Continuing to make the web more mobile friendly
Getting good, relevant answers when you search shouldn’t depend on what device you’re using. You should get the best answer possible, whether you’re on a phone, desktop or tablet. Last year, we started using mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal on mobile searches. Today we’re announcing that beginning in May, we’ll start rolling out an update to mobile search results that increases the effect of the ranking signal to help our users find even more pages that are relevant and mobile-friendly.
If you’ve already made your site mobile-friendly, you will not be impacted by this update. If you need support with your mobile-friendly site, we recommend checking out the Mobile-Friendly Test and the Webmaster Mobile Guide, both of which provide guidance on how to improve your mobile site. And remember, the intent of the search query is still a very strong signal — so even if a page with high quality content is not mobile-friendly, it could still rank well if it has great, relevant content.
If you have any questions, please go to the Webmaster help forum.
Posted by Klemen Kloboves, Software Engineer
AMP NewsLab Office Hours in your language
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is a global, industry-wide initiative, with publishers large and small all focused on the same goal: a better, faster mobile web.
We’ve had a great response to our English language AMP office hours, but we know that English isn’t everyone’s native language.
For the next two weeks, we’re rolling out a new series of office hours in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, and Indonesian and invite everyone to learn about AMP in their native language. Product Managers, Technical Managers, & Engineers at Google, will get to speak in their native tongue, and answer any questions you may have on AMP.
First we will reintroduce you to AMP and how it works, before diving into the technical specs and various components of AMP. You can add your questions via the Q and A app on the event pages below, and we will answer them during the office hours. You can also watch them on the News Lab YouTube page after the event.
Check out the lineup below and join the discussion.
- French
- Introduction to AMP – Mar. 7 @ 1700 CET with Cecile Pruvost, Industry Manager
- AMP Anatomy – Mar. 14 @ 1700 CET with Emeric Studer, Technology Manager
- Italian
- Introduction to AMP – Mar. 8 @ 1500 CET with Luca Forlin Head of International Play Newsstand Partnerships
- AMP Anatomy – Mar. 15 @ 1500 CET with Flavio Palandri Antonelli, AMP Software Engineer
- German
- Introduction to AMP – Mar. 9 @ 1700 CET with Nadine Gerspacher, Partner Development Manager
- AMP Anatomy – Mar. 18 @ 1600 CET with Paul Bakaus, Developer Advocate
- Spanish
- Introduction to AMP – Mar. 9 @ 1430 CET with Demian Renzulli, Technical Solutions Consultant
- AMP Anatomy – Mar. 16 @ 1430 CET with Julian Toledo, Developer Advocate
- Brazilian Portuguese
- Introduction to AMP – Mar. 10 @ 1430 BRT with Carol Soler, Strategic Partner Manager
- AMP Anatomy – Mar. 17 @ 1430 BRT with Breno Araújo, Technology Manager
- Russian
- Introduction to AMP & AMP Anatomy – Mar. 10 @ 1500 MSK with Natasha Rostovtceva, Strategic Partner Manager & Boris Farber, Developer Advocate
- Japanese
- Introduction to AMP – Mar. 15 @ 1800 JST with Duncan Wright, Strategic Partner Manager
- Indonesian
- Introduction to AMP – Mar. 10 @ 1400 WIB with Rica Handayani, Strategic Partner Manager
Posted by Tomo Taylor, AMP Community Manager
AMP error report preview in Search Console
More and more sites are implementing Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) for news content, so we’ve decided to provide a preview of error reports in Search Console to help you get ready for the upcoming official AMP launch and get early feedback from you. Y…
Updating Our Search Quality Rating Guidelines
Developing algorithmic changes to search involves a process of experimentation. Part of that experimentation is having evaluators—people who assess the quality of Google’s search results—give us feedback on our experiments. Ratings from evaluators do not determine individual site rankings, but are used help us understand our experiments. The evaluators base their ratings on guidelines we give them; the guidelines reflect what Google thinks search users want.
