On 4th of May 2020 google rolled out its search engine algorithm updates. This year’s core update was all about content. Google focused more on improving the content quality and introduced four major updates in their algorithm.
Because Google Core Updates can increase your website’s SERP rankings it becomes necessary to keep up with these updates. Let’s take a quick look and understand what this year's update was all about.
Know about E-A-T
Did you know that Google employs raters to give keep a check on their algorithm’s effectiveness? These raters assess the content that ranks in top 10 and check if the content satisfies the E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness) standards. Raters have no control over rankings but they cross check if the top results provide the quality content to secure a rank. In simple words if you understand how raters evaluate your content according to EAT standards, it can help you do better in Search.
Green flag to No- Follow links
To combat the issue of websites trying to rank themselves better by guest posting, Google has introduced a new concept. Earlier no follow links were ignored by Google while crawling through the page. But now, no follow links will be given importance as they can help Google understand your page better. Two new link attributes were introduced too.
a) Rel=” sponsored” – Used for ads, sponsored links and posts.
b) Rel=” UGC” – Used for user generated content like comments.
Reassess your content
Visitors are the king for Google. It wants the most relevant results to be displayed at the top position for any search. But what is relevant content? Is it high-quality content, an hour long read or one with a lot of images? Well, Google decides the relevancy of content through factors like bounce rate, scrolling depths, time stayed on page and site engagement. You can't control these factors to a large extent. So, how do you increase the relevancy of your content? What you can do on your part is to make the content as relevant as possible to the search by making it more informative yet short and crisp. Don't beat around the bush as nobody likes reading an hour long article. Include info-graphics, links and relevant keywords.
Core Web Vitals
The new addition to Page Ranking Signal is Core Web Vitals. It is a set of metrics indicating the speed, responsiveness and visual stability of a page. The following metrics are a part of Google’s Core Web Vitals and this is something you should keep a check on if you are a website owner.
a) Largest Contentful Paint: This metric determines the time for loading the largest contents of a page. It should ideally be 2.5 sec or less than that.
b) First Input delay: It determines the time after which a page becomes interactive once the user has clicked on URL. An ideal time is 100 ms. This factor is important for websites where users need to interact like e-commerce websites.
c) Cumulative Layout shift: This is the total number of times a page layout shifts during the loading phase. A good CLS score is less than 0.1. If elements keep shifting while user is interacting can lead to bad user experience.
Well, a lot of you know the importance of page loading experience, but FIL and CLS are two new addition to this set that you should pay some attention to.
Google has announced that it doesn’t plan to change the rankings until the year 2021. So, you don’t need to panic if these new changes will affect your current position. You still have a lot of time to prepare for these changes. Take these above factors into consideration and see what wonders it can do to your Search performance.