2018, celebrating our global Webmaster community
2018 has been a very important year for our webmaster support community. What has happened? There’s been a program rebranding, a global summit, and loads of community hangouts.
In October, the former Top Contributors became Gold Product Experts, and the Rising Stars, Silver Product Experts. This rebranding happened throughout all of the product forums and these are some of the new badges and names:
Silver Product Expert: Newer members who are developing their product knowledge
Gold Product Expert: Trusted members who are knowledgeable and active contributorsIn November, we invited all of our Gold Product Experts from every Google help forum (such as Blogger or Google My Business) to a global summit. This meetup happened in the Google campus in Sunnyvale, California. Out of the almost 550 attendees from all over the world, around 70 were Webmaster Gold Product Experts. Coming from 25 different countries, this was the second biggest community that attended the event. Later that month, another very successful meetup took place in Moscow, gathering 23 Russian speaking Product Experts (of which 10 were Webmasters).
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| Gold Webmaster Product Experts at this year’s global summit in Sunnyvale. |
Many of the attendees acknowledged that this “was a really valuable time”, that the “sessions were very insightful and interesting” and that “the entire event was fantastic!”.
This knowledgeable group of super users provides invaluable help in 16 languages to more than 2 million users a year, about everything related to Search, Structured Data or Search Console in the forums.
And what is the profile of our community? Many of our Product Experts (Silver and Gold) are site owners who started out on the Webmaster forums (some more than a decade ago) by asking questions about their own sites. After their issues were fixed, most of them stayed to give back to the community, as they realized that their expertise could be of use to others. We want to thank all of our experts for their dedication and constant knowledge sharing to help users who are having trouble with their websites.
Throughout the year, we’ve held 75 live office hours hangouts on the Webmaster YouTube channel, in English, Japanese, German, Hindi, French, and we’ve also kick started the calls in Spanish. On those hangouts, anyone can raise their questions to the Google team directly and interact with one another.
If you’re interested in joining the community, meeting everyone and helping other users on the Webmaster forums, you can learn more on the Product Experts program website. We are always excited to meet users from diverse backgrounds and skill-sets!
Looking forward to what 2019 will bring to our community… And looking forward to meeting you!
Written by Aurora Morales, Trust & Safety Outreach team
Mobile-First indexing, structured data, images, and your site
It’s been two years since we started working on “mobile-first indexing” – crawling the web with smartphone Googlebot, similar to how most users access it. We’ve seen websites across the world embrace the mobile web, making fantastic websites that work on all kinds of devices. There’s still a lot to do, but today, we’re happy to announce that we now use mobile-first indexing for over half of the pages shown in search results globally.
Checking for mobile-first indexing
In general, we move sites to mobile-first indexing when our tests assure us that they’re ready. When we move sites over, we notify the site owner through a message in Search Console. It’s possible to confirm this by checking the server logs, where a majority of the requests should be from Googlebot Smartphone. Even easier, the URL inspection tool allows a site owner to check how a URL from the site (it’s usually enough to check the homepage) was last crawled and indexed.
If your site uses responsive design techniques, you should be all set! For sites that aren’t using responsive web design, we’ve seen two kinds of issues come up more frequently in our evaluations:
Missing structured data on mobile pages
Structured data is very helpful to better understand the content on your pages, and allows us to highlight your pages in fancy ways in the search results. If you use structured data on the desktop versions of your pages, you should have the same structured data on the mobile versions of the pages. This is important because with mobile-first indexing, we’ll only use the mobile version of your page for indexing, and will otherwise miss the structured data.
Testing your pages in this regard can be tricky. We suggest testing for structured data in general, and then comparing that to the mobile version of the page. For the mobile version, check the source code when you simulate a mobile device, or use the HTML generated with the mobile-friendly testing tool. Note that a page does not need to be mobile-friendly in order to be considered for mobile-first indexing.
