Is Google fudging search rankings to benefit pages that embed YouTube vids? Or is this just another ‘bug’?
- Reference: 1603263372
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/10/21/google_search_iframe/
- Source link:
In an [1]analysis earlier this year, content delivery experts Swarmify dug into a puzzling change to Google’s PageSpeed Insights [2]tool , where the search engine giant will automatically scan any website and provide an extensive rundown of how fast the website is, complete with suggestions for how to improve it.
That speed component is a key part of the complex algorithm Google uses to decide how and where to rank websites in web search results, which, as any website owner will tell you, is absolutely critical to pulling in traffic. Anything beyond page two of Google search is a virtual graveyard. If your webpages are deemed by Google to take too long to fetch and render for desktop PCs or mobile devices, you're banished into that hinterland.
Swarmify found one website was getting a low performance score (60 out of 100) and identified an animated GIF as the reason for it. They switched to the more-modern MP4 format with HTML5, and saw an immediate boost to 74: not surprising as streaming the MP4 should be more efficient than fetching a large GIF image.
But then, on a hunch, the team decided to take the small video, post it to Google-owned YouTube, and embed it in the website's page, rather than host the material on the site's own servers. The result? An immediate performance jump to 99 out of 100, which could well be the difference between getting traffic thanks to Google search ranking, and becoming an internet backwater.
Surely Google wasn’t directly giving webpages with YouTube videos an artificial boost? No, of course not, because it if did, SEO experts would simply flood all webpages with YouTube videos. In fact, what was happening, the team found out was that anything loaded onto the page using an iframe tag, such as an embedded YouTube video, was simply discounted from Google’s PageSpeed tool altogether.
Zero-rating
That’s right: even if a webpage loaded slowly because of heavy content, so long as that content was contained within an iframe, it had no impact whatsoever on the speed ranking that Google uses as part of its ranking algorithm.
How did they prove this? They ran one more test: putting the entire website within an iframe tag – and the score? A perfect 100.
Of course, as with anything to do with the dark science that is search engine optimization, there is no single provable cause-and-effect but it is very odd that Google would simply ignore iframes in its calculations of webpage speed, especially when SEO experts are certain that Google’s systems are capable of fetching and analyzing iframe content.
When you tell Chrome to wipe private data about you, it spares two websites from the purge: Google.com, YouTube [3]READ MORE
The iframe tag is not restricted solely to YouTube videos, although it’s fair to say that they likely make up a huge proportion of iframes on webpages globally. The other main uses of iframes? Sticking third-party ads and Google Maps on pages, it appears.
There are other services that routinely use iframes to embed their content onto other websites: video service Vimeo, for example. Iframes are a pretty standard way to load content onto a webpage from a second source.
It’s just that by far the greatest use of them is ads, YouTube videos, and Google Maps. Twitter and Facebook, for example, use Javascript to embed posts on pages from their services.
This iframe free-ride was not always in place. In fact, Google used to penalize embedded video quite heavily. But earlier this year, Google started pushing a new set of metrics it calls “Web vitals” made up of terms that only SEO folk, browser programmers, and studious web developers will likely ever heard of: First Contentful Paint (FCP), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and others.
Wag the dog
It’s just one more sign of how Google has slowly moved from changing how it ranks webpages in order to keep one step ahead of those that artificially inflate webpages for clients, to deciding how and on what terms people creating webpages will be accepted into its search rankings. For years now, the tail has been wagging the dog.
So does the decision to effectively lift any speed penalty on websites that host YouTube videos or Google Maps prove that the Chocolate Factory is using its market power to benefit itself?
No, because, as ever, there is just enough plausible deniability. Just as there was earlier this week when we [4]highlighted that Google’s browser, Chrome, was, very unusually, retaining user data for its own Google.com and YouTube.com websites while deleting all cookies and data for all other websites, even when users had actively indicated that they wanted that data deleted when they shut the browser down.
The programmer who noticed that privacy issue, and others who commented on it, predicted that when brought to light, Google would simply claim it was a bug and promise to fix it in a forthcoming update.
Several hours after our story went live, Google informed us that it was “aware of a bug in Chrome that is impacting how cookies are cleared on some first-party Google websites. We are investigating the issue, and plan to roll out a fix in the coming days.”
