It’s Friday again, so here we are with another weekly round of SEO news updates. Here’s a quick overview of what’s happening this week:

1. Google explains how results are automatically generated
2. An Update on How Google Generates Web Page Titles
3. Google My Business Products Approval Process
   
4. Google Posts Can Now Appear On Third-Party Sites Without Your Knowledge
   

Now onto a deep dive into these headlines.

25/08/2021- Google explains how results are automatically generated

Google’s ranking system aims to present the most relevant and useful results out of a billion web pages and content in their search index. 

An article was published on the factors that determine the results returned for your query.

1. Meaning of your query

Google built language models that try to decipher the intent behind the few words of your search query to provide the most relevant results. It does simple actions like correcting words to more complex ones like finding synonyms to provide relevant documents that might not even contain the exact words you used.

The system can also recognize local intent or trending queries hence it will return either local results or up-to-date information respectively. 

1. Relevance of Content 

The system also analyzes to content to check whether it contains the most relevant information. The most basic way is by checking for the same exact keywords used in the query but it can also use aggregated and anonymized interaction data to assess whether search results are relevant to queries. Say you’re looking for “dogs”, the system will not only look for webpages that contain the word “dogs” multiple times but will assess whether they contain relevant content such as pictures or videos of dogs. 

1. Quality of Content

Besides identifying relevant content, the system aims to provide the most helpful ones by identifying signals that can help determine which content demonstrates expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. 

One way of doing this is checking to see if other prominent websites refer or link to the particular content. 

1. Usability of Content

Accessibility is just as important in results. The systems will look at page experience aspects that focus on user experience. For example, it looks at loading speeds or whether the webpage is mobile friendly. 

1. Context and Settings

The system utilizes information such as your location, search history and search settings to ensure the results provided are relevant and useful.

For example, if you’re in Melbourne and looked up ‘restaurants’, the search results will provide you with restaurant that in Melbourne and close to where you live. If you had searched ‘korean food’ before searching ‘restaurants’, the system takes this as an indicator that you’re more keen on finding out about Korean restaurants near you rather than any other cuisine. You may even personalize your search settings by toggling features such as Safesearch to prevent graphic content from showing up in your search results

25/08/2021- An Update on How Google Generates Web Page Titles

Google has introduced a new system in Google Search to provide the best titles for documents in their search result. 

While they have gone beyond using HTML text for titles for more than a decade, they’ve decided to make even more use of such text. In particular, they are making use of text that humans can visually see when they arrive at a web page which is the main visual title or headline shown on a page This content is often placed within <H1> tags, within other header tags, is made large and prominent through the use of style treatments.

The reasons why we don’t always use HTML title tags is because they can be:

1. Very long.
2. “Stuffed” with keywords, because creators mistakenly think adding a bunch of words will increase the chances that a page will rank better.
3. Or be missing entirely or contain repetitive and generic language. 

That being said, it does not mean that HTML title tags should be disregarded completely. Site owners should still focus on making great HTML title tags. 

26/08/2021- Google My Business Products Approval Process

Users who are uploading products on Google My Business are seeing a notice that their products are being reviewed and are subjected to being approved or rejected. 

26/08/2021- Google Posts Can Now Appear On Third Party Sites Without Your Knowledge

Google now has a notice when you add Google Posts in Google My Business that those posts can appear not just on Google properties but third-party sites. Users are questioning what kind of third-party sites their posts will end up on or what these sites will do with them. 

So that’s all for the SEO news update this week. See you guys next week! 

Updated: 23 April 2024