Google's ranking rules in 2021

Google has published an announcement of updated ranking rules and indicated that the new Page Experience ranking signal will be taken into account from May 2021: "A note on timing: we recognise that many site owners are rightly focused on responding to the effects of COVID-19.

The ranking changes described in this post won't happen until next year at the earliest, and we will notify you at least six months before they are implemented. We're providing tools to help you get started (and because site owners have consistently asked to learn about the ranking changes as early as possible)," reported the announcement.

In a nutshell, Google's new ranking rules make it clear that user experience comes first.

The importance of core web metrics for SEO

Core Web Vitals were part of the Page Experience update and certainly caused the biggest stir. There are many things to say about Core Web Vitals, but they boil down to the three most basic aspects:

LCP - Largest Contentful Paint, which relates to the speed at which the largest single object on the page loads.

FID - First Input Delay, which refers to the page's reaction time to the user's first input (whether they click, tap, or press any keys).

CLS - Cumulative Layout Shift - this is a measure of how much the page content jumps on load, mainly visual content once opened.

Of course, some SEO experts believe that the whole Page Experience update is nothing special and may even: "[...] detract [...] from the core mission of communication and storytelling".

And of course, most of the Page Experience updates are just a collection of things we've known for a long time: use HTTPS, be mobile-friendly, control your page speed, and so on.

But Core Web Vitals are a little different and can impact SEO practices in unexpected ways. A key factor that is already changing rankings is cumulative layout bias.

As most SEO experts know, for some time an important part of image optimisation has been the use of the <decoding = async> attribute in the img tag to avoid losing page speed when rendering the page.

Using <decoding = async> could result in some pretty sloppy pages if coders didn't specify the height and width of each individual image to be rendered. Some websites did this anyway, for example Wikipedia has a predetermined space for images on most pages.

But as SEO experts, we didn't have to worry too much about pages being unstable because it didn't affect rankings. Now that CLS has been officially declared a ranking factor, things will change for a number of websites and SEO experts.

We will need to make sure that every web page is written with CLS in mind, with a predetermined space for each image to avoid layout shifts.

The importance of AMP for SEO

The relevance of AMP today is an open question. While it's always been a great quick and easy way to increase page speed, privacy concerns have been voiced over and over again since the technology's inception.

But 2020 will see a significant change, as as part of the same Page Experience update, Google announced that we finally don't need to create AMP pages for the "Top Stories" rendition feature.

This is a pretty significant step for anyone trying to get as many SERP features as possible, and in particular for news sites.

With AMP pre-rendering, combined with some serious design constraints, it often does give page speed gains, even if it doesn't directly affect rankings.

However, the "Top Stories" search engine feature has been a huge benefit to using AMP for any news outlet with a website, and it's easy to see why. Just look at how much of the search engine page is taken up by "Top Stories" results.

The importance of EAT for SEO

Experience. Authority. Credibility. These are absolutely positive words and something we should all strive for in our professional lives. But what about search engine optimisation?

Based on Google's quality score guidelines, EAT has been the talk of the town for a while now. Let's take a look at how they could change the way we optimise for search.

As Google officials told us, EAT itself is not a ranking factor. Upon receiving further questions, John Mueller confirmed the idea, and Ben Gomez, Google's vice president of search engineering, confirmed that quality assessors do not directly affect the ranking of any page.

 The rules for how search engines sort sites are changing, so it pays to keep your finger on the pulse at all times

Update for 2021:
Keywords in meta title tags

Including the keywords you think your page should rank for in the page title tag is a prerequisite for ranking. While this fact is obvious to any marketer with SEO experience, keyword strategy is a serious intellectual task that can easily take 20-30 minutes per page. It's also worth noting that keyword placement and concentration in the title tag is also important. Ideally, the title tag should only contain the target keyword; but actually adding articles and adjectives around it is important for readability.

Backlinks

Backlinks were the original foundation of Google's algorithm, as laid out in the research paper that started Google. However, in 2018, they began to lose ground due to the two factors above: consistent publishing of engaging content and keywords in title meta tags. While backlinks are still an important factor when Google decides where to place a website in search results, your main focus should be on content, as it organically attracts links and is the most important ranking factor on its own.

Internal links

Google paid much more attention to this factor, which is often discussed along with hubs, in 2017. The greater the concentration of pages with the same keyword in their title tags, the higher a site will rank for that keyword if there are internal links connecting them. Publishing 100 articles on different aspects of a topic and linking them to one authoritative page will be a powerful expression of the value of that page and will give it a higher ranking.

A website optimised for mobile devices

If you want to attract visitors in 2021, your website needs to be easy to navigate on mobile phones and tablets. "Mobile-friendly" used to be the standard, but Google has moved to a mobile-centric world, meaning it expects mobile visitors to be the primary target of your web design. Ideally, there should be no desktop version of your website at all. The site should look the same on mobile devices and on computers: the layout should be simple enough, and the site navigation should be optimised for interaction with mobile users.

Visitor's time on the site

The biggest change to Google's algorithm in the last five years is visitor time on site, which was integrated into the ranking algorithm in 2016. Google used to be wary of giving importance to the site presence factor, which can be easily manipulated by website owners. But Google's increasingly sophisticated technology, borrowed from the click fraud detection advertising business, has made visitors' time on site a significant part of its algorithm.

Page speed

Google has always valued user experience above all else, which is why it invests in thousands of data centres around the world to deliver search results in milliseconds. Your website should take a page out of Google's book and focus on page speed. You want pages to load as fast as possible. With each additional second it takes for your site to load, ranking ability is lost. You can check your page speed with the free Google PageSpeed Insights tool.

Site Security / SSL Certificate

As the internet becomes an increasingly important element of our lives, hackers are becoming more sophisticated. Google's nightmare would be serving sites that harm its searchers. As a consequence, if your domain is even vulnerable to hacking - if, say, your site doesn't have an SSL certificate (denoted by the "s" at the end of "https") - it will lose its ability to rank. An SSL certificate is usually free and can be easily obtained from your registrar.

Off-site mentions

There has been debate for years about whether Google takes into account website mentions that are not hyperlinks. Mentions of a company are the same as links, but without the link itself, so why wouldn't this mention add to a website's credibility in Google's algorithm? This factor, although relatively new, is a small but significant part of Google's algorithm.

Keywords in URLs

A remnant of old school SEO from the 2000s, placing the keywords you are targeting in the URL of a page is still a best practice, although its weight in the algorithm is minimal.

The rules for how search engines sort sites change, so it pays to always keep on top of things

Changes to Google's algorithm from 2020.

The main changes to Google's algorithm in 2021 that differ from 2020 are as follows:
Factor #1, consistent publication of engaging content, increased in importance by one percentage point.

While the concept of creating nodes of related pages targeting the same keyword used to be about consistently publishing compelling content, keywords in title meta tags and internal links, this year it deserves a separate category: niche expertise.

Mobile-friendliness lost one percentage point, mainly because Google assumes mobile-friendliness and now only penalises sites that have made no effort in this area.

The number of keywords in meta titles increased by one percentage point, further reinforcing the importance of a well-designed keyword strategy that meets the search intent of visitors.

Social signals continued to decline, which seemed paradoxical. Our team believes this is because Google tracks so much data about its users that it doesn't need to rely on social data as much as it used to.

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