Bartosz asked Martin Splitt about passage indexing, stating that what he knows is that passages is going to help users with long form content by ranking a small section of the article,

“Yes, pretty much. That’s the core.”

Splitt then stated that he wasn’t excited by the original blog post framing it as “Passage Indexing.”

“While I’m not super excited about us framing it… originally as passage indexing, it is actually a ranking change.

Martin then suggested calling it Passage Ranking.

“Yes, I would call it Passage Ranking, that makes sense.”

See the full interview with Martin Splitt discussing everything about Google Passages : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8U4F-Gngy4

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Splitt insisted there is nothing to do to optimize for passages because it’s designed to help sites that aren’t ranking as well as they should.

“Again, if you have a website that ranks well, it’s not really a problem for you. We are only improving rankings for pages that are currently having trouble.”

Q: Will passages show up in a different feature, like People Also Ask?

Splitt answered probably not, that Passage Ranking is strictly a blue links feature. By blue links he means the traditional search results.

Q: Are there any guidelines for how long or short a passage has to be to be considered passages?

Splitt answered that he doesn’t think that there is a specific guideline.

Then he said:

“Because again, this is based on what the algorithm picks up and that’s machine learning, so that can change at any point in time.

And it can be really short, it can be as short as a few words, it can be as long as a paragraph I would guess.”

Splitt paused then exclaimed,

“Or maybe longer, I don’t know.”

Q: Can a passage with the answer in the body copy outrank a page with the query in the page title?

Splitt replied that it’s an interesting question. He thought about it then responded with a rhetorical question, asking if a page with a good answer in the body is more relevant than a page with the query in the page title.

Bartosz responded that if he had to answer the rhetorical question, he would say that relevance is more important than whether a keyword phrase is present in the page title.

Splitt raised his arms and exclaimed with a smile, “Ta-da!”

The next question asked if there would be a jump anchor like with some featured snippets and he responded that he didn’t know.

A jump anchor is a Chrome browser feature where a URL can be configured with extra parameters that when the link is clicked will cause Chrome to jump to a specific passage in a page and also highlight it with yellow.

Q: Will Passages be tested before rolling out?

Splitt guaranteed that it will be tested before rolling out and when it does roll out that it will be done bit by bit and not all in one go.

He said that, similar to the HTTP/2 crawling rollout, they’re going to do it in smaller batches and see what happens as they roll it out.

He then reiterated that there is nothing for publishers to do, that passages is for web pages that aren’t ranking well and don’t have good structure or well focused pages to also begin to rank for queries. Splitt underlined the point that Passages is for helping publishers who may not have the best optimized pages.

He said:

“It just, again, allows pages that are not ranking well and don’t have a good structured content to begin with or have like focused pages to begin with, to also potentially rank for queries.”

Splitt then repeated that Passage Ranking is not something that will affect a publisher with good SEO practices.

“It’s not for you who know what they are doing.

If you know what you are doing, passage ranking… will be the least interesting thing that has ever happened to you.

If you have good relevant well structured content, I would be surprised if a random passage on a really long page is magically so good that it outranks you. And if it does…”

Martin Splitt GesturingMartin Splitt said, “If it does…” then gestured in a way that seemed to say, “Why do you think?”

Splitt gestured in a way that to me seemed to mean, that if a passage outranks you, then perhaps your page wasn’t as relevant.

See the full interview with Martin Splitt discussing everything about Google Passages : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8U4F-Gngy4

Enjoyed this video? Make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel here : https://www.youtube.com/user/searchenginejournal

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Tomek Rudzki asked if there were any intersections between the neural net understanding of Subtopics and Passages.

Subtopics is a reference to Google’s ability to show a diversity of answers for broad search queries.

This is how Google’s blog post explained subtopics:

“We’ve applied neural nets to understand subtopics around an interest, which helps deliver a greater diversity of content when you search for something broad. As an example, if you search for “home exercise equipment,” we can now understand relevant subtopics, such as budget equipment, premium picks, or small space ideas, and show a wider range of content for you on the search results page. “

Splitt responded that these were two different things. Subtopics were a way of understanding queries, a way to give users “ways of zooming in to the content.” He said Subtopics is a way of understanding things and Passages is a ranking thing.

Cindy Krum brought up how the official Google announcement talked about BERT in the context of Passages.

Splitt indicated that BERT is a way of understanding content and that of course, before the Passages ranking can happen, Google needs to understand the content. He stressed that these are related but different things.

Splitt looked up in the air and took a breath as he tried to work out in his mind how to explain this seemingly complex relationship.

Splitt answered:

“The problem here is there’s like lots of smaller systems talking to each other, so everything is blurry. There is no clear separation between the things.

But for me, how I look at it, is when we talk about Passages as a thing you see in search results ranking, that requires that we understand the document, of course.

We can’t say like… this Passage is about this thing if we don’t understand that. But then there’s this other understanding which is more like, how does this relate to things and how does this get disambiguated from other similar topics and other similar entities?

Extracting these concepts and extracting how this relates to each other is a separate process internally for us than it is to understand what this page is about.

…It’s related, but it’s completely separate processes. …Without natural language understanding we can’t do either of these things.

But in this case, Passages is a ranking feature where we say like, …this page covers these five different topics and one of the topics is this specific tomato kind, for instance… whereas the rest of the page talks about cucumbers and gardening in general.”

Tomek asked when will Passage Ranking be Introduced.

Splitt responded that it’s supposed to go live in December but that it might go live in 2021.

See the full interview with Martin Splitt discussing everything about Google Passages : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8U4F-Gngy4

Enjoyed this video? Make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel here : https://www.youtube.com/user/searchenginejournal

Looking to keep up with what current and effective in Digital Marketing today, check out https://www.searchenginejournal.com for everything you need to keep up with the Digital Marketing space and improve your skills as an internet marketer.

Because specific searches can be the hardest to get right, Google has been looking for ways to find those specific answers buried deep within page content. They have recently made a breakthrough in ranking and are now able to not just rank web pages, but individual passages from the pages.

With this new ability to better understanding the relevancy of specific passages, we need to make sure we cover those high intent questions and provide searchers with the best possible answers.

In this video, we cover this new “Passage Ranking” concept and share what you can do to improve your site’s visibility.

�� Get more SEO Tips to Maximize Your Sites Exposure: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRFTkssEVFpcb9pR4IACnaqWhAlW9EoUi

�� Introducing BERT: Google’s New AI Algorithm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rs_jy…

�� What is Semantic SEO: How search has changed and what you can do about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQHkIRZVx9s

#passageranking #seo #google

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