Missing alt-text for images on mobile pages
The value of alt-attributes on images (“alt-text”) is a great way to describe images to users with screen-readers (which are used on mobile too!), and to search engine crawlers. Without alt-text for images, it’s a lot harder for Google Images to understand the context of images that you use on your pages.
Check “img” tags in the source code of the mobile version for representative pages of your website. As above, the source of the mobile version can be seen by either using the browser to simulate a mobile device, or by using the Mobile-Friendly test to check the Googlebot rendered version. Search the source code for “img” tags, and double-check that your page is providing appropriate alt-attributes for any that you want to have findable in Google Images.
For example, that might look like this:
With alt-text (good!):<img src="cute-puppies.png" alt="A photo of cute puppies on a blanket">
Without alt-text:<img src="sad-puppies.png">
It’s fantastic to see so many great websites that work well on mobile! We’re looking forward to being able to index more and more of the web using mobile-first indexing, helping more users to search the web in the same way that they access it: with a smartphone. We’ll continue to monitor and evaluate this change carefully. If you have any questions, please drop by our Webmaster forums or our public events.
Posted by John Mueller, wearer of many socks, Google Switzerland
Why & how to secure your website with the HTTPS protocol
A few days ago, Fatih Ozkosemen and I led an episode of the AdSense On Air series. This program consists of monthly videos which cover many topics of interest to online publishers (we recommend you sign up if you use Google AdSense). The November 2018 version was dedicated to HTTPS migrations.
You can find the whole session, about one hour long, in this video:
The video covers the following topics:
- What HTTPS encryption is, and why it is important to protect your visitors and yourself,
- How HTTPS enables a more modern web,
- What are the usual complaints about HTTPS, and are they still true today?
- “But HTTPS certificates cost so much money!”
- “But switching to HTTPS will destroy my SEO!”
- “But “mixed content” is such a headache!”
- “But my ad revenue will get destroyed!”
- “But HTTPS is sooooo sloooow!”
- Some practical advice to run the migration. Those are an aggregation of:
- The “site move with URL changes” documentation
- General level advice on which HTTPS specifications to choose (HSTS, encryption key strength, etc…)
We hope that this sort of content is useful. Don’t hesitate to let us know if you like it and if we should do more! You can reach out to us directly on Twitter (Vincent & Fatih). Let us know which topics are of interest to you by commenting here or on the YouTube page. If you have questions when you plan your own HTTPS migration, don’t hesitate to ask in our Webmaster Help Forums.
Posted by Vincent Courson, Search Outreach Specialist
Introducing the Indexing API and structured data for livestreams
Over the past few years, it’s become easier than ever to stream live videos online, from celebrity updates to special events. But it’s not always easy for people to determine which videos are live and know when to tune in. Today, we’re introducing new …
Rich Results expands for Question & Answer pages
People come to Google seeking information about all kinds of questions.
Frequently, the information they’re looking for is on sites where users ask and answer each other’s questions. Popular social news sites, expert forums, and help and support message boards are all examples of this pattern.
Frequently, the information they’re looking for is on sites where users ask and answer each other’s questions. Popular social news sites, expert forums, and help and support message boards are all examples of this pattern.
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A screenshot of an example search result for a page titled “Why do touchscreens sometimes register a touch when …” with a preview of the top answers from the page.
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In order to help users better identify which search results may give the best information about their question, we have developed a new rich result type for question and answer sites. Search results for eligible Q&A pages display a preview of the top answers. This new presentation helps site owners reach the right users for their content and helps users get the relevant information about their questions faster.
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| A screenshot of an example search result for a page titled “Why do touchscreens sometimes register a touch when …” with a preview of the top answers from the page. |
To be eligible for this feature, add Q&A structured data to your pages with Q&A content. Be sure to use the Structured Data Testing Tool to see if your page is eligible and to preview the appearance in search results. You can also check out Search Console to see aggregate stats and markup error examples. The Performance report also tells you which queries show your Q&A Rich Result in Search results, and how these change over time.
