Google, the premier search engine for the internet has released several updates to its services over the past quarter to continue its mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
NB: This is an article from Milestone
This time around Google has focused on making search results clearer and more informative for users by introducing features like author properties for article pages, UPIs for products beings sold, new webpage title generation techniques, new rich results for the travel and leisure industry, and much more. With all these new features and updates, it looks like Google is going to provide users with a highly intuitive experience on the search engine. Let’s take a closer look at some of the major updates to Google in Q3 2021.
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Google Algorithm updates
1. Page Experience Rollout
The rollout of the Page Experience algorithm is now complete. This algorithm update will not affect most pages as it is not a standalone ranking factor but rather a tiebreaker. Google also announced that it has removed Safe Browsing from the Page Experience Report. This is because breaches in a page’s safety cannot necessarily be attributed to the website owner, and they should not be penalized for it.
2. Link Spam Update
Websites that use sponsored links, affiliate links, guest and social posts as monetization techniques will need to qualify these links. This update was introduced to curb spam links that are included on these sites which can lead to a poor experience for users. This new update will check websites using poor link building strategies to manipulate SERPs, therefore, it is important to employ Google’s best practices for link building strategies.
Search updates
1. Non-AMP pages are now eligible to appear on Google News
Articles no longer need to be in an AMP format to appear in the Top Stories box in Google News. This broadens the spectrum of topics and articles that feature in this section and can be a great way to improve visibility.
2. Google Adds Author Properties to Article Type Schemas
Google has updated its article schema to now include links to the author’s information and show that the piece of content is an original work. This helps Google distinguish between article writers that have the same or similar names. The author.url property can be found in the Article Schema, so pages that already have this schema deployed can just add a link to the author’s bio page.
Google has not provided recommendations for the link to be provided in this case, but it is assumed that a bio page on the same domain name as the article would be preferred. It is important to keep this updated as Google’s Quality Raters manually look for the source of articles and if there is too much ambiguity related to the author of the article it can lead to the page being marked as a low-quality page. The same as schema can be deployed for including the author’s bio as well.
