Do you know what the passive voice is and why you should avoid it in most cases? In the readability analysis in our Yoast SEO plugin, we recommend using the passive voice in a maximum of 10% of your sentences. In this post, we’ll answer a couple of questions about the passive voice and the assessment in our plugin.
Firstly, we’ll explain what it is. Then, we’ll clarify why it’s best to avoid passive voice in your copy. After that, we’ll discuss what the Yoast SEO passive voice check does, and how you can avoid using it in your copy. Finally, we’ll describe some situations in which using it makes perfect sense.
The passive voice is a grammatical construction. The easiest way to explain it is by contrasting it with the active voice. The active voice is the standard English sentence structure. The simplest possible sentences feature an actor (the subject), who does (the verb) something to either a person, animal or thing (the receiver).
Word
Mom
hugged
me
Semantic function
actor
direct verb
receiver
In the passive voice, the actor and receiver are switched around. The receiver then becomes the grammatical subject. Note that the meaning of the sentence stays the same, the only difference is the word order.
Word
I
was hugged
by mom
Semantic function
receiver
direct verb
actor
In some passive sentences, you can omit the actor. ‘I was hugged’, for example, is a perfectly sensible passive sentence, although it provides less information.
Why should you avoid the passive voice?
Let’s cut to the chase: using the passive voice almost always makes your writing more distant and your message less clear. There are two main reasons for this.
1. It is wordy
Firstly, passive sentences are wordy. The passive alternative to an active sentence is simply longer. For example, consider these two sentences:
1. The passive voice almost always makes your message less clear.
2. Your message is almost always made less clear by using the passive voice.
You convey the same message by using the passive but add three words. When overusing the passive form in your text, this can really add up.
2. The sentence structure is complex
Secondly, the passive voice uses a sentence structure which requires more cognitive effort. Your reader will spend valuable working memory on making sense of the sentence. This decreases the likelihood of you getting your message across.
Let’s explore why the passive form demands more effort. As I told you before, the basic active sentence structure is quite consistent and logical in English. The passive voice turns this all the way around. You first read what was affected. Then you read what happened to it. Lastly, you learn how it was affected. You discover who or what was responsible only at the very end. This sequence differs from how we usually make sense of events.
Moreover, we expect the actor to be in the subject position, so we are slightly disoriented. This means constructing an image of what happens takes a tiny moment longer. Again, these moments can easily add up if you overuse the passive voice.
In the example I gave, there is no added benefit to using the passive: the active sentence conveys the same information. Whenever you use passive voice, always consider whether a better, active alternative is available.
What does the Yoast SEO passive voice check do?
The readability analysis in the Yoast SEO plugin comes with a passive voice assessment, which checks whether the number of sentences containing passive voice exceeds the recommended maximum amount. You’ll get a green bullet if less than 10% of your sentences have passive voice. It’ll turn red if you go over 15%. Passive voice makes your writing more distant, and your message less clear. So, try to write in an active voice — it will make your writing much stronger!
The passive voice assessment in the Yoast SEO readability analysis
How to use less passive voice in your copy
Almost every passive sentence has an active counterpart. If you can’t find an active alternative, you should just use the passive form. We’ll discuss some examples in the next paragraph.
Let’s focus on rewriting passive voice sentences into active ones first, though. We’ll give an example for every tense in English in which the passive makes sense.
When you rewrite a passive sentence into an active sentence, two things happen:
1. The verb changes.
2. The actor and receiver are switched around.
The change of the verb is most difficult. Therefore, we’ll highlight it. Of course, the examples below are really simple, but all the important information is there. Most sentences just have more words after the subject, verb and object. Those words will not change when you rewrite the sentence.
Tense
Passive voice
Active alternative
Present simple
A book is bought by me.
I buy a book.
Present simple continuous
A book is being bought by me.
I am buying a book.
Present perfect
A book has been bought by me.
I have bought a book.
Past simple
A book was bought by me.
I bought a book.
Past simple continuous
A book was being bought by me.
I was buying a book.
Past perfect
A book had been bought by me.
I had bought a book.
Future
A book will be written by me.
I will write a book.
Future perfect
A book will have been written by me.
I will have written a book.
What are the exceptions?