If you have any questions, ask us in the Webmaster Help Forum or reach out on Twitter!
Posted by Kayla Hanson, Software Engineer
PageSpeed Insights, now powered by Lighthouse
At Google, we know that speed matters and we provide a variety of tools to help everyone understand the performance of a page or site. Historically, these tools have used different analysis engines. Unfortunately, this caused some confusion because the…
Notifying users of unclear subscription pages
Every month, millions of Chrome users encounter pages with insufficient mobile subscription information. Surprising charges that come from unclear communication are a poor user experience. That’s why starting from Chrome 71 (December 2018), Chrome will show a warning before these pages, so that users can make informed decisions when signing up to mobile based subscription services. Users will be offered the choice to proceed to the page or go back if they were unaware that they were entering a billing page.
Unclear mobile subscriptions
Picture this: Andrea is browsing the web on a mobile connection to access a gaming page and they’re presented with a page that asks them for their mobile phone details.
They fill in the blanks with their mobile number and press Continue, and get access to the content.
The next month, the phone bill arrives and they see a charge they were not expecting. Was the subscription to the online gaming service really that expensive? Did they really agree to pay that specific price for the service? How much did they agree to be charged to access the content?
Clearer billing information for Chrome users
We want to make sure Chrome users understand when they are going through a billing flow and trust that they’ll be able to make informed decisions while browsing the web.
To adequately inform users, it’s important to provide a sufficient level of details within the billing page as outlined by our new mobile billing charges best practices. Pages that answer positively to the following questions generally provide sufficient information for users:
- Is the billing information visible and obvious to users? For example, adding no subscription information on the subscription page or hiding the information is a bad start because users should have access to the information when agreeing to subscribe.
- Can customers easily see the costs they’re going to incur before accepting the terms? For example, displaying the billing information in grey characters over a grey background, therefore making it less readable, is not considered a good user practice.
- Is the fee structure easily understandable? For example, the formula presented to explain how the cost of the service will be determined should be as simple and straightforward as possible.
If Chrome detects pages that don’t provide sufficient billing information to users, the following warning will be displayed to the user on Chrome mobile, Chrome desktop and Android’s WebView:
The warning will be shown to users entering unclear billing pages.
When we identify such pages, we will notify the webmaster through Search Console where there will be an option to let us know about the changes they’ve made to clarify the billing process. For websites that aren’t verified on Search Console, we will do our best to get in touch with the webmasters affected and will be available to answer questions in our public support forum available in 15 languages. Once an appeal has been sent via Search Console, we will review the changes and remove the warning accordingly.
If your billing service takes users through a clearly visible and understandable billing process as described in our best practices, you don’t need to make any changes. Also, the new warning in Chrome doesn’t impact your website’s ranking in Google Search.
If you have any questions, please come and have a chat with us in the Webmaster Help Forum.
Posted by Emily Schechter, Chrome Security, Giacomo Gnecchi Ruscone & Badr Salmi El Idrissi, Trust & Safety
Introducing reCAPTCHA v3: the new way to stop bots
Today, we’re excited to introduce reCAPTCHA v3, our newest API that helps you detect abusive traffic on your website without user interaction. Instead of showing a CAPTCHA challenge, reCAPTCHA v3 returns a score so you can choose the most appropriate action for your website.
A Frictionless User Experience
Over the last decade, reCAPTCHA has continuously evolved its technology. In reCAPTCHA v1, every user was asked to pass a challenge by reading distorted text and typing into a box. To improve both user experience and security, we introduced reCAPTCHA v2 and began to use many other signals to determine whether a request came from a human or bot. This enabled reCAPTCHA challenges to move from a dominant to a secondary role in detecting abuse, letting about half of users pass with a single click. Now with reCAPTCHA v3, we are fundamentally changing how sites can test for human vs. bot activities by returning a score to tell you how suspicious an interaction is and eliminating the need to interrupt users with challenges at all. reCAPTCHA v3 runs adaptive risk analysis in the background to alert you of suspicious traffic while letting your human users enjoy a frictionless experience on your site.
