In the last quarter of 2019, Google’s executives announced an update to their search algorithm that would shape the way how websites and webpages were going to be ranked. As we are talking about the most popular search engine in the world and the one that marks the trends for others, this had a huge impact over the whole internet community, especially considering that many creators’ revenue depends (directly or indirectly) on how close to the top they appear on the organic results. Those of us who offer our services to optimize the rankings, make it our point to always be up to date with all such developments.
Quality over quantity
The first major overhaul was related to the acronym EAT and had a tremendous impact. Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness became a huge factor to determine the quality of the results in Google’s Search Engine. Make no mistake; these elements have always been important. After this update, however, their relevance skyrocketed and pages without any sort of beneficial purpose (or that didn’t attempt to help users but just to hard sell) started to get the lowest ratings and basically were relegated to oblivion.
During the second half of 2021, Google crammed 3 updates whose impact and reach we all are still trying to completely understand. The last one (made in November), made things clear: Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness continues to play a major role in the algorithm updates because YMYL pages (acronym for Your Money or Your Life, i.e. pages that heavily influence decisions related to a person’s money or life) were hit the hardest. All of this, can only mean that with their core updates, the SE giant keeps pushing for quality content and this trend doesn’t seem to stop.
Changes in the AI
Now let’s talk about the other overhauls in chronological order. The first one came in June and it was possible thanks to the latest breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence technology. The previous BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) technology was replaced by MUM (Multitask Unified Model) that’s reportedly a thousand times more powerful and advanced. This new AI will not only provide the SE with better image recognition, understanding of misspelt words and assessment of key moments in audiovisual content, but will also enable visual searches, translated results and subtopics or related topics to the user’s search.
Finally, the August Update came with its own term: Core Web Vitals. Following the principal of life signal, these web vitals serve as a ranking factor that Google will measure in order to score the experience provided by individual pages to all users. These Core factors are the following:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): it is related to the initial loading time of the webpage as perceived by the users.
- First Input Delay (FID): related to the interactivity of the content, it is destined to measure how fast it takes for an interactive element (such as links and buttons) to respond.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): it has to do with the visual stability of the page and evaluates the movement and response of elements after the initial loading.
It is crystal clear that Google is aiming for excellence in all the results in their Search Engine. Their aim is to provide their users with the information they are looking for as quickly and as accurately as possible. To do so, they are heavily investing in state-of-the-art technologies to improve their algorithm even further. Therefore, it is quite sure that we will see new updates that will follow this line of work this year and the ones that follow. We can do nothing but stay tuned to the latest technology news, wait for them and hope to adapt in time.