Sometimes, using the passive voice can be the only logical way to word a sentence. Mostly, this occurs when the actor is unknown or irrelevant. To illustrate this, let’s look at an example I used in the first paragraph of this very text:
In the passive voice, the actor and receiver are switched around.
There is no identifiable actor here, nor would he or she be relevant. After all, we’re talking about a general action here, not a specific one. Any alternative active sentence would be less clear and concise than the passive sentence I wrote, so it’s the best option available.
Alternatively, you may want to use a passive sentence to focus on the receiver. This works when the object is more central to the topic than the actor:
J.F. Kennedy was killed in 1963 in Dallas, Texas by Lee Harvey Oswald.
This means that we’re not here to tell you to avoid the passive voice like the plague. If it beats the active alternative, by all means: use it! Rules about style are hardly ever set in stone, so don’t make the mistake of following the rule of thumb too strictly. Do what seems right to you and what makes your text flow nicely. A maximum of 10% generally suffices. You should be able to achieve numbers even lower than that by following our advice.
We also discuss the use of passive voice in our SEO copywriting course that helps you write great content. You can get access to this course and all of our other SEO courses with Yoast SEO Premium, which also gives you access to some extra features in the Yoast SEO plugin.
In most cases, active sentences are easier to understand than passive sentences. After writing your text, scan it for passive voice constructions. Then, always ask yourself: is a better, active alternative available? If there is, use it. If not, use the passive voice.
E-A-T Checklist: 13 Ways to Improve Your Website's E-A-T Rating and Boost Your SEO Ranking
Advertisements. Adverts and other content shouldn't distract from the main content on a page or stop users from accessing it. ...
Attribution. ...
Content. ...
Misleading Content. ...
Policies. ...
Purpose. ...
Qualifications. ...
Relevancy.
E-A-T is a new acronym in SEO land that stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trust – criteria that Google is using to ensure that the websites it’s ranking highly are factually accurate, helpful, and reliably-sourced.
Expertise means that they want you to be an expert in your field. Authority means that you need to make sure Google can understand your credentials. Trust means that you do what you say you will do and can be trusted to deliver the goods.
The following is an alphabetic list of things to consider when trying to improve the E-A-T of your website.
It’s not necessary to do everything on this checklist and many of the steps here you will likely have already completed. Additionally, not everything on here will be relevant to every site and this checklist is focused mostly on commercial sites so please keep that in mind when reading.
1. Advertisements
Adverts and other content shouldn’t distract from the main content on a page or stop users from accessing it.
Are pop-up ads and interstitial pages (pages before or after expected content) easy to close?
Are adverts distracting? Do they contain graphic or shocking content?
Can users view your content? (remove ads that scroll with the page and interstitial content that redirects them away without providing a way back).
2. Attribution
It should be clear to Google and people using your site who owns the site and who created the content on it. This includes providing contact details whenever possible.
Is content on your site attributed to a person, company, or organisation?
Do you have author pages for content contributors?
Is it clear who owns and maintains your site? Do you have an ‘About’ or ‘Contact’ page?
Do you have a dedicated blog with further information about your site or business?
Are your contact details on every page of your site?
3. Content
Content should be well made and clearly show that a great deal of work, time, and skill has been put into creating it. All information should be factual, up-to-date, and an appropriate length. Clickbait titles are a no-go. Google also has much stricter standards for major businesses than they do for small local businesses.
How does your content help the person using it?
Does your content function the way it’s supposed to?
Do all the pages on your site load properly?
Do any e-commerce pages function properly? Can users find and purchase products?
Is content well written? Is there spelling or grammatical mistakes?
Does written content make sense? Is it easy to read?
Is there keyword stuffing (cramming in keywords with no concern for readability)?
Is all information factual?
For factual content – do you use any of your own original research? By producing original research you are providing something extra valuable for Google’s users.
Also for factual content – do you provide references to other work that you’ve drawn information from? This way Google can get an idea of how credible your info is.
Does any scientific or medical information represent a ‘well-established consensus’?
Is content frequently reviewed and updated?
Is any content copied or auto-generated? If so, replace it with original human-created content.
Do titles accurately describe the content they belong to? Are any exaggerated or shocking?
Are you producing content about a niche topic? (If not you’ll need to provide as much information as possible).
