Google Algorithm Update 2021

This year’s Google’s new algorithm changes are minor but it is important to know the summary. It is official and well known that Google is now giving importance to “Page Experience”. Apart from Page Experience, the possible signals which they will give importance are mobile-friendliness, safe-browsing, HTTPS, site’s loading speed, interactivity, visual stability and possibly alt text for images. I believe that most of the serious websites of these days already given importance to the points we have mentioned. Google published few important blog posts on their update : Timing for bringing page experience to Google SearchHelping users easily access content on mobile.

Barry Schwartz asked Danny Sullivan on Twitter (see it here) whether this is the Google SMITH Algorithm. The reply was no (read the linked Tweet). What is SMITH? SMITH is an internal tool for natural language processing and information retrieval. In future, Google search will be able to “understand” larger chunks of texts better.

What should be done by the webmasters so that own website(s) is/are not negatively affected is a big question. This is a minor update which unlikely to change the fortune of a website overnight. Page experience includes all aspects of how users interact with a web page and how good or bad it is for them. So, it is more important for e-commerce websites. What metrics the content publishing websites like blogs should improve. Many of the experts are inclining to polish the already known things such as alt text of the images.

With time the updates are requiring complex and costly tweaks, which is normal and expected. Outside the corporate websites, many websites will be unable to score over 90% (or A+) in every minute tests. We will repeat the same points we are giving importance for the last 11 years – create unique content, every day publish content and stay for some decades. Nicely crafting the articles (like we have mentioned while talking about featured snippet) on a decently fast loading website with a lot of good backlinks will rank better.

Ending with the tips on optimizing images (which Google shared on their video), use relevant images, optimize image placement, use alt-attributes, use high quality images, use max-image-preview-large directive, add image licensing markup, may be use lazy loading method.