If it isn’t on Google it does not exist.
Jimmy Wales
How did Google Search Technology Come Into Existence?
Ever since the term Google was coined and search became public, search engine optimization has become a buzzword. Information retrieval in cyberspace was the key basis for the development of Google algorithms. This system to retrieve information in response to a query (search Box inputs) was developed by three students from Stanford University in California. The three Ph.D. students were working on a research project on search engine ranking that eventually led two of the students to create Google a company with headquarters in Menlo Park, California. Google is now among the top five information technology companies in the USA. One among:
- Apple
- Meta
- Amazon
- Microsoft
The three students were Sergei Brin, Scott Hassan, and Larry Page. Scott Hassan was the one who developed much of the coding behind the search technology that Google uses. Scott Hassan was not part of the trio when Google was founded, he went on to master robotics and created a company called Willow Garage in the year 2006.
Google was founded in the year 1998 primarily as a search company with a focus on search engine technology that ranked websites on the basis of multiple metrics, unlike previous engines that based the ranking on the basis of the number of times the queried word was mentioned on the web page.
Google Ranking Mechanism – Back Rub
The founders developed a relational information retrieval model that looked into the page’s relation on the web, chiefly, the external links pointing to it. Thus, the listing on the SERP or search engine result page acts as a pillar page with external links pointing towards it. This relationship is based on relevance and the links pointing to a website nowadays have to be contextual. This mechanism gave rise to the Page Rank and the search engine was called BackRub. Nowadays, the importance of the relationship based on backlinks pointing toward a site is still relevant, but more than two hundred metrics impact the Page Rank. These quantitative and qualitative metrics are now hidden from webmasters.
The primary aim of search algorithms is to return a result that is the closest matching answer to the query based on intent. Hence logically, the closest match should rank first but this is not exactly the case with the probability of a number of pages with closely matched answers being more than one or several. In this blog post, I will evaluate certain contemporary metrics based on download speed used for ranking.
Ranking Similar Answers
When a user types a query in the search box of the browser ten links to websites or blogs are returned in the response. To be among the ten listings there is a compliance yardstick. Some vital factors that the technology company looks into for inclusion on the first page are:
How smooth the retrieval was (Page Download Speed)?
How was the page experience (UX)?
The engine calculates user satisfaction using several metrics one being the bounce rate. If the bounce rate is high the website will have fewer chances of ranking among the top. The speed and the user experience are part of the page experience but remember other factors impact user experience besides the web core vitals.
Core Web Vitals
Among the recent emphasis laid by the search company are factors mentioned in the guidelines. These are core web vitals. The speed insights and UX are based on user satisfaction and the three primary aspects are
- Page load experience
- Visual stability
- Speed of response
Remember total time taken to download completely on the user’s browser should be less than 3 seconds and anything greater than that could be a compromise or total rejection. This is one of the reasons for the high bounce rate.
These metrics are based on :
Largest Content Paintful (LCP)
I will explain this as the first impression that visitors get whence the head image or text takes an awful time to load. Google calls it the largest content paintful. The header image should download within 1.2 seconds. All images impact the load time including those in the background – video poster images and the text blocks. Optimize images such that the file weight is less the 50 kb and the dimensions of all images are mentioned in the coding.
Developers should avoid embedding heavy unoptimized images that carry file weight over the limit.
First Input Delay (FID)
Imagine you are clicking on a link on a website and it does not respond quickly. Though this aspect is beyond the designer’s capability to some extent since it depends upon many external factors like the Internet speed at that time. But remedial measures can be taken at the development stage. FID is standardized as that under 100 ms for a good page load experience.
Recommended Steps
- Optimize 3rd Part Codes & Scripts(Analytics – Social Media Buttons).
- Minify Compress or Delete unused CSS Files.
- Remove Deserted JavaScripts.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS – UX)
Imagine you are about to press a button on the page and before you do it shifts way down below or elsewhere on the page. This is a bad UX on the page and should not happen. This is not a speed element and is determined by an image or link shifting between the two frames from its initial position to the last position when the page has been completely downloaded. This is called layout shift. The impact fraction calculates how much the shift is from one frame to another and is measured as a fraction of the total area of the viewport. CLS is calculated by multiplying the impact fraction with the distance fraction. The latter is how much distance the element has covered while moving from one frame to another. The CLS limit should be .1 and not more than that.
Role of Webmasters
Webmasters need to understand these core aspects that impact page download speed and UX. This knowledge helps in guiding the technical SEO team or the developers to rectify the anomaly for better rankings. There are tools like Lighthouse and Gtmetrix that help measure these metrics and recommend the solutions as well.
