Google Search News (Dec ‘21) – Google ranking algorithms updates, SEO quiz, and more!
[MUSIC PLAYING] JOHN MUELLER: Happy
holidays, everyone. And welcome back to the
"Google Search News." I hope life is treating you
reasonably well wherever you are. I'm your host today,
John Mueller, here from Google Switzerland. With this show, we
want to give you a regular summary of what's been
happening around Google Search, specifically for website
owners, publishers, and SEOs. If you find these useful,
which I hope you do, and if you'd like
to stay up to date, make sure to subscribe
to the channel. How is it already
the end of the year? Well, it's good to see you
all here again because I have some updates. Today, we'll look at Search
Central documentation, briefly cover
search updates, look at options for a recent
security issue, and more. So without further ado,
let's jump right in. A year ago, we launched the
new Google Search Central site.
It's a place where all search
documentation for site owners comes together. It covers everything
from quality guidelines to structured data
implementation details, including tips for e-commerce
and JavaScript-based websites. I think it's awesome. But it's also run by my team,
so I might have a slight bias. Anyway, we recently announced
that we worked together with the Google SEO team on it. You might be surprised
that we also do SEO. But as I've said before,
SEO is not a bad word. Among other things, we work to
improve the content, titles, descriptions, and
internal linking to make our pages easier to find. The Google SEO team is
isolated from the search teams, so they also rely
on our documentation to learn about SEO. So if you're wondering whether
you should spend time on SEO, keep in mind that
even Google needs it.
Additionally, the
search documentation now includes a neat
interactive checklist, which helps you to quickly
find relevant content for your situation. Give it a try, and let us
know how it works for you. All our documentation has a
feedback link on the bottom, and we appreciate
all submissions. I'll add a link in
the description below. Moving over to search itself. We recently announced
two bigger updates in our ranking algorithms. First, there was a
November core update. We call them core
updates because they affect the core of our systems
and can result in changes across Search and Discover. Afterwards, we announced
the December product reviews update.
This update aims to better
promote high-quality product reviews. To give you a sense of what
we consider best practices, we have a blog post with
updated documentation. I'll add links to them
in the description below. These updates came
after mid-November. It's hard to get the timing
of updates like these right. Ultimately, our
goal is to highlight your amazing content as
prominently as possible, as soon as possible. These kind of updates are also
more about longer term changes in Search, so they
tend not to be affected by quick tweaks of websites. Because of this, I
strongly recommend first taking a step back and
reading more about the updates, wait to see how they
actually affect your website, and then consider
whether there's something to improve or to change.
And now, over to
a security update. There was recently
a big security issue that affected lots of online
services and websites. This issue came from a
popular component that's used across countless systems. Because of the nature
of security issues, it's critical to fix them
as quickly as possible or to isolate them so that
they can't be exploited.
Some have chosen to take parts
of their websites offline to prevent harm while the
issue is being resolved. Last spring, we talked about
briefly closing a website. That's also relevant here. Additionally, I wrote
a bit about what you could do should you need
to take your website offline to fix an issue like this. When it comes to SEO,
my recommendation is to keep a static
copy of the website online using the same URLs. A static copy allows you
to disable the server side functionality without
affecting the content shown.
This allows users to still find
the bulk of your information and help search engines to keep
the website in their indexes. This won't work
for all websites. And hopefully, you've
resolved this particular issue in the meantime. Nonetheless, it's good to
have this kind of setup in your collection of tools
should the need arise. And let's hope that's
not all too often. On a lighter note, the
HTTP Archive project recently launched their
Web Almanac for 2021. They analyzed a large
part of the internet to determine the
current state of things. The SEO chapter is
over 35 pages long and was written by a
number of fantastic people from the SEO community. It's a fascinating look into the
state of websites with regards to SEO and worth checking out. It's also a fun
source of trivia. For example, did you know
that more home pages use H2 headings than H1 headings? I certainly didn't know. And now over to some
smaller updates. Google Search Console recently
launched a new graphic design. It looks really
fancy and modern. If you haven't taken a look
at Search Console recently, go check it out.
Also, we recently alerted
websites of redirect errors in Search Console. Unfortunately, most
of these alerts were from a mistake on our side. If you received this alert,
I recommend checking a sample page with the Inspect URL tool. And if it looks good,
then you should be fine. We've added an annotation
in the chart as well. Sorry about that. On mobile-first indexing, we
recently posted an update. Mobile-first indexing
is still ongoing. And because of issues
that we've seen on a small number
of websites, we've decided to leave it without
a final date for now. We'll continue to inform
sites of problems as needed. And last but not
least, if you're in the mood for a fun SEO quiz
in the format of a web story, I've added a link below. It's quick and easy and
made together with folks from the SEO community. And that's all for now, folks. Thanks for sticking around until
the end of the year with us. It's always useful to me
to look back and compile the highlights.
I hope you found it useful
and insightful as well. If you have any
feedback or comments, please send it our way
in the comments here. I hope the end of the year
is a bit calmer for you all and that you're able to do some
things with family and friends nearby despite the situation. Personally, I'm not always
a big fan of the holidays.
It seems to me
that we should work to make the whole year good,
not just a few weeks at the end. Either way, I wish you
all a great end of year and a particularly
fantastic next year. If you subscribe here, I'm sure
we'll meet again next year, perhaps in another episode
of the Google Search News. Bye. I'm a snowman now. OK, Google, get rid of the snow. Wow. Geez. What happened? It's gone. I have snow in my mouth..
