A Quick Look at the new Google Passage Ranking

According to Google, the Passage Ranking update is now live for English queries in the United States.

As every web user knows, finding information via search engines can be challenging.

Sometimes, a single sentence that answers your query might be buried deep in a web page. As such, searchers have to identify the relevant page and comb through the content to find answers.

Expectedly, the process is tedious and time-consuming.

To address this issue, Google announced a Passage Indexing update back in October 2020. Thanks to this ranking update, Google could now index individual passages from web pages.

In a blog post announcement, Senior Vice President of Search and Assistant at the company, Prabhakar Raghavan, wrote:

“By better understanding the relevancy of specific passages, not just the overall page, we can find that needle-in-a-haystack information you’re looking for.”

Well, the update is currently live in US English.

Google Passage Ranking now Live in the United States

Last week, Google’s Public Liaison for Search, Danny Sullivan, tweeted that Passage Ranking is live for English queries in the US. Then, he pointed out that the update should extend to other regions soon.

The tweet reads:

“Passage ranking launched yesterday afternoon Pacific Time for queries in the US in English. It will come for more countries in English in the near future, then to other countries and languages after that.”

As in any Google update, the Passage Ranking update raises two essential questions:

How will Passage Ranking update impact SEO?
How can site owners optimize for the update?

According to the search giant, the new Passage Ranking would impact 7 percent of search queries across all languages when it rolls out globally.

Also, Google’s Martin Splitt suggested that the update should benefit long-form content. That’s because Google can now index and rank a small section of long articles.

With that said, the search engine stated that creators can’t optimize for the update.

“Continue to focus on great content,” says Google.