Passing Ranking Rolled Out: What to Expect and What's Next
Major SEO news for today include Google declaring passage ranking was rolled out. Just to remind, it influences around 7% of all queries.
Passage ranking takes the words from the content of a page and assigns each word a "relevance" score to the topic of that page. The more relevance a word has to the topic, the higher its score will be. The score each word gets is used to determine the "Importance" of a page. The importance of a page is defined as the total sum of its word relevances. So the more relevant a word is, the more important a page is. What's important to remember about passage ranking is that it doesn't actually look at the words on a page and decide if they are relevant or not.
And that's just the beginning. The company has also announced a new algorithm update which will roll out in phases over the next few months. This is going to be big!
Core Web Vitals Coming
Google says the minimum threshold for all Core Web Vitals must be met in order to benefit from the associated ranking signal. If you're lacking in one area, you won't rank as high as a competitor who has them all. Regardless of whether you have them or not, the new algorithm will ultimately determine your ranking based on an aggregate of all the associated signals involved. So even if you have all of them, there is no guarantee you rank #1 for your chosen keywords.
Apart from all of the above, it's never late to optimize for Google Knowledge Graph. With KG resources list, you'd easily find what you need to know in order to do that.