In February 2021 a new Ranking Update was pushed live in Google Search Google’s for now the change is live for English-language queries in the United States only, but you should keep track of this Tweeter thread because it will be soon announced its opening to other languages and locations.
Google Passages: What They Are & What They Are Not
Long story short, Google Algorithm is now much better at understanding content and therefore they can rank search queries on the back of how well specific fragments or passages of your content satisfy the user intent of such queries, in other words, passage indexing allows Google to pull out sections of the content in a webpage and rank it separately from the rest of the page. Google said in its official documentation, this technology will improve 7% of search queries across all languages once rolled out globally.
In the video below, we have an interesting discussion with Martin Splitt and other SEOs, in which Martin explains how Passages work, and how to integrate this with your SEO strategy.
Has your website lost Organic Traffic lately?
In summary, this update shouldn’t be much of a problem if your content is well structured and serves the right user intent. Therefore, if you are an eCommerce website, for example, your performance in search shouldn’t be affected by this update.
