Earlier this year, Google held its annual I/O developer conference where we get an insight into what the world’s largest search engine and info hub is working on. Naturally, it’s a day every SEO anticipates and dreads, depending on what changes are made. Here are the main takeaways from this year’s event.
1. The Helpful Content Update
In December of last year, Google launched the Helpful Content Update to further its aim of prioritizing informative and valuable content over others. Now this update will get an update of its own, intended to refine its crosshairs by looking for so-called thin content and black hat methods that tried to game Google’s system.
It takes a lot into account, from user intent to even the UX design of the website. Using these, it can pinpoint somebody’s search intentions. Somebody searching current affairs will find The Washington Post and other news websites, with pages mostly full of prose and recommendations for other reading, awash with neutral colors.
Somebody looking for online entertainment, on the other hand, will find websites like Paddy Power Games that have a distinct iGaming UX design, where the page itself is an on-theme green color and it’s arranged by smaller windows that show off the colorful games and events on offer. One page is designed to transmit stories across the web, the other to host and market a wide selection of games all at once.
The main difference (at least from the user’s end) is UX design. Focusing on user intention is a natural, user-friendly way of guiding users to what they’re looking for, keeping these distinct sectors of the internet separated by the search bar.
2. The Perspective Filter
The Perspective Filter is the secret ingredient that enables the Helpful Content Update (Update). It is a small field that can appear at the top of search engine results pages, intended to highlight the experience of others. The experience was recently highlighted under new E-E-A-T guidelines, best explained by SEO wizards Ahrefs.
Where experience and expert input benefits a search, the perspective filter will add relevant voices to the top of their page. Searches caught by this filter will also prioritize short and long-form videos of people talking about and actually doing the things that are being searched. Discussion boards and social media are also fair game, mainly the sites that allow and encourage the input of identifiable experts. It takes that first E of E-E-A-T and makes this experience easier to access.
3. AI-Powered Search
Of course, AI was the word of the day given how it has taken the tech world by storm in the past 12 months. Google is also leveraging their deep-learning resources towards creating its own ChatGPT competitor – Bard – detailed here by Search Engine Journal. So naturally, AI is going to influence Google searches more and more.
Google announced that it will incorporate generative AI into search, something that many SEOs have feared since services like ChatGPT could theoretically replace SERPs entirely, meaning no click conversions. Google went the extra mile to put these concerns to rest, stressing that their typical search (with Google Ads) will stick around. Instead, the AI will be at the side, explaining headlines and concepts when requested. Whether this truce survives the next few years remains to be seen.
Those are the three big SEO-facing developments at Google I/O this year. Those in the industry predicted some of it, specifically the crackdown on experience and user intent. However, it’s an understatement to say that generative AI has made tremendous leaps and bounds in record time, catching every industry by surprise. As AI grows at a fast pace, we have no doubt that it’ll be the star of the 2024 I/O event too.
