Welcome to our round up of the latest SEO news. This month we cover the latest update to the search quality rater guidelines, do links really matter less to Google, Google losing market share and their latest AI search offering.
Google updates search quality raters guidelines
Google released an updated version of their search quality raters guidelines in January. In case you are not familiar with this document, it is the documentation that they give to testers who are hired to evaluate the quality of their search results. These are people who are product-testing Google’s search results, ensuring the algorithms are working as intended.
It was in this document that they first introduced their E-E-A-T framework (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness).
It does not give away the secrets of their algorithm, but what it does do, is provide us with valuable insight into what Google believes makes a quality website and a good user experience.
Google wants to reward quality websites that offer a good user experience. They want people to focus on this when creating websites. It is hard to imagine Google losing their dominance of the search market but not impossible. If they were to send users to low quality websites with a poor user experience where it felt like a challenge to access the information you were looking for, it is possible users would try alternatives. To some extent, a search engine is only as good as its results.
The following update has attracted a lot of attention in the SEO community:
“The main content (MC) of a page should support its purpose. Web site owners and content creators should place the most helpful and essential MC near the top of the page so that visitors can immediately access it. A high-quality page has the most helpful MC placed most prominently. Content that supports the page purpose without directly contributing to the primary goal can be included, but it should be shown lower on the page in a less prominent position. For example, on recipe pages, the recipe itself and important supporting content directly related to the recipe should be prominently displayed near the top of the webpage.”
Later on in the document they relate this directly to a recipe website:
“The primary purpose of the page is to share a recipe for Butterbeer. While helpful MC such as the ingredients and information about Butterbear are at the top of the page, significant scrolling is required to find the actual Butterbeer recipe. The "jump to recipe" link itself is difficult to find. The page has a large amount of content unrelated to Butterbeer between the Butterbeer ingredients and the Butterbeer recipe. The page has photos and reviews of many other unrelated foods at universal studios. In addition, Ads and SC and interstitials appear throughout causing additional scrolling to finally find the recipe towards the bottom. All of the above lead to a poor user experience.”
Google wants to avoid sending users to websites that require ‘significant scrolling’ and where key information is hard to find. It is why we always recommend putting the user at the centre of your website build.
If you work in or with Search Engine Optimisation, this document is one you should be reading.
How important are links to Google?
Ask ten SEOs how important links are and it is very likely that you will get ten different answers. Google’s Gary Illyes was quoted recently as saying ‘links matter less’ than they used to. To test this, Ahrefs carried out this study ‘Google Says “Links Matter Less”—We Looked at 1,000,000 SERPs to See if It’s True’
They looked at the rankings for the 1,000,000 keywords with the highest search volume in the USA. Their study came to some interesting conclusions.
The first was links matter more at higher search volumes. One explanation that they posit for this is that as queries become more competitive, links could become more important. Links are an important ranking signal in highly competitive spaces. Another possible explanation is that as these sites are getting a high number of views, meaning more people see the pages, it is more likely websites will link to them.
They also concluded that links play a key role in local-based searches. This is when users include a location with their search, such as ‘Bournemouth digital agency’. From this, it appears that links helps Google understand a business’s location. Interestingly, the study found internal links were also important for local searches - something that you can influence on your own website.
The overall conclusion of the study was that the correlation between rankings and links had decreased slightly (when compared to a similar study from 2019), but remain an important factor.
Google’s search market share below 90% for fourth month in a row
In October, Google’s share of the global search market fell below 90% for the first time since 2015 according to Statcounter.
It has now remained below 90% for the fourth month in a row.
Bing, Yandex and Yahoo have picked up these users.
Statcounter’s data is for traditional search engines and does not include AI answer engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity AI or Siri, which are increasingly competing with search engines.
Google’s dominance is not about to end anytime soon. ChatGPT search, which was made available to all free ChatGPT users in December, has been predicted to reach a 1% share of the search market by the end of 2025.
These numbers are for the global search market. In the UK, Statcounter gives Google a 93.21% share of the market in January, which is the lowest it has been in the past 12 months.
How will Google respond to this? Well……
Google Search testing ‘AI Mode’
According to a leaked email that was obtained by 9to5Google, Google is currently internally testing a new search feature called ‘AI Mode’.
This has been created as a new way of answering what they are calling open-ended or exploratory questions, as well as the supplemental questions that follow the initial exchange. This type of question is something that search engines currently struggle with, i.e. queries where users ask for advice or comparisons.
In the email, Google gave the following questions as examples:
“How many boxes of spaghetti should I buy to feed 6 adults and 10 children, and have enough for seconds?”
“Compare wool, down, and synthetic jackets in terms of insulation, water resistance, and durability”
This is at present being tested internally. It shows how Google is constantly evolving their search offering. Search, and SEO, never slows down.
