Google Passage Ranking

[wonderpunter]

So a new update to the algorithm is live https://www.seroundtable.com/google-...ive-30920.html I have seen massive crawls.. massive bouncing however the main keywords that have dropped have also had thier pages increase in traffic, and CTR is way up. Too early to make sense of it but what is everyone else seeing?

[chaumi]

If you take this literally you'd expect a major/major impact......and may explain why traffic is up

''In short passage ranking is Google's way of algorithmically sifting through a long piece of content and being able to understand that a specific passage or set of passages is about query X, while another specific passage or set of passages in that same document can be about query Y. Google is able to rank the same piece of content but different passages within that content separately and for different queries. Google is not indexing them separately but ranking them separately.''


You might expect (good) long form content to do well out of this.

The theory would be...you were ranking for query A, B, C...and now you might be for A, D, E, F, G, H

[PROFRBcom]

Traffic is up the last few days, but then again, it is the weekend and a brutal cold wave is keeping one of our big markets in doors so it's hard to tell from a birds eye view if we are experiencing any traffic boost.

We don't track individual keywords and **** so I have no idea what is jostling around under the hood, all we care about is if it is trending up or down in the aggregate

I think we would be likely to benefit from this update however, since we write long-form most of the time.

Crossing my fingers and toes our traffic doubles in the next week

[chaumi]

Bear in mind it said it was US only so far with other English to follow (but it didn't say when)

[PaulEchere]

Impressions and traffic did increase, I've also seen some of my pages move up 5-6 positions up for keywords I wasn't even aiming for.

[tufty]

My U.S. site got hit in December core update. I saw the most daily impressions since that time on Wednesday (first day of passage ranking). I thought maybe it was the start of a recovery from core update, having changed quite a few things in a bid to recover, but it must be passage rank boost. Not a big uplift, but at least in the right direction.

[PROFRBcom]

Now I am curious but I am clearly a n00b.

Can anyone help me to figure out how to get GA to filter for:

Organic Google Traffic only
USA only
Display in graph form

I can do Google traffic only, and separated into a list of countries, but I want to see ONLY the USA data in this sort of visualization:



If I can figure out how to do this, I'll post it with an arrow pointing to WED and we'll all see if this algo change affected our long-form USA targeted content/traffic

[Nocturnalant]

Now I am curious but I am clearly a n00b.

Can anyone help me to figure out how to get GA to filter for:

Organic Google Traffic only
USA only
Display in graph form

I can do Google traffic only, and separated into a list of countries, but I want to see ONLY the USA data in this sort of visualization:



If I can figure out how to do this, I'll post it with an arrow pointing to WED and we'll all see if this algo change affected our long-form USA targeted content/traffic

In google organic traffic ---> "Add segment" ---> "New segment" ---> "Advanced", Filter country, contains United States

[gil.langelaan]

Now I am curious but I am clearly a n00b.

Can anyone help me to figure out how to get GA to filter for:

Organic Google Traffic only
USA only
Display in graph form

I can do Google traffic only, and separated into a list of countries, but I want to see ONLY the USA data in this sort of visualization:



If I can figure out how to do this, I'll post it with an arrow pointing to WED and we'll all see if this algo change affected our long-form USA targeted content/traffic

Go to Acquisition - All Traffic - Channels - Organic Search - Landing Page

[chaumi]

After considering this a bit more....if you think about it G were already (depending on the page) showing a result in the SERPs for multiple queries relevant to that page.

And we know the description snippet can vary (it's not always the actual page description you wrote, but whatever they decided was most relevant to show).

So what I think they might actually be saying here is they've found a way to give the most appropriate description snippet for the query that the page has appeared for.

If I'm right, then in theory impressions wouldn't rise...because they're still showing what they were before...but click through rates theoretically should rise (because they're showing a better/more appropriate snippet that's more relevant to the searchers query)


...and while on the subject, if anyone doesn't like the snippet description that's being displayed there is a way to 'tell' (or at least 'suggest' to) Google not to show it and pick something else. Just pm if you haven't heard of it before and want to know how to do it.

[PROFRBcom]

In google organic traffic ---> "Add segment" ---> "New segment" ---> "Advanced", Filter country, contains United States

I knew I loved the GPWA for a reason. Thanks, that worked!