4. Misleading Content
Deceiving users is very much frowned upon. It’s unlikely that your business’s website engages in any of this behaviour (so I won’t format these as questions) but it’s worth mentioning the behaviours Google considers malicious.
Stealing passwords or personal information.
Impersonating a different site or brand – with a copied logo or branding or a very similar URL.
Presenting factually inaccurate misinformation in order to benefit a person, business, or organisation (monetarily, politically, or otherwise).
Non-satirically presenting false conspiracies or hoaxes as if they were accurate.
Falsely claiming to provide independent reviews in order to manipulate users.
Falsely claiming to be a celebrity in order to manipulate users.
5. Policies
To help ensure that shopping sites are legitimate, not scams, Google wants to see their policies displayed somewhere that’s easy for users to find.
On shopping sites – do you display your payment, exchange, and return policies prominently?
6. Purpose
For a page to be useful it should have a clear purpose and meet that purpose as perfectly as possible. The main content on the page should also be easy to access and use.
It is obvious, from a glance, the purpose or purposes of every page on your site?
Are there any pages that are not helpful to users? Pages that are purely commercial are not considered helpful.
How well does your page fulfil its purpose? Does it do what it’s intended for?
Is it clear what is the main content and what is advertisements and supplementary content (sidebars, headers, footers etc)?
Are adverts and sponsored content clearly labelled? Misleading users into clicking on content they do not wish to click on is not okay.
7. Qualifications
The ‘E’ in E-A-T stands for ‘expertise’. Google wants to make sure that the information at the top of their search results is accurate. To provide information on some topics (YMYL – see below) authors have to be qualified experts, but with other subjects, lived-experience is often enough.
Have you filled out author pages with information about the author’s experience, qualifications, awards, and any time they’ve been mentioned or quoted by relevant experts? (and have you linked to these to help Google join the dots?)
Have you added professional organisations your business belongs to on your About page or Homepage?
Have you mentioned awards that your business has won and qualifications that your team has earnt?
Have you talked about how long your business has been operating?
8. Relevancy
Ensuring that Google makes a strong connection between your business and the areas you cover will make it more likely for your website to rank well.
Do you only produce relevant content? For example, if your site is about car repairs, don’t add a page with a recipe for cupcakes.
Have you built up links and citations from relevant individuals, companies, and organisations (particularly ones with high E-A-T)?
Have you created and maintained a relationship with relevant experts in your field?
9. Reputation (Off-Site)
Your online reputation is determined by a wide variety of things but Google looks mostly at external sources to determine if they can trust you. It’s worth noting that lacking any online reputation doesn’t mean that you won’t rank well (unless your site is considered YMYL – see below) but it’s still great to do all you can to gain a positive reputation.
Has your company been recommended online by a professional society or other relevant experts?
Is your company or anyone in your team a member of a professional society? If so, is this mentioned anywhere apart from on your site?
Has your business won any awards and where are they mentioned?
Is there any positive press surrounding your company?
Have any important (and relevant) people or organisations made a reference to your company or a member of your team online (such as quoting you on their own website)?
10. Reputation (On-Site)
While on-site reputation improvement will likely have less of an effect than ones off-site, they’re still worth considering. Anything that makes you appear as highly trained, knowledgeable, and trustworthy experts is fantastic and should probably be mentioned on your site.
Have you made it clear what professional organisations you belong to?
Have you mentioned any awards that you’ve won?
Have you added positive testimonials to your site?
Do you engage with users on your site? Do people interact with your blog posts and do you respond to them?
Have you mentioned important relationships that you have with industry experts? For example, our own Marcus Miller writes for Search Engine Land.
11. Reviews
Reviews and reputation cover similar ground but here we’re looking specifically at what actual customers think about your business.
Do you chase up your satisfied customers for positive reviews?
Do you encourage unsatisfied customers to get in touch to resolve their issues?
If you do have bad reviews, do you make sure to address and resolve them?
What is the content of your bad reviews? Do they mention small, one-off issues or a larger problem (such as evidence of financial wrongdoing)?
How does your company score on sites like Yelp, Trustpilot, and Better Business Bureau?
If appropriate, how do you score on Amazon or Google Shopping?
