Today in Digital Marketing - Meet Google’s New Algorithm Update

Episode Date: February 11, 2021

Get the entire show content, with links and images, as a daily email newsletter! Subscribe at TodayInDigital.com/newsletterGoogle’s new algorithm update is poised to be among its biggest changes ever… Facebook is working on a Clubhouse clone… Why has Instagram changed its Like button?... and getting your images to rank higher in the search engines.Enjoying the show? Please consider rating and reviewing us!About the Podcast:Join Our Free Slack CommunityGet this as a daily email newsletterAdvertising and ClassifiedsLeave a VoicemailFollow Tod: Twitter • LinkedIn • TikTok • TwitchToday in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital. Subscribe at https://TodayInDigital.com or wherever you get your podcasts. (Theme music by Mark Blevis. All other music licensed by Source Audio.)Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Today, Google's new algorithm update is poised to be among its biggest changes ever. Facebook is working on a Clubhouse clone. Why has Instagram changed its Like button? And getting your images to rank higher in the search engines. It's Thursday, February 11th, 2021. Happy Dirty Thursday, Switzerland! I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing. A big milestone for the popular CMS platform WordPress.

That platform now powers 40% of all websites. A year ago, that number was 35%. And when you look at just the top 1,000 websites in the world, WordPress's market share is even higher, nearly 52%. So that's number one. But today's quiz, it's a simple one. What platform is number two? You think you know? I bet you don't. The answer later in the episode. Well, today is the first full day of a big change to the way Google ranks content. It's called passage-based ranking.

It's a bit complicated, and there's one person I trust to help us make sense of it all, Barry Schwartz, who is the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable website. Barry has covered search for more than 17 years and was kind enough to jump on the show today. Thank you, Barry. And first, what is passage-based ranking? It's basically a way, let's say you have a large piece of content, a large article, and that article is really, really long, but it has numerous types of ways to rank for certain types of queries. So maybe the first part of the article talks about apples. The second part of the article talks about oranges. The third part of the article talks about bananas.

You technically could rank, if you search if somebody searches for apples, technically that article could rank for apples because it has a passage about apples. It could rank for oranges because it has a passage about that and so forth. Previously, Google said they weren't so good about ranking a piece of content for different types of queries, for different types of terms, if that page had various things all over the place, now Google's better at understanding the whole entire page and ranking sub passages or sub sections or passages of that article for specific types of queries, which it wasn't able to do as well as it is now. So this is a ranking change, not an indexing change. 100% a ranking change

has nothing to do with how Google changes how they're indexing. Google initially launched this as calling it passage indexing. It is not indexing. They now are calling it passage ranking. And I kind of called them, I had a meeting with them when they first announced this, and I kind of called them out, like, are you actually indexing pieces of a page differently? Like, what indexing means is like they're putting content into a database, into like a file folder. Are you actually taking that piece of a page differently? Like what indexing means is like they're putting content into a database, into like a file folder. Are you actually taking that piece of that page, chunking it and putting it separately into a different piece of database for each section or passage of that page?

And they're like, no, no, it's not working like that. We're just able to rank pieces of that page differently. We're storing the content and in our index the same. Nothing's changing with that. It's just how we rank. So it's just getting smarter, I guess, at understanding phrases and their meaning. Not just, I mean, phrases and their meanings

were more about BERT and RankBrain and stuff like that. This is more about whole passages, like a bunch of sentences put together. I was saying this passage of content is about X, not this word is about X or Y, or the intent is about X and Y. It's more about the whole passage is about X and Y. How is this different than featured snippets, which we're used to on a page popping up at the top? So feature snippets has nothing at all to do with passage ranking, according to Google. Feature snippets is basically a way for Google to use whatever technology they're using beforehand for understanding content and ranking that piece of

content at the top of their search results. You're not going to see any difference in terms of how the user interface works in Google search for passage ranking. It's going to look the same. It's going to look like a normal snippet, a normal search result, whereas feature snippets looks different. It's isolated. It's labeled as a feature snippet, it's at the top, and it actually pulls a piece of content from the page. And the technology they're using for these two different things, passage indexing versus featured snippets, are completely different according to them. And one's about ranking, and one's about serving up a piece of content as an answer, I guess, in the search results. In the past, you know, I think we've always known that Google, the algorithm looks

for certain signals like page titles and headings and things. Do we know what signals Google is going to be looking for for passage-based ranking? So it's not really for, they keep telling us, it's not really for us to optimize for. SEOs who are already doing good SEO are already doing a great job optimizing their content so that it ranks. This is about content that isn't really optimized, where Google is now doing a better job of understanding a piece of content and being able to rank content that wasn't well optimized. So it's really about throwing a lifeline. I think Gary from Google, Gary Ish from Google, who's Google's search central advocate, basically said it's kind of like throwing a lifeline to non-SEOs who don't know how to optimize their content because Google's better at understanding what they're really trying to say because maybe they've had a long piece of content and they put it all on one big page

and it's really hard for Google to figure out what that page is about. Now they're better at understanding what that page is about versus what an SEO would have done was kind of break that page up in a much better way. Do we know how many websites this will affect?

