[MUSIC PLAYING]
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 home
in 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.
Now that you're here, I've missed you.
It's been a while since our last "Google Search News."
The coronavirus has stirred things up a bit.
Everything's a bit more complicated and confusing.
Like many of you, we're currently
all working from home.
On the one hand, this means my commute to my desk
is now extremely short.
On the other hand, this means our usual recording studio
setup is out of reach.
So to help keep you informed about Google Search,
we decided to start recording from home.
We're not sure when things will get better with regards
to recording, so in the meantime,
we'll do more videos like this from home.
And now, on to the Google Search news.
Today we'll take a look at COVID-19-related updates,
new speed metrics, mobile-first indexing, and more.
So let's check it out.
Many things have changed as coronavirus
started making its rounds.
For Google, this meant adding and modifying
some parts of Search, as well as helping
webmasters tackle the new challenges in various ways.
The details are linked below, and here's a brief overview.
With in-person events being canceled,
we added support for postponed, canceled, and online events
with structured data.
Government and official health websites
can now show special announcements directly
in Search results using structured data
and a separate Search Console tool.
As businesses temporarily closed,
we noticed that some sites were handling the closure badly,
so we created guidance for handling closures
in a Search-friendly way.
For other sites, the issues were more with regards
to additional server load, so we created some help
for dealing with that.
And finally, to help official organizations
to make their information as accessible as quickly
as possible, we set up a separate Help forum.
We know there will continue to be challenges that
arise as the world turns, so I'm sure there will
be more to come in this regard.
As a side note, the changes in events
also affect our events as well.
For the meantime, we've put our Webmaster Conference series
on hold, and have started sharing some highlights
from individual sessions on YouTube
in the Webmaster Conference Lightning Talks playlist.
Time spent being at home feels like it's passing both (SPED-UP
SPEECH) extremely quickly and (SLOWED-DOWN SPEECH) extremely
slowly.
(NORMAL SPEECH) What is time?
What day is it?
Well, I don't know either.
However, when it comes to the speed of web pages,
Chrome recently launched a new set of metrics
that we call the Core Web Vitals.
It provides a clear set of foundational metrics
for website developers to help build and improve
online experiences.
These will be introduced across a variety
of tools like Lighthouse, Chrome DevTools, and PageSpeed
Insights.
Google Search Console currently offers an experimental Speed
Report, which highlights the previous metrics used
across these tools.
With the announcement of Core Web Vitals,
the team is planning to update the Speed Report to help
site owners identify opportunities to improve user
experiences on their sites.
The Core Web Vitals includes the following metrics.
Largest Contentful Paint, or LCP in short.
This measures perceived load speed and marks the point
in the page load timeline when the page's main content has
likely loaded.
This metric is dependent on First Contentful Paint and Time
To First Byte, which you might have heard of before.
First Input Delay, or FID.
This measures responsiveness and quantifies
the experience users feel when trying to first interact
with the page.
Cumulative Layout Shift, or CLS, which
measures the visual stability and quantifies
the amount of unexpected layout shift of visible page content.
Because the web continues to evolve,
we expect to update these on an annual basis
and to give you the tools you need to help
make your websites fantastic.
We'll keep you informed as time goes by.
We mentioned mobile-first indexing in our last episode
as well.
Mobile-first indexing is a process
of Google indexing the web using a crawler that
acts like a mobile device, like a smartphone.
This matches what users commonly see when they browse.
About 70% of all Search results currently shown
are from mobile-first indexing, and we
expect this number to rise significantly
once some of the larger websites are able to be moved over.
This is an amazing achievement that's
only possible due to a lot of work
on websites, making them work well for mobile devices.
We're continuing to move forward with mobile-first indexing
as our systems recognize that sites are ready.
As a goal, earlier this year we decided
to switch everything over to mobile-first indexing
in September of this year.
We picked that date before coronavirus
was widespread here, so it's possible
that this date might change.
Sites continue to improve with regards
to mobile-first indexing, even in times of COVID-19,
which is a great sign.
To make it easier for sites to get ready
for mobile-first indexing, we added more documentation
in our developer docs.
If you're unsure of your website's status
with regards to mobile-first indexing,
Google Search Console will show you
how we're primarily indexing your pages.
These are some pretty big changes,
but there is a lot more.
Here is a brief run-through to help keep you up to date.
In the search developer's documentation,
we added a page that lists all updates to the documentation.
No need to watch this show anymore.
No, wait-- not that.
But it will help to keep you informed of all changes,
for example, in structured data elements.
We added documentation about licensable images,
if that's something that you have on your site.
JavaScript and structured data--
how do they work together?
Check out more in the developer documentation.
Search Console now has a revamped removals report,
information about review rich snippets,
and updated site new features.
and some cool new user interface changes,
such as better exports.
There is always more happening around Search
than we can cover here.
If you'd like to stay up to date,
I'd recommend subscribing to this channel,
checking in on our blog, and following us on Twitter.
That's all for now, folks.
Thank you for joining us, and thanks for your patience as we
navigate recording from home.
If you have any questions or comments,
feel free to add them right here or reach out to us on Twitter.
And now, on to the weather.
[SIGH] Let's be realistic.
It is not very useful to do a weather report,
because nobody is going outside anyway.
Let's hope that things get better soon.
In the meantime, mark your calendars for June 10
to join us for the next "Webmaster Conference Lightning
Talk" on rich results and Google Search Console.