Google Search Console launches desktop page experience report
With the upcoming Google page experience update coming to desktop, today Google launched a new page experience report for desktop in Google Search Console. “To support the upcoming rollout of page experience ranking to desktop, Search Console now has a dedicated desktop section in its Page Experience report to help site owners understand Google’s ‘good page experience’ criteria,” Google wrote.
How to access. You can access the report by clicking here or by going to Google Search Console, and clicking on the Page Experience link under the experience tab.
What it looks like. Here is a screenshot of this report for one of my sites:
More details. Google first launched the page experience report in April 2021 before the launch of the page experience update. The new Google Page Experience report offers metrics, such as the percentage of URLs with good page experience and searches impressions over time, enabling you to quickly evaluate performance. You can also drill into specific pages to see what improvements need to be made.
You can use this report to make the necessary adjustments to the desktop versions of your pages before Google rolls out the desktop version of the page experience update. As a reminder, we do not expect there to be a huge ranking change due to this update, but it may impact sites more if their stories show in the top stories section, since a solid page experience score is required to show in the top stories carousel.
Read more: Google Search Console launches desktop page experience report
Google Search Ranking Update January 14th & 15th (Unconfirmed)
Friday and Saturday, January 14th and 15th there may have been another unconfirmed Google search ranking algorithm update. This comes a few days after the unconfirmed January 11th update. There is some chatter but this time, the Google tracking tools are showing much higher volatility.
There does appear to be more volatility surfacing this morning, Monday, January 17th. It is a bit early to see, as the chatter is not lining up right now with what the tools are showing. Of course, it is a US holiday today, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day. So that might result in less chatter, as some are off, but it wouldn’t directly represent why the tools are showing so much change.
So if you saw ranking fluctuations around this time, you are not alone.
Read more: Google Search Ranking Update January 14th & 15th (Unconfirmed)
Google: Target CPA In Google Ads Not Going Away In 2022
Google’s Ginny Marvin via the AdsLiaison account on Twitter confirmed that target CPA, tCPA, is not being canceled in 2022. She wrote “we have no plans to sunset tCPA in 2022” after there was some speculation that it might be turned off in 2022.
Ginny did add “As announced last year, we did make some changes to how Smart Bidding strategies are organized and advertisers can continue to access tCPA functionality by using maximize conversions with an optional target CPA.” Here is the news about the changes Google made to tCPA last year.
Target CPA bidding is a Smart Bidding strategy that sets bids for you to get as many conversions (customer actions) as possible. When you create the Target CPA (target cost-per-action) bid strategy, you set an average cost you’d like to pay for each conversion. When a customer does a Google search that fits your product or service, Google Ads uses your Target CPA to set a bid based on the auction’s likelihood to convert.
Read more: Google: Target CPA In Google Ads Not Going Away In 2022
Google: Hosting Companies Should Serve 500 Status Code On Robot Detection Interstitial
Google’s John Mueller posted one of those PSA tweets this morning asking hosting companies that trigger robot detection interstitials to not use a 200 status code. John also said not to place a no-index on that page. If you do these things the pages served with these can be dropped out of the Google index and search results.
Instead, remove the index and serve a 5xx status code, that will help Googlebot deal with the robot detection interstitial.
Read more: Google: Hosting Companies Should Serve 500 Status Code On Robot Detection Interstitial
Google Product Reviews Update Will Expand, May Use Machine Learning & Can Be Incorporated In Core Updates
Google’s John Mueller was asked a series of questions around the product reviews update on last Friday’s video hangout. In short, it will expand to other languages and countries, it probably does use machine learning and eventually, it might be incorporated into the larger core updates.
As a reminder, we had two product reviews updates in 2021, one in April 2021 and the other in December 2021.
John basically said Google does plan to expand the product reviews update beyond just English, as we covered before – but he has no timeline for when that might happen.
Here is what was said:
AUDIENCE: So I have a few questions about product reviews, which is my domain. So I noticed that recently you made some moves in the US to promote product reviews, where there were real testing instead of just comparison. Do you have any time estimates of when we could expect these upgrades to be, like, in the market stack in French or German?
JOHN MUELLER: I don’t know, with most things, it’s something, where we tend not to pre-announce them. So it’s hard to kind of say ahead of time. And for some of these updates, the team moves very fast in kind of, like, rolling things out globally. And for other types of updates, it’s very slow. And sometimes there are also policy and legal reasons kind of that make things a little bit harder. So it’s always very tricky to give an estimate.
Then he was asked if the product reviews update uses human input or machine learning? John basically said no to human input but likely to machine learning. John said this takes an “algorithmic approach” and not a human editing approach, like most of what Google does. He isn’t sure if this specific update uses machine learning, but he said it probably does “to some extent.”
Read more: Google Product Reviews Update Will Expand, May Use Machine Learning & Can Be Incorporated In Core Updates
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