Google is planning for the new algorithm to roll out in 2021 : The User Experience

Hi
Google is planning a search ranking change incorporating Core Web Vitals [, and planning for the new algorithm to roll out in 2021. so it will add The User Experience is to be come a ranking factor.

 

Cool. It's almost 7 months away. Meanwhile they'll introduce 4-5 other major updates. It's really a continuous process for them. I am wondering why they are announcing it so early.

 

So, what are the factors that google considers as "good user experience"?

I am 100% sure that even after this rollout, those sites which have slow loading iframe ads, slow executing JS, those sites will still rank on top because they are the top names in a particular country in that niche.

I am also 100% sure that "user experience of people with disability" will not even be a factor in google's user experience criteria list.
Heck, even google's own websites and products are not considering this, so obviously this is nowhere in their mind.

Webpages throwing 600kb, 700kb of "just" HTML and JS, will still be considered ok, again because they got enough domain authority and links.

What do they consider "good user experience?"

 

All Google are doing is changing the algorithm to make search even more useless! If google search was any good no one would need pay for advertising!

Remember how good google used to be back in the good old days!

 

Yes, i miss them days, when it was simple (ish) to get your site on 1st page results without paying, when you could pay another webmaster for a link without the fear of potentially getting penalized...

 

This will push people to spend more money on UI

 

At one point years back, I was spending over £12,000 PM on Google advertising and to be honest it did just pay for itself much of the time!!! The problem was I knew that almost half of the clicks I got to my sites were competitors wasting my money! Some clicks were costing us a couple of quid per click so very fast and easy to burn though money quickly!

Also, where as I used to get a lot of organic traffic that died off rapidly over a 4 week period, (funnily enough just after google did a major update) we went from page one to oblivion. A few weeks after the drop google contacted us and just happened to mention that our organic traffic had decreased and that as a result of that we should look to increase our adwords budget to nearer £20K PM to maintain our site level traffic, to which i told them to sod off and cancelled all advertising with google (it took me 7 months to get my remaining account balance money back from them)

Now we use lots of affiliates, if customer don't buy we don't pay. We also use very successfully direct mail, this provide a far, far better return than google adwords ever did. More recently we have started using social media influence's - again most are on an affiliate only basis so they get paid when a customer buys. Most so called influence's really don't have as much clout as they'd like to think they have, many have come to me and said i have X number of followers and can bring so many people to your site (take all of that with a very big pinch of salt) and in reality bring little or no traffic.

I have to say affiliates are the future for me, between a number of companies we have over 3,000 affiliates. Some earn nothing each month and we let them go after 3 months, other bring in huge numbers of traffic and some of that traffic is very highly converting.

I do sometimes wonder just how much money google would make if search was based on an affiliate bases rather than pay per click? Personalty I think google would be worth a small fraction of its current value. If anyone reading this thinks i hate google, well your right - i do!

In case anyone is wondering we use JRox Affiliate Manager - it makes managing affiliates a doddle

 

I'm thinking things like bounce rates will affect ranking from now. It's harder and harder to rank on Google now with all these new roll outs. I've seen my rankings drop 4-5 rankings due to their recent changes.

 

While what you say is true, reputation is hard to establish. A website with optimal performance will receive a preferred ranking for many (new) reasons. In the next years it includes an 'example function' which enables a website to be ranked #1 (on mobile) purely on the basis of website performance.

Google intends to lift the quality of the general internet to ultra high levels, comparable or even better than that of native mobile apps. The motive is that Google's biggest source of revenue is advertising on search which is dependent on the regular internet so Google essentially intends to 'save the internet' by pushing website performance.

User experience is a factor to be considered from the perspective of Google. What would make a searching user happy into the far future? For Google, users will need to feel that the internet serves them well so that they will continue to use search for anything, including shopping.

In business the idea has been for some time that in the future, there will be just one app for everything. From Google's perspective, it's attempt to 'win' may be to make 'the internet' it's app for everything (powered by search). To out-compete, 'the internet' will need to outperform potential competition.

 

@SNTJJ
I agree with you somewhat, however, your statement that "Reputation is hard to earn" is something I don't agree with, at least not in this case.

Google is simply giving more importance to websites which have been online for many years, 20 year old websites.
These websites were the only options back then.
Like Yahoo for example.
Then other websites came, some of which did better work than those 20 year old websites.
Like Google for example.

Google giving preference to those 20 year old websites, is like google is saying,
"Yahoo is better than google."
Google's words, Google's logic, not mine.

In my niche for example,
google would list those 20 year old websites on top, even if the search term is remotely related to the content of those 20 year old websites.
When you visit the website, all you can see is, well, barely anything related to the search query.
How is this "improving the web"?

Newer websites, like mine for example, I felt that the info displayed on those 20 year old websites is not enough, and I need more data and analysis to make a sound decision on the subject.
Data that I am not finding anywhere, or finding in pieces here and there.
I must have sent countless emails to those 20 year old "reputation earned" websites, asking them to make those additional things available.
All requests landed on deaf ears.

