Weekly SEO news: 8 December 2020
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Here are the latest website promotion and Internet marketing tips for you.

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Andre Voget, Johannes Selbach, Axandra CEO

1. Google: page experience ranking algorithm coming May 2021

Google announced the page experience ranking algorithm that is coming in May 2021 some time ago. Last week, Google published a new FAQ page for the planned update.

Google page experience update

What is the page experience update?

The page experience algorithm tries to understand how website visitors perceive a web page: how quickly it loads, how well the page is displayed on mobile phones, how ads are shown on the page, etc.

The new page experience algorithm uses existing Google ranking factors. For example, the page speed update, the mobile-friendly update, the interstitials update and the HTTPS update are part of the new algorithm. Google is going to refine the metrics that deal with usability and speed.

What is new in the FAQ?

The FAQ page shares details on how Google assesses user experience across mobile and desktop. Page experience signals for ranking will apply only to mobile search.

Google prioritizes the observed user experience. The technologies and architectures involved in delivering that experience do not matter.

According to Google, it's very likely that your web pages will meet Google's new criteria if you use AMP pages. It's also possible to meet or exceed the new thresholds without AMP.

Websites can be mobile-friendly while having a low Core Web Vitals score. Google's Page Experience signal measures aspects of how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page. Core Web Vitals is one aspect of this along with Mobile-friendliness. These are not meant to be overlapping but additive in order to provide a holistic picture of page experience.

There are many different ranking signals

Google uses many different signals to rank web pages in the search results. Analyze your web pages with the Top 10 Optimizer and the website audit tool to find out if your rankings can be improved.

You can check the rankings of your web pages with the ranking monitor in SEOprofiler.

What can you do now?

The relevance and quality of the content will continue to be more important than page experience. It's a good idea to get your web pages in shape now. Optimize your web pages now and get better rankings on Google and other search engines:

Optimize your website now

Stay safe during these difficult times!

2. Internet marketing news of the week

GoogleGoogle December 2020 core update is live

"Google has announced that the December 2020 Core Update is now rolling out live. It will take 1-2 weeks to fully roll out. [...] Google’s advice for core updates remains the same. Core updates do not penalize websites. For example, cleaning your links won’t help if your rankings drop after a core update. Instead, it’s likely that other websites do something better than your website."


How are personalized ranking of search results calculated at Google?

"This description of how the personalized ranking of search results provides more details of how personalization works at Google compared to other patents I have written about from Google such as one on Personalized Search Results at Google, which told us about bias documents that would be added to non-personalized search results."

John MuellerGoogle: don't use confusing redirects on your website

"Google's John Mueller told a webmaster on Twitter that it wasn't good to use confusing redirects on a website. [...]

'We have the hardest time crawling & rendering your pages. You redirect https->http->https, and then update the URLs. Not being able to crawl, render, & index clearly prevents us from understanding what's on your pages, and picking a good canonical URL.'"


How often does Google My Business add new categories?

"In the last year, we have noticed that Google adds new categories, or deletes old ones on a monthly basis.  In 2018 we saw 54 categories added and in 2019 there were 45 added."


+++ SEARCH +++ ENGINE +++ NEWS +++ TICKER +++

  • Google: Users tend not to care why a page is slower, and we don't differentiate in our metrics either.
  • New ads format for Google Discover.
  • Google crawl budget information (only applies to websites with 1M+ pages).
  • U.S judge hearing Google case rejects government's protective order request.
  • Google illegally spied on workers before firing them, US labor board alleges.
  • Google Dictionary results are now available with an option to choose your preferred language.

3. Previous articles