DANIEL WAISBERG: Hi, I'm Daniel Waisberg,
search advocate at Google.
HILLEL MAOZ: And I'm Hillel Maoz, engineering lead
for Search Console.
DANIEL WAISBERG: First of all, thanks for joining me today,
Hillel.
HILLEL MAOZ: Thank you, Daniel.
DANIEL WAISBERG: This is the very last episode
of the Search Console training series.
And we are going into the bits and bytes of the product.
And who better than you to talk about it?
HILLEL MAOZ: Sure, Daniel, always
great to chat about what we do and how we do it.
DANIEL WAISBERG: Today we'll talk
about what happens under the hood in Search Console.
We'll focus on two areas, how Search Console actually works
and how it fits into the search ecosystem
and how we think about features and go about building them.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
HILLEL MAOZ: Before we go into the nuts and bolts of Search
Console, it's important to say out loud
what the team is trying to accomplish.
Our mission is to provide data and tools
to help site owners improve their websites
and optimize their appearance on Google.
The product extracts important, relevant information
from Google Search internal systems,
reports it to site owners, and enables
them to improve their website performance on Google.
Now, you may be asking yourself, what exactly is the search
ecosystem?
Daniel, can you take that one?
DANIEL WAISBERG: Sure.
First, there's the web, where millions of websites
publish content all the time, including you,
watching this video right now.
Second, there is Google, which crawls the web,
finds content, and stores it in the Google index.
It extracts all the relevant information from every page
so that it can retrieve the best results for user queries
on the Google Search results page.
And third, there are Search users looking for answers
and navigating from Search results
to their desired web pages.
Search Console is the main communication channel
between Google Search and site owners--
basically, you.
The tool provides information on how
your site performs on Search.
And it provides technical information
on potential issues Google found in your pages.
From working together with the team for some time now,
I know they're always monitoring Google internal systems
and data sets for important website information.
They're also tightly integrated with other Google Search teams
to make sure Search Console is ready for new features.
And of course, we keep our ears open to learn
what are your needs.
There are numerous reports and features on Search Console.
We organize them into three main groups.
The Search Analytics group displays all the relevant user
activity data related to website performance in Google Search.
The Reporting group focuses on helping
you track issues, debug, and validate fixes
on specific pages or entire websites.
The Configuration group manages site and user configurations
as well as alert settings.
Hillel, can you give us a little more information
about each of those groups?
HILLEL MAOZ: Sure, Daniel.
The Search Analytics group is the part
of the team that works on retrieving and reporting data
from our internal systems about users' clicks and impressions
on Search results.
There are billions of search results every day.
We process that information and store data
for every site for a period of 16 months.
This information is mainly surfaced
through the performance reports, where you can slice and dice
the data to learn more about patterns and anomalies
in your Google Search traffic.
The Reporting group is the part of Search Console
that surfaces how your pages are seen by Google Search.
For example, is Google finding all your pages?
Are there any errors that prevented Google
from crawling your pages?
Are there issues with your structured data implementation?
Google crawls pages from millions of domains.
It looks for hundreds of signals supporting
dozens of search features, such as AMP, recipes, and FAQs.
The information is available through actionable reports that
help you debug, fix, and inform Google to start a validation
process for pages you just fixed.
We also offer testing tools to enable
you to trigger the entire Search stack for any given URL.
For example, when you type a URL in inspect URL
or the rich results test, we run a simulation of the Google
index and give you the information
we find with high fidelity.
This enables site owners to debug any URL on their site
easily and effectively.
Accounts is the group responsible for managing
site and user configurations.
Their primary goal is to help site owners verify their sites
and get access to their accounts,
and of course, to prevent anyone that
is not site owner to see your Search Console information.
This group also handles all the emails
that you receive from Search Console.
They do that for dozens of other types
across all the different reports,
making sure you never miss an important change or update.
DANIEL WAISBERG: Well, now that we know how the Search Console
team is organized, let's talk a little bit
about how the team developed the reporting tools that you use.
The process can be roughly divided into three main steps.
I know.
It's the third time in this video
that we've grouped something in threes.
Coincidence?
Maybe.
The first step is to define what can
help a page succeed on Search.
We check that Google crawls the pages
and gets all the content the site wants to share with us.
For example, for topics such as mobile friendliness, core web
vitals, or structured data, we define all the signals
that can validate their implementation in every page.
That leads us to the second step,
which is to build a pipeline to go
over all the pages in the index periodically and classy them
against the signals.
If we find that a page fails for a specific website,
we collect all the relevant details such as the reason
the page couldn't be crawled, or why
we're unable to use its structured data.
And finally, the third step is to build reports
to share this information with you using the Search Console
interface, which is where you can see
this information for your site.
For a complete picture, we publish dedicated documentation
articles where users can learn about these new reports
and better understand the information being displayed.
Keep in mind that Google is always evolving.
So new opportunities to shine on search arise frequently.
Our job as a team is to keep up with these changes
and build an effective way for you
to leverage new and existing Search features to the fullest.
HILLEL MAOZ: Daniel, before we forget,
there's one last point to discuss before we part.
The team is always looking for feedback
from the Search community.
You are a valuable source of information
to help drive product strategy and improve Search Console.
If you have feedback, make sure to submit it
through the product, or mention us on Twitter.
DANIEL WAISBERG: Thank you so much for joining us today,
Hillel.
And thanks for all the work you and your team put into this.
It's helping lots of websites succeed on Search.
Hopefully now you will understand a bit more
about how and why the Search Console team builds
features in the product.
If you liked this video, make sure to check out
the Search Console training series in our YouTube channel.
You'll love it.
Stay tuned.
HILLEL MAOZ: Oh, I just realized, the holidays
are coming.
Are you doing anything, Daniel?
DANIEL WAISBERG: No, not much.
But I'll definitely take some time to rest a bit.
This year was challenging, to say the least.
HILLEL MAOZ: True.
So let's take this opportunity to wish the SEO
community a wonderful holiday season
and a happy, peaceful, and healthy new year.
DANIEL WAISBERG: Here's to a great 2021.