More Accurate Bot Detection with “Actions”
In reCAPTCHA v3, we are introducing a new concept called “Action”—a tag that you can use to define the key steps of your user journey and enable reCAPTCHA to run its risk analysis in context. Since reCAPTCHA v3 doesn’t interrupt users, we recommend adding reCAPTCHA v3 to multiple pages. In this way, the reCAPTCHA adaptive risk analysis engine can identify the pattern of attackers more accurately by looking at the activities across different pages on your website. In the reCAPTCHA admin console, you can get a full overview of reCAPTCHA score distribution and a breakdown for the stats of the top 10 actions on your site, to help you identify which exact pages are being targeted by bots and how suspicious the traffic was on those pages.
Fighting Bots Your Way
Another big benefit that you’ll get from reCAPTCHA v3 is the flexibility to prevent spam and abuse in the way that best fits your website. Previously, the reCAPTCHA system mostly decided when and what CAPTCHAs to serve to users, leaving you with limited influence over your website’s user experience. Now, reCAPTCHA v3 will provide you with a score that tells you how suspicious an interaction is. There are three potential ways you can use the score. First, you can set a threshold that determines when a user is let through or when further verification needs to be done, for example, using two-factor authentication and phone verification. Second, you can combine the score with your own signals that reCAPTCHA can’t access—such as user profiles or transaction histories. Third, you can use the reCAPTCHA score as one of the signals to train your machine learning model to fight abuse. By providing you with these new ways to customize the actions that occur for different types of traffic, this new version lets you protect your site against bots and improve your user experience based on your website’s specific needs.
In short, reCAPTCHA v3 helps to protect your sites without user friction and gives you more power to decide what to do in risky situations. As always, we are working every day to stay ahead of attackers and keep the Internet easy and safe to use (except for bots).
Ready to get started with reCAPTCHA v3? Visit our developer site for more details. Posted by Wei Liu, Google Product Manager
Google is introducing its Product Experts Program!
Over 12 years ago, we started answering webmaster questions and listening to feedback on our webmaster forums (although at the time, it was a Google Group for questions about sitemaps – original announcement). From a small mailing list, these forums have evolved to cover 15 languages and over 50,000 threads per year. These days, we learn a lot from some of the cases surfaced on this platform, and constantly use it to gather feedback to pass on to our teams.
Google’s Top Contributors (
Some of the Webmaster forum participants
Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re rebranding and relaunching the Top Contributor program as Google’s Product Experts program! Same community of experts, shiny new brand.
Over the following days, we’ll be updating our badges in the forums so you can recognize who our most passionate and dedicated Product Experts are:
More information about the new badges and names.
Those Product Experts are users who are passionate about Google products and enjoy helping other users. They also help us by giving feedback on the tools we all use, like the Search Console, by surfacing questions they think Google should answer better, etc… Obtaining feedback from our users is one of Google’s core values, and Product Experts often have a great understanding of what affects a lot of our users. For example, here is a blog post detailing how Product Expert feedback about the Search Console was used to build the new version of the tool.
Visit the new Product Experts program website to get information on how to become a Product Expert yourself, and come and join us on our Webmaster forums, we’d love to hear from you!
Written by Vincent Courson, Search Outreach team
The new Search Console is graduating out of Beta 🎓
Today we mark an important milestone in Search Console’s history: we are graduating the new Search Console out of beta! With this graduation we are also launching the Manual Actions report and a “Test Live” capability to the recently launched URL inspection tool, which are joining a stream of reports and features we launched in the new Search Console over the past few months.
