nudging Google to index your content

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