SEARCHENGINES
Google May Replace FID With INP
At Google I/O last week, Google’s Annie Sullivan and Michal Mocny introduced a new metric named INP or Interaction to Next Paint. INP measures overall responsiveness to user interactions on the page and it may or may not replace FID, First Input Delay, as a Core Web Vitals metric.
I know a lot of SEOs obsess about Core Web Vitals, despite it not being an even subtle ranking signal, but because it is easy to sell and actually does benefit users and conversions. So I felt it is important to finally cover what is going on with INP, Interaction to Next Paint, and Core Web Vitals.
To be clear, nothing has changed yet with Core Web Vitals and INP is very much in the experimental phase. But there is a chance that INP will be added to Core Web Vital and / or replace FID in Core Web Vitals.
This was announced at Google I/O in this session at about 6 minutes in:
Michal said “FID has some fairly large blind spots.” He said “and that’s why we are introducing a new experimental responsiveness metric, Interaction to Next Paint. INP is a full-page lifecycle metric, just like Cumulative Layout Shift. That means it measures all interactions, not just the first. We call that runtime responsiveness to help differentiate from just loading responsiveness. INP measures the whole input latency, from when a user interacts until they actually see a visual response, not just the initial delay on main thread.”
This is about making sure the web site lets you interact with it within a short period of time. The example on the right gives immediate visual feedback that an image is being fetched from the network. This visual feedback underscores the importance of communicating a result of an interaction.
INP is a metric that aims to represent a page’s overall interaction latency by selecting one of the single longest interactions that occur when a user visits a page. For pages with less than 50 interactions in total, INP is the interaction with the worst latency. For pages with many interactions, INP is most often the 98th percentile of interaction latency.
Phil Walton from Google also tweeted about it:
First up: INP 🚀
We now have a name and definition for the responsiveness metric we’ve been talking about for the past year.
It’s called “Interaction to Next Paint” (INP), and you can learn all about it in this fantastic talk by @anniesullie & @mmocny:https://t.co/5zyTgTLkDw
— Phil Walton (@philwalton) May 12, 2022
So many SEOs are nervous about it, but Annie Sullivan from Google told us to not worry, we can give feedback in the thresholds and other elements.
We love feedback over twitter, but it’s really hard to track.
Our official channel is [email protected]; please send it there if you don’t want us to miss it.
— Annie Sullivan (@anniesullie) May 12, 2022
Google yesterday wrote a blog post explaining the differences between FID and INP, Glenn Gabe summed it up nicely in these tweets with these screenshots:
More: We will take steps to provide more actionable guidance on the metric in 2022-23. We hope to achieve this by:
* Creating channels for easy access to field data on INP for frameworks & web developers
* Work with frameworks to build features that will improve INP by default pic.twitter.com/V4yBYFagDL— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) May 16, 2022
Google said “We expect the INP score to provide a better compass for websites to improve responsiveness and performance in the future. We will take steps to provide more actionable guidance on the metric in 2022-23.”
There is also a Twitter Spaces interview with Annie Sullivan where Annie answers a bunch of questions around INP. This includes mentions around Google replacing FID with INP. You can listen to it over here.
INP is something to have on your radar but not to panic about – espesially over SEO concerns.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
Source: www.seroundtable.com
SEARCHENGINES
Google Again Says Ignore Link Spam Especially To 404 Pages
I am not sure how many times Google has said that you do not need to disavow spammy links, that you can ignore link spam attacks and that links pointing to pages that 404/410 are links that do not count – but John Mueller from Google said it again.
In a thread on X, John Mueller from Google wrote, “if the links are going to URLs that 404 on your site, they’re already dropped.” “They do nothing,” he added, “If there’s no indexable destination URL, there’s no link.”
John then added, “I’d generally ignore link-spam, and definitely ignore link-spam to 404s.”
Asking if it would hurt to disavow, after responding with the messages above, John wrote:
It will do absolutely nothing. I would take the time to rework a holistic & forward-looking strategy for the site overall instead of working on incremental tweaks (other tweaks might do something, but you probably need real change, not tweaks).
