Google Search News (Sept ‘22) – New reports, structured data, and more!
[MUSIC PLAYING] JOHN MUELLER: Hi,
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. Wow. It's already September. And, of course, I have
some updates for you. Today, there is news about
ecommerce, search ranking, Search Console, and more. So let's get started. Ecommerce in Search has
grown significantly. Whether you're selling
products directly or working with merchants indirectly,
we've got some updates for you. First up is structured
data– for pros and cons.
These annotations can help users
to see a high-level summary of a review. It's shown in search directly. You can find out more in
our search developer's documentation. Recently, we announced expanded
eligibility for some product experiences from the
use of structured data. The features include the
shopping knowledge panel, popular products, and features
in Google Images and Lens. We updated the documentation and
added a new merchant listings report to Search Console. Additionally, there are a bunch
of new ecommerce related videos here on the channel, too. There are YouTube Shorts– perfect for getting a dose
of SEO while on the run. And now over to ranking updates. In August, we launched the start
of a series of improvements to Google Search.
The goal is to help people
to find great content made by and for people. We call it the helpful
content update. We published a series of
recommendations for creators. In short, focus on
people-first content and avoid search
engine-first content. The full details are on Search
Central and the Google blog. This update is a
site-wide signal, and the process is
fully automated. For affected sites,
improvements will be taken into account over time. This change is currently
for searches in English. If you have questions
about this update, please post in our
Help Community. On the subject of
ranking updates, we have a page that's dedicated
to keeping track of them. The sample of updates,
which we list here, are bigger changes,
where we have guidance to help site owners.
If you're wondering
about specific updates, we hope this list
with dates helps you to narrow things down. And now over to Search Console. Google Search
Console helps explain how a website is
doing in Google Search and gives site owners
information on potential issues and areas for improvement. If you're not using
Search Console, I recommend giving it a shot.
New is a Video Indexing Report. This helps you to determine
which videos were indexed and what might be preventing
the others from being indexed. In addition to this report,
we enhanced the URL inspection tool to give you
information about videos. Also new is an HTTPS report. Sites use HTTPS to securely
communicate with users. It authenticates the
website and protects the privacy and integrity
of transmitted data. HTTPS is a part of the page
experience ranking factor. With the new report,
it's easier to recognize any issues blocking a page
from being served securely. It's gradually
rolling out over time. Over the last month, we
have simplified the way that we classify pages, items,
and issues in Search Console. This makes it easier to
focus on critical issues that affect your site's
visibility in Search and to better
prioritize your work. Finally, we announced that
the geotargeting setting and the hreflange report in
Search Console are going away. Hreflang annotations
continue to be supported, and you can find all
the recommendations for managing multilingual
and multiregional sites in our documentation.
Moving on to some neat
non-Google things. If you're getting started
in the world of SEO, Jackie Chu shared a list of
interview questions for SEOs. Interviews are stressful
for both sides. Jackie picked some great
questions for you to try out and to build on. And then once you're in, it's
time to build an SEO strategy. Tom Critchlow has
a great write-up on how to work on
SEO strategically. Whether you're working on
a big company's website or just starting on your blog,
I'd recommend checking it out. And while you're
here, I have a bunch of shorter updates to share.
We're experimenting with a new
format for our SEO Office Hours to try to answer your
questions around Search. Take a listen, and
tell us what you think. In July, the search quality
rater guidelines were updated. The quality raters help us
to evaluate our algorithms. If you're curious about what we
consider, then check that out. In our developer
documentation, we added information about how
many bytes of HTML Googlebot will crawl.
While this doesn't
affect most sites, it's cool trivia to
mention to developers. It's 15 megabytes, by the way. We also added best
practices for feeds for the follow feature
in Google Discover. This feature is currently
available in English in the US. And that's all for
this time, folks. Thank you for tuning in to
the "Google Search News." I hope things have been
going reasonably well for you this year, and I'm
looking forward to catching up here
again in the near future.
Please drop any feedback
and comments here. I always read them all. And if you subscribe
to this channel, we'll make sure to let you know
when another episode is ready. Bye, everyone. [MUSIC PLAYING].
