Hey ,

Over the past two decades, Google has indexed over 130-trillion landing pages. Now, they are flexing their cutting-edge NLP & ML capabilities even more. As of last month, Google started indexing the individual passages that make up our web content. 

The new update is called Passage Ranking. It's designed to help Google provide more relevant results for very specific searches. For many long-tail searches when search intent is narrow, the most relevant content is often buried deep within a page. With Passage Ranking, Google can now find those "needle-in-a-haystack," answers and display them prominently in the SERPs! 

Here's what we know about Passage Ranking so far: 

•   Went live on Feb. 10th 
•   Ranked passages will appear in the SERPs as a traditional blue-link result 
•   The update impacted 7% of all search queries (by volume), and probably greater than 30% of long-tail searches. 

And here's how your site can take advantage of this change to WIN:

•   Optimize your landing pages / content for long-tail keywords
•   Utilize our Landing Page Optimizer in your dashboard here to optimize for long-tail keyword variants and see 5X-10X your Organic Traffic (free for a limited time only). 
•   Benefit from increased CTR in search results (remember, normalized CTR is part of the ranking algorithm).

To get real data from Google about how this update impacted your site, check out the Google Search Console tool in your dashboard. Want to see how it's impacted our SEO? Take a look :) 

Here at LinkGraph, our keyword positions have continued to improve nicely. 

As you create new landing pages or optimize existing content, think about your site architecture, headings, and how Google might segment your content into passages. Site owners that make it easier for Google to not only identify web pages, but their relevant passages, will likely see their keyword rankings benefit in the long-run. 

Talk to you next update, 

Manick