Get Ready for New SameSite=None; Secure Cookie Settings
This is a cross-post from the Chromium developer blog and is specific to how changes to Chrome may affect how your website works for your users in the future.
In May, Chrome announced a secure-by-default model for cookies, enabled by a new cookie classification system (spec). This initiative is part of our ongoing effort to improve privacy and security across the web.
Chrome plans to implement the new model with Chrome 80 in February 2020. Mozilla and Microsoft have also indicated intent to implement the new model in Firefox and Edge, on their own timelines. While the Chrome changes are still a few months away, It’s important that developers who manage cookies assess their readiness today. This blog post outlines high level concepts; please see SameSite Cookies Explained on web.dev for developer guidance.
Understanding Cross-Site and Same-Site Cookie Context
Websites typically integrate external services for advertising, content recommendations, third party widgets, social embeds and other features. As you browse the web, these external services may store cookies in your browser and subsequently access those cookies to deliver personalized experiences or measure audience engagement. Every cookie has a domain associated with it. If the domain associated with a cookie matches an external service and not the website in the user’s address bar, this is considered a cross-site (or “third party”) context.
Less obvious cross-site use cases include situations where an entity that owns multiple websites uses a cookie across those properties. Although the same entity owns the cookie and the websites, this still counts as cross-site or “third party” context when the cookie’s domain does not match the site(s) from which the cookie is accessed.
When an external resource on a web page accesses a cookie that does not match the site domain, this is cross-site or “third-party” context.
In contrast, cookie access in a same-site (or “first party”) context occurs when a cookie’s domain matches the website domain in the user’s address bar. Same-site cookies are commonly used to keep people logged into individual websites, remember their preferences and support site analytics.
When a resource on a web page accesses a cookie that matches the site the user is visiting, this is same-site or “first party” context.
A New Model for Cookie Security and Transparency
Today, if a cookie is only intended to be accessed in a first party context, the developer has the option to apply one of two settings (SameSite=Lax or SameSite=Strict) to prevent external access. However, very few developers follow this recommended practice, leaving a large number of same-site cookies needlessly exposed to threats such as Cross-Site Request Forgery attacks.
To safeguard more websites and their users, the new secure-by-default model assumes all cookies should be protected from external access unless otherwise specified. Developers must use a new cookie setting, SameSite=None, to designate cookies for cross-site access. When the SameSite=None attribute is present, an additional Secure attribute must be used so cross-site cookies can only be accessed over HTTPS connections. This won’t mitigate all risks associated with cross-site access but it will provide protection against network attacks.
Beyond the immediate security benefits, the explicit declaration of cross-site cookies enables greater transparency and user choice. For example, browsers could offer users fine-grained controls to manage cookies that are only accessed by a single site separately from cookies accessed across multiple sites.
Chrome Enforcement Starting in February 2020
With Chrome 80 in February, Chrome will treat cookies that have no declared SameSite value as SameSite=Lax cookies. Only cookies with the SameSite=None; Secure setting will be available for external access, provided they are being accessed from secure connections. The Chrome Platform Status trackers for SameSite=None and Secure will continue to be updated with the latest launch information.
Mozilla has affirmed their support of the new cookie classification model with their intent to implement the SameSite=None; Secure requirements for cross-site cookies in Firefox. Microsoft recently announced plans to begin implementing the model starting as an experiment in Microsoft Edge 80.
How to Prepare; Known Complexities
If you manage cross-site cookies, you will need to apply the SameSite=None; Secure setting to those cookies. Implementation should be straightforward for most developers, but we strongly encourage you to begin testing now to identify complexities and special cases, such as the following:
- Not all languages and libraries support the None value yet, requiring developers to set the cookie header directly. This Github repository provides instructions for implementing SameSite=None; Secure in a variety of languages, libraries and frameworks.
- Some browsers, including some versions of Chrome, Safari and UC Browser, might handle the None value in unintended ways, requiring developers to code exceptions for those clients. This includes Android WebViews powered by older versions of Chrome. Here’s a list of known incompatible clients.
