Google might not provide you relevant information or the right answer to your query all the time.
For example, you are searching Google to know how to open ancient locks. But Google shows you everything about ancient locks but the key information you are looking for. Instead of showing you the relevant answer, it is showing you news and blogs about ancient locks.
That doesn’t mean Google lack information on this. But it only fails to detect the right information in your context. The desired result or answer might be buried somewhere in the chunks of text. May it is just a single line on the page consisting of 1,000 words.
Even you need to manually check the piece of information going from page to page.
Good thing is that Google has realized this.
It is going to roll down its next update specifically for this problem.
According to this update, Google will not just index webpages, but individual passages from those pages to display the relevant information. This passage-based indexing is a “needle-in-a-haystack” approach as said by the search engine giant.
This brief guide will help you know what actually this update is, when this is going to roll out and how to leverage this for ranking.
What is Passage Based Indexing?
Although there is no official term for this update yet, it is right to call it passage-based indexing for time being. After all, it is designed to index the important passages on a web page.
Google will use passage-based indexing to find the relevant information that is otherwise buried deep in a web page. It is just like looking for a needle in a haystack.
This statement from its official YouTube channel says it all—
“We’ve recently made another breakthrough, and are now able to not just index webpages, but individual passages from those pages. This helps us find that needle in a haystack because now the whole of that one passage is relevant. So, for example, let’s say you search for something pretty niche like ‘how can I determine if my house windows are UV glass.’ This is a pretty tricky query, and we get lots of webpages that talk about UV glass and how you need a special film, but none of this really helps the layperson take action. Our new algorithm can zoom right into this one passage on a DIY forum that answers the question.”
To understand it better, here is a visual example provided by Google about how it looks like before and after the update for the same query.
However, Google won’t stop indexing full pages. The new update will enable it to figure out the meaning of content and passages to show the relevant piece of information.
It is also important to understand here that Google won’t index individual passages. Instead, it analyses the page content and highlights those passages for ranking.
When Will Google Launch Passage Based Indexing Feature?
This update is expected to be launched this year in the USA for English language web pages. Later, it will be designed for more languages/locations across the world.
How to Rank for Passage Based Indexing?
For users, it is good news as they can find the specific information from the stack. And it is equally important for webmasters.
This is because the update will impact 7% of queries on Google search, according to Google.
Google is said to consider some key signals about a page to determine the ranking.
Here are some of them you can work over.
Page Titles or Heading:
It will help Google understand if the results are relevant to a query.
Header Tags:
Header tags can play an important role as Google can use them to locate information.
Featured Snippets:
Featured snippets locate the most relevant passage on a page.
So you must have understood about passaged based indexing by Google as well as its importance with the help of our SEO experts. What do you think? Let us know by commenting below!