Earlier this year we had tons of SEOs notice spammy links to 404 error pages, John said ignore them. In 2021, Google said links to 404 pages do not count, Google also said that in 2012 and many other times.
Plus, outside of links to 404 pages, Google has said to ignore spammy links, time and time again – even the toxic links – ignore them. The messaging around this changed in 2016 when Penguin 4.0 was released and Google began devaluing links over demoting them.
Here are those new posts in context:
I’d say add both. Lol
— Jeremy Rivera (@JeremyRiveraSEO) April 11, 2024
Sure. But also, save yourself the work completely :-).
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 11, 2024
Re-reading your initial post – if the links are going to URLs that 404 on your site, they’re already dropped. They do nothing. If there’s no indexable destination URL, there’s no link. I’d generally ignore link-spam, and definitely ignore link-spam to 404s.
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 11, 2024
… but still… is this a dumb idea?
— Rebekah Edwards (@rebekah_creates) April 11, 2024
It will do absolutely nothing. I would take the time to rework a holistic & forward-looking strategy for the site overall instead of working on incremental tweaks (other tweaks might do something, but you probably need real change, not tweaks).
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 11, 2024
And in general, Google says it ignores spammy links, so you should too (not new) but this post from John Mueller is:
I would just ignore them, Google ignores them too. Sometimes they’re just more visible in tools, but that doesn’t mean they’re a problem.
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 18, 2024
And then also on Mastodon wrote about a similar situation, “Google has 2 decades of practice of ignoring spammy links. There’s no need to do anything for those links.”
Forum discussion at X.
Note: This was pre-written and scheduled to be posted today, I am currently offline for Passover.
SEARCHENGINES
Google Needs Very Few Links To Rank Pages; Links Are Less Important
Gary Illyes from Google spoke at the SERP Conf on Friday and he said what he said numerous times before, that Google values links a lot less today than it did in the past. He added that Google Search “needs very few links to rank pages.”
Gary reportedly said, “We need very few links to rank pages… Over the years we’ve made links less important.”
I am quoting Patrick Stox who is quoting what he heard Gary say on stage at the event. Here is Patrick’s post where Gary did a rare reply:
I shouldn’t have said that… I definitely shouldn’t have said that
— Gary 鯨理/경리 Illyes (so official, trust me) (@methode) April 19, 2024
Gary said this a year ago, also in 2022 and other times as well. We previously covered that Google said links would likely become even less important in the future. And even Matt Cutts, the former Googler, said something similar about eight years ago and the truth is, links are weighted a lot less than it was eight years ago and that trend continues. A couple of years ago, Google said links are not the most important Google search ranking factor.
Of course, many SEOs think Google lies about this.
Judith Lewis interviewed Gary Illyes at the SERP Conf this past Friday.
SEARCHENGINES
Google Core Update Flux, AdSense Ad Intent, California Link Tax & More
For the original iTunes version, click here.
The Google March 2024 core update is still rolling out, almost 6 weeks now, and we saw two shifts of ranking volatility, both mid-week and the weekend before. Google’s Danny Sullivan went on the defensive on search quality and forum listings in the search results. Google’s site reputation abuse spam policy will be fought both algorithmically and through manual actions. Google responded to The Verge mocking its search rankings over best printer. Google Search Console has a new unused ownership tokens page. Some sites may see the Google Indexing API work for a limited time on unsupported content types. And having two sites won’t result in your sites search ranking decline. BingBot now fully supports Brotli compression and will test Zstd compression soon. Google Search is testing thumbs-up and down buttons for product carousels. Google is testing new sitelinks designs. Google Notes on Search may not go away in May. Google Maps no longer supports draft reviews. Google Maps released a bunch of new maps, directions, travel and EV features. Google Ads Demand Gen campaigns now support AI image generation. Google Ads is testing a similar product carousel. Google Ads reminds advertisers that ad customizers are going away. Google Ads is testing a new horizontal ad card format. Google AdSense has these new ad intent formats. Google AdSense publishers are reporting lower RPM earnings since mid-February. Google threatens to drop links to California news publishers amongst link tax bill. That was the search news this week at the Search Engine Roundtable.
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