In the latest Ask Google Webmasters video, a question was featured about keyword-based top-level domains (TLDs). John Mueller said in the video there aren’t any benefits from featuring a keyword in domain names when someone posed this question:
Does a .jobs domain improve ranking in Google for jobs?
Over the last hundred years, politicians have been wading into economics and breaking up businesses that have become too big – by becoming monopolies – and lots of laws, regulations and policies have been devised around this. But we’ve entered a new era and in that era, the popular board game we all play once every couple of years wouldn’t be called Monolopy, it would be called Monopsony. Read more
There is currently a lot of talk in the SEO community of a June 2020 Google Update rolling out. Although this has yet to be confirmed by Google – who have been getting much better at confirming these things these days. Read more
In a blog post today (28th May 2020), Google has announced they will be rolling out the use of page experience as a ranking factor.
Google cites internal studies and industry research that demonstrates users prefer websites that have ‘great page experience.’
Page experience isn’t anything new in the realms of SEO. I remember when working at UKFast in 2008/2009 we ran a campaign called “Google Love” that talked about how hosting a website on a really fast server would help you rank better in Google. And for years SEO consultants have been using the PageSpeed Tool from Google to work out whether Google is going to mark a site down or not based on page speed.
As smartphones became more and more important for web traffic, Google slowly began to move towards a mobile-first index and introduced mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor.
Google has therefore given us a bit of a sneak peek into the soon-to-be changes to search rankings and how page metrics will be part of that mix.
An important announcement was also made earlier this month in which Google said the Core Web Vitals helps site owners to measure user experience.
The update will include page experience metrics as ranking factors. Interestingly that whilst they are still supporting AMP they are removing AMP requirements for Top Stories eligibility.
This announcement is about giving website owners enough time to get their heads around using these kinds of metrics for SEO purposes. Google says they’ll only be rolling it out in 2021.
Google went on to say:
“The page experience signal measures aspects of how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page. Optimizing for these factors makes the web more delightful for users across all web browsers and surfaces, and helps sites evolve towards user expectations on mobile. We believe this will contribute to business success on the web as users grow more engaged and can transact with less friction.
“Core Web Vitals are a set of real-world, user-centered metrics that quantify key aspects of the user experience. They measure dimensions of web usability such as load time, interactivity, and the stability of content as it loads (so you don’t accidentally tap that button when it shifts under your finger – how annoying!).”
“We’re combining the signals derived from Core Web Vitals with our existing Search signals for page experience, including mobile-friendliness, safe-browsing, HTTPS-security, and intrusive interstitial guidelines, to provide a holistic picture of page experience.”
But whilst AMP is no longer going to be first and foremost for Top Stories, pages must meet the Google News content policies to be eligible.
The first three ranking factors they’re likely to be covering are:
Overall, this has to be a great addition to Google’s ranking factors. This is another great step forward in helping make sure the internet is cleaned up, removing all that old broken content and we can’t wait to get stuck into seeing how this impacts our clients’ rankings.
Working from home costs for around 114,000 employees will be covered by Google as it confirms homeworking will likely continue until the end of 2020. Read more
Google has announced they are rolling out a core update to their ranking factors, which will see many SERPs changing in the next day or so. Read more
The NHS has rejected the model proposed by Apple and Google, for the coronavirus contact tracing app, even though there have been significant concerns raised about both the performance and privacy of their solution. Read more
Google has announced that their introduction of the SameSite cookie labelling will be rolled back due to the Coronavirus lockdown. They went on to say that all users of Chrome 80 will have SameSite turned off for the time being. Read more
The search giant recently announced it is pledging a whopping $800+ million to support small and medium businesses, health organisations and government agencies during the global pandemic. Read more
When you search for something on Google, hands up who clicks on the sponsored links at the top of the page? No, me neither, so why don’t people click on sponsored ads in Google? Read more
