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JOHN MUELLER: Hi, everyone, and welcome
to the first "Google Search News."
I hope life is treating you well, wherever you are.
I'm your host today, John Mueller, here
from Google Zurich in mostly sunny 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'd like to stay up-to-date,
make sure to subscribe to the channel.
Today, we'll be covering Search Console, changes
in nofollow links, some new meta tags to watch out for,
and a bit more.
Google Webmaster Tools--
I mean Search Console--
made a big step towards moving over
to their new interface recently.
Search Console is a free tool that gives webmasters and site
owners information on how Google Search interacts
with their websites.
The most visible change is that the old home page and dashboard
are now replaced with a new one.
This is a big step for the team and allows
them to focus more on interesting new features
for the millions of websites that use these tools.
We haven't moved everything over yet,
and some legacy features are still
linked from the new Search Console for now.
But stay tuned.
Search Console will continue to evolve.
In other news, there's been a change in the Webmaster Office
Hours.
The Webmaster Office Hours are a way for anyone
to chat with a Google employee about their website and Google
Search.
Let's take a quick look at how it works now.
First, we introduced new sessions about a week
beforehand on the YouTube community page,
as well as in the event calendar.
For each session, you can leave questions
that you'd like to cover directly as comments
and vote on other questions.
Once the session starts, we'll add the link to the live video
conference as a comment, and you're
welcome to join in person to ask, elaborate,
or just discuss.
These sessions are recorded, and the recording's
added to our YouTube channel afterwards.
Everyone is welcome to join.
15 years ago, we introduced the rel=nofollow attribute
on links.
The web has evolved significantly since then.
So recently, we gave it a bit of a revamp and expanded it.
Google announced two new attributes for outbound links.
These are rel=sponsored and rel=ugc.
The first, rel=sponsored, is for advertisements, sponsorships,
and the like.
The other, rel=ugc, is for links created by your users
in user-generated content.
All of these are considered hints for ranking purposes.
Starting March, 2020, we'll also be treating these as hints
to help us discover new pages.
This helps us to better understand the web overall.
Existing sites don't need to make any changes,
but being clearer with rel=ugc and rel=sponsored is an option.
If you're unclear about which attribute best fits,
drop by the Webmaster Help Forum.
Recently, Google changed when review stars
are shown in Search results.
The change has two parts.
First, review-rich results are only
shown for certain types of items where reviews really
make sense.
Additionally, if a local business, organization,
or subtype of these includes reviews about itself
on its own website, those would not be shown in Search.
This includes both reviews a business collects itself,
as well as those from third-party providers
that are embedded with widgets.
Reviews about other supported items
continue to be shown as before.
Curious to find out more?
Check out the blog post link below.
On September 24, Google announced a set
of new meta tags that give publishers globally the ability
to express preference regarding how much of their page's
content is shown as a preview in search results.
In particular, there are meta tags
that let you specify how many characters may be shown
in a text snippet, whether and how large an image
preview may be, and how long a video preview may be shown.
Additionally, there's an HTML attribute
that can be used to restrict parts of text
from being shown as a preview.
We call it the data-nosnippet attribute.
That feature will become available later this year.
Next to these, our documentation goes into how AMP pages
and how structured data may be shown in search.
I'll link to the documentation in the description below.
In other news, we've been holding a number of webmaster
conferences worldwide, in places like Kuala Lumpur, Bali, Ho Chi
Minh City, and Sapporo, Japan, with more locations lined up.
These events are made for local webmasters
and generally run by Googlers from offices close by.
If you see one nearby, feel free to register and say hi.
That's all for now, folks.
And now, onto the weather.
Well, it's autumn here now, so there's a bit of sun
and a bit of cloudiness.
So whether it'll be a nice day is hard to say.
I guess you could say, it depends.
But stay tuned for the next weather report
and, of course, "Google Search News," coming to you
in a few weeks' time.