As promised:

[TheGooner]

I tried to help you PROFRBcom, but I couldn't work it out in Analytics either ...
Thanks for reposting the correct method.

We see a small bump a couple of days later ... but that's the weekend with more sports events ..
So maybe not related to the change.

SIDEBAR :
-------------------------
Google is pretty useless for keyword info though isn't it ?

Looking at the keyword info it gave me for US users ... fully 99.3% of users are "not provided" or "not set."
WTF? NINETY-NINE PERCENT ?? It's my traffic - at least give me some info.

[Michael Martinez]

So what I think they might actually be saying here is they've found a way to give the most appropriate description snippet for the query that the page has appeared for.

If I'm right, then in theory impressions wouldn't rise...because they're still showing what they were before...but click through rates theoretically should rise (because they're showing a better/more appropriate snippet that's more relevant to the searchers query)

They say no one will know where the passage ranking has kicked in, although initially it's only applied to US-English queries.

They haven't published any details about what their algorithm(s) are using to do this. Many people have wrongly guessed an algorithm called SMITH may be in use. SMITH is used to compare whole documetns for "Similar results" requests (an entirely different class of queries).

My guess is that it will take time for anyone to surface real methods of detecting which pages are affected in which queries. Maybe by comparing historical queries-by-page data with new data going forward (from Google Search Console) it might be possible to see a change in the kinds of queries for which pages are ranking.

But Google implied strongly this change is meant to help underserved pages. So the people most likely to notice something as a result of this new ranking methodology might be those whose pages have lost position because their pages are now being outranked by other content.

It could be that Google has developed a new passage caching system that doesn't require them to bump an entire document up into faster storage. Only a small percentage of their index is stored in RAM - these are the most "important" documents. The next tier uses Flash storage, which is less expensive but still pretty fast. And apparently a majority of their index is stored on hard drives, which are slow but cheap storage compared to the other two options.

So the less often they have to hit the hard drives to resolve queries, the happier they are. That's why they rely on cached search results, which some of their algorithms (like RankBrain) are designed to recommend to the master query resolver.

Google's search engine is built on a massive array of short cuts. Passage ranking sounds like another one.

[PROFRBcom]

I tried to help you PROFRBcom, but I couldn't work it out in Analytics either ...
Thanks for reposting the correct method.

We see a small bump a couple of days later ... but that's the weekend with more sports events ..
So maybe not related to the change.

Agreed. The weekend data skews the small sample size. Will monitor for trends over the following month, perhaps report back here if I remember it

Would love to see someone else post some data on the US traffic post-update in the same format I did!

SIDEBAR :
-------------------------
Google is pretty useless for keyword info though isn't it ?

Looking at the keyword info it gave me for US users ... fully 99.3% of users are "not provided" or "not set."
WTF? NINETY-NINE PERCENT ?? It's my traffic - at least give me some info.

Google Analytics doesn't show much KW data. You want Google Search Console for that data! Surprised you don't use this already TheGooner

[TheGooner]

Yes I use Webmaster tools (incl search console) but why would Analytics not also have the data?

Search console gives me much more keyword data - but I can't do all the segment analysis that Analytics gives me.
It would have far more useful value in Analytics.

[Michael Martinez]

Import your Google Search Console data into Google Analytics. You can do some segmentation that way.

[TheGooner]

Import your Google Search Console data into Google Analytics. You can do some segmentation that way.

Got a cheat sheet on how to do that Michael Martinez?

UPDATE :
I tried working through Google analytics help.

I think that the problem was that it was linked to http:// not https:// variant of the console URL.
I tried to delete the old and add the new and got "hmmm ... something doesn't seem right" screen.

I think it's well and truly broken now.
I've never had a great deal of success with configuring the Analytics engine.
Too complicated.

[Michael Martinez]

I haven't had to set it up for any accounts in quite a while, but the accounts to which I have access, that have it set up, are still working.

As I recall, you had to verify some things on both sides.

If you're using GA4, that may not have the ability yet. I'm only guessing. I'm not a fan of Google Analytics and only set it up as a fallback.

[artrust99]

Didn't get any movement on positions at all. So at least, I'm doing nothing wrong )

[gil.langelaan]

For now my positions have already improved but the impressions, clicks and traffic decreased comparing with previous month...
All the time on Feb lower results.