- App developers are advised to declare the appropriate SameSite cookie settings for Android WebViews based on versions of Chrome that are compatible with the None value, both for cookies accessed via HTTP(S) headers and via Android WebView’s CookieManager API, although the new model will not be enforced on Android WebView until later.
- Enterprise IT administrators may need to implement special policies to temporarily revert Chrome Browser to legacy behavior if some services such as single sign-on or internal applications are not ready for the February launch.
- If you have cookies that you access in both a first and third-party context, you might consider using separate cookies to get the security benefits of SameSite=Lax in the first-party context.
SameSite Cookies Explained offers specific guidance for the situations above, and channels for raising issues and questions.
To test the effect of the new Chrome behavior on your site or cookies you manage, you can go to chrome://flags in Chrome 76+ and enable the “SameSite by default cookies” and “Cookies without SameSite must be secure” experiments. In addition, these experiments will be automatically enabled for a subset of Chrome 79 Beta users. Some Beta users with the experiments enabled could experience incompatibility issues with services that do not yet support the new model; users can opt out of the Beta experiments by going to chrome://flags and disabling them.
If you manage cookies that are only accessed in a same-site context (same-site cookies) there is no required action on your part; Chrome will automatically prevent those cookies from being accessed by external entities, even if the SameSite attribute is missing or no value is set. However we strongly recommend you apply an appropriate SameSite value (Lax or Strict) and not rely on default browser behavior since not all browsers protect same-site cookies by default.
Finally, if you’re concerned about the readiness of vendors and others who provide services to your website, you can check for Developer Tools console warnings in Chrome 77+ when a page contains cross-site cookies that are missing the required settings:
Some providers (including some Google services) will implement the necessary changes in the months leading up to Chrome 80 in February; you may wish to reach out to your partners to confirm their readiness.
Posted by Barb Palser, Chrome and Web Platform Partnerships
The Search Console Training video series is rolling out
A new video series about Google Search Console is rolling out on Youtube now! The series focuses on how to use Search Console to optimize your website for Google Search. In the videos we explain each of the reports available to you, giving examples on where to find data, how to analyze it, and how to fix issues that might affect your search appearance. We’ll have over a dozen episodes focusing on most of the features available on Search Console.
As we finished migrating to the new Search Console in 2019, we knew a detailed training video series would help users learn about the product and its many use cases. Below are the videos we have already released and there are many more to come! Check the Search Console Training playlist for a new video every two weeks and subscribe to the Webmasters YouTube channel to get notified about new video uploads.
I hope that by the end of the series you’ll agree with us that Search Console data is insightful, fun and exciting! Let us know what you think via commenting on videos or tagging us on Twitter.
Posted by Daniel Waisberg, Search Advocate
An update on 2019
With 2020 hanging above our heads much the same way that bricks don’t, people start reflecting on what they achieved this year, what went wrong, and how they could improve. We’re no different, but instead of choosing what went well or wrong ourselves, we picked the announcements on our @GoogleWMC Twitter account that users interacted with the most, and decided to reflect on those.
We had launches that you appreciated a lot. For example, we announced at Google I/O that Googlebot is becoming evergreen, meaning that it’s always going to use an up-to-date version of Chromium for rendering. We hope that this will make it easier for developers to create stunning, modern, and snappy JavaScript experiences, by tapping onto the power of over 1000 new features and interfaces that are now supported.
Speaking of robots, together with the original author of the Robots Exclusion Protocol, other search engines, and input from webmasters, we submitted an Internet Draft to the IETF in order to start standardizing the 25-year-old protocol.
Like Twitter users, we also thought it’s an exciting project which lays down the rules of crawling for good, although it doesn’t change anything for most.
But we haven’t stopped there with touching ancient protocols: we also rethought how we need to treat “nofollow” links to keep up with the evolution of the web. It was an announcement that seemed to be welcomed by most Twitter users, and for a good reason: having a “hint” model for rel=”nofollow” may help us reward those who create high quality content more, by serving even better results to our users.
