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JOHN MUELLER: Hi there.
And welcome back to Google Search News
I hope life is treating you reasonably well wherever
you are.
Look at this.
Today, we're back to the studio.
Perhaps I can sort the books at home in my shelves
by color now.
Well, anyway, we're here to talk about updates
from Google Search.
So let's get to it.
This time, we have news about Core Web Vitals, news for news,
generative AI, of course, Search Console, and more.
First up is Core Web Vitals.
We recently clarified how we use Core Web
Vitals in our helpful content ranking system.
I'd recommend the blog post and the documentation
for the full details.
We also announced the dropping of mobile friendliness
as a factor there, since most sites are friendly on mobile.
With that, we'll be removing the mobile usability
report and the mobile friendly testing
tool in Search Console with its API at the end of the year.
Additionally, we announced that Interaction to Next Paint,
or INP for short, will become a part of the Core Web Vitals.
It will replace First Input Delay, FID, in March 2024.
Search Console has data on it for you already.
It's good to take time to prepare,
should you spot issues to work on.
Keep in mind that a great page experience involves
more than just Core Web Vitals.
And while a great page experience
aligns with what our core ranking systems seek to reward,
there's a lot more involved.
It's best to take a holistic approach.
So I recommend checking out our documentation.
And now, over to some news about news websites.
Last year, we created guidance and best practices
for e-commerce websites.
Now, it's time for news websites.
Starting off, we have two videos on SEO best practices for news
sites and on how to best use Search Console for news sites.
Search Console gives site owners information
on how Google is able to crawl, index, and show a website
across Search and Discover.
We've also started including news topics in our events.
If you're working on a news site and you see one of our events
nearby, it's worth checking it out.
How could we do a news episode without mentioning AI nowadays?
Recently, we launched Search Labs,
a place where you can sign up and try out new products
and ideas that we're exploring.
Search Labs is initially available for users in the US.
I'll link to the blog post below.
Search Labs includes the Search Generative Experience,
or SGE in short, which uses generative
AI to give more information and context to your searches.
It's pretty cool.
It's still very early days for these systems.
However, personally, I'm amazed at what
the team has done so far.
The feedback I've seen posted publicly by SEOs
and site owners has been interesting for me,
and I'm sure insightful for all of the teams involved directly.
Please, keep submitting your feedback.
I'm sure we'll hear more about this in the future.
And now, over to a few short updates from Search Console.
First, we launched an update to the rich results
test that allows code editing.
It makes trying out fixes to your markup
much easier and faster.
Then Search Console Insights now also supports users
without Google Analytics.
This makes it easier for you, or for your clients,
to check out how their site is doing in Google Search.
Next, the video indexing report was
updated to include finer grained information on video indexing
issues that can be resolved.
And then, if that wasn't enough, we just
finished up another season of Search Console training
on our YouTube channel.
If you've ever wondered about traffic drops,
there's a video waiting for you there.
Fun fact, Google Sitemaps was a tool that
evolved into Search Console.
We still support sitemaps there, of course.
However, recently, we announced the pending deprecation
of the so-called ping endpoint for sitemaps.
We noticed that the data received there
wasn't particularly useful.
So we plan on turning it off towards the end of the year.
You don't need to make any changes.
You can still submit your sitemap files
through Search Console and robots.txt.
Switching gears, I wanted to highlight some neat things
from you all, which I shared with some Google Search teams
recently as well.
First, there's an insightful post
by Lily Ray on preparing for AI features in search engines.
Who knows how things will pan out?
But it's interesting to think about some
of the possibilities.
Spoiler alert, Lily doesn't say that SEO is going away.
So we might continue to meet here on YouTube.
Then there's a detailed article by Jes Scholz
about website crawling.
Crawling might be just a small step in a search engine.
But without it, nothing else matters.
Check it out or bookmark it if you want
to crawl through it later on.
Finally, Bryan Casey wrote about the leading 80%
of the marketing content from IBM's website.
Is less actually more when it comes to SEO?
I'm glad people talk about work like this.
Thanks, Bryan, Jes, and Lily.
Is it time already?
Wait, I have some short updates left.
In our documentation, we wrote about a new generic crawler,
reorganized the page about Google crawlers,
and added the IP addresses that we use for them.
The spam report also got a makeover.
Together with the updated spam policies in our search
essentials, previously known as the Webmaster Guidelines,
we hope this makes it easier to report problematic search
results.
And last but not least, we changed how we treat the top
level domain, .ai, in Google Search.
It's now a so-called generic country code top level domain.
If you've been meaning to make a website for the tiny Swiss
Canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden, this is your chance.
If you're ever nearby, Appenzell is a lovely region and home
to a cheese museum, which tells a story of one of Switzerland's
most famous cheeses.
On that note, I must be off to find some cheese.
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That's it for this episode.
Thank you for tuning in to the Google Search News.
I hope this video was useful.
And please, add feedback and comments here,
as we read them all.
If you subscribe to this channel,
we'll make sure to let when another episode is ready.
Bye.
We recently clarified how we use--
[STUMBLES] Our YouTube channel?
CREW: Yeah, you know what I'm going to say.
JOHN MUELLER: Sheezen.
CREW: Sheezen.
JOHN MUELLER: Nothing else matters.
Oh my gosh, I messed that up.
Was that a good ending, do you think?
Or too cheesy?
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