In 2013, we published our human rating guidelines to provide transparency on how Google works and to help webmasters understand what Google looks for in web pages. Since that time, a lot has changed: notably, more people have smartphones than ever before and more searches are done on mobile devices today than on computers.
We often make changes to the guidelines as our understanding of what users wants evolves, but we haven’t shared an update publicly since then. However, we recently completed a major revision of our rater guidelines to adapt to this mobile world, recognizing that people use search differently when they carry internet-connected devices with them all the time. You can find that update here (PDF).
This is not the final version of our rater guidelines. The guidelines will continue to evolve as search, and how people use it, changes. We won’t be updating the public document with every change, but we will try to publish big changes to the guidelines periodically.
We expect our phones and other devices to do a lot, and we want Google to continue giving users the answers they’re looking for—fast!
Posted by Mimi Underwood, Sr. Program Manager, Search Growth & Analysis
An update on how we tackle hacked spam
Recently we have started rolling out a series of algorithmic changes that aim to tackle hacked spam in our search results. A huge amount of legitimate sites are hacked by spammers and used to engage in abusive behavior, such as malware download, promotion of traffic to low quality sites, porn, and marketing of counterfeit goods or illegal pharmaceutical drugs, etc.
Website owners that don’t implement standard best practices for security can leave their websites vulnerable to being easily hacked. This can include government sites, universities, small business, company websites, restaurants, hobby organizations, conferences, etc. Spammers and cyber-criminals purposely seek out those sites and inject pages with malicious content in an attempt to gain rank and traffic in search engines.
We are aggressively targeting hacked spam in order to protect users and webmasters.
The algorithmic changes will eventually impact roughly 5% of queries, depending on the language. As we roll out the new algorithms, users might notice that for certain queries, only the most relevant results are shown, reducing the number of results shown:
This is due to the large amount of hacked spam being removed, and should improve in the near future. We are continuing tuning our systems to weed out the bad content while retaining the organic, legitimate results. If you have any questions about these changes, or want to give us feedback on these algorithms, feel free to drop by our Webmaster Help Forums.
Posted by Ning Song, Software Engineer
Surfacing content from iOS apps in Google Search
We’ve been helping users discover relevant content from Android apps in Google search results for a while now. Starting today, we’re bringing App Indexing to iOS apps as well. This means users on both Android and iOS will be able to open mobile app content straight from Google Search.
Indexed links from an initial group of apps we’ve been working with will begin appearing on iOS in search results both in the Google App and Chrome for signed-in users globally in the coming weeks:
How to get your iOS app indexed
While App Indexing for iOS is launching with a small group of test partners initially, we’re working to make this technology available to more app developers as soon as possible. In the meantime, here are the steps to get a head start on App Indexing for iOS:
- Add deep linking support to your iOS app.
- Make sure it’s possible to return to Search results with one click.
- Provide deep link annotations on your site.
- Let us know you’re interested. Keep in mind that expressing interest does not automatically guarantee getting app deep links in iOS search results.
If you happen to be attending Google I/O this week, stop by our talk titled “Get your app in the Google index” to learn more about App Indexing. You’ll also find detailed documentation on App Indexing for iOS at g.co/AppIndexing. If you’ve got more questions, drop by our Webmaster help forum.
Posted by Eli Wald, Product Manager
Finding more mobile-friendly search results
Webmaster level: all
When it comes to search on mobile devices, users should get the most relevant and timely results, no matter if the information lives on mobile-friendly web pages or apps. As more people use mobile devices to access the internet, our algorithms have to adapt to these usage patterns. In the past, we’ve made updates to ensure a site is configured properly and viewable on modern devices. We’ve made it easier for users to find mobile-friendly web pages and we’ve introduced App Indexing to surface useful content from apps. Today, we’re announcing two important changes to help users discover more mobile-friendly content:
1. More mobile-friendly websites in search results
Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices.