So Google 7 first launched that when it rolls out globally, it will affect about 7% of search queries. Google just launched it yesterday in the US English results only. So I assume it's going to affect about 7% of US English results, which is a pretty big update. If you look at that, compared to like the Penguin update from the old days, that was like a 4% when it first launched, 4% impact. And the Panda update was more of like 11, 12% impact. So it's a pretty big update.

So only US pages for now, it's going to roll out in the future to other countries? Initially, it was supposed to launch globally at the end of last year, but Google just released it just to US English results. So if you search on google.com in the US and type in English, that's what's impacted by it. Beautiful.

Barry, thank you for jumping in today. No problem. Thanks for having me. Barry Schwartz runs Search Engine Roundtable. That's at ser impacted by it. Beautiful. Barry, thank you for jumping in today. No problem. Thanks for having me. Barry Schwartz runs Search Engine Roundtable. That's at seroundtable.com. Truly one of the best resources online for keeping up to speed on all the changes in SEO. Again, that's seroundtable.com. You can also visit his consulting firm at rustybrick.com. In a shocking development, Facebook is reported to be taking a competing app's features

and copying it. I know, right? The app in question, Clubhouse. Clubhouse is pretty new. It's a bunch of rooms where people gather, sort of like a webinar or a Zoom meeting, except it's audio only. So in some ways, kind of a live podcast app? It's invitation only for now. The room topics vary wildly since anyone can set up their own room. As I opened up the app when I was writing the script, I saw a room about basketball, one for musicians, a session called Deconstructing a Good Pitch Deck, and one called How to Build Your Following 10 Times Fast on All Channels. Yes, the information marketers have moved in and sort of taken it over, sadly. The New York Times reported this week that Facebook is reportedly working on its own Clubhouse clone.

Twitter has been working on one for a while now that they call Spaces. According to the New York Times, Facebook has the scale to provide similar tools to its audience, which could then stop them spending their time in another app. That's actually a core risk for Clubhouse. As they say in investing circles, Clubhouse essentially has no mo so far there's not really any kind of broad digital marketing opportunity, unless you're promoting your own course or trying to get investors for a startup. It's his Facebook's MO, though.

When Snapchat turned Zuckerberg's $3 billion offer down, he directed his Instagram team to just copy Snapchat. Even the like button came from friend feed. Facebook denies it copied it. Facebook didn't comment on the Clubhouse clone report, and Twitter has not said when Spaces will go live. It is the year of the ox, and if your marketing program includes some lunar new year content, you may be interested in the help Instagram and Facebook are offering. There are new story stickers, new AR effects, of course. And on Instagram, they've even changed the like reaction button for some people to a Lunar New Year like, which has a red background and gold design elements. Lunar New Year is largely celebrated in China, but marketers trying to reach a broader

Asian audience in their own markets have learned it can be a strong component to their annual marketing plans. One of the big misconceptions about SEO is that there's one type of algorithm, one type of SEO. And there's not. There's dozens, maybe more. There's video SEO, job SEO, local SEO, image SEO, each of them with their own sets of attributes and ranking criteria. That latter one, image SEO, is one of the more commonly known. You might know, for instance, that you'll have better luck having your images rank in Google if you use alt text. Well, this week, Google released a short video with 12 tips on having your images rank higher. Here's a clip. Use a good URL structure for your image files. Google uses the URL path as well as a file name to help it understand your images.

Consider organizing your images content so that URLs are constructed logically. Avoid changing your image URLs and use 301 redirects when they do need to be changed. Images tend not to be crawled as frequently as web pages, so it's important to use persistent URLs for them. And when it comes to URLs, make sure they're not blocked by robots.txt. The full video can be found on YouTube, their channel name is Google Search Central.

Back to the quiz. If WordPress is the number one CMS platform out there, what's number two? Technically speaking, Shopify is. I know, I know, that's an e-commerce platform mostly, but, you know, if we extend that definition out a little bit, Shopify would come in at number two. But number two is only 5% of the market. Number three, in case you're curious, is Joomla, with only 3% share. Remember, you can get this podcast as a daily email newsletter too now, complete with images, related videos, links to dive deeper, and even newsletter exclusive content. There's a free tier as well. You'll get a sample bonus issue

once or twice a month. The newsletter comes out about an hour before the podcast drops. Just go to todayindigital.com slash newsletter to sign up or tap the link in this episode's notes. That's it for today. Talk to you tomorrow. My parents have showed me

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