Search for the name of your business – what shows up in the search results? An obvious sign that Google doesn’t trust you is if they boost negative reviews about your company to the front page.
12. Site Security and Maintenance
Making sure that your site is secure will increase your E-A-T – as your site will be considered more trustworthy.
Have you converted your site to HTTPS by obtaining an SSL certificate?
Do you perform regular maintenance on your site?
Does your site have hacked pages?
Are comment sections and forums free of user-generated spam?
Have you created a Google Search Console account and set it up to inform you if your site is hacked?
13. YMYL (Your Money or Your Life Sites)
YMYL is an acronym that Google uses to describe a site that may be harmful to searchers (if the information on it is false). A wide range of topics falls under this heading, as well as commercial sites – particularly ones that sell expensive or ‘big ticket’ items.
Is your site commercial? Can people send you money for products or services through it?
If it is a commercial site – how expensive are the products or services you’re selling? Would they be considered ‘big ticket items’?
Does your site cover topics that could potentially harm the person viewing them if the information you give them is inaccurate? (e.g. legal, financial, or medical advice or important news).
Are you certain that there’s no potential for harm on your site? Even topics like parenting or car repairs may be considered harmful.
If your site is potentially harmful, Google will judge it more harshly – please, read back through the whole list above and see if there is anything else you can do to improve your E-A-T.
Do you have a good online reputation? Google doesn’t want to show potentially harmful content from little-known sources. A non-YMYL site can potentially get away with not having an online reputation but you cannot.
Is everyone contributing a proven, highly-qualified expert in their topic? Is the information they provide up-to-date and fully-factual?
Improve Your E-A-T
Looking to improve your E-A-T is a solid white hat SEO strategy. We are simply giving our users and the search engines what they want – high-quality results.
If you’re still not sure about how to improve your E-A-T (and thus your rankings) or just don’t want the hassle of dealing with it yourself then get in touch to see how we can help.
Google's Passage Ranking is now live in the U.S. Martin Split answers questions about the ranking factor and how it's impacts on SEO
What Is Google Passage Ranking: 16 Key Points You Should Know
1. Will Passages Help Long Webpages?
Bartosz asked 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.”
2. What Should Publishers Do About Google Passage Ranking?
Bartosz then asks if we need to do anything specific in response to this new algorithm.
Splitt shakes his head, indicating no.
“No. That’s a change that is pretty much purely internal and there is nothing that you need to do, you don’t need to make any changes to your website, you don’t need to make changes to any of your pages, to any of your articles or to your markup.
There is no special special thing that you need to do.
It’s just us getting better at more granularly understanding the content of a page, and being able to score different parts of a page independently.”
3. Should Publishers Review and Rewrite Heading Elements?
Bartosz then asks if tightening up the use of heading elements in order to better communicate what the different sections of a page are about will help or if Google will understand the content regardless of the markup.
Splitt answered:
“It’s pretty much that. With any kind of content some semantic and some structure in your content so that it’s easier for automated systems to understand the structure and the kind of like, the bits and pieces of your content.
But even if you would not do that we would still be able to say like… this part of the page is relevant to this query where this other piece of your page is not as relevant to this query.”
4. What if SEO Agencies and Software Publishers Claim Passages Optimization?
Bartosz then asks Splitt’s opinion on the scenario of an SEO agency or an SEO software publisher making the claim of being able to optimize for Passage Ranking.
Splitt chuckled, as if trying to restrain himself but then broke out into full laughter before answering the question.
He said,
“How do I put this nicely… uhm…”
Splitt shrugged and said,
“Each to their own I guess! Sure…”
Then he became a little more reflective and answered:
“Oomph… There will probably be some people who will try to capitalize on this. But I wouldn’t fall for it.”
Next Bartosz asked Splitt to name some top misunderstandings of what Passage Indexing is.
“I think that the core myth is that it’s a thing. Because really it is just a smaller change where we try to help those who are not necessarily familiar with SEO or are how to structure their content or content strategy.
Because lots of people end up creating these long-winded pages that are having a hard time ranking for anything, really because everything is so diluted at this long content. We are helping those.”
Splitt next suggested that if you have a grasp on how to organize content that this (passages ranking) is pretty much not applicable.