One of the most tweeted – and also most humbling – moments this year was when we lost a part of our index, which caused Search Console to misbehave, and also had rendering failures roughly the same time. Since Google Search works like a well oiled machine most of the time, we didn’t have processes to quickly communicate issues to those who should know about them: webmasters. Lacking a proper process and channel to communicate these issues was a mistake and we are still working hard to rectify it, however one thing is clear: we need to do more on the critical communication side of things.
We do like to communicate, in general: we shoot videos, we go to conferences, big and small, where we reach thousands of webmasters and SEOs, and in 2019 we extended our reach with the Webmaster Conference, which landed in 35 locations around the world in 12 languages. Not to mention the weather reports on our YouTube channel.
We hope you had a fantastic year and the new year will bring you even more success. If you need help with the latter, you can follow our blogs, @googlewmc on Twitter, or you could join us at a Webmaster Conference near you!
Posted by John Mueller, Cheese Connoisseur, and Gary the house elf
Launching a new Publisher Center
Today we are announcing the launch of Publisher Center to help publishers more easily manage how their content appears across Google products. Publisher Center merges two existing tools, Google News Producer and Google News Publisher Center, improving their user experience and functionality.
Publisher Center’s new features include a simpler way to manage your publication’s identity, like updating light and dark theme logos. It also provides an easier way for those that own multiple publications to organize and switch between them, particularly with improved permission settings that make it easier to collaborate with colleagues. Additionally, publishers can now point to the URLs for their website’s sections instead of RSS to configure sections in Google News. Content for News will now come directly from the web, just as it does for Search.
Publisher Center launches today in the existing four languages of the previous tools (English, Spanish, French, and German) and will expand to more languages soon. Learn more here.
Posted by Eric Silva, Product Manager
Package Tracking Early Access Program
People frequently come to Google Search looking to find information on the status of their packages. To make it easier to find, we have created a new package tracking feature that enables shipping companies to show people the status of their packages right on Search. Here’s an example of how this information may appear:
Through the package tracking Early Adopters Program, which is available in all countries, shipping companies can sign-up to participate in this feature and give feedback on how to improve it. To take part in the program, a carrier will need to provide a RESTful JSON or XML API that returns the package tracking information. We can work with you to reuse an existing API or setup a new one.
Interested in providing package tracking information to your customers? Please review the full eligibility requirements and fill out the interest form.
If you have any questions, let us know through the forum or on Twitter.
Posted by Allen Harvey, Product Manager
Introducing the new Search Console messages
Search Console sends millions of messages every month. They’re our main way to let you know when your website has a new issue and to make you aware of updates and opportunities to improve your presence on Google.
To make working with messages more efficient in Search Console, we have been working to make messages an integral part of the product. As of today, messages will be available through a panel accessed easily by clicking the bell icon at the top of any page in Search Console. The main difference from the old interface is that now you’ll have access to your messages throughout the product, no need to leave your reports.
You’ll see a notification with the number of new messages on top of the bell icon, as shown below. Click it to see a panel with a list of messages for your site, you can mark one or more messages as read to clear the clutter.
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| Image: New Search Console Messages |
We are also introducing a new way to make messages more actionable by categorizing them into several types, such as Coverage, Enhancement types, Performance, and others. This will make it easier for you to find information about a specific issue.
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| Image: Categories in Search Console messages |
We are also introducing the capability for site owners to access all the messages sent to the site, even those that were previously sent, regardless of when they were verified and when the messages were sent. Now, when users gain access to a new site they can see messages the site have received in the past, which should help the new owners to understand the context for that property.
The message panel shows messages only from May 23, 2019 onward. Messages sent before that date can be viewed only in your personal email or in the legacy message list. Your old messages will be available in the old interface for the time being, you can find them under the “Legacy tools & reports” section in the sidebar.
We hope this new feature improves your workflow and puts all the information you need at your fingertips to make better and faster decisions. If you have any feedback please let us know through the forum or via Twitter.