Our journey to the new Search Console
We launched the new Search Console at the beginning of the year. Since then we have been busy hearing and responding to your feedback, adding new features such as the URL Inspection Tool, and migrating key reports and features. Here’s what the new Search Console gives you:
More data:
- Get an accurate view of your website content using the Index Coverage report.
- Review your Search Analytics data going back 16 months in the Performance report.
- See information on links pointing to your site and within your site using the Links report.
- Retrieve crawling, indexing, and serving information for any URL directly from the Google index using the URL Inspection Tool.
Better alerting and new “fixed it” flows:
- Get automatic alerts and see a listing of pages affected by Crawling, Indexing, AMP, Mobile Usability, Recipes, or Job posting issues.
- Reports now show the HTML code where we think a fix necessary (if applicable).
- Share information quickly with the relevant people in your organization to drive the fix.
- Notify Google when you’ve fixed an issue. We will review your pages, validate whether the issue is fixed, and return a detailed log of the validation findings.
Simplified sitemaps and account settings management:
- Let Google know how your site is structured by submitting sitemaps
- Submit individual URLs for indexing (see below).
- Add new sites to your account, invite and manage users.
Out of Beta
While the old Search Console still has some features that are not yet available in the new one, we believe that the most common use cases are supported, in an improved way, in the new Search Console. When an equivalent feature exists in both old and new Search Console, our messages will point users to the new version. We’ll also add a reminder link in the old report. After a reasonable period, we will remove the old report.
Read more about how to migrate from old to the new Search Console, including a list of improved reports and how to perform common tasks, in our help center.
Manual Actions and Security Issues alerts
To ensure that you don’t miss any critical alerts for your site, active manual actions and security issues will be shown directly on the Overview page in the new console. In addition, the Manual Actions report has gotten a fresher look in the new Search Console. From there, you can review the details for any pending Manual Action and, if needed, file a reconsideration request.
URL Inspection – Live mode and request indexing
The URL inspection tool that we launched a few months ago now enables you to run the inspection on the live version of the page. This is useful for debugging and fixing issues in a page or confirming whether a reported issue still exists in a page. If the issue is fixed on the live version of the page, you can ask Google to recrawl and index the page.
We’re not finished yet!
Your feedback is important to us! As we evolve Search Console, your feedback helps us to tune our efforts. You can still switch between the old and new products easily, so any missing functionality you need is just a few clicks away. We will continue working on moving more reports and tools as well as adding exciting new capabilities to the new Search Console.
Posted by Hillel Maoz and Yinnon Haviv, Engineering Leads, Search Console team
Collaboration and user management in the new Search Console
As part of our reinvention of Search Console, we have been rethinking the models of facilitating cooperation and accountability for our users. We decided to redesign the product around cooperative team usage and transparency of action history. The new Search Console will gradually provide better history tracking to show who performed which significant property-affecting modifications, such as changing a setting, validating an issue or submitting a new sitemap. In that spirit we also plan to enable all users to see critical site messages.
New features
- User management is now an integral part of Search Console.
- The new Search Console enables you to share a read-only view of many reports, including Index coverage, AMP, and Mobile Usability. Learn more.
- A new user management interface that enables all users to see and (if appropriate), manage user roles for all property users.
New Role definition
- In order to provide a simpler permission model, we are planning to limit the “restricted” user role to read-only status. While being able to see all information, read-only users will no longer be able to perform any state-changing actions, including starting a fix validation or sharing an issue.
Best practices
As a reminder, here are some best practices for managing user permissions in Search Console:
- Grant users only the permission level that they need to do their work. See the permissions descriptions.
- If you need to share an issue details report, click the Share link on that page.
- Revoke permissions from users who no longer work on a property.
- When removing a previous verified owner, be sure to remove all verification tokens for that user.
- Regularly audit and update the user permissions using the Users & Permissions page in new Search Console.
User feedback
As part of our Beta exploration, we released visibility of the user management interface to all user roles. Some users reached out to request more time to prepare for the updated user management model, including the ability of restricted and full users to easily see a list of other collaborators on the site. We’ve taken that feedback and will hold off on that part of the launch. Stay tuned for more updates relating to collaboration tools and changes on our permission models.