To get help with making a mobile-friendly site, check out our guide to mobile-friendly sites. If you’re a webmaster, you can get ready for this change by using the following tools to see how Googlebot views your pages:
- If you want to test a few pages, you can use the Mobile-Friendly Test.
- If you have a site, you can use your Webmaster Tools account to get a full list of mobile usability issues across your site using the Mobile Usability Report.
2. More relevant app content in search results
Starting today, we will begin to use information from indexed apps as a factor in ranking for signed-in users who have the app installed. As a result, we may now surface content from indexed apps more prominently in search. To find out how to implement App Indexing, which allows us to surface this information in search results, have a look at our step-by-step guide on the developer site.
If you have questions about either mobile-friendly websites or app indexing, we’re always happy to chat in our Webmaster Help Forum.
Posted by Takaki Makino, Chaesang Jung, and Doantam Phan
An improved search box within the search results
Webmaster level: All
Today you’ll see a new and improved sitelinks search box. When shown, it will make it easier for users to reach specific content on your site, directly through your own site-search pages.
What’s this search box and when does it appear for my site?
When users search for a company by name—for example, [Megadodo Publications] or [Dunder Mifflin]—they may actually be looking for something specific on that website. In the past, when our algorithms recognized this, they’d display a larger set of sitelinks and an additional search box below that search result, which let users do site: searches over the site straight from the results, for example [site:example.com hitchhiker guides].
This search box is now more prominent (above the sitelinks), supports Autocomplete, and—if you use the right markup—will send the user directly to your website’s own search pages.
How can I mark up my site?
You need to have a working site-specific search engine for your site. If you already have one, you can let us know by marking up your homepage as a schema.org/WebSite entity with the potentialAction property of the schema.org/SearchAction markup. You can use JSON-LD, microdata, or RDFa to do this; check out the full implementation details on our developer site.
If you implement the markup on your site, users will have the ability to jump directly from the sitelinks search box to your site’s search results page. If we don’t find any markup, we’ll show them a Google search results page for the corresponding site: query, as we’ve done until now.
As always, if you have questions, feel free to ask in our Webmaster Help forum.
Posted by Mariya Moeva, Webmaster Trends Analyst, and Kaylin Spitz, Software Engineer
HTTPS as a ranking signal
Webmaster level: all
Security is a top priority for Google. We invest a lot in making sure that our services use industry-leading security, like strong HTTPS encryption by default. That means that people using Search, Gmail and Google Drive, for example, automatically have a secure connection to Google.
Beyond our own stuff, we’re also working to make the Internet safer more broadly. A big part of that is making sure that websites people access from Google are secure. For instance, we have created resources to help webmasters prevent and fix security breaches on their sites.
We want to go even further. At Google I/O a few months ago, we called for “HTTPS everywhere” on the web.
We’ve also seen more and more webmasters adopting HTTPS (also known as HTTP over TLS, or Transport Layer Security), on their website, which is encouraging.
For these reasons, over the past few months we’ve been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algorithms. We’ve seen positive results, so we’re starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal. For now it’s only a very lightweight signal — affecting fewer than 1% of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content — while we give webmasters time to switch to HTTPS. But over time, we may decide to strengthen it, because we’d like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web.
In the coming weeks, we’ll publish detailed best practices (we’ll add a link to it from here) to make TLS adoption easier, and to avoid common mistakes. Here are some basic tips to get started:
- Decide the kind of certificate you need: single, multi-domain, or wildcard certificate
- Use 2048-bit key certificates
- Use relative URLs for resources that reside on the same secure domain
- Use protocol relative URLs for all other domains
- Check out our Site move article for more guidelines on how to change your website’s address
- Don’t block your HTTPS site from crawling using robots.txt
- Allow indexing of your pages by search engines where possible. Avoid the noindex robots meta tag.
If your website is already serving on HTTPS, you can test its security level and configuration with the Qualys Lab tool. If you are concerned about TLS and your site’s performance, have a look at Is TLS fast yet?. And of course, if you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to post in our Webmaster Help Forums.