Posted by Maya Mamo, Haymi Shalom & Yuval Kurtser, Search Console engineering team
Google Search News for November 2019
The ecosystem around and in Google Search has continued to evolve since the first episode of Google Search News. With this video series, we aim to give regular updates on Google Search, in particular for SEOs, publishers, webmasters — essentially anyo…
New reporting for Products Results in Search Console
We recently announced that in addition to schema.org markup, product data feeds submitted through Google Merchant Center and Google Manufacturer Center will be used to enrich Google Search shopping journeys. Today, we are announcing a new Search Appearance in the Search Console Performance report, which captures search stats for Product rich results on Google Search.
People come to Google to discover, research, and decide which products and brands to purchase. In order to provide helpful product information to shoppers, Google shows rich product data like product descriptions, price and availability within the search results.
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| Image: Rich product information on Google Search results |
Website owners need to understand the impact of these rich results. The Google Search Console Performance report provides key metrics like clicks and impressions to help webmasters understand and optimize the performance of their website results on Google Search. These metrics can further be segmented by device, geography and queries.
If your website is eligible to appear on Product search results, you’ll find a new Search Appearance type called “Product results”, with which you can segment your traffic to analyze your search performance.
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| Image: Search Appearance of “Product results” |
The new ‘Product results’ search appearance (shown in the screenshot above) will help website owners understand their search performance for product rich results. For example, they’ll be able to answer the following questions:
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How much traffic comes from experiences with rich data like price, availability?
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How does shopping traffic change over time, and for what shopping search queries is the website shown?
If you have any questions on this (or other) Search Console reports, let us know through the forum or on Twitter.
Posted by Siddhartha Garg, Product Manager
Get faster with the new Speed report in Search Console
A fast web experience has long been an important user experience factor that we have promoted and advocated for. To help site owners on this quest we showed a preview of the Speed report in Search Console at Google I/O 2019. Since then, we’ve been iter…
Site Kit is now available for all WordPress sites
Today, we’re announcing that Site Kit is available for everyone to install from the WordPress plugin directory. Site Kit is Google’s official WordPress plugin — it gives you insights on how people find and use your site, how to improve and monetize your content, with data from multiple Google tools. Learn more about Site Kit on the official Site Kit website.
Who is Site Kit for?
Site Kit makes it easy for WordPress site owners to understand how their site is doing and what to do next. As a WordPress site owner, Site Kit offers you:
- Easy to verify site ownership through Search Console — no need to paste a code snippet on your site to prove you’re an owner.
- Convenient and easy access to relevant stats directly in your WordPress dashboard. We save you time — see the key information right when you sign in.
- Cross-product insights — Google Search Console, Google Analytics, PageSpeed Insights, AdSense — are combined into a single, intuitive dashboard. We help you make informed decisions, quickly.
- No source code editing. This is the easiest way to install and manage Google products on your site in just a few clicks.
If you are a developer or an agency working on WordPress sites for clients, Site Kit can make your life easier:
- You’ll get aggregated insights from Google products, distilled in a dashboard that your clients or other teams can easily access. No need to copy data from multiple products to compile reports for clients.
- The site performance stats and improvement recommendations come directly from Google — your customers will be getting the latest best practices recommended by Google products.
- Site Kit provides roles and permissions to help you manage access to the site’s data and make sure only the relevant people can see stats from Google products.
If you work on a plugin or hosting provider, Site Kit provides a scalable, easy way for your users to provision and access key Google tools and metrics.
- Easy connection to official Google tools. Your customers don’t have to edit the source code to set up Google tools.
- Added value for your platform. Your customers get important information about how their site is performing right in your own dashboard.
- Flexible UI. You can pull stats from the plugin dashboard and display stats natively in your platform’s UI.
Site Kit’s main dashboard helps you see the most important info about how your site is doing at a glance: how people are finding your site (traffic sources), your most popular pages, and what people search for to find your site. For more, check out the Find your way around Site Kit guide in our docs.