“If you are in this webinar, then I would assume that you have some grasp of the topic and that you have some strategic content on how to structure your content in the first place, that this is pretty much not for you. It’s not really that you need to pay attention to or worry about.”
5. How Will Passage Ranking Impact Ecommerce?
Bartosz followed up by asking if Passage Indexing would apply to eCommerce situations, for example on a very long product category page.
Splitt answered that it was unlikely because there isn’t enough content in that scenario for the passages ranking to apply.
This is how he answered:
“Unlikely because normally there isn’t that much content around the specific bits in the category that we would consider a passage.
…Unless it’s textual content, it doesn’t really benefit from this.”
He then pointed out the practical aspect of a product query in that a specific product page is what should be outranking a category page for a product query.
6. What’s the Difference Between Featured Snippet and Passages Ranking?
Cindy Krum asked Splitt to clarify what the difference is between passages and featured snippets.
Splitt responded that internally featured snippets is a completely separate system. He explained that the featured snippet will take a “self-contained” answer that’s in a page and then place that into an “instant answer” type context and called it a “very simple thing.”
By Instant Answer he means a search query that doesn’t need an in depth answer but can be answered with a few sentences or less. An instant answer typically may not need to be clicked through to the site but read right there in the search results.
By contrast, Splitt said that a passages type result would be a page that might not necessarily give a concise answer and would be more of a “blue links” type search result.
He then reiterated that featured snippets and passages ranking are not the same and are different systems.
He added, in response to a follow up question, that he was unsure if the implementation would allow the simultaneous ranking of a featured snippet and passages ranking for the same content.
7. How Does Google Understand Passages vs. Subtopics
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.
“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.
8. What’s the Connection Between BERT and Passages?
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.
9. Which Sites Benefit from Passages?
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 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.
10. Google Passage Testing Tool?
Regarding the question if there will be a “fetch and render” tool that will let you know if your page might qualify for passages, Splitt explained why that’s not possible.
“It’s not something that you can take that much action on unless you restructure your content or rewrite your content.
And there’s no tool to like check ranking really, at least we are not providing any way of doing that.
And it’s not a change in indexing, it’s not a change in rendering, it’s not a change in crawling. So none of the technical aspects that you have control over.
…So there will not be a Passage testing tool.”
11. What Changes After Passage?
Splitt tried to explain what Passage Ranking is in the most simple terms, apologizing if his aptitude for simplification isn’t up to the task.
He said that before Passages, the algorithm would identify the main content, ignoring the footer, navigation and so on.
Once identified, Google tries to figure out what the page is about.
“What it used to do is try to figure out what is this page about by basically looking for one subject. What is likely the main thing that this is covering.
And then you had, maybe you had a few pages that were really laser focused… so it was easy for us to say, oh yeah, this is about tomatoes, this is about a cucumber, this one over there is about avocados… cool.
But what if you actually somehow, for some reason, because you didn’t really know what you were doing, you have this one huge web page, that talks about all the different vegetables.
…If you have one huge page with all the vegetables on them, what is this page about?
Well vegetables. Okay.
But if I then look for very specific information… then I’m searching for that specific thing then this page is tricky. because in ranking, we look at all the pages we have on this specific topic… and there are a few pages that are specifically about this… and then there is this other page that’s about all sorts of vegetables.
So now we have this problem of how do we rank these two different pages?
We have this page that is very specific on this thing and the other page is very specifically not on this thing but on all sorts of vegetables.
Well historically we have been limited by our language understanding to say like Okay so the page that covers all these vegetables isn’t scoring as high isn’t ranking as high because it’s not very focused on the thing that the user is asking us for.
Whereas this other page is very specifically addressing the question that the user is asking us.
Now with passage indexing we can say that oh this page is about vegetables and this part is about this specific kind of tomato.
And then we can compare what we know about this specific part of the page that is covering the tomato to the other passage that happens to be a full page actually that is also talking about this tomato.
And then we can say more granularly can say like …this passage might just be part of a larger page but it has lots of really good pieces of information…
Whereas the other one is basically like saying yeah this is a kind of tomato…
And that allows us to more granularly rank these different things against each other.
It does not mean that we are storing them differently. It does not mean you have to do something specific about it.
You just need to make sure that your content is relevant and good to the queries you want to be ranking for.
…We can now be more specific about the different topics, that we can actually rank them more granularly.
