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JOHN MUELLER: Hi, everyone, and welcome back
to the Google Search News series.
I hope life is treating you reasonably well,
wherever you are.
I'm your host today, John Mueller, here from Switzerland.
With this show, we want to give you
a regular summary of what's been happening around Google Search,
specifically for webmasters, 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.
It's been a bit quiet here with regards
to launches over the summer.
Nonetheless, there are a few things worth mentioning.
So without further ado, let's move on
to a recent Google Search news.
Today, we'll take a look at Search Console Insights,
some updates on images, programming for SEOs,
and a bunch more.
All right, let's take a look.
We recently launched a preview of Search Console Insights.
It combines data from Google Analytics and Search
Console for content creators in an easy-to-understand way.
Its goal is to help site owners improve their sites in Search
and to make it easier for them to track their progress.
Using all of the features of Google Analytics
and Search Console can be challenging, even for experts.
Search Console Insights aims to make that significantly easier,
especially for less experienced site owners.
Search Console Insights is currently
available as a preview to a limited number
of users for initial trials.
Unfortunately, it's currently not possible to add new sites,
but we hope to expand it over time.
If your site is included in the preview,
you'll receive an email through Search Console.
If you have access, let us know how
it worked for you with the feedback links in the tool.
I find it exciting to see new approaches for sharing insights
with site owners, helping them to improve
their visibility in Search.
Also from Search Console, we have
the following short updates.
We recently added a news filter in the Performance Report.
This gives insights into how news content
is performing within the News tab in Google Search.
On the structured data side, we added support
for some new types in the rich results test.
This includes article, critic review, and employer rating.
The details for all structured data types
are in our Search Developers documentation.
Finally, a while back, we added support for domain properties
in Search Console.
A domain property gives you information
for all variations of your domain,
making it easier for you to see the full picture
of your website in Search.
We recommend using these where possible, and of course
it's fine to combine them with traditional properties.
Moving along to images.
We recently launched support for licensable images
in Google Images.
This allows image providers to give more information
about image licensing, better informing users directly
in the Search results.
This can be done either on an image level using
IPTC metadata, or on a per-page basis using structured data
markup.
Our documentation has the implementation details,
and Search Console can help with the rich results test.
Also for images, if your pages are shown in Google Discover,
you can help them stand out a bit by enabling large image
previews.
Google Discover is a simple, feed-like experience
that shows users content related to their interests
automatically.
By default, a standard image thumbnail may be shown there.
Larger image previews can currently
be enabled either by using AMP pages
or by using the max-image-preview attribute
of the robots meta tag.
This is a piece of code on your pages
specifically for search engines.
Updating the robots meta tag can be a challenge,
depending on your website's configuration.
So it may make sense to check with your site's developer
or administrator to find out more.
Our robots meta tag documentation
is linked in the description.
Slightly different than the usual news--
and I realize it's hard to classify
any news as usual nowadays--
let's switch gears for a moment.
One of the trends we've recently seen
is SEOs starting to look at programming--
or look at it again.
Back in the early days, many SEOs
came from website development, but over time, things
have changed a bit.
In the meantime, we're seeing more folks try out
Python, a programming language that's usable even
within a browser.
Python can be useful for a variety of SEO and website
tasks.
While you don't need to know Python in order
to be a good SEO, it can be useful.
And in general, understanding any programming language
makes it easier to understand better
how search engines, web servers, and the internet all work,
even if you don't write code often.
When it comes to SEO in Python, there's
a lot of information available online.
Folks like Ruth Everett and Hamlet Batista
have been regularly publishing articles on everything
from how to get started to advance techniques that
use machine learning, even putting together a training
course for those that want to dive in.
They regularly post about these topics on their Twitter
accounts, so it's worth checking that out if you're interested.
That's a lot already, but wait, there is even more.
We mentioned mobile-first indexing last time.
Given the circumstances, we decided
to change the final date to the end of March, 2021.
This hopefully gives those remaining sites a bit more time
to make appropriate changes.
If your site is using WordPress, we're
happy to let you know that site maps are now
a part of WordPress Core.
This means that any website using WordPress
will be able to submit a site map file by default.
Site maps are broadly supported by search engines
and help crawling and indexing of new and updated
content on your website.
Finally, while we can't go to events in person nowadays,
we've been busy both on this YouTube channel,
as well as with a new podcast.
On YouTube, we've been posting more webmaster conference
lightning talks, which are short videos based
on sessions that we've presented at conferences over the years.
In our "Search off the Record" podcasts,
we've been talking about some of the behind-the-scenes aspects
of Google Search.
If you're keen on hearing about things
that don't tend to make it into our official documentation,
make sure to subscribe there.
Every time I compile these, I realize there is always
so much happening in Search--
often, more than we can cover here.
If you'd like to stay up-to-date,
subscribe to this channel, check out our blog,
and follow us on Twitter.
And that's all for now, folks.
I hope you, your family, friends, and co-workers
are all doing as fine and fit as possible.
Thank you for joining us here, and I look forward
to seeing you all again in one of the future episodes
of Google Search News.
If you have any questions or comments,
feel free to add them right here or reach out to us on Twitter.
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