What is Passage Indexing?

passage indexing

What is Passage Indexing?

Passage indexing is a thing that Google likes more than updating its ranking signals.  Well, passage indexing is a new technology rolled out on February 11, 2021, by Google. If you’ve heard about passage indexing, you must be having some questions related to it such as. What is passage indexing? How is it related to SEO? Does it affect PPC ads Services? How can it help to bring more traffic to your website? Or is it just another slight change in Google’s algorithm and ranking factors?

In this article, we’ll try to answer the above question to give you an idea about Passage Indexing.

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So Passage Indexing is nothing to be scared of, it is just a small Google update. To help the Google search engine understand the web content better so it can show the best results to searcher’s queries.
That’s why there is absolutely no need to make huge changes to update your content. However, it is also not correct to say that passage indexing doesn’t matter at all. Also, there is no need to change your current web content in order to make your web content Passage Indexing-friendly because it’s more of an internal ranking modification.

What does that actually mean?

It is an automated feature that pulls out passages or paragraphs from the web pages into search engine results, even if the page is about a different topic from the leading one. 

Passage indexing is not all about displaying results, it is an additional ranking factor that is going to help Google to understand better individual sections within the article or web pages.

Let’s look at an example: Benefits of Passage Indexing

You want to know about digital marketing services, your main goal is to know the topic entirely, including the section like how to be a successful digital marketer, what are the skills required to be a digital marketer, the tools that are used, what is the scope in digital marketing, and how to get started in digital marketing. 

That is a lot of informative content, but it also means your entire article likely won’t rank high for the query like “scope in digital marketing” because your article has only one paragraph covering that query. 

With the passage indexing update, google can easily pull out the paragraph or sections from the web pages and will rank them independently according to the query. For example, your section on “ digital marketing tools” might rank well for that keyword, not necessary if the full article is if the entire post isn’t optimized for it.

In this picture see how passage indexing affects search results queries: 

Here in this picture, you can clearly see how Google bolds specific words that are considered appropriate to the searched query. It skims for relevant keywords that indicate the content is probably useful for a specific query. 

See? No such thing to worry about.

Benefits of Passage Indexing

  1. It can help long-form articles rank well on SERP
  2. More focus on user queries than the Google bots
  3. Long-tail keywords are more important than ever
  4. On-page SEO factor importance is reduced but not very much

How Does Passage Indexing Work?

As most of us know very well that Google is not very transparent about how, exactly, the feature functions may be to keep things more interesting. 

But according to its blog, Google uses BERT and the neural nets for a better understanding of the content and better ranking of the passage/ section when searched. Google still indexes the entire web page but precisely looks for the content and meaning of the passage while crawling the full page. Each passage is annotated and can be ranked and scored independently. 

Google has mentioned that the Passage index will impact only 7% of search queries, so don’t expect huge changes. If your web page is already ranked well, passage indexing will not impact your website at all. 

However, it will be beneficial for the websites with useful long-form content that isn’t perfectly optimized and can get a small boost in rankings as well as traffic. 

Remember that indexing passively doesn’t impact what pages Google indexes but it tends to focus on ranking the specific paragraph or section. 

I hope by now you have a basic knowledge about passage indexing, why it matters for your website, and how can it help to improve your Google rankings.

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