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 been a while since we last saw each other.
There's been so much keeping us busy lately,
which is why it's good to have these videos from time to time.
In this episode, we'll be covering
an update of the page experience ranking change, video best
practices, search console, and more.
So without further ado, let's dive right in.
Starting us off is the page experience change.
As you may recall, this is an upcoming ranking change,
which takes into account the user experience on web pages.
It includes technical elements like HTTPS,
as well as quantifiable metrics for speed and responsiveness.
We just published some additional information
on this change.
Here are a few highlights.
First off, you have more time.
We moved the start of the rollout to mid-June.
The change will take place slowly
over the course of two months on a per page basis.
This gives you a bit more time to improve your website
before things start off.
And to be clear, this is just one of many factors
that our systems take into account.
There's no need to do a scramble.
Take the time to find good solutions for your websites
and your users.
Every website is a bit different.
The core web vitals part of the ranking factor
is based on real user metrics, which
take a while to be collected, and which are automatically
updated over time.
Making improvements at any point will be reflected there.
A website doesn't need to be, and rarely is,
perfect from the start.
You'll start to see positive results as your pages pass
the needs improvement mark.
We also plan on using these factors
for the Top Stories carousel, and within Google News.
Additionally, signed exchanges will
be available for all web pages.
In short, signed exchanges is a setup
that enables Google Search to prefetch your pages
in a privacy preserving way to make the experience
for your users even better.
There are a lot of details in the blog post, and even
more answers in an FAQ post in our Help forum.
I'll link to these below.
Wow, so much information about this particular search change.
I hope it's not too much, but let
me know if there's something we should cover more.
Luckily, there are also folks outside of Google
who are fantastic at explaining some of the technical details
and practical aspects.
For example, recently I saw an amazing guide
on Cumulative Layout Shift, or CLS,
which is a part of the Core Web Vitals.
It includes explanations about the metric, different ways
to measure it, and a bunch of really practical tips on how
to improve your pages for it.
The guide was written by Jess Peck,
and I'll link to it in the description as well.
Next up-- and it almost feels a bit recursive
to talk in a video about a video about videos.
Anyway, here's an update on video best practices.
Video is a fantastic way of reaching people,
and it doesn't even need to be a news video like this one.
We've been improving how videos are shown in search results.
To help your site to take advantage of these changes,
we've updated and expanded our documentation
on video best practices.
This includes a video from Danielle,
who actually works on the video search team here at Google.
Wow.
In the updated documentation, you
can learn how to help Google to find your videos for indexing.
Additionally, you can learn about ways
to express how you'd like your videos to be highlighted
in search.
If you've been including videos in your web pages,
you may already be aware of some of these things.
Regardless, I strongly recommend double checking
to make sure you're using all the available features
to your best advantage.
And of course, if you haven't been
making videos for your web pages,
perhaps it's worth giving it a shot.
Now over to our evergreen topic, Google Search Console.
Search Console is a way of finding out
how your website is doing with regards to Google Search.
Where, and how, are people finding your website?
Are there issues holding your site back?
There's much more though.
To get started, just verify ownership of your site's domain
name.
Within Search Console, we recently added regex support
in the performance report.
With regex-- some people mistakenly call it regex--
you can enter patterns instead of words for matching.
You can use it for the search queries, as well as
the pages shown in the report.
It's been one of the most requested features for Search
Console, so it's cool to see it here now.
Additionally, we've added a special report
for the page experience update which covers
all of the elements involved.
At a glance, you can see how your site is doing.
In particular, how many pages are
seen as reaching the fairly high threshold of good
across the metrics, how the site is
doing in terms of mobile usability,
and all of the other aspects of the page experience factor.
This is the first time we've put together
such a comprehensive report for a specific ranking change,
and we hope it makes it easier for you to improve
your website for your users.
That's almost it.
But wait, there's a bit more to mention.
For example, the web creators team at Google
has been busy making lots of content
for all of the amazing folks, like you perhaps,
who regularly create content of their own for the web.
This includes, but isn't limited to bloggers, for example.
The team has created videos and articles
to help with complex topics like monetization
and better understanding of your audience.
Similarly, on this channel, we've
started a series on sustainable monetized websites
where we cover other aspects of monetization.
In particular, explaining how to take into
account the various policies and guidelines that apply.
Finally, also on this channel, we've
been actively publishing Search Central Lightning Talk videos.
These are short videos on specific topics,
similar to how we might present them at events.
Physical events are not taking place for now,
so we hope these tide you over.
They cover important topics, and hopefully make
it a bit easier for you to be successful on the web.
And on the topic of events, I also wanted
to call out Google I/O. It's taking place mid-May,
and will be held virtually.
There are lots of sessions, including some live Ask Me
Anything slots.
I'm sure it'll be neat, so make sure to register ahead of time.
And that's all for now, folks.
Thank you for watching this episode.
It always feels good to me to look back and pull together
the things that really stood out.
I hope you find it useful and insightful as well.
If there are elements you'd like to have covered differently,
then please let us know in the comments
below, or drop me a note on Twitter.
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 the Google Search News.
Bye, everyone.
[BEEP]
Within Search Console, we recently added reg--
regex support.
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Reg-- regex.
Rejects?
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With regex, which some people mistakenly call regex--
[BEEP]
With regex, some people mistaken--
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This is going to be terrible.
[BEEP]
It's regex.
Rej-ex.
[BEEP]
OK, I need to stop here.