This was the whole reason why I developed my website in the first place.
To make it a lot easy to find all the data in one single place so that appropriate decision can be made.

Since then I have made it a point to listen to requests of my website visitors. 75% of my website was developed because of the requests of these visitors.
They asked, and if I had the info, I provided, in the easiest way possible.

Google, however, still ranks those 20 year old "domains" better than me.
Not just one page, 2-3 pages from the same domain, pushing others lower.

Worst thing are those "video results" from youtube.
Taking top screen space, and videos developed by novice people.
Channels which got subscribers because they were heavily promoted on social sites.
Videos developed for one single purpose, earn from youtube ads, not developed for giving info to user.

Even worse are the ads shown on those 20 year old websites. Ads in the middle of the content, again and again, and so so so slow loading...

If google thinks that it can become "one single choice" of searchers based on these 20 year old sites, Yahoo type sites, then google is mistaken.

 

Preferred listing of established websites is a "safe bet" type bias from the perspective of a lack of knowledge of what satisfies individual users. Besides that, from a mere quality perspective, such websites are often better developed, more reliable and better attuned to what could satisfy users, and therefor in general provide a better user-experience.

Since Google's latest AI powered technology enables to determine user-experience more accurately, it will allow Google to shift to a user-experience quality based index and to abolish 'safe bet' type of biases in its rankings. Some time ago, Google already abolished the "premium domain" bias which could provide an indication that Google intends to remove such biases from its rankings.

(2012) Google EMD Update: Exact Match Domains No Longer Rank As Well
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-emd-update-15776.html

For new websites a shift to user-experience quality based ranking provides an opportunity to achieve top rankings quickly on the basis of website quality.

With regard to your example website to have been developed for user-experience. Google determines certain quality standards that may not match the actual demands/evaluation of/by users. Google is a bias in its own rankings. It is a commercial company that has diverse interests, with a primary interest being advertising revenue.

The question for SEO therefor is: what is an optimal user-experience quality from the perspective of Google?

Optimizing a website for optimal Google Core Web Vitals scores is a good start. Google displays the score for each individual page that is indexed in Google's Search Console.

search.google.com/search-console/core-web-vitals

Beyond that: it's numbers available to Google. Even factors such as conversion are likely to be used in Google's determination of user-experience. A website with a high conversion is likely to be ranked higher than others. In that sense, perhaps a SEO strategy could be to provide an optimal insight into these metrics, such as an optimal integration with Google Analytics. Google's AI uses those metrics.

 

@SNTJJ

That statement by google,
"exact match domains do not rank on top",
is not true.
Do a search for "keyword tool".
Top result is "keywordtool.io"
Not just this, try these "Top SEO", or "SEO Blog"
Exact match domains are on first page.

Also, I think you and me, we are on different pages when we are talking about "user experience".

When you are mentioning user experience, you are giving examples like,
safe bet websites provide better user experience.

When I am saying user experience, I mean
1. websites that are faster to load,
2. websites which are not stuck with 20 year old ancient presentation methods.
3. websites which provide lots of data on one page, and present it in a systematical manner, so that user does not has to "find and click" here and there.
4. no slow loading ads,
5. and most important, compatible with screen readers and other accessibility tools.

All of these are almost always missing from those "preferred safe bet" websites.
What does user experience actually means to google?

I understand the safe bet website concept in some cases, like NEWS websites for example.
You cannot show NEWS from random websites.
Its better to show NEWS from established websites.

But this concept cannot be applied to every niche.
Medicine research, govt info research, NEWS, those places, surely yes.
But in almost every other niche, that safe bet website concept produces not just less useful, but even highly irritating results...

There is also something very new I am seeing these days on these popular websites,
"hiding the link as text."
There are menus and text on the website, which do not get read as a clickable link by screen readers, and when you look at source code even then its plain text, but its clickable by mouse.
Huge problem for people on screen readers.
I am not sure why these people are doing this.
What was the problem with wrapping it in an anchor tag.

It looks like this:
<div id="something"> some 2-3 word text here </div>
or some other HTML tag, like <li> or <span> etc

Then on page load some javascript converts that into a clickable link for mouse.
I am seeing this happening everywhere now, and am not sure why.
What went wrong with anchor tags...
And its happening on popular websites mostly.

Obviously these are all things which are so much against user experience, in my opinion.

When google is going for "artificial intelligent", then it should act like "human intelligence",
and not like pre-made set of commands, followed like a checklist...
Thats not AI.

 

Why should a monopoly even try? And they are busy enough adjusting border radiuses for a while..

 

Yes, you may be right. I similarly noticed that EMD domains maintained preferred rankings.

Dedication to a subject or relevancy is a quality aspect. EMD may still provide an advantage when paired with quality content.

