What’s a Fragel & how does it show Google’s SEO strategy — Cindy Crumb // Mobile Moxie

Quotes

• “Fraggle is something that I have been talking about maybe a year and a half. It is a fragment at handle. It is a bit of text and a handle. Handle basically means when you click on handle, you not only get to a page but it scrolls to a specific part of a page.” -Cindy

• “Google has been including jump links in search results here and there for a while. Over a year ago, I started to see Google was testing a new kind of result where there was one main page ranking and if you click on the main title tag in the SERP then you would just get on the top of the page.” -Cindy

• “So you are talking about a search experience where, when you are conducting a query as normal, it not only brings you to,hey, heres the landing page but to heres some filtering options drop you to the right portion of the landing page.” -Ben

• “I think of this being similar to anchor tag. If I was building a website where if I want somebody to link and I am not just going to drop them to the top of the page but a specific section on a page, might click the buy it now but it brings them all the way to the bottom of the page where a checkout component of the larger page might live.” -Ben

• “We are essentially talking about directional links that are bringing you to specific pieces of content.” -Ben

• “Fast forward to today, not as many websites use an anchor link. Google has figured out how to canonicalize, and how to eliminate automatically duplicate content and find different variations of URL and understand them together. They have gotten more sophisticated on those things.” -Cindy

• “The other thing that they got sophisticated on is language understanding. Whats important about fraggles that is often missed is thatyou dont have to have an anchor link for Google to turn it into a fraggle.” -Cindy

• “In some cases, Google is adding these handles on its own. Theyre finding the sections of the page for you and breaking it up and turning that into search results for you.” -Cindy

• “To me, the takeaway here is that Google is doing a better job of understanding what is actually on the page and theyre navigating searches to, not only the right page to give you the answers to your questions.” -Cindy

• “While it is also about providing a better user experience for searchers but in the long run this is to help to in providing a better experience to voice searches and assistant kind of interactions.” -Cindy

• “I have seen in my analytics that the fraggles when we put them in when we actually added the jump links, they were getting indexed again and had their own rankings and their own traffic in Search Console.” -Cindy

• “If Google can break a single page web app into fraggles, they can rank it. Why wouldnt they? This is the way where things that dont have URLs get to link or get to rank. It is strings onstrings.” -Cindy

• “Its interesting. So the potential future of mobile SEO could be, hey we are just going to put everything on one page and let Google figure out whats relevant because we dont actually have to do linking internally. Google knows whats the content on the page, we just need to make it visually pleasing.” -Ben

• “I think it forces us all to do a better job. Mobile SEO is a lot like traditional SEO, its just harder. We have to do a better job because theres lesser real estate, thereslesser attention span, and because theres a lot more competition for the juicy result.” -Cindy

• “On mobile, they are thinking about non-reading use cases. You want to watch something, listen to something or download an app, buy something, map for directions. Its not always that you want to read.” -Cindy