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JOHN MUELLER: Hi, everyone, and welcome back
to the "Google Search News."
I hope life is treating you reasonably well,
wherever you are.
Today, we're recording back at home.
We'll be back in the studios for one of the future episodes,
don't worry.
But this video is not about me.
It's about updates from Google Search.
So, let's get to it.
Today, we have new data exports, fresh search guidelines,
a status dashboard, and more.
Getting started, we have new functionality
for Search Console called the bulk data export.
Search Console gives site owners insights
into their website and search.
The bulk data export brings the performance data
to Google BigQuery.
BigQuery is essentially a giant database
for all kinds of information.
Once the data is there, you can run complex queries over it
or export it to other systems.
The bulk data export gives you all the performance data
available for your property, except for anonymized queries.
It goes past the daily data row limit in the user interface.
This is useful for larger websites with many thousands
of pages or queries per day.
For smaller sites, the Looker Studio connector or the Search
Analytics API are often enough.
For getting started, there's a lot of documentation available.
If you prefer to get started with exporting a spreadsheet
or with the Looker Studio connector,
we have videos for you too.
So, if you're working on a larger website,
or if you just love to play around with more data,
check it out.
And now, over to some new search guidance.
Recently, tools to help brainstorm and create content
have become more popular.
To help site owners, we publish guidance
on the use of AI-generated content for search.
I'll link to it below.
In short, Google's ranking systems
aim to reward original high-quality content that
demonstrates authoritativeness, expertise, and trustworthiness.
We have more about this in our How Search Works site.
Our focus on the quality of the content
rather than how the content was produced
is a useful guide that has helped
us to deliver reliable and high-quality results to users
for years.
Additionally, we recommend thinking about who, how,
and why regarding your content.
Using automation, including AI, to generate content
with the primary purpose of manipulating ranking
in search results is a violation of our spam policies.
However, this doesn't mean that all use of automation is spam.
Automation has been used to generate
helpful content, such as sports scores, weather
forecasts, and transcripts.
AI can also help people to generate great and helpful
content for the web.
The appropriate use of AI or automation
is not against our guidelines.
Evaluating your content in terms of our guidelines,
whether you're using AI-generated content or not,
will help you to stay on course with what our systems seek
to reward and what users love to discover in search.
If you're curious, I'd invite you to check out Google Bard,
or one of the other tools available.
Next up is a status dashboard for Google Search.
We recently launched a dashboard for transparency on changes
and incidents in Search.
Incidents regarding crawling, indexing, or serving
are extremely rare, but we wanted
to have a place to inform site owners should they happen.
By the way, serving is what we call it
when we show the Search Results page.
We worked with Google's site reliability engineers
to create this dashboard for crawling, indexing,
and surveying widespread issues from the recent past are
shown here.
Knock on wood, we haven't had to list any yet.
Besides incidents, we started using the same dashboard
to track bigger ranking system changes.
The dashboard gives an easy overview of these changes
and provides both RSS for feed reader and a JSON version.
For example, you'll see the latest core update from March
and recent product reviews updates listed there.
The product reviews ranking system
now covers a bunch of new languages.
And now, over to some updates in our search developer's
documentation.
First up is a search quality rater guidelines update.
Google works with raters to evaluate bigger changes.
To the existing EAT, for Expertise, Authoritativeness,
and Trustworthiness, we added an E for Experience.
The document is quite long and comprehensive,
but it's a great read.
We recently updated some documentation
for the rel=canonical link annotations.
These give search engines a hint regarding your preferred page
for indexing.
We also added a gallery of the most common visual elements
shown in search.
This is great for when you want to talk
about a specific part of search, but you
don't remember the name.
And last but not least is a set of recommendations for linking.
If you're working with a web designer
and want to make sure links on your site work well for search,
this is the document that you want to forward.
Taking a step out of the Google world, folks from my team
recently joined an event run by the Women in Tech SEO community
in London.
Areej AbuAli created the community
to help women discuss, share, and learn from each other.
For women active in or interested in Technical SEO,
I strongly recommend the community.
The initiatives they've run over the years
have been inspirational.
I'll drop a link in the description below.
And we're not done yet.
There's a bit more.
Search Console recently revamped the user and mission management
features, and added a video indexing report, plus updates
for merchant listings.
Web.dev published top Core Web Vitals recommendations
for 2023.
These vitals are ways to measure the experience of your users
on your web pages.
If you're keen on making your pages better for users,
check that out.
And also on web.dev, there are now comprehensive HTML images
and accessibility courses available.
If you want to know more about these topics,
take a look there.
If you prefer videos, we also have a bunch of new ones
available for you.
There are new SEO Fairy Tales episodes, a new Lightning Talk,
and new SEO Office Hours waiting for you.
But if you prefer meeting in-person,
you might have spotted us at events
in Brazil, Israel, Singapore, Germany, England, United
States, and more.
Perhaps we'll see you at a future event this year.
Stay tuned for more.
And 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 your feedback and comments here.
We read them all.
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we'll make sure to let you know when another episode is ready.
Bye.
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