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JOHN MUELLER: Hi, everyone, and welcome back
to the "Google Search News" series.
I hope life is treating you reasonably well wherever
you are.
I'm your host today, John Mueller, here from 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 two months since our last update.
So without further ado, let's take a look
at what's new and interesting in the world of Google Search.
Today, we'll take a look at Google Webmaster--
um, Google Search Central, Search Console,
and we'll be catching up on other stories,
plus a bunch more.
Off we go.
We recently changed the name of our work
to connect site owners to Google Search from Google Webmasters
over to Google Search Central.
Fewer and fewer people identify as webmasters,
and it's hard to focus on just one particular role given
all of the people who help make websites
successful through search.
The name change includes our social channels,
in particular our Twitter account and, of course,
this YouTube channel.
With this change, we're also taking the vast amount
of content available for site owners regarding search
and both migrating it to a central location
and improving it for the new context.
This includes many articles from the Search Console Help Center
as well as thousands of posts on the webmaster blogs
across 13 languages.
Moving the blogs also helps make the localized versions
of posts easier accessible, which is fantastic
news for the large parts of the world that don't speak English.
This has been a gigantic undertaking,
and there's still much more left to be
done between moving the content, updating it, and localizing
it all.
To help us, our Googlebot mascot has gotten a cute little
sidekick-- a spider.
We don't have a name yet for this spider,
but perhaps you have a suggestion.
Let us know in the comments below.
Unrelated to our name change, there's
also a new team at Google who is busy
creating content for all of those who love and work
on the web--
the Web Creators team.
You can find them on the Google blog, on Twitter, YouTube,
and even on Instagram.
Woo-hoo!
Go, Web Creators!
Moving on to Search Console.
One of the updates from Search Console
is that we've temporarily had to disable some functionality
in the URL Inspection tool.
In particular, this affects the ability
to request indexing for URLs directly for Google Search.
We're currently working on the infrastructure
behind this feature to help make it more
robust for you and your site.
We realize it can be frustrating when
you want to make updates as quickly as possible in search.
So we hope to have this back for you soon.
In the meantime, we strongly recommend
using the usual methods for helping search engines find
and index your content.
This includes making sure that your website is correctly
accessible, that it links prominently to new pages,
and that you use site maps to let us know
about updates automatically.
Even when the request indexing feature is back again,
we strongly recommend using these methods
for normal website updates since they
are scalable and automatic.
We briefly talked about two other stories
in previous episodes, and I'd like to give you
short updates there.
On Web Stories, we're starting to see some fantastic
content being created, which is being highlighted in Search
and now in Discover as well.
If you use WordPress, definitely check out
the updated Web Stories plugin, which
makes creating nice stories extremely easy.
We've been updating this plugin over time,
so it's worth trying it out again
if you used it in the past.
Also for Web Stories, the Web Creators YouTube channel
recently published a video on how
to best do SEO for Web Stories.
Remember, Web Stories are also normal HTML pages.
So everything you might have learned about SEO
applies there too.
I've added the links to the description below.
And then there is Core Web Vitals and the page experience
ranking factor.
We talked about these previously as well.
The update here is that there is now
a date for when this factor will be active in Google Search,
namely May 2021.
This still gives you lots of time.
But being quick and making your site fast
will, of course, benefit your users.
So don't put it off for too long.
As an aside, someone outside of Google
recently compiled a spreadsheet with lots of tools for Core Web
Vitals as well as some case studies
that could be useful in getting this work prioritized.
It's linked below as well.
And now for a short update on events.
There haven't been any in-person events, obviously,
but online events can be useful too.
Here's a sample of some of the events
you might be interested in reading up on or watching
videos about.
Search On-- every year, we make thousands
of improvements to Google from advancing our ability
to understand language to new features that organize
information in useful ways.
The Search On Livestream has some interesting news
on how Google uses advances in technology
to improve Google Search.
Check out the blog posts and videos link below,
in particular the new hour-long video on how search works,
which is long and insightful.
The NewsGeist virtual event--
the Google News team held an interesting event
full of discussions and deep dives
on a variety of topics involving news websites.
If you're keen on news about news,
be sure to check out their YouTube channel, which
has a lot of the recordings.
While on the subject of videos, we've also
been busy here on this channel.
Just to mention a few, we have videos
on doing SEO for e-commerce sites or even for governments.
If you use JavaScript, there's a video
on SEO for single-page apps.
Some of the names have changed with the rebranding.
For example, we now have AskGooglebot
instead of AskGoogleWebmasters.
On the podcast side, we've released a number of episodes,
including one with our tech writer
who managed the big site migration as well as one
with someone who works with the Web Stories
plug-in for WordPress.
Meeting people in podcast format who work on things
you also work with can be quite fun.
We've all been working from home for months now.
So you'd think we'd be used to it by now.
Ha.
Well, at least for me and maybe for you as well,
these times are still hard.
With the holiday season coming up,
it's not going to get any easier.
But hang in there.
I have a feeling things will get better next year.
If you'd like to chat about search in the meantime,
feel free to drop by in one of our office hour sessions.
In any case, I hope you, your family, friends, and co-workers
are all doing as well as possible
given the circumstances.
And that's all for now, folks.
Thank you for joining us here.
If you'd like to see more of these episodes,
make sure to subscribe to the channel.
If you have any questions or comments,
feel free to add them right here or reach out to us on Twitter.
I look forward to seeing you all again
in one of the future episodes of "Google Search News."
Bye.
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