Google Search Central Blog

More time, tools, and details on the page experience update

Mon, 19 Apr 2021 09:00:00 +0000

Last November we announced that the page experience ranking change will go live on Google Search this year, in what we’re calling the "page experience update". To help publishers and site owners improve their page experience and prepare, today we’re announcing a few key updates.

Upcoming changes to FeedBurner

Wed, 14 Apr 2021 08:00:00 +0000

Feedburner is making several upcoming changes to support the product's next chapter. This post describes what you can expect to change and what you can do now to ensure you’re prepared.

Announcing the Sustainable Monetized Websites video series

Mon, 12 Apr 2021 02:00:00 +0000

The new series Sustainable Monetized Websites is now available on the Search Central and the Google AdSense YouTube channels. This series focuses on the best practices for people who create or manage content online and monetize it, acknowledging how challenging this can be and assisting them with resources and focus areas.

Expanding support for APAC Search Central Help Communities

Fri, 09 Apr 2021 06:00:00 +0000

As we’ve been continuously working to improve support for website owners in more language markets, we’re very excited to announce the opening of our Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Thai Search Central Help Communities with support from a global team of community managers that are dedicated to helping Product Experts.

What creators should know about Google’s product reviews update

Thu, 08 Apr 2021 10:00:00 +0000

Google Search is always working to show the most useful and helpful information possible, through testing, experimenting, and review processes. From this, we know people appreciate product reviews that share in-depth research, rather than thin content that simply summarizes a bunch of products. That’s why we’re sharing an improvement to our ranking systems, which we call the product reviews update, that’s designed to better reward such content.

Improved data filtering and comparison on Performance reports

Wed, 07 Apr 2021 08:00:00 +0000

This post describes a new way to filter data on the Search Console Performance reports: regular expressions, or regex. This will allow users to create more complex query and page based filters and answer more questions that interest them.

New for education sites: Practice problems and Math solver structured data

Thu, 25 Mar 2021 08:00:00 +0000

In this post, we provide details to help you implement structured data on your practice problems and math solver pages to make your pages eligible to feature on Google Search as rich results. We also announce the new rich results status reports to help you make sure that your implementation is correct.

SharedArrayBuffer messaging clarifications

Fri, 19 Mar 2021 07:00:00 +0000

Some of you might have received an email from Google Search Console with the subject "New requirements for SharedArrayBuffers". We received feedback that the message was confusing, and wanted to give some more insight into the issue, so that you can decide which next steps are appropriate.

New resources for video SEO

Wed, 17 Mar 2021 06:30:00 +0000

As global online video consumption continues to grow, Google aims to surface video content from diverse sources across the web. We want to make it easy for site owners to get their videos indexed and surfaced on Google. Today, we’re excited to share two new resources to help you optimize your videos for Google Search and Discover.

Providing better product information for shoppers

Fri, 26 Feb 2021 16:00:00 +0000

To best help users find your content and products in Search, we recommend that you clearly identify products mentioned.

New Association functionality added to Search Console

Mon, 22 Feb 2021 08:00:00 +0000

We're happy to announce that Search Console has a new and enhanced Association page. Any associations that were previously set are carried over to the new Associations page automatically.

Join us at Search Central Live

Thu, 18 Feb 2021 08:30:00 +0000

On February 24, we will host our first installment of our new event series called Search Central Live.

Search Console Discover report now includes Chrome data

Tue, 02 Feb 2021 08:15:00 +0000

Starting today, all your Discover traffic (including from Chrome) will be shown in the Performance report for Discover.

Introducing Google News performance report

Tue, 12 Jan 2021 07:15:00 +0000

Today we are launching Google News performance reporting to help news publishers better understand user behavior on Google News on our Android and iOS apps, as well as on news.google.com.

Index Coverage Data Improvements

Mon, 11 Jan 2021 06:00:00 +0000

Based on the feedback we got from the community, today we are rolling out significant improvements to the Index Coverage report so you’re better informed on issues that might prevent Google from crawling and indexing your pages. The change is focused on providing a more accurate state to existing issues, which should help you solve them more easily.

