Don’t lose sleep over the Page Experience Update and more; Friday’s daily brief

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Good morning, marketers, or has it been a long night?  

Are you up all night worrying about your Core Web Vital scores? Can’t sleep because the Google Page Experience Update is just around the corner?  Well, go back to bed, it will be alright! I get it but we’ve been through updates like these before. Remember Mobilegeddon, maybe the HTTPS update, or the intrusive interstitials penalty and many like it? They all turned out to not be a huge update that really impacted rankings that much at all. In fact, Danny Sullivan of Google said on Twitter, “It shouldn’t be the case that overnight, we flip some type of switch and there’s a massive change.” He admitted “that’s not typically how rollouts of this nature (such as speed, mobile-friendliness) have worked.” 

Relevance will rank supreme: “While all of the components of page experience are important, we will rank pages with the best information overall, even if some aspects of page experience are subpar. A good page experience doesn’t override having great, relevant content. However, in cases where there are multiple pages that have similar content, page experience becomes much more important for visibility in Search,” Google wrote.

So really, do not lose sleep over this, everything will be fine. Yes, tackle the Core Web Vital issues that are most serious. Ultimately having a good user experience on your site will help with conversions, site revenues and happier website visitors. But I wouldn’t bank on it giving you a noticeable ranking boost or even a noticeable ranking decline.

Barry Schwartz,
Your SEO Sleep Therapist

Facebook updates Ads Manager for SMBs

Facebook launched their “Good Ideas Deserve To Be Found” initiative yesterday to help SMBs with more personalized ads. With more local businesses moving online due to the pandemic, the goal is to help make social media marketing more accessible. Updates for SMBs include the following:

• A simplified Ads Manager so SMBs can understand campaign performance and make optimizations faster
• Waived fees for businesses selling with Checkout on Shops through June 2021 and waived fees for paid online events until at least August 2021
• New options to note what type of dining experiences are available at restaurants
• A new menu tab for restaurants on Pages so businesses can upload their menu directly to their Page
• An updated Business Resource hub on Facebook and Professional Dashboard on Instagram with more information on how personalized ads work

Google Search featured snippets may be bouncing back

Yesterday we reported that Google may be showing fewer featured snippets in its search results.  The decline started after February 18th, but it seems like at least one tool is showing a bounce back as of February 25th.

RankRanger shows that as of February 25th, Google is now showing about the same level of featured snippets as it once did prior to the decline on February 18th.  This might be a blip in the data or it might be our report triggered Google to fix some sort of bug.  We are not sure, but maybe the featured snippets you lost are coming back?
Read more here.

Why doesn’t Google announce deprecating search ranking signals?

Deprecating search ranking signals. Google’s John Mueller said Google generally does not announce when it deprecates search ranking factors or signals. But is that true? They did with rel next/prev, Google News stock tickers and genre and meta keywords, authorship, also told us when you stop using MapReduce and some other things.

Google update to Display and Video 360 API. Google announced an update to its Display and Video 360 API. Some of the new features include anew insertion order targeting service and bulk list method enabling the retrieval of insertion order targeting, additional output-only fields mp3Audio and oggAudio for third-party audio creatives and support for more performance goal types to assign to insertion orders and campaigns, including click and impression conversion rate performance goals.
Proper HTML. When it comes to metadata, you need to make sure that the syntax is exact.  Google can understand broken HTML pages for content purposes but with structured data and meta data, you need to get it right said John Mueller of Google.

We’ve curated our picks from across the web so you can retire your feed reader.

• Google Adjusted Its Search Algorithm Due To SEO Gaming Four Or Five Times In 10 Years – Search Engine Roundtable
• Google: Quality, not quantity is what matters for links – SISTRIX
• The Potential Impact of Gen Z on SEO – Moz
• What is a Content Hub (And What Can it Do for Your Business)? – Didit
• Why is this site not ranking for its brand name? The mysterious case of an adult eCommerce store’s issues with Google. – Marie Haynes

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.