Get started with Site Kit
To get started, install the plugin from the WordPress plugin directory. Here are some recommendations on how you can make the most of Site Kit:
- Review the main dashboard on a weekly basis and check for any significant changes in how people are finding your site. Are people finding your site from a new place?
- Keep track of how your recent posts are doing by checking the individual page reports.
- Compare the top performing pages and how people found them. Is a particular topic or product attracting more visitors from social channels?
- Set up new Google services to get more interesting insights — for example, if you enable PageSpeed Insights and Analytics, you’ll be able to see whether page load time affects bounce rate.
If you are attending WordCamp US in Saint Louis, stop by to see a demo of Site Kit and talk to the team. We’re also happy to answer your questions in the Site Kit support forum.
Posted by Mariya Moeva, Product Manager, Search and Content Ecosystem
Google Webmaster Conference goes to Tel Aviv
We are happy to let you know that the Google Webmaster Conference is coming to Tel Aviv, Israel this winter!
If you are looking for an opportunity to socialize with the Search engineering team, or to hear from us what we’ve been working on, here is your chance! We’re planning lots of interesting content: John Mueller on Search, Andre Naumann on Trust & Safety, Daniel Waisberg on structured data, and many more speakers from the Search Console team.
The event will take place on December 4th, between 15:00 and 19:00 in the Google Tel Aviv offices. Learn more and apply for a spot at our website.
Get ready, and see you in Tel Aviv! And if you miss this one, don’t worry, we’ll have more events around the world next year. To be the first to learn about new locations, make sure to follow Google Webmasters on Twitter.
Posted by Daniel Waisberg, Search Advocate.
Video Series for New Webmasters: Search for Beginners!
We are excited to introduce our newest video series: “Search For Beginners”! The series was created primarily to help new webmasters. It is also for anyone with an interest in Search or anyone who is still learning about the Web and how to manage their online presence.
We love to see the webmaster community grow! Every day, there are countless new webmasters who are taking the first steps in learning how Search works, and how to make their websites perform well and discoverable on Search. We understand that it sometimes can be challenging or even overwhelming to start with our existing content without some prior knowledge or basic understandings of the Web. We find our basic videos in our YouTube channels to be the ones with the most views. At the same time, advanced webmasters also see the need for content that can be sent to clients or stakeholders to help explain important concepts in managing an online presence.
We want to help all webmasters succeed, regardless of whether you have been managing websites for many years or you’ve just started out yesterday. We want to do more to help the new webmasters and this video series will hopefully help us achieve that.
Introduction to the series:
Episode 1:
The “Search For Beginners” video series covers basic online presence topics ranging from ‘Do you need a website?’, ‘What are the goals for your website?’ to more organic search-related topics such as ‘How does Google Search work?’, ‘How to change description line’, or ‘How to change wrong address information on Google’. Actually, we get asked these questions frequently in forums, social channels and at events around the world! The videos are fully animated. The videos are in English with subtitles available in Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, Chinese, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, and English. We are working on more, so please stay tuned!
And if you consider yourself a more experienced user, please feel free to use these videos to support your pitches or explaining things to your clients. If you want to share any ideas or learnings, please leave them in the comment section in each video so that others can benefit from your knowledge and experience.
Follow us on Twitter and subscribe on YouTube for the upcoming videos! We will be adding new videos in this series to this playlist about every two weeks!
Posted by Cherry Prommawin, Search Quality Analyst
Goodbye, Flash
“The end of an era”… that’s the title Microsoft used to announce it will stop supporting Flash in their web browsers. Flash is disabled by default in Chrome (starting in version 76), Microsoft Edge, and FireFox 69. Soon, we’ll also move on from Flash in indexing for Google Search.
Flash was the answer to the boring static web, with rich animations, media, and actions. It was a prolific technology that inspired many new content creators on the web. It was everywhere. The Flash runtime, which plays Flash content, was installed 500 million times in the second half of 2013.
I still remember my son playing endless number of Flash games until my wife yelled at him. It’s time to go to bed, son. Hey Flash, it’s your turn to go to bed.
