2nd week of April and no, the March 2024 Core update has not yet been completed. As of writing, we are now in the 38th day of roll-out. Google did tell us that this is a more complex update than their usual core updates and that it involves changes to multiple core systems, so it may take longer than usual.
It seems to be quiet in the SEO space this week and there is not much notable news. Google’s video on how it serves pages in the search results is a must-watch though and offers good insights.
Last week’s episode of Google’s “How Search Works” video series was all about how Google crawls and indexes pages. This week’s release is about how Google ranks and serves pages. According to Gary, when a user enters a query in Google, the machine searches their index for matching pages and return results that they believe are the highest quality, trustworthy, and most relevant to the query. The retrieval of the results begins with the interpretation of the query.
At first, the query is cleaned up and searched for certain entities. The query is also expanded to include similar words. Once Google understands the query, it sends it to the index and based on the parsed query, the index will return a large number of results that will need to be ranked.
Ranking largely depends on the relevancy of the results to the user. Hundreds of factors determine this relevance with the actual contents of the page being the most important factor. Things like the user’s location, language, and device type are also considered. The quality of the page and site are also taken into consideration.
According to the video, quality is determined by a number of factors such as uniqueness of the content, the relative importance of the page on the internet, and a lot more. Search Essentials should be able to cover all these factors.
Check out the How Search Works episode below:
Fun Fact: Google was initially named BackRub, before it was decided by the founders to name it Google.