For a moment, let’s pretend it’s February 2019. Your children are at school. You feel the breeze on your chin. You don’t yet understand the terms social distancing or flattening the curve. COVID-19 is nonexistent! Though it feels like it’s been a lifetime since then, in reality it was just 18 months ago. And for those of us …
Measuring Page Experience: The Tools and Tricks You Need to Know
We may talk a lot about mysterious algorithms, complex spiders that crawl the web, and the importance of trustworthy and authoritative hyperlinks, but when it comes down to it, human experience is one of the best ways to judge a website’s worth. After all, despite all the technical jargon and preening for search engines, the …
Page Experience: The Newest Google Ranking Factor
Imagine you’re at a mall looking for new shoes. In one store, you’re immediately handed an unrelated flyer, the lights gradually come on, the sales associates keep moving around the shoes, the cashier takes forever to appear at the desk, and the credit card reader seems . . . sketchy. At another store, the merchandise …
Bounce Rate: A Complex and Consistently Misunderstood Metric
According to Google, a bounce is “a single-page session on your site.” In other words, a user enters your website on a particular page and exits from that same page, without navigating to any other pages on your website. A bounce rate is “the percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only a single page.” …
Rethinking Rank Tracking: Why Ranking #1 on Google Is Overrated
Everyone wants to be the best. Whether you’re rooting for your favorite basketball team, participating in your town’s annual pie-baking contest, or competing for the top sales in your office, aiming for #1 is a natural human impulse. This desire for dominance comes out in full force when businesses are competing to be #1 on …
Mobile-First Indexing Best Practices
When we last discussed mobile-first indexing, it was so fresh on the scene, it hadn’t even gone live yet! At the time it was viewed as an unprecedented shift that reflected searchers’ newfound preference for searching on mobile devices. The updated index would predominantly use the mobile version of a webpage’s content when evaluating the …
Updates to Search Console
You’re making a big mistake if you manage a website without the assistance of Google Search Console. Not only is this handy service free to use, but also it helps you succeed in Google Search by providing tools that allow you to monitor and maintain your search engine optimization (SEO) and repair any issues that arise. …
Myths About BERT, Google’s Latest Algorithm Update
We first introduced bidirectional encoder representations from transformers – a.k.a. BERT, Google’s biggest update in years – at the end of October. Designed to help Google’s algorithm better understand the intent behind search queries, BERT processes words in relation to all the other words in the query, not one-by-one in order. This neural network-based technique for …
Is Google Search Fair? How Humans Interfere with Search Results
After you type a query into Google, you might imagine a digital algorithm sifting through results and churning out the best answers, ranked by relevance and quality. And you wouldn’t be wrong. But despite the fact that Google employees created and refined the search engine’s algorithm, most people assume that Google has taken a “hands-off” …
Meet BERT – Google’s Biggest Update in Years
Have you ever tried to search for something on Google that you didn’t know how to spell? Or struggled to get Google to understand what you were trying to say? With its newest algorithm update – the biggest update since RankBrain was introduced in 2014 – Google is hoping to make it easier than ever …
