There has been some speculation or questions if Google, along with the December 2020 core update, released the passage indexing feature. Google did say passage indexing would be live by the end of the year, so is it live?
I asked John Mueller of Google that question on Friday's office hours hangout at the 6:32 mark and he said he isn't sure if passage indexing is live yet or not but it is not something Google would bundle together with a core update launch. He said "I don't think, I mean I don't know if it's out yet but usually the the core update wouldn't be something that we would bundle with other kinds of changes like that so. It's something that maybe is coming out at the same time but it wouldn't be because of the core update it would be kind of like more of a coincidence. I don't know what the the timing plans are for that."
I really do not know if passage indexing is live yet, I did not just ask John if it was live, I also asked other sources at Google and I am waiting to hear back.
I assume, at this point, it is not live but should be live soon. Of course, I hope this was not released the same time as the core update, that would make tracking these changes a bit of a disaster for the SEO community. But Google has released multiple updates on top of each other previously, and technically, core updates are tons of baby algorithms - so all core updates act that way.
But Passage Indexing, well, I'd hope Google gave us a bit of time between the core update and that release to see how either may or may not impact our sites?
Here is the video embed at the start time:
Forum discussion at Twitter.