As always, we love to hear feedback from our users. Feel free to use the feedback form within Search Console, and we welcome your discussions in our help forums as well!
Posted by John Mueller, Google Switzerland
Links, Mobile Usability, and site management in the new Search Console
More features are coming to the new Search Console. This time we’ve focused on importing existing popular features from the old Search Console to the new product.
Links Report
Search Console users value the ability to see links to and within their site, as Google Search sees them. Today, we are rolling out the new Links report, which combines the functionality of the “Links to your site” and “Internal Links” reports on the old Search Console. We hope you find this useful!
Mobile Usability report
Mobile Usability is an important priority for all site owners. In order to help site owners with fixing mobile usability issues, we launched the Mobile Usability report on the new Search Console. Issue names are the same as in the old report but we now allow users to submit a validation and reindexing request when an issue is fixed, similar to other reports in the new Search Console.
Site and user management
To make the new Search Console feel more like home, we’ve added the ability to add and verify new sites, and manage your property’s users and permissions, directly in new Search Console using our newly added settings page.
Keep sending feedback
As always, we would love to get your feedback through the tools directly and our help forums so please share and let us know how we’re doing.
Posted by Ariel Kroszynski and Roman Kecher – Search Console engineers
Hey Google, what’s the latest news?
Since launching the Google Assistant in 2016, we have seen users ask questions about everything from weather to recipes and news. In order to fulfill news queries with results people can count on, we collaborated on a new schema.org structured data spe…
An update to referral source URLs for Google Images
Every day, hundreds of millions of people use Google Images to visually discover and explore content on the web. Whether it be finding ideas for your next baking project, or visual instructions on how to fix a flat tire, exploring image results can so…
How we fought webspam – Webspam Report 2017
We always want to make sure that when you use Google Search to find information, you get the highest quality results. But, we are aware of many bad actors who are trying to manipulate search ranking and profit from it, which is at odds with our core mission: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Over the years, we’ve devoted a huge effort toward combating abuse and spam on Search. Here’s a look at how we fought abuse in 2017.
We call these various types of abuse that violate the webmaster guidelines “spam.” Our evaluation indicated that for many years, less than 1 percent of search results users visited are spammy. In the last couple of years, we’ve managed to further reduce this by half.
Google webspam trends and how we fought webspam in 2017
As we continued to improve, spammers also evolved. One of the trends in 2017 was an increase in website hacking—both for spamming search ranking and for spreading malware. Hacked websites are serious threats to users because hackers can take complete control of a site, deface homepages, erase relevant content, or insert malware and harmful code. They may also record keystrokes, stealing login credentials for online banking or financial transactions. In 2017 we focused on reducing this threat, and were able to detect and remove from search results more than 80 percent of these sites. But hacking is not just a spam problem for search users—it affects the owners of websites as well. To help website owners keep their websites safe, we created a hands-on resource to help webmasters strengthen their websites’ security and revamped our help resources to help webmasters recover from a hacked website. The guides are available in 19 languages.
We’re also recognizing the importance of robust content management systems (CMSs). A large percentage of websites are run on one of several popular CMSs, and subsequently spammers exploited them by finding ways to abuse their provisions for user-generated content, such as posting spam content in comment sections or forums. We’re working closely with many of the providers of popular content management systems like WordPress and Joomla to help them also fight spammers that abuse their forums, comment sections and websites.
Another abuse vector is the manipulation of links, which is one of the foundation ranking signals for Search. In 2017 we doubled down our effort in removing unnatural links via ranking improvements and scalable manual actions. We have observed a year-over-year reduction of spam links by almost half.
Working with users and webmasters for a better web
We’re here to listen: Our automated systems are constantly working to detect and block spam. Still, we always welcome hearing from you when something seems … phishy. Last year, we were able to take action on nearly 90,000 user reports of search spam.
