Robots Refresher: robots.txt – a flexible way to control how machines explore your website
A long-standing tool for website owners, robots.txt has been in active use for over 30 years and
is broadly supported by crawler operators (such as tools for site owners, services, and search
engines). In this edition of the r…
Search Central Live is going to Madrid
We’re very excited to announce that Search Central Live is going to Madrid for the first time on April 9!
The event will have a mix of presenters from the Google Search, News, and Partnerships teams and the content
will be del…
First Search Central Live in South Africa
On April 2, 2025 we’ll be in Johannesburg, South Africa for the very first Search Central Live event in Africa!
We’re excited to welcome you at Search Central Live South Africa and talk about all things Google Search!
Robots Refresher: introducing a new series
Every now and then we get questions about robots.txt, robots meta tags, and the control
functionality that they offer. Following our December series on crawling,
we thought this would be the perfect time to put together …
Search Central Live is going to New York City
We’re excited to announce that Search Central Live is coming to New York City for the first time on March 20, 2025.
The Google Search team has organized events in the city several times, but this time we’re bringing our main Search event t…
Search Central Live is going to New York City
We’re excited to announce that Search Central Live is coming to New York City for the first time on March 20, 2025.
The Google Search team has organized events in the city several times, but this time we’re bringing our main Search event t…
Search Central Live is returning to Brazil
We’re excited to announce that Search Central Live is returning to São Paulo in 2025. Following our
successful events in 2023 and 2024, we’re continuing our mission to help Brazilian businesses enhance
their site’s performance …
Simplifying the visible URL element on mobile search results
Mobile searchers will soon see a cleaner, more streamlined look for how URLs appear in search
results. Initially introduced as part of the “site hierarchy” feature,
we’ve found that the breadcrumb element isn’t as useful…
Crawling out of December: the 2024 recap
It might happen that by the end of this post you’re going to try to decide who wrote this blog
post, a large language model (LLM) or Gary. And you’d be right to ponder that and delve into the
intricacies of the language …
Crawling December: CDNs and crawling
Content delivery networks (CDNs) are particularly well suited for decreasing latency of your
website and in general keeping web traffic-related headaches away. This is their primary purpose
after all: speedy delivery of …
Crawling December: Faceted navigation
Faceted navigation is a great way to help users find what they need on your site, but it can
create an SEO nightmare if not implemented carefully. Why? Because it can generate a near-infinite
number of URLs, which causes…
Search Central Live Kuala Lumpur and Taipei 2024: Recap
The Search Central Live events in Kuala Lumpur and Taipei were nothing short of amazing, in large
thanks to the over 600 people who attended the events! We were thrilled to see the level of
enthusiasm and engagement from…
An improved way to view your recent performance data in Search Console
To better help you monitor the recent performance of your content, we’re launching the ’24 hours’
view to the SC performance reports and improving the freshness of the data. We’re rolling out
these changes to all properties gradually…
Crawling December: HTTP caching
Allow us to cache, pretty please.
As the internet grew over the years, so did how much Google crawls. While Google’s crawling
infrastructure supports heuristic caching mechanisms, in fact always had, the number of requests
that…
Crawling December: The how and why of Googlebot crawling
You may have heard that Google Search needs to do a bit of work before a web page can show up in
Google Search results. One of these steps is called crawling. Crawling for Google Search is done
by Googlebot, a program running on Goog…
Join as at Search Central Live in Zurich!
We’re looking forward to meeting you at the Google office in Zurich for Search Central Live Zurich 2024 on Dec 12, 2024.
Join us for presentations, Q&A and networking on December 12, 2024.
Updating our site reputation abuse policy
Earlier this year, as part of our work to fight spam and deliver a great Search experience,
we launched a spam policy to combat site reputation abuse.
We’re clarifying our policy language to further target this type of spammy behavio…
Farewell, Sitelinks Search Box
It’s been over ten years since we initially announced the sitelinks
search box in Google Search, and over time, we’ve noticed that usage has dropped.
To help simplify the search results, we’ll be removing this visual element starting…
Search Central Live Jakarta and Bangkok 2024: it’s a wrap
Our first two Search Central Live events in Asia this year have been wrapped up and we finished
looking back at what we’ve learned and what we can do better.
Bringing Store ratings on Search to more countries
Google’s Store Ratings
have been helping US merchants highlight the high quality experiences other shoppers have had right
from Search, and we’re now bringing store ratings to English-language shopping searches in
…