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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, here
from Google Switzerland.
With this show, we want to give you
a regular summary of what's been happening around Google Search,
specifically for website owners, 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.
It's good to see you all again.
I have a bunch of updates for you today.
They include core web vitals, Search Console, RSS,
and a lot more.
So without further ado, let's jump right in.
Let's start off with core web vitals and the page experience
ranking change.
We mentioned this last time, too, so I'll be brief.
This is a new ranking change, which
takes into account the user experience of web pages.
It includes elements like HTTPS, as well as
aspects around speed and responsiveness.
The announced changes, such as the updated cumulative layout
shift, or CLS for short, are now live in all of the testing
tools and in Search Console.
Keep in mind that the data in Search Console
is based on the Chrome user experience report data, which
is aggregated over 28 days.
Another update is that the ranking change has just
recently started rolling out.
It's aimed at being fully rolled out for all URLs
by the end of August this year.
In practice, this slower update means that you would usually
not see your whole site shift in search visibility
from one day to the next.
Instead, you'd see a gradual change over time.
This also means you can continue to work on improving things
if your site isn't doing as well as you'd
like in terms of these metrics.
There are a lot of details and specifics
that folks might be interested in.
For that, we have an expanded FAQ in our help forum.
I'll link to all of this below.
And now over to Search Console.
Google Search Console is a fantastic way
of finding out how your website is doing with regards to Google
Search.
After verifying your website there,
you can get lots of information.
For example, where and how are people finding your website?
Are there any issues you could resolve to make
your site easier to find?
All of that and more.
Last time, we talked about regex.
That functionality was so well received
that the team expanded on it and has recently
launched negative regex.
It gives you all of the information
that doesn't match what you provided,
and that's a positive thing.
For example, you could use a regex
to cover all variations of your brand's name,
and then see all queries that didn't mention the name.
This is a way of splitting branded search
terms from unbranded.
So plus one for negative regex, if you ask me.
Then we recently launched Search Console insights.
Search Console and Google Analytics
give a fantastic amount of information,
but it can be a bit too much if you
don't have time to regularly understand what it all means.
Search Console insights distills this information down
and give site owners a nice and easy overview
of what's been happening with regards to their site.
If you work as an SEO or for an agency,
this is a neat way of helping any less savvy site
owners to see how your work has helped their site.
It's still super fresh, so I'd recommend checking it out.
Think about how you might use it,
and point folks there who don't want to research numbers
in the mountains of data in Search Console and Analytics.
Let's move on to RSS.
RSS is the name of a specially formatted XML file, or feed.
It's commonly used for syndicating information.
It's been traditionally used to provide information
about new blog posts and articles to subscribers.
Some might say RSS is not new, but it was recently
mentioned at Google I/O, the big Google developer conference,
so let's take a brief look.
We use RSS feeds similarly to [INAUDIBLE] files
to help us optimize our crawling,
and to make sure we don't miss any updates on a website.
This remains unchanged.
Additionally, at I/O, we mentioned
that we're going to start using them
in the context of a follow button in Chrome.
This would allow users to receive updates
from your website directly in their browsers.
This is independent of Search.
This Chrome experiment will first be visible in English
in the US in Chrome on Android.
If your website is already producing RSS feeds,
you may already be prepared.
As usual, these feeds should be linked
from the head of your pages.
One aspect to mention is that the title of your feed
may be visible to users, so it's a good practice
to check that it's a useful representation of what
the feed provides.
To speed up delivery of updates, we
recommend using WebSub, which we also support for Search.
I'm curious to see how this works out.
I hope we have more news to share on this
once it expands from the experimental stages.
Woo, so many things to think about when
it comes to making websites.
If you're just getting started on SEO
or if you're keen on diving into specific topics,
I recently ran across a fantastic website
by Aleyda Solis which can help you out.
It's called learningseo.io.
It's an amazingly comprehensive way
of getting an overview of all of the information already
published about SEO.
You can find a learning path that works for you,
or just be amazed at how many fantastic articles folks
have written on certain topics.
Aleyda does a fantastic job of curating
this, so the information you find there
will be useful and relevant.
I recommend bookmarking that and checking
in when you're keen on working yourself
into another facet of SEO.
And now for a bunch of smaller updates.
The latest core update was announced early June,
and there's another plan for July.
These are updates to the core of our Search systems,
so you may see changes in how your site is shown in Search.
We have a blog post with more information
about these updates, which I'll link to below.
Google I/O took place at the end of May.
There were lots of sessions with videos.
You can find them all on the Google I/O website.
At I/O, we also announced MUM and other machine learning
technologies.
SEOs have asked if this is the end of SEO.
The shorter answer is no.
These modern tools make it easier for you to do your jobs,
and the specific activities will evolve.
For example, there will be less, fewer,
or reduced need to include all possible synonyms,
or words that mean the same or similar.
We recently launched a shared location
for all content policies around Search.
This should make it easier for you to find any specific policy
that you're looking for.
And then, we recently unlaunched the generic rich results search
appearance type in Search Console.
This makes it a bit easier for you
to focus on the bigger picture.
And last, but definitely not least, we're doing a survey.
You should find a link right here.
The survey is about our video content,
and I'd really appreciate to hear from you to find out
more about what we could do to better support
you and your work.
That's all for now, folks.
Thank you for watching this episode.
It always feels good to me to look back at the last two
months and pull together the things that really stood out.
I hope you found it useful and insightful as well.
If there are elements you'd like to have covered differently,
please let me know in the comments
below or drop me a note on Twitter.
Looking around, it seems like summer is finally coming.
Well, at least on this side of the planet.
While it's impossible to know for sure,
it feels like things are also slowly getting
a little bit better in terms of the coronavirus.
I hope the outlook is looking positive for you, your family,
and those around you as well.
If you'd like to see more of these episodes,
make sure to subscribe to the channel.
We're regularly publishing new videos here.
I'm sure there's something coming up which
you'll appreciate as well.
And, as always, I look forward to seeing you all again
in one of the future episodes of "Google Search News."
Bye.
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