Reporting spam, malware and other issues you find helps us protect the site owner and other searchers from this abuse. You can file a spam report, a phishing report or a malware report. We very much appreciate these reports—a big THANK YOU to all of you who submitted them.
We also actively work with webmasters to maintain the health of the web ecosystem. Last year, we sent 45 million messages to registered website owners via Search Console letting them know about issues we identified with their websites. More than 6 million of these messages are related to manual actions, providing transparency to webmasters so they understand why their sites got manual actions and how to resolve the issue.
Last year, we released a beta version of a new Search Console to a limited number of users and afterwards, to all users of Search Console. We listened to what matters most to the users, and started with popular functionalities such as Search performance, Index Coverage and others. These can help webmasters optimize their websites’ Google Search presence more easily.
Through enhanced Safe Browsing protections, we continue to protect more users from bad actors online. In the last year, we have made significant improvements to our safe browsing protection, such as broadening our protection of macOS devices, enabling predictive phishing protection in Chrome, cracked down on mobile unwanted software, and launched significant improvements to our ability to protect users from deceptive Chrome extension installation.
We have a multitude of channels to engage directly with webmasters. We have dedicated team members who meet with webmasters regularly both online and in-person. We conducted more than 250 online office hours, online events and offline events around the world in more than 60 cities to audiences totaling over 220,000 website owners, webmasters and digital marketers. In addition, our official support forum has answered a high volume of questions in many languages. Last year, the forum had 63,000 threads generating over 280,000 contributing posts by 100+ Top Contributors globally. For more details, see this post. Apart from the forums, blogs and the SEO starter guide, the Google Webmaster YouTube channel is another channel to find more tips and insights. We launched a new SEO snippets video series to help with short and to-the-point answers to specific questions. Be sure to subscribe to the channel!
Despite all these improvements, we know we’re not yet done. We’re relentless in our pursue of an abuse-free user experience, and will keep improving our collaboration with the ecosystem to make it happen.
We also actively work with webmasters to maintain the health of the web ecosystem. Last year, we sent 45 million messages to registered website owners via Search Console letting them know about issues we identified with their websites. More than 6 million of these messages are related to manual actions, providing transparency to webmasters so they understand why their sites got manual actions and how to resolve the issue.
Last year, we released a beta version of a new Search Console to a limited number of users and afterwards, to all users of Search Console. We listened to what matters most to the users, and started with popular functionalities such as Search performance, Index Coverage and others. These can help webmasters optimize their websites’ Google Search presence more easily.
Through enhanced Safe Browsing protections, we continue to protect more users from bad actors online. In the last year, we have made significant improvements to our safe browsing protection, such as broadening our protection of macOS devices, enabling predictive phishing protection in Chrome, cracked down on mobile unwanted software, and launched significant improvements to our ability to protect users from deceptive Chrome extension installation.
We have a multitude of channels to engage directly with webmasters. We have dedicated team members who meet with webmasters regularly both online and in-person. We conducted more than 250 online office hours, online events and offline events around the world in more than 60 cities to audiences totaling over 220,000 website owners, webmasters and digital marketers. In addition, our official support forum has answered a high volume of questions in many languages. Last year, the forum had 63,000 threads generating over 280,000 contributing posts by 100+ Top Contributors globally. For more details, see this post. Apart from the forums, blogs and the SEO starter guide, the Google Webmaster YouTube channel is another channel to find more tips and insights. We launched a new SEO snippets video series to help with short and to-the-point answers to specific questions. Be sure to subscribe to the channel!
Despite all these improvements, we know we’re not yet done. We’re relentless in our pursue of an abuse-free user experience, and will keep improving our collaboration with the ecosystem to make it happen.