Google Search will stop supporting Flash later this year. In Web pages that contain Flash content, Google Search will ignore the Flash content. Google Search will stop indexing standalone SWF files. Most users and websites won’t see any impact from this change.
Flash, you inspired the web. Now, there are web standards like HTML5 to continue your legacy.
Jalgayo /tʃɑlˈgɑjɔ/ (goodbye in Korean), Flash.
Posted by Dong-Hwi Lee, engineering manager, Google
New reports for video results in Search Console
Video is an important and growing medium used to consume information online, and we want to make it as easy as possible for people to find useful and interesting videos on Google. Today, we’re introducing two new tools to help you understand your videos’ performance in Search and identify opportunities to improve your video markup.
There are three main ways people can see videos on Google Search today: on the main Search page; on the videos Search tab; and in Discover:
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| Left to right: Videos on the main search page; video search; and Discover. |
Video Enhancement Report
Structured data can help search engines understand when videos appear on a page, so they can be displayed with a rich visual treatment, including accurate information on a video’s duration, upload date, and other metadata, as well as previews. This in turn helps users better understand what they’ll find in your video before they click.
A new report for “Videos” is now available in Search Console for sites that use structured data to annotate videos. The report allows you to see any errors and warnings for markup implemented on your site. When you fix an issue, you can use the report to validate if it was resolved by re-crawling your affected pages. Learn more about the rich result status reports.
Video Appearances in Performance Report
The Search Console performance report already includes an option to see the performance of your video tab search results (type = video). We are excited to share that we’ve extended our support for videos, so you can now also see the performance of your videos in the main Search results tab (type = web) and in Discover using the new “Videos” appearance. Content can appear with the video appearance if your page uses VideoObject structured data, or if Google uses other signals to detect that there is a video on the page.
These new tools should make it easier to understand how your videos perform on Search and to identify and fix video issues. We also recommend you follow these video best practices. If you have any questions, be sure to post in our forum.
Posted by Danielle Marshak, Product Manager
Updating the user agent of Googlebot
Googlebot uses a Chrome-based browser to render webpages, as we announced at Google I/O earlier this year. As part of this, in December 2019 we’ll update Googlebot’s user agent strings to reflect the new browser version, and periodically update the ver…
Join us at a Webmaster Conference in Mountain View, California
Earlier this year we announced a series of Webmaster Conferences being held around the world to help website creators understand how to optimize their sites for Search. We’ve already held 22 of these events, with more planned through the end of the year. Building on the success of these events so far, we’re hosting a product summit version of this event at the Google Headquarters in Mountain View on Monday November 4th.
Photos from the Webmaster Conference in Kuala Lumpur, earlier this year.
This event is designed to facilitate an open dialog between the webmaster and SEO community and Search product teams. This one-day event will include talks from Search product managers, Q&A sessions, and a product fair giving attendees the opportunity to have direct conversations with product managers. Attendees will learn from the people building Search about how they think about the evolution of the platform, and have the opportunity to share feedback about the needs of the community.
We also realize that not everyone will be able to make this event in person, so we plan to share out much of the content and feedback after the event.
If you’re interested and able to make it, we encourage you to apply today as space is limited. Complete details about the event and the application process can be found on the event registration site. And as always, you can check out our other upcoming events on the general Webmaster Conference site, the Google Webmasters event calendar, or follow our blogs and @googlewmc on Twitter!
Posted by John Mueller, Google Switzerland
Google Search News: coming soon to a screen near you
The world of search is constantly evolving. New tools, opportunities, and features are regularly arriving, sometimes existing things change, and sometimes we say goodbye to some things to make way for the new. To help you stay on top of things, we’ve s…
More options to help websites preview their content on Google Search
Google uses content previews, including text snippets and other media, to help people decide whether a result is relevant to their query. The type of preview shown depends on many factors, including the type of content a person is looking for and the kind of device they’re viewing it on.
