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JOHN MUELLER: Hi, everyone, and welcome back
to the "Google Search News" series.
I hope life is treating you well, wherever you are.
I'm your host today, John Mueller, here
from Google Zurich 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,
then make sure to subscribe to the channel.
Today, we'll take a look at Search Console,
mobile-first indexing, structured data, web search,
and some other news.
It's been a busy time, so let's check it out.
We're starting off with Search Console.
This month, we celebrated the two-year anniversary
of the new Search Console.
It's been a long process creating new features
to replace the old ones, and all of the feedback
from passionate users along the way has been awesome to see.
Since our last episode, the Search Console team
has worked to make the data in the Discover report
much fresher, similar to how the Search Performance
report was updated.
Discover, originally the Google Feed,
bubbles up content that users have expressed interest
in without them having to search for it.
We've also made the Index Coverage
Report more comprehensive.
That's not visible for all sites,
but generally means that the data we show there
is as consistent as possible with the search results.
Finally, also in Search Console, we've
updated the messaging system.
Previously, messages were shown in a common inbox.
Now, they're shown right next to the reports themselves.
This makes it easier to resolve issues
associated with particular reports on your site.
Mobile-first indexing continues to grow.
Mobile-first indexing is a process
of crawling and indexing with mobile devices
to match what most users would see when they use the web.
As we switch more sites over, we've
recognized more issues that need to be resolved by webmasters.
We've recently updated our documentation
to touch more on that.
Here's a short summary.
With mobile-first indexing, we will only index
the content that's on the mobile version of your page.
If it's your intention to show less content on mobile
than on desktop, that's what will be used for indexing.
This includes not only the text, but also images, links,
headings, and structured data.
For pages with images, remember the alt attribute,
include high-resolution images, and embed the images
appropriately prominently on the page.
Similarly, if your page uses ads,
then position the ads on mobile in a way that doesn't
block your primary content.
For sites that use separate mobile URLs,
commonly called MDOC URLs, make sure to reference
the mobile URLs within the structured data,
like Breadcrumb, Product, VideoObjects,
as well as in hreflang annotations.
There are more details in our documentation.
Going forward, we'll also be sending messages
about mobile-first indexing through Search Console,
should we recognize issues on your site.
We're continuing to work on mobile-first indexing.
Our longer term goal is to be able to completely switch over
so that all crawling and indexing matches
what the majority of the web's users would see.
Moving over to news about structured data,
we use various forms of structured data
to better understand content on web pages.
Recently, we decided to stop supporting data-vocabulary.org
structured data per 6 of April, 2020.
Google Search Console will now issue warnings for pages using
data-vocabulary.org schema, so that sites know to switch over
to schema.org markup.
The most common usage of data-vocabulary.org markup was
for breadcrumbs.
If you added breadcrumb markup to your site early on,
double-check Search Console's Enhancement reports.
If you see warnings there, it's probably
time to update your markup to schema.org.
To check your pages for other issues,
use the Rich Results test.
This test will flag any recognized issues
with regards to structured data.
Within Google Web Search, we regularly make updates--
thousands of them every year.
Our website on how search works has more, if you're curious.
These changes are meant to help users
find relevant information, perhaps on your site.
Site owners can find out more about these changes
on our blog, as well as on Twitter.
To keep you up-to-date, let's check out
some of the recent changes.
Late last year, we announced the use of BERT in Google search.
BERT is a modern way for computers
to understand natural language.
We use it both for working out what the user was really
looking for, as well as for better understanding the pages
in our index.
The Google Research team has written about some of the work
they've done on this, as well.
For ranking, we've made regular updates,
including so-called core updates in December and January.
We call them core updates when they
affect our ranking algorithms at their core.
Sometimes, we also make changes to the visible design
in Search, which our passionate users recognize
right away because, well, it looks different.
Recently, we've experimented with a visible design
for desktop users that's similar to what we've
been showing mobile users.
We received a lot of feedback on these changes
and will continue to test and listen to feedback, as usual.
Another change was to reduce duplication
in our search results.
Previously, we might show the same page,
both as a traditional search result
and also with a larger preview.
We call these featured snippets.
With this change, we're removing that duplication
and showing these pages just once.
This change does not affect how your site's data is collected
and shown in Search Console, where
the average position continues to be
based on the topmost element for your site.
As a side note and unrelated to this change,
if you have preferences with regards
to how much of a snippet you'd like to have shown,
we have documentation on the appropriate robots
meta tags for you to check out, too.
We have a few more short updates for you.
Chrome has made some changes with regards to how
websites are handled when they incorrectly use HTTPS.
In particular, Chrome is stricter on its handling
of mixed content.
Mixed content is when a secure page on HTTPS
includes elements that don't use HTTPS,
such as images or JavaScript.
Mixed content is bad, and it makes pages insecure.
Independently, we've sent out notices via Search Console
to websites that use older, insecure versions of the TLS
protocol for HTTPS.
These older versions won't be supported by modern browsers,
so their server must update to a newer protocol version soon.
Regarding rendering, here's a short update.
As announced last year, we've moved
to using a modern version of Chrome for rendering.
One part of that change is currently still ongoing.
We're moving to a user agent similar to what users would
have when they use Chrome.
The user agent is a text each browser
sends to web servers which generally
identifies the browser.
Going forward, we'll be updating the version number
as we update the version of Chrome used.
Some websites try to recognize Googlebot
based on the exact text of the user
agent, which they'd need to do differently in the future.
Finally, here on this YouTube channel,
we recently launched a new series
about Google Search Console.
Google Search Console is a free tool
that helps website owners, or in general, anyone who
has a public presence on the web,
to succeed with the help of Google Search.
The video series is hosted by Daniel Weisberg
and covers a variety of topics all around Search Console.
The first videos are out already,
and there's more to come.
That's all for now, folks.
Thanks for joining us.
And now, onto the weather.
The weather outside is cold.
It's winter here in Switzerland.
It looks like it's even going to start snowing soon, which
is great if you like snow.
But who likes snow?
Well, I love snow.
There's something special about a day out in the sun and snow.
But if you don't like snow, the nice part about winter
is that it's just the first step towards spring and summer.