4 Google Updates To Bear In Mind in 2022

Google Updates 2022

Google’s Search algorithm places searcher experience and quality results at the apex of its ethos. It’s from this that the Search Algorithm is regularly updated multiple times during the year as a way of ensuring that the most relevant and reliable results are prominently projected to people searching.

Let’s face it, we all want to be at the top of SERP(Search Engine Results Page), enjoying free traffic if you have optimized your website through SEO, or paying for ad placement through Google Ads, Microsoft Ads etc.

In 2015 there were 2 high-impact changes that shook the SEO world; Mobilegeddon and RankBrain.

Google’s diverse range of updates such as Project Owl in 2017set a solid foundation for future advancements such as 2021 Core Web Vitals– which measures three new metrics into the algorithm that help rank websites based on the quality of the user experience.

These updates that have occurred previously, have formed the architecture of how Google ranks websites and makes future updates.

Although Google is generally tight-lipped about what it updates, below is our list of what we think may be considered when evaluating updates in 2022:

1. Page Experience Update

(i) Security Issues

Google finds it prudent for “reputable websites” not to have had any security issues as having them, disqualifies all pages on the website.

(ii) HTTPS:

Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure is a secure form of HTTP and is used as a primary protocol to transfer data between web browsers and websites. To be eligible for a Good page experience, a page must be served over HTTPS.

(iii)Core Web Vitals

This involves the measurement of page performance using a set of matrices from a user’s point of view. Knowing about these matrices is very important hence why we have spent some time explaining them a little bit more. The matrices include :

a) Page Speed

The time it takes for a page to load, includes the time taken to send an HTTP request to the complete display of a page on a browser. People don’t like waiting for a page to load. Page Speed has three dimensions:

   . Time To First Byte(TTFB) or Server Response Time
   . Transfer Time or the time it takes to download a HTML page
   . Time taken for server to render the web page in a browser.

b) Time to Title

Might look minute, but time to title is a big deal. This is the time taken for a title to appear in a browser after a request has been made.

c) Time To start Render

This is the time taken between a request and start loading time. The page doesn’t have to be fully loaded. Only the beginning of loading is considered.

d) Time to Interact

This involves the time it takes for an individual to begin scrolling on a page, clicking on links, filling out forms etc. Very important due to the fact that a study has shown that the quicker people interact with a web page, the less likely they are to leave.

e) Bounce Rate

The time it takes for people to bounce away from your site. Bounce Rate is calculated by checking the time a visitor visits a single page on a website and does nothing on the page before leaving.

A high bounce rate indicated that people are leaving your site early and that may be due to factors such as page speed.

41% -55%, is considered as an average bounce rate. 56%- 70% could be considered as being on the high side, but some other pages might have an explainable reason for this.

For example, if the success of your website is one that depends on people landing on e.g. a services page, then have later taken to a contact page so that they can either email or call you, then a low bounce rate should be expected.

But if your page is a blog article and people don’t have to go any further after that, then having a high bounce rate shouldn’t be all that bewildering. With this said, an optimal bounce rate should range between 26% – 40%.

f) DNS Lookup Speed or DNS Lookup Time

Time taken by Domain Name System(DNS) provider to translate a domain into an IP address. If you have a slow DNS provider, you will have a slow DNS Lookup Speed.

iV) Ad Experience

Advertising techniques that are disruptive to a user are discouraged by Google. Disruptive Ads are according to Google are unexpected and interferer with the usability of device functions. A classic example are the popup ads that feel a whole section.

2 Google MUM Update

MUM stands for Multitask Unified Model.
MUM, is meant to help search engines understand the context and search intent through the power of AI. As things stand, MUM is being held as being better than BERT(Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers).

A bit about Bert: Google made research, on transformers: these are models that process words in relation to all other words in a sentence, rather than one by one. By looking at the words that come before and after, Bert models can understand the intent of a search by considering the full context.

With that said, MUM is more powerful than Bert at least by 1000 times according to Google. It’s meant for helping Google not only understand Search intent and context but also videos, images and podcasts. It will all this in about 75 languages.

So what does MUM mean for your website in terms of SEO?

MUM will give Google new ways of better understanding the content on your website and rendering it to the right searches when need be. How is this so?

According to Google, due to the MUMs multimodal machine learning approach, it can unlock information from different formats(documents(HTML, PDF, TXT,), images, audio, and video and contextualising and linking content beyond the artificial levels of language) and make connections between them, thus providing searchers with answers when a query is made.

This in turn enables MUM to provide better answers to complex queries.
So moving forward, it would be prudent as an add-on to focus the production of content in other formats such as images, video and audio to help Google understand what you are trying to communicate and render it to would-be website victors.

3. Google Qualifying Links & Link Spam Update

Google has advised that it knows that many bloggers make money through affiliate links. Furthermore, it doesn’t find anything wrong with this as long as it’s done in the right way, what is the right way? When participating in any affiliate programme, qualifying links have to be linked in this way rel=” sponsored”, regardless of whether these links were created manually or dynamically.

As part of its effort to improve product-related searches and better reward high-quality content, websites that fail to qualify their affiliate links might face algorithmic actions by the system and manual actions may be issued to prevent these links from affecting search.

4. Product Review Update

This is meant to promote high-quality product reviews. According to Google, they received a lot of feedback from users on what type of review content is deemed as trustworthy and useful.

Users trust reviews with evidence of products actually being tested. Furthermore, they prefer multiple options for purchasing the product.

Therefore, Google’s best practices for product reviews are:

.Evidence of audio, visuals, or other links of personal experience with the product. This is meant to support the expertise or authenticity of your review.

. Include links to multiple sellers to give potential customers an option of buying from their desired merchant.

In the year 2022, we shall surely see multiple updates by Google as they try to improve the algorithm and make it easier for would-be searchers to find queries.

It’s our hope that if you haven’t been putting these practices to use that after reading this you will start. These practices can help with ensuring that you don’t wake up one day and see a significant deep in traffic.

Questions?
Will you be implementing anything discussed above?
If not then why? Send us an email for more details or if you require help with some of the things discussed.