Google Says Time And Place Are Crucial For Determining Featured Snippet Rankings

Getting cheap SEO packages is an affordable way to help your website rank on the first page of Google’s search results, and part of these services includes ranking for featured snippets. In a new Google explainer page, Danny Sullivan explained to providers of SEO packages how websites appear as featured snippets on the search engine results page. In the article, SEOs and webmasters were given details on what Google uses to show web pages as featured snippets.

Sullivan explained that the time and place (geographic location) act as signals, which have an important role in triggering featured snippets. He focused on explaining these two factors, and then used the term “critical context” to discuss how essential these two signals are.

In some literature studies, critical context refers to the process of understanding what a piece of literature means. This includes finding metaphors, allusions, hidden relationships, or even references to past and present events when the piece was written. All in all, literary critical context gives the readers a better understanding of a piece of literature.

Aside from that, the phrase “critical context” was also used in the research of Natural Language Processing algorithms. For instance, in a book by O’Reilly – which was relevant to information retrieval – he said that critical context was crucial to understanding semantic meaning.

But in terms of SEO, Sullivan said that critical context describes what a surge might mean in certain search queries. Critical context like time and place helps providers of SEO packages know what users are really searching for, and the same works when it comes to featured snippets.

He said that Google has made changes that allow SEOs to better understand whether local or fresh information is important in delivering relevant results to the search.

This means that Google personalises the search results when an algorithm uses geographic information to affect the search rankings.

Sullivan then explained the concept of freshness indicators. He said it refers to a surge of content related to a certain topic. This looks a lot like the Query Deserves Freshness (QDF) ranking algorithm by Google.

QDF basically means that search results requested by users need to be up-to-date and relevant. So when a person enters a word or a phrase on Google, the first websites that appear are those that were recently published and contain more meaningful content. In this case, Google uses this algorithm to find fresh content for the featured snippets.

In his article, Sullivan goes on to explain that Google’s freshness indicators identify new content that is both relevant and more unique from other existing fresh content. This explanation was made within the context of a trending search for the phrases “orange sky” and “why is it hazy”.

Google determined that both of these search terms were trending in certain geographic locations. This information contributed to the critical context of such search phrases.

For instance, the phrase “orange sky” was trending in California, so California Google shows users featured snippets that explain why the sky was orange.

Meanwhile, the phrase “why is it hazy” was trending on the east coast. This search term was related to the haziness caused by the fires on the west coast due to the smoke drifting across the country.

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