Our strategists stay across Google’s latest, most pivotal algorithm adjustments so you don’t have to. The following is a brief overview of changes to New Zealand’s SEO landscape in April.
Website performance and UX: Doubling down on its efforts to enhance user experience and assist website owners in improving this metric, Google has introduced a tutorial to identify Interaction to Next Paint (INP) issues. An important user-centric metric for measuring page load responsiveness, INP measures the time between a user's input and the screen responding to that input, and replaced First Input Delay (FID) in March. You can watch the tutorial here.
404 and 410 status: Google has clarified the distinction between 404 and 410 errors on websites. A 404 error signifies "not found," whereas a 410 error indicates "gone." Typically, website owners use the 404 page. According to Google, there's no penalty for 404 errors, as those pages simply drop out of the index. The processing difference between 404 and 410 is minimal, making them practically interchangeable for SEO purposes.
The future of SEO: Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, has addressed the future of Search, rejecting the notion that SEO will become obsolete in the next decade. He anticipates that people and websites will remain integral to search, emphasising the continued importance of the web ecosystem in enhancing search functionality, augmented by AI integration as this technology improves.