We hope to see more websites using HTTPS in the future. Let’s all make the web more secure!
Posted by Zineb Ait Bahajji and Gary Illyes, Webmaster Trends Analysts
Android app indexing is now open for everyone!
Webmaster level: All
Do you have an Android app in addition to your website? You can now connect the two so that users searching from their smartphones and tablets can easily find and reach your app content.
App deep links in search results help your users find your content more easily and re-engage with your app after they’ve installed it. As a site owner, you can show your users the right content at the right time — by connecting pages of your website to the relevant parts of your app you control when your users are directed to your app and when they go to your website.
Hundreds of apps have already implemented app indexing. This week at Google I/O, we’re announcing a set of new features that will make it even easier to set up deep links in your app, connect your site to your app, and keep track of performance and potential errors.
Getting started is easy
We’ve greatly simplified the process to get your app deep links indexed. If your app supports HTTP deep linking schemes, here’s what you need to do:
- Add deep link support to your app
- Connect your site and your app
- There is no step 3 (:
As we index your URLs, we’ll discover and index the app / site connections and may begin to surface app deep links in search results.
We can discover and index your app deep links on our own, but we recommend you publish the deep links. This is also the case if your app only supports a custom deep link scheme. You publish them in one of two ways:
- Insert a rel=alternate elment in the section of each web page, or in your sitemap to specify app URIs. Find out how to implement these methods on our developer site.
- Use the App indexing API
There’s one more thing: we’ve added a new feature in Webmaster Tools to help you debug any issues that might arise during indexing app pages. It will show you what type of errors we’ve detected for the app page-web page pairs, together with example app URIs so you can debug:
We’ll also give you detailed instructions on how to debug each issue, including a QR code for the app deep links, so you can easily open them on your phone or tablet. We’ll send you Webmaster Tools error notifications as well, so you can keep up to date.
Give app indexing a spin, and as always, if you need more help ask questions on the Webmaster help forum.
Posted by Mariya Moeva, Webmaster Trends Analyst
7 Things I Wish Execs Knew About Link Building
Whether it’s your CMO, your client or your client’s boss, we’ve all worked with someone who just doesn’t quite get search. And that’s OK. We can’t expect everyone to understand the intricacies behind what goes into that No. 1 ranking. SEO is easy in theory, but…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
App Indexing updates
Webmaster Level: Advanced
In October, we announced guidelines for App Indexing for deep linking directly from Google Search results to your Android app. Thanks to all of you that have expressed interest. We’ve just enabled 20+ additional applications that users will soon see app deep links for in Search Results, and starting today we’re making app deep links to English content available globally.
We’re continuing to onboard more publishers in all languages. If you haven’t added deep link support to your Android app or specified these links on your website or in your Sitemaps, please do so and then notify us by filling out this form.
Here are some best practices to consider when adding deep links to your sitemap or website:
- App deep links should only be included for canonical web URLs.
- Remember to specify an app deep link for your homepage.
- Not all website URLs in a Sitemap need to have a corresponding app deep link. Do not include app deep links that aren’t supported by your app.
- If you are a news site and use News Sitemaps, be sure to include your deep link annotations in the News Sitemaps, as well as your general Sitemaps.
- Don’t provide annotations for deep links that execute native ARM code. This enables app indexing to work for all platforms
When Google indexes content from your app, your app will need to make HTTP requests that it usually makes under normal operation. These requests will appear to your servers as originating from Googlebot. Therefore, your server’s robots.txt file must be configured properly to allow these requests.
Finally, please make sure the back button behavior of your app leads directly back to the search results page.
For more details on implementation, visit our updated developer guidelines. And, as always, you can ask questions on the mobile section of our webmaster forum.