I did not intend to argue anything about user-experience per se, I merely intended to indicate what user-experience could mean from the perspective of Google.

What is an optimal user-experience in general? How could one know?

For SEO it may not be relevant what the actual user-experience is (i.e. if users are happy with a website). At question would be how Google determines user-experience as valuable.

In that sense it may be simple: Google is a commercial company that is dependent on a certain quality of service for 'searching users'. User-experience should therefor be seen as an extension of Google Search and not on individual website level. Google doesn't care about users who enter a website by typing in the domain. They only care about users who use search.

Yes, you may be correct but how would it be possible to lift the quality of the general internet? The question what is 'valuable' user-experience is very difficult and the answer could change in time. The question is similar to asking what is a "good" website?

In this case Google is a sort of entry door to 'the internet' and by enforcing quality requirements based on what it deems valuable, they can have a certain effect on the quality of the internet in general. The user-experience that they seek should complement search and key aspects of such user-experience would be performance, speed, functionality, security and reliability. Google is unlikely to be interested in actual happiness of users other than how that happiness is related to the experience of Google search. Thus, from Google's perspective, certain metrics are what matter and Google's AI would merely be a machine in service of Google's long term commercial interests.

A question for context could be: would user-experience in service of happiness of search users be favorable for the actual quality the internet?

 

@SNTJJ
You have a very clear thought process! I like the way you explain things!


I understood your point about user-experience for google means reliability and security and performance, but consider this also,
what if google keeps showing webpages which are extremely difficult to use,
use too much mobile data of users and displays very less information about the searcher's query.
Or if the user has to go through a 10 minute video to find that 1 line of answer he/she was looking for.

Another search engine, bing for example,
starts showing webpages which are loading fast,
do not have 15 iframes loading inside the page,
do not have slow loading ads in those iframes,
consume less data of users,
and more or less provide same answers like those Google's choice popular websites are providing.

Then don't you think that people would start prefering this other search engine over google?
Google is not the "only" gateway to internet...
It can never be, no matter how much google tries.
Competition is increasing on an yearly basis.

There used to be majorly yahoo and google.
Then microsoft came with bing, bought yahoo later.
Now duckduckgo is coming in.
And some new Chinese engine bots are also hitting our websites a lot, which is supposed to be faster.
That fast thing is their selling point. Its an entire OS like Android.
To maintain their "fast" repo, that engine will definitely prefer faster websites over those slow loading ones, websites which consume less data etc.

Don't you think so?

 

I am not certain of how to evaluate "what users want" or in what relation an answer to that question could stand to search engines in general (i.e. their generic interest as a search engine).

Does duckduckgo (appear to) favor fast loading websites?

I shared an argument for Google: advertising revenue. If it can be shown that all search engines prefer fast loading websites, there may be a different reason involved.

Yahoo was one of the first pioneers in website performance. It introduced the Yslow score many years before Google's PageSpeed score. It may be logical that when considering that search engines evaluate 'website quality' that performance is a primary aspect that is evaluated. Performance is a tangible metric tied to user-experience that could be a first choice for ideas to improve the search index. It could mean that preferred listing of fast websites may not be tied to "what users actually want" but would be more like an attempt "to do as best we can" to improve user-experience and thereby (hopefully) satisfy what users want.

There have been studies that showed favorable metrics tied to fast loading websites. A question could be: do those metrics represent what users actually want?

Google performed extensive research using AI and its Google Analytics data. In 2009 it concluded in a blog "Speed Matters".

(2009) https://ai.googleblog.com/2009/06/speed-matters.html

(2018) https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2018/01/using-page-speed-in-mobile-search.html

(2018) thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/data-measurement/mobile-page-speed-new-industry-benchmarks/

What do users want and how would it be possible to know?

Do you have an idea why search engines benefit from fast loading websites?

p.s. Yahoo was bought by Verizon.

 

This Google ranking Algorithm update was rolled out yesterday itself.
And it is said to be a core update.
So I think, they did not wait for 2021, they posted the update as soon as they got it ready.
It was rolled out at 2:00 PM EST yesterday.
By the time you guys get to know about it, it would already be settled.
The time would be too early if you make opinions right now.
I suggest to wait it out and then form your conclusions.

 

@SNTJJ
Don't think in terms of search engines.
Think in terms of "platform" that the user is using.

They are using chrome, android.

Now, as you said, google is a gateway to internet.

So when people open browser app on their android phone, browser app would be chrome I think,
and they do a search, which goes to google search by default,
end result are websites which are slow,
and its not just the website, but the slow loading ads in iframes also,
then who will these users blame for slow performance or high mobile data usage?

Website, chrome, or android platform?

Google search engine is just a means for google Alphabet Inc now,
its not the end product of the company, not anymore.

Its only a matter of time and availability of options,
these people will make the switch to something faster.

 

Google has changed its search algorithm to alter search results in ways it ... denied in the past, a new investigation from The Wall Street Journal finds.