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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.