For instance, if you look for recipe results on Google, you may see thumbnail images and user ratings–things that may be more helpful than text snippets when it comes to deciding what you want to eat. Alternately, or perhaps you’re looking for a concert nearby, and are able to check out the events directly in the search results. These are made possible by publishers marking up their pages with structured data.
Google automatically generates previews in a way intended to help a user understand why the results shown are relevant to their search and why the user would want to visit the linked pages. However, we recognize that site owners may wish to independently adjust the extent of their preview content in search results. To make it easier for individual websites to define how much or which text should be available for snippeting and the extent to which other media should be included in their previews, we’re now introducing several new settings for webmasters.
Letting Google know about your snippet and content preview preferences
Previously, it was only possible to allow a textual snippet or to not allow one. We’re now introducing a set of methods that allow more fine-grained configuration of the preview content shown for your pages. This is done through two types of new settings: a set of robots meta tags and an HTML attribute.
Using robots meta tags
The robots meta tag is added to an HTML page’s <head>, or specified via the x-robots-tag HTTP header. The robots meta tags addressing the preview content for a page are:
- “
nosnippet“
This is an existing option to specify that you don’t want any textual snippet shown for this page. - “
max-snippet:[number]“
New! Specify a maximum text-length, in characters, of a snippet for your page. - “
max-video-preview:[number]“
New! Specify a maximum duration in seconds of an animated video preview. - “
max-image-preview:[setting]“
New! Specify a maximum size of image preview to be shown for images on this page, using either “none”, “standard”, or “large”.
They can be combined, for example:
<meta name="robots" content="max-snippet:50, max-image-preview:large">
Preview settings from these meta tags will become effective in mid-to-late October 2019 and may take about a week for the global rollout to complete.
Using the new data-nosnippet HTML attribute
A new way to help limit which part of a page is eligible to be shown as a snippet is the “data-nosnippet” HTML attribute on span, div, and section elements. With this, you can prevent that part of an HTML page from being shown within the textual snippet on the page.
For example:
<p><span data-nosnippet>Harry Houdini</span> is undoubtedly the most famous magician ever to live.</p>
The data-nosnippet HTML attribute will be start affecting presentation on Google products later this year. Learn more in our developer documentation for the robots meta tag, x-robots-tag, and data-nosnippet.
A note about rich results and featured snippets
Content in structured data is eligible for display as rich results in search. These kinds of results do not conform to limits declared in the above meta robots settings, but rather, can be addressed with much greater specificity by limiting or modifying the content provided in the structured data itself. For example, if a recipe is included in structured data, the contents of that structured data may be presented in a recipe carousel in the search results. Similarly, if an event is marked up with structured data, it may be presented as such in the search results. To limit that presentation, a publisher can limit the amount and type of content in the structured data.
Some special features on Search depend on the availability of preview content, so limiting your previews may prevent your content from appearing in these areas. Featured snippets, for example, requires a certain minimum number of characters to be displayed. This can vary by language, which is why there is no exact max-snippets length we can provide to ensure appearing in this feature. Those who do not wish to have content appear as featured snippets can experiment with lower max-snippet lengths. Those who want a guaranteed way to opt-out of featured snippets should use nosnippet.
The AMP Format
The AMP format comes with certain benefits, including eligibility for more prominent presentation of thumbnail images in search results and in the Google Discover feed. These characteristics have been shown to drive more traffic to publishers’ articles. However, publishers who do not want Google to use larger thumbnail images when their AMP pages are presented in search and Discover can use the above meta robots settings to specify max-image-preview of “standard” or “none.”
These new options are available to content owners worldwide and will operate the same for results we display globally. We hope they make it easier for you to optimize the value you get from Search and achieve your business goals. For more information, check out our developer documentation on meta tags. Should you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us, or drop by our webmaster help forums.
Posted by John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Switzerland
Fresher data in your site’s Search Performance report
We analyzed our user feedback, and today would like to announce a new improvement to the report based on users’ #1 feature request – improved data freshness!
The Performance report helps webmasters and site owners better understand how their site performs on Google search, and answer questions such as:
- General stats: How much traffic did my site get from Search and Discover?