Posted by Cody Kwok, Principal Engineer
Introducing the Indexing API for job posting URLs
Last June we launched a job search experience that has since connected tens of millions of job seekers around the world with relevant job opportunities from third party providers across the web. Timely indexing of new job content is critical because m…
New URL inspection tool & more in Search Console
A few months ago, we introduced the new Search Console. Here are some updates on how it’s progressing.
Welcome “URL inspection” tool
One of our most common user requests in Search Console is for more details on how Google Search sees a specific URL. We listened, and today we’ve started launching a new tool, “URL inspection,” to provide these details so Search becomes more transparent. The URL Inspection tool provides detailed crawl, index, and serving information about your pages, directly from the Google index.
Enter a URL that you own to learn the last crawl date and status, any crawling or indexing errors, and the canonical URL for that page. If the page was successfully indexed, you can see information and status about any enhancements we found on the page, such as linked AMP version or rich results like Recipes and Jobs.
URL is indexed with valid AMP enhancement
If a page isn’t indexed, you can learn why. The new report includes information about noindex robots meta tags and Google’s canonical URL for the page.
URL is not indexed due to ‘noindex’ meta tag in the HTML
A single click can take you to the issue report showing all other pages affected by the same issue to help you track down and fix common bugs.
We hope that the URL Inspection tool will help you debug issues with new or existing pages in the Google Index. We began rolling it out today; it will become available to all users in the coming weeks.
More exciting updates
In addition to the launch of URL inspection, we have a few more features and reports we recently launched to the new Search Console:
- Sixteen months of traffic data: The Search Analytics API now returns 16 months of data, just like the Performance report.
- Recipe report: The Recipe report help you fix structured data issues affecting recipes rich results. Use our task-oriented interface to test and validate your fixes; we will keep you informed on your progress using messages.
- New Search Appearance filters in Search Analytics: The performance report now gives you more visibility on new search appearance results, including Web Light and Google Play Instant results.
Thank you for your feedback
We are constantly reading your feedback, conducting surveys, and monitoring usage statistics of the new Search Console. We are happy to see so many of you using the new issue validation flow in Index Coverage and the AMP report. We notice that issues tend to get fixed quicker when you use these tools. We also see that you appreciate the updates on the validation process that we provide by email or on the validation details page.
We want to thank everyone who provided feedback: it has helped us improve our flows and fix bugs on our side.
More to come
The new Search Console is still beta, but it’s adding features and reports every month. Please keep sharing your feedback through the various channels and let us know how we’re doing.
Posted by Roman Kecher and Sion Schori – Search Console engineers
Google Search at I/O 2018
With the eleventh annual Google I/O wrapped up, it’s a great time to reflect on some of the highlights.
What we did at I/O
The event was a wonderful way to meet many great people from various communities across the globe, exchange ideas, and gather feedback. Besides many great web sessions, codelabs, and office hours we shared a few things with the community in two sessions specific to Search:
- Deliver search-friendly JavaScript-powered websites with John Mueller and Tom Greenaway
- Build a successful web presence with Google Search with Mariya Moeva and John Mueller
The sessions included the launch of JavaScript error reporting in the Mobile Friendly Test tool, dynamic rendering (we will discuss this in more detail in a future post), and an explanation of how CMS can use the Indexing and Search Console APIs to provide users with insights. For example, Wix lets their users submit their homepage to the index and see it in Search results instantly, and Squarespace created a Google Search keywords report to help webmasters understand what prospective users search for.
During the event, we also presented the new Search Console in the Sandbox area for people to try and were happy to get a lot of positive feedback, from people being excited about the AMP Status report to others exploring how to improve their content for Search.
Hands-on codelabs, case studies and more
We presented the Structured Data Codelab that walks you through adding and testing structured data. We were really happy to see that it ended up being one of the top 20 codelabs by completions at I/O. If you want to learn more about the benefits of using Structured Data, check out our case studies.
During the in-person office hours we saw a lot of interest around HTTPS, mobile-first indexing, AMP, and many other topics. The in-person Office