Will Google discover, in response to our queries today that zero-rating iframe content on websites is also a bug that it will fix soon? Our prediction is, no, it won’t. Because the connection is sufficiently deniable.
But here is our prediction: if other companies, particularly competitors to Google, start using iframes as a default, the tech giant will suddenly re-evaluate its PageSpeed tool and realize that, actually, yes, iframe content can have an impact on a webpage’s speed.
But by then, no doubt, a Google engineer will have discovered another route to give every page that engages with Google’s services a little boost. Just enough every time.
The US government [5]sued Google on Tuesday for abusing its market position to maintain its monopoly on the search and search ad markets, apropos of nothing, of course. ®
Get our [6]Tech Resources
[1] https://buzz.swarmify.com/how-to-get-a-100-score-on-lighthouse-pagespeed-in-one-easy-step/
[2] https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/19/google_cookie_wipe/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/19/google_cookie_wipe/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/20/us_google_antitrust/
[6] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
I see flying pigs in the sky
They don't do evil, so it's necessarily a bug, right?
G's revised motto
See no Evil, Speak no Evil, be a Weevil.
"How I long for the old days when content was king and SEO meant having useful terms in an tag"
How I long for the days when web sites had content that could be read without "styles" getting in the way and images that could be viewed without running masses of untrustable scripts.
I have nothing against good presentation - or even fancy presentation - but we've got to the point where presentation has taken over completely at the expense of content, and this is already making a high proportion of web sites inaccessible to people with some disabilities and those with older kit.
Just for example, the last time I looked, the Register called about 1100 lines of styles to format a news item page of just over 10k text characters of content (a theoretical average of almost one style per word), and on many web sites a simple query form can't be used unless JS is enabled merely because the submit button uses JS instead of an HTML submit. However the worst case I've encountered is the National Cyber Security Centre web site, the entirety of which is a JS app. You can't even see contact information with JS disabled. Despite JS being the primary vector for drive-by infections and many other client side breaches, the official national guidance agency for cyber security obviously thinks this is "the way forward".
The changing state of SEO is merely a symptom of the general trend towards mindless introduction of complexity.
Re: "How I long for the old days when content was king..."
(Original title became too long with Re: and the quotation)
I, for one, has no issue with the web requiring JavaScript. But it needs to be safe, and the generated HTML should always be available and understandable to screen readers (both are mostly up to the developer)
Dumping old clients is a feature to me, though.
Re: "How I long for the old days when content was king..."
"But it needs to be safe" - problem is, you cannot easily tell if its "safe"
"Dumping old clients is a feature to me, though."
Sites should not hammer an old PC, there's no reason someone should have to fork out lots of cash to get a new PC just because some JavaScript jockies create lots of CPU hammering dross
I run old PC's (as why chuck them until they break) - and script blockers are my friend
Re: "How I long for the old days when content was king..."
In defence of El Reg, this site is one of the minority that still works completely fine with javascript disabled. Even these comments.
Blockers
TL;DR Google speed test developers assume everyone uses blockers for ads and videos
It would be no surprise to see Google giving preferential treatment to website with embedded Youtube videos, just look how a search on Google will usually bring back videos from Youtube as the top result.
I have actually found iframes to be a dangerous technology that really should be be disabled and you have to opt in if you need it. I have seen several website embedding a 1 pixel size iframe on a page which cab load content without it being shown to the end user, and this can be used to track you even when you are using other tracking blocking techniques. Or even could load up illegal content which would then get stored in your internet cache and a record of you visiting the site recorded by your ISP. Yes you would never know until it was too late.
Benefit YouTube?
Try to find a page that hosts a Vimeo video. G'wan, I dare ya.
Veeery interesting...
But stupid.
Never mind YouTube. My first thought was to embed an entire webpage in an iframe - but after a few microseconds realised that wouldn't work, because there would then be no search terms recognised as there would be no content in the actual page! But is there a compromise? Load a basic chunk of plain-vanilla text with the critical phrases, suitably non-displayed, and then put the rest of the page into an iframe? Be interesting to experiment, until it gets blocked.
How I long for the old days when content was king and SEO meant having useful terms in an
tag and in the first few K of the page.