Google now “consider passages from pages as an additional ranking factor.”
Here are the tweets, but most of this is just a confirmation of our original story that we wrote after speaking to a Google spokesperson. We asked that Google share this information on official channels.
Why we care. There has been confusion around this largely because Google’s initial language around the change was confusing: “now [we are] able to not just index webpages, but individual passages from those pages.” Sounds like separate indexing, right? As we clarified in our initial reporting and Google confirmed today, indexing hasn’t changed, just Google’s ability to parse out a relevant passage that may be well down a page and would not have stood a chance of ranking before. It’s somewhat sematic, but it’s important to understand how the technology works.
The good news for content creators and SEOs, is that this technology will help us create content in ways that best serve our audiences. You don’t have to be pre-occupied with thinking about breaking up content to be optimized around a single idea or keyword.