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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.
I'm your host today, John Mueller.
Wow.
It's already September.
And, of course, I have some updates for you.
Today, there is news about ecommerce, search ranking,
Search Console, and more.
So let's get started.
Ecommerce in Search has grown significantly.
Whether you're selling products directly or working
with merchants indirectly, we've got some updates for you.
First up is structured data-- for pros and cons.
These annotations can help users to see a high-level summary
of a review.
It's shown in search directly.
You can find out more in our search developer's
documentation.
Recently, we announced expanded eligibility for some product
experiences from the use of structured data.
The features include the shopping knowledge panel,
popular products, and features in Google Images and Lens.
We updated the documentation and added a new merchant listings
report to Search Console.
Additionally, there are a bunch of new ecommerce related videos
here on the channel, too.
There are YouTube Shorts--
perfect for getting a dose of SEO while on the run.
And now over to ranking updates.
In August, we launched the start of a series of improvements
to Google Search.
The goal is to help people to find great content made
by and for people.
We call it the helpful content update.
We published a series of recommendations for creators.
In short, focus on people-first content
and avoid search engine-first content.
The full details are on Search Central and the Google blog.
This update is a site-wide signal,
and the process is fully automated.
For affected sites, improvements will be
taken into account over time.
This change is currently for searches in English.
If you have questions about this update,
please post in our Help Community.
On the subject of ranking updates,
we have a page that's dedicated to keeping track of them.
The sample of updates, which we list here,
are bigger changes, where we have
guidance to help site owners.
If you're wondering about specific updates,
we hope this list with dates helps
you to narrow things down.
And now over to Search Console.
Google Search Console helps explain
how a website is doing in Google Search
and gives site owners information on potential issues
and areas for improvement.
If you're not using Search Console,
I recommend giving it a shot.
New is a Video Indexing Report.
This helps you to determine which videos were indexed
and what might be preventing the others from being indexed.
In addition to this report, we enhanced the URL inspection
tool to give you information about videos.
Also new is an HTTPS report.
Sites use HTTPS to securely communicate with users.
It authenticates the website and protects
the privacy and integrity of transmitted data.
HTTPS is a part of the page experience ranking factor.
With the new report, it's easier to recognize
any issues blocking a page from being served securely.
It's gradually rolling out over time.
Over the last month, we have simplified the way
that we classify pages, items, and issues in Search Console.
This makes it easier to focus on critical issues that
affect your site's visibility in Search
and to better prioritize your work.
Finally, we announced that the geotargeting setting
and the hreflange report in Search Console are going away.
Hreflang annotations continue to be supported,
and you can find all the recommendations
for managing multilingual and multiregional sites
in our documentation.
Moving on to some neat non-Google things.
If you're getting started in the world of SEO,
Jackie Chu shared a list of interview questions for SEOs.
Interviews are stressful for both sides.
Jackie picked some great questions for you to try out
and to build on.
And then once you're in, it's time to build an SEO strategy.
Tom Critchlow has a great write-up
on how to work on SEO strategically.
Whether you're working on a big company's website
or just starting on your blog, I'd recommend checking it out.
And while you're here, I have a bunch
of shorter updates to share.
We're experimenting with a new format for our SEO Office Hours
to try to answer your questions around Search.
Take a listen, and tell us what you think.
In July, the search quality rater guidelines were updated.
The quality raters help us to evaluate our algorithms.
If you're curious about what we consider, then check that out.
In our developer documentation, we
added information about how many bytes of HTML Googlebot
will crawl.
While this doesn't affect most sites,
it's cool trivia to mention to developers.
It's 15 megabytes, by the way.
We also added best practices for feeds
for the follow feature in Google Discover.
This feature is currently available in English in the US.
And that's all for this time, folks.
Thank you for tuning in to the "Google Search News."
I hope things have been going reasonably well for you
this year, and I'm looking forward
to catching up here again in the near future.
Please drop any feedback and comments here.
I always read them all.
And if you subscribe to this channel,
we'll make sure to let you know when another episode is ready.
Bye, everyone.
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