Google has recently announced that they will be rolling out an algorithm update for their search engine in June of 2021 meaning that it was pushed back a month from May giving digital marketers and web developers an extra month to make the necessary changes to keep up with the update. Google has also disclosed the details of the update to the general public leaving no excuse for everyone to adapt to the new changes. So, what are the new updates that we have to make?
Excellent question! In this article we will be covering these changes in detail so stay tuned! The main areas that are being updated include the new scoring surrounding user page experience and core web vitals.
The website user experience (UX) update will focus on areas such as aesthetically appealing website design & elements, efficient & functional navigation, engaging & relevant content, mobile-first website design (for AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages), SSLs, safe browsing, and level of disruption while browsing (intrusive interstitials: so think pop-ups, error pages, and similar elements).
The update will also take into consideration the core web vitals or how fast a page loads on device (through Largest Contentful Paint or LCP), stability of website (through Cumulative Layout Shift or CLS), and interactivity (through First Input Display or FID). This may disincentivize website designers from making web pages too “heavy” as far as file sizes and promotes the process of properly ordering the triggered events within the page.
A recent update in February also allows the search engine to find the best snippets (passage-based ranking) of texts from within a crawled page meaning that proper content marketing will be more important than ever with an emphasis on longer-form highly knowledgeable or informative text bodies.
If you would like the full explanation straight from the horse’s mouth, please follow this link. Alternatively, you may click on the second link down below that ends in “guides/page-experience.” There are also resources available through the Google Search Central to run checklists or tests on your websites so you can make sure you are compliant and get the reassurance directly from Google.
These added metrics do not take away from the current website attributes that Google currently ranks, but adds more metrics to the overall mix so don’t forget about the already established best practices for Google and Black Hat vs. White Hat content!
This new update should improve search and give preferential ranking to websites that are built properly, run smoothly, and are safe for users to browse allowing for a better overall experience for Google users. I am excited to see how website creators and users will adapt to the shift as well as looking forward to the next set of updates from Google to make everyone’s life a bit easier!
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