Posted by Michael Xu, Software Engineer
More detailed search queries in Webmaster Tools
Webmaster level: intermediateTo help jump-start your year and make metrics for your site more actionable, we’ve updated one of the most popular features in Webmaster Tools: data in the search queries feature will no longer be rounded / bucketed. This c…
5 “Foundations” Of SEO That Were Torched In 2013
The basics of SEO haven’t changed much in the last 15 years. If you followed the mantra of creating good content and obtaining quality links, they still haven’t changed… or have they? Here are five SEO “foundations” that were absolutely torched in 2013. If you are still counting on any of these,…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Improving URL removals on third-party sites
Webmaster level: allContent on the Internet changes or disappears, and occasionally it’s helpful to have search results for it updated quickly. Today we launched our improved public URL removal tool to make it easier to request updates based on changes…
How To Overcome Your Client’s Expectations Of Impossible Results
There isn’t much I dislike about Web marketing, but dealing with clients whose expectations don’t align with reality has to top the list. While many might gripe and complain that the client “just doesn’t get it” (often a true statement), the client’s absence of…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Indexing apps just like websites
Webmaster Level: Advanced
Searchers on smartphones experience many speed bumps that can slow them down. For example, any time they need to change context from a web page to an app, or vice versa, users are likely to encounter redirects, pop-up dialogs, and extra swipes and taps. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could give your users the choice of viewing your content either on the website or via your app, both straight from Google’s search results?
Today, we’re happy to announce a new capability of Google Search, called app indexing, that uses the expertise of webmasters to help create a seamless user experience across websites and mobile apps.
Just like it crawls and indexes websites, Googlebot can now index content in your Android app. Webmasters will be able to indicate which app content you’d like Google to index in the same way you do for webpages today — through your existing Sitemap file and through Webmaster Tools. If both the webpage and the app contents are successfully indexed, Google will then try to show deep links to your app straight in our search results when we think they’re relevant for the user’s query and if the user has the app installed. When users tap on these deep links, your app will launch and take them directly to the content they need. Here’s an example of a search for home listings in Mountain View:
We’re currently testing app indexing with an initial group of developers. Deep links for these applications will start to appear in Google search results for signed-in users on Android in the US in a few weeks. If you are interested in enabling indexing for your Android app, it’s easy to get started:
- Let us know that you’re interested. We’re working hard to bring this functionality to more websites and apps in the near future.
- Enable deep linking within your app.
- Provide information about alternate app URIs, either in the Sitemaps file or in a link element in pages of your site.
For more details on implementation and for information on how to sign up, visit our developer site. As always, if you have any questions, please ask in the mobile section of our webmaster forum.
Posted by Lawrence Chang, Product Manager
Used To Searching For Content? Now, Content Searches For You
When it comes to search, we are accustomed to queries that are initiated client-side and not server-side. But, Google Now and similar services are altering this long-standing trend. Search, by definition, implies user-initiated actions. How is this changed by technology such as Google Now and…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
New Research Says Search Engines Have Little To Do With Promoting Pirated Content
A new research paper authored by Matt Schruers and published by the Computer & Communications Industry Association argues that search engines have been unfairly targeted in the quest to impede online copyright infringement. According to the paper, the perception is that search engines are the…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
In-depth articles in search results
Webmaster level: all
Users often turn to Google to answer a quick question, but research suggests that up to 10% of users’ daily information needs involve learning about a broad topic. That’s why today we’re introducing new search results to help users find in-depth articles.
These results are ranked algorithmically based on many signals that look for high-quality, in-depth content. You can help our algorithms understand your pages better by following these recommendations:
- use schema.org “article” markup,
- provide authorship markup,
- rel=next and rel=prev for paginated articles (also watch out for common rel=canonical mistakes),
- provide information about your organization’s logo,
- and of course, create compelling in-depth content.
Following these best practices along with our webmaster guidelines helps our systems to better understand your website’s content, and improves the chances of it appearing in this new set of search results.
The in-depth articles feature is rolling out now on google.com in English. For more information, check out our help center article, and feel free to post in the comments in our forums.
Posted by Pandu Nayak, Member of Technical Staff