- Search queries: What are my site’s top and trending search queries?
- Top content: What are my site’s most successful pages on Google search?
- Site’s audiences: From which countries? From which devices – is it mostly mobile?
- Formats: What search formats does my site get (AMP, recipes, etc.) ?
With the new fresh data, users can now see data as recent as less than a day old – a significant improvement compared to the previous few days.
We hope this improved data freshness allows you to better monitor and track your site’s performance and addresses some important needs such as:
- Seeing your weekend performance on Monday morning – no need to wait until Wednesday.
- Checking on your site’s stats first thing in the morning after, or even during, important days such as holidays, global events, and shopping days.
- Checking if your site’s traffic rebounds soon after fixing an important technical issue.
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| Fresh Data in Search Performance report |
In addition, we updated the report to clearly communicate the data timezone (Pacific time zone). This is useful when you’d like to interpret the data compared to your local time zone or integrate it with other sources such as Google Analytics.
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| Performance report date picker |
Each fresh data point will be replaced with the final data point after a few days. It is expected that from time to time the fresh data might change a bit before being finalized.
The Search Analytics API does not support fresh data yet. In addition, fresh data is not available on the Discover performance report. As a result, properties that are eligible for Discover performance report will not see fresh data in their Overview report. We hope to address these items in the future.
Exporting performance data over time
We also heard your feedback about wanting a simple way to explore and export your performance over time. Starting today, this is possible. Simply choose ‘dates’ in the table below the graph, select the desired time frame, and explore the data in Search Console or export the chart. We hope that this new feature will help you further explore your performance trends and changes over time.
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| Performance report now with ‘dates’ table |
In conclusion
We hope that this new fresh data will help you better monitor your site’s performance and identify trends, patterns and interesting changes much closer to when they happen. In addition, we hope that the new date table dimension will assist you in exploring performance trends and changes over time. If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out on the Webmaster Help Forum or on Twitter
Posted by Ziv Hodak, Search Console product manager
Making Review Rich Results more helpful
Search results that are enhanced by review rich results can be extremely helpful when searching for products or services (the scores and/or “stars” you sometimes see alongside search results).
Add the
To make them more helpful and meaningful, we are now introducing algorithmic updates to reviews in rich results. This also addresses some of the invalid or misleading implementations webmasters have flagged to us.
Focus on schema types that lend themselves to reviews
While, technically, you can attach review markup to any schema type, for many types displaying star reviews does not add much value for the user. With this change, we’re limiting the pool of schema types that can potentially trigger review rich results in search. Specifically, we’ll only display reviews with those types (and their respective subtypes):
- schema.org/Book
- schema.org/Course
- schema.org/CreativeWorkSeason
- schema.org/CreativeWorkSeries
- schema.org/Episode
- schema.org/Event
- schema.org/Game
- schema.org/HowTo
- schema.org/LocalBusiness
- schema.org/MediaObject
- schema.org/Movie
- schema.org/MusicPlaylist
- schema.org/MusicRecording
- schema.org/Organization
- schema.org/Product
- schema.org/Recipe
- schema.org/SoftwareApplication
Self-serving reviews aren’t allowed
Reviews that can be perceived as “self-serving” aren’t in the best interest of users. We call reviews “self-serving” when a review about entity A is placed on the website of entity A – either directly in their markup or via an embedded 3rd party widget. That’s why, with this change, we’re not going to display review rich results anymore for the schema types localBusiness and Organization (and their subtypes) in cases when the entity being reviewed controls the reviews themselves.
Add the name of the item that’s being reviewed
With this update, the name property is now required, so you’ll want to make sure that you specify the name of the item that’s being reviewed.
This update will help deliver a much more meaningful review experience for users, while requiring little to no changes on the part of most webmasters. You can find all those updates documented in our developer documentation. If you have any questions, feel free to come to our webmaster forums!
Posted by Yuxin Cao, Software Engineer & Sven Naumann, Trust & Safety Search