…Beforehand we couldn’t. Before hand we had the ability to say like ok this page is mostly about dogs. We would also score it for cats.
…Whereas now we can say, yeah, the page itself is not a good candidate but actually it is a better candidate than what we would have said beforehand.
Because we can now say that there is only that 10% cat content… but this is pretty relevant to the query in question.”
Asked if the goal was to dis-incentive the creation of thin content on highly specific content, Splitt said no, that’s not the goal at all.
He reaffirmed that the goal was to help pages that had great content buried in bad content structure.
Splitt then repeated that publishers and SEOs who know how to create well structured content don’t have to worry about Passages. Passages is for publishers with great content that is diluted by the other content on the page.”
Asked whether mobile first indexing and rendering has anything to do with Passages, Splitt answered no. He explained that Mobile first indexing has nothing to do with ranking and nothing to do with rendering.
He went further by saying that mobile first indexing has nothing to do with and ranking and has nothing to do with rendering.
Rendering, mobile first indexing and passages are all from different parts of the infrastructure.
12. Is It Possible to Opt Out of Passage Ranking?
Bartosz asked if it was possible to opt out of Passages.
Splitt laughed out loud because the meaning of the question was inherently absurd in that, why would anyone want to opt out of ranking?
“If you just want a blue link, then I’m very happy to tell you that a Passage is just a blue link. Good, then we’re on the same page.
No… that’s like saying I don’t want to rank for these five paragraphs of my page.”
13. Are Passages Considered as Different Documents?
Someone asked if Passages were handled as different documents.
Splitt answered no, they are considered as one document with multiple annotations and in ranking can be scored independently. One document that can be scored with multiple scores according to the queries that it potentially may be a candidate for.
Regarding the annotations on a web page, he said there are all sorts of scores and identifiers, bits and pieces attached to it, like a folder with lots of information.
He revealed that how documents (web pages) look internally is that they look like collections of information, including the content, which he referred to as the smallest part of the information. He said that it’s not an HTML page with a score attached to it, that it’s more complicated than that.
14. Could Passage Ranking Give High Authority Sites an Advantage?
Someone asked whether higher authority sites might have an advantage under passage indexing.
“Could passage indexing imply that higher authority websites might rank better for longtail keywords even if they don’t have a dedicated page for it than more unknown websites?”
Splitt insisted that the question is mixing different things. He said that question is mixing “authority” with content structure and that’s a ranking question where he would have to discuss ranking factor weightings, something that’s Google does not discuss in public.
15. Can Sites with Bad Content Structure Rely on Passages?
Splitt discussed how Passage Ranking is for publishers whose pages are not properly structured. But he also warned that sites with poorly structured content should not rely on Passages to help their pages rank.
16. Is it Worthwhile to Combine Long Tail Topics into Larger Documents?
Bartosz raised the scenario of a publisher that is making pages that address highly specific longtail topics that might have two queries a year. He asked if it would be better to join all those hyper-specific granular pages into a larger document of related topics.
Splitt said that publishers could try that out but said that he doesn’t know if that would pay off because Passages is an automated system. He cautioned that he wouldn’t strategize on this too much.
He said that the intention was not to encourage publishers to rewrite their content. He said that it’s about helping sites that wouldn’t ordinarily rank to rank. He said that he wouldn’t try to capitalize on it.
He said that joining the long tail content might work, but that he didn’t actually know if it would play out in a specific way.
Citation:
Citations are an online reference to a business that features the business' name, address, and phone number (NAP). Typically, when an SEO refers to citations, they are talking about a group of individual business listings on various sites.
What is an SEO Citation
A local citation is any online mention of the name, address, and phone number of a local business. Citations can occur on local business directories, on websites and apps, and on social platforms. Citations help Internet users to discover local businesses and can also impact local search engine rankings.
How do you make a citation for SEO?
How do I build citations?
Get listed with the 'big three' data aggregators.
Submit to other core sites.
Submit to popular industry and local sites.
Pursue unstructured citations.
Why Citations Are Important
SEO Link Citations are considered a ranking factor for local SEO. Having your business listed in trusted online local directories sends signals to Google to improves their degree of certainty that your local business exists. This is why it's important to pick your seo link citations wisely