A weird year in review

Wed, 16 Dec 2020 08:20:00 +0000

2020, what a year this was! We found new ways to work and collaborate, to learn and have fun, and also to stay safe.

An update on the Structured Data Testing Tool

Tue, 15 Dec 2020 07:20:00 +0000

In July, we announced that the Rich Results Test is out of beta. In that blog post, we said that the Structured Data Testing Tool would be deprecated. Since then, we've heard your feedback and we'd like to give an update on what the future looks like for the Structured Data Testing Tool

Updates to Search Console’s API

Wed, 09 Dec 2020 10:00:00 +0000

A few months ago we announced an API infrastructure upgrade to improve the performance of the Search Console API as demand grows. Today we’re happy to announce some more updates coming your way.

New and improved crawl stats for your site

Tue, 24 Nov 2020 14:33:30 +0000

To help website owners better understand how crawls their sites, we’re launching a brand new version of the in Search Console.

We moved! Introducing the new home for the Google Webmasters blogs

Wed, 18 Nov 2020 13:50:15 +0000

Last week we changed our name to Google Search Central and published our new central site. As part of this site migration, we're also consolidating the Google Webmaster Blogs into one place on the new site. Today, we're announcing that this page within the Google Search Central site is the new home for our blog. We migrated all of the archived blog posts, dating back to 2005.

Goodbye Google Webmasters, hello Google Search Central

Wed, 11 Nov 2020 17:50:15 +0000

Merriam-Webster claims the first known use of the word "webmaster" was in 1993, years before Google even existed. However, the term is becoming archaic, and according to the data found in books, its use is in sharp decline. A user experience study we ran revealed that very few web professionals identify themselves as webmasters anymore. They're more likely to call themselves Search Engine Optimizer (SEO), online marketer, blogger, web developer, or site owner, but very few "webmasters".

Timing for bringing page experience to Google Search

Tue, 10 Nov 2020 15:54:37 +0000

This past May, we announced that page experience signals would be included in Google Search ranking. These signals measure how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page and contribute to our ongoing work to ensure people get the most helpful and enjoyable experiences from the web. In the past several months, we’ve seen a median 70% increase in the number of users engaging with Lighthouse and Page Speed Insights, and many site owners using Search Console’s Core Web Vitals report to identify opportunities for improvement.

PES@Home 2020: Google’s first virtual summit for Product Experts

Thu, 05 Nov 2020 20:14:19 +0000

More than ever, users are relying on Google products to do their jobs, educate their kids, and stay in touch with loved ones. Our Google Product Experts (PEs) play a vital role in supporting these users in community forums, like the Webmaster Help Community, across many languages.

Best practices for Black Friday and Cyber Monday pages

Mon, 26 Oct 2020 14:35:43 +0000

The end of the year holiday season is a peak time for many merchants with special sales events such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday. As a merchant, you can help Google highlight your sales events by providing landing pages with relevant content and high quality images.

The Search Console Training lives on

Fri, 02 Oct 2020 12:55:26 +0000

In November 2019 we announced the Search Console Training YouTube series and started publishing videos regularly. The goal of the series was to create updated video content to be used alongside Search documentation, for example in the Help Center and in the Developers site.

New Schema.org support for retailer shipping data

Tue, 22 Sep 2020 16:16:23 +0000

Quick summary: Starting today, we support shippingDetails schema.org markup as an alternative way for retailers to be eligible for shipping details in Google Search results.

New open source robots.txt projects

Mon, 21 Sep 2020 13:08:22 +0000

Last year we released the robots.txt parser and matcher that we use in our production systems to the open source world. Since then, we've seen people build new tools with it, contribute to the open source library (effectively improving our production systems- thanks!), and release new language versions like golang and rust, which make it easier for developers to build new tools.

Googlebot will soon speak HTTP/2

Thu, 17 Sep 2020 11:57:08 +0000

Quick summary: Starting November 2020, Googlebot will start crawling some sites over HTTP/2.