🔍 Google's latest algorithm: The Page Experience Update

May 29, 2020

Good morning Search Marketer, Google is doubling down on user experience.

The Page Experience Update is on its way and it's designed to evaluate pages based on how human users (you guessed it) experience web pages. The new ranking algorithm will take into account whether your pages load quickly, if your content jumps around as it loads, if it uses HTTPS, features intrusive interstitials, and factor in Google's new Core Web Vitals set of speed, interactivity and visual stability metrics (also announced earlier this week).

While the emphasis here is clearly on user experience, Google has told us that having great content will still be the more important consideration: Google will still seek to rank pages with the best overall information, even if the page experience isn't top-notch. However, all other considerations being equal, page experience can be a deciding factor for your visibility.

The company paired this announcement with more news: AMP will no longer be a requirement for content to appear in the mobile version of Google's Top Stories section. These items were announced together because page experience will become a ranking factor for the Top Stories section. If you're currently publishing AMP pages, there's no need to make any changes and your AMP versions will continue to be what's linked in the Top Stories. You also won't need to formulate plans to change whether you use AMP or overhaul your UX just yet — these updates won't be live until sometime in 2021. We'll keep you updated when they launch.

Online ad revenue growth is slowing. Domestic digital advertising revenue grew to $124.6 billion in 2019 — that's 16% YoY, but the days of explosive growth seem to be tapering down as the market reaches maturity. In Q1 of this year, revenue totaled $31.4 billion (up 12% from Q1 2019), but March figures were impacted by COVID-19. Just as concerning as the slowing growth is how the revenue is dispersed: the top 10 internet companies controlled 77% of digital revenue last year, according to the IAB.

Your Shopify technical SEO questions, answered. Shopify makes it convenient for business owners to get their online stores up and running, but that convenience means you have to work around Shopify's rigid framework. To help you (or your clients) get the most out of your Shopify store, we've published a Technical SEO for Shopify guide, complete with solutions on overcoming the CMS' duplicate URL issue and site architecture limitations.

Keep on reading for your daily Search Shorts and more.

Ginny Marvin,
Editor-in-Chief

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Search Shorts

Indexing, images, and submission

Google indexing issues. A few nights ago, Google may have had more indexing issues with fresh content. We've covered this topic numerous times over the past year or so, and it seems to be a recurring issue.

Swipe up in image search. Matle Ubl from Google said the swipe up feature in image search leads to a higher click-through rate and more traffic to your web site.

Submitting search pages. Google's John Mueller said on Twitter "submitting all search pages make crawling & indexing significantly harder for large sites. IMO this is where smaller sites can prioritize much better than larger ones can."

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