Searchenginejournal published a lengthy piece today about a topic a lot of SEOs have on their mind, where the cookieless tracking is going and what it means - [
searchenginejournal.com...]
You have to skip down halfway through it to get passed the "what is a cookie, etc" basic stuff but there are some valid points in there. As I was reading it my instinct told me that the entire article's premise was based on a wrong assumption about Google.
Just a hunch but it dawned on me that Google doesn't need to track people to know what to serve them, it gets a hint from the query itself. Google also doesn't truly care about everything on a page except the precise(and hopefuly consice) bit that answers the users query.
Hard to wrap one's head around it but I am seriously questioning if all of the content bound by a page has been untethered from that page. A 5000 word article covering all aspects of a topic doesn't answer a very specific query as much as, well, a very specific response to the query with less unrelated stuff.
I'd been reading a bunch about FAQ schema after seeing questions under more results and thought I'd run a quick test. I took a blog with roughly 40 pages and performed a site: search to confirm 40 pages indexed. I then picked a single page and added Schema markup, 20 FAQs in fact, and submited a crawl request to propagate it. 30 minutes later I performed a site command again and sure enough, search now said it had 60 pages for this 40 page site. I tried going to page 5 and 6 of results for the site command but they don't exist, only 40 articles are shown.
Clearly a bug but a telling one? Is Google treating a 40 page site with 20 FAQ sections as 60 "pages" ? Who needs cookies and tracking when you can give a single paragraph direct answer to queries, and detach them from the pages they came from, instead of sending a person to a 5000 word article which is 95% irrelevant?
SEO's have their work cut out to get on top of this change. We've gone from needing an entire site be about a subject to rank it to individual pages standing on their own and now a simple paragraph is enough, if it answers a specific query. No need to cookie entire pages if you don't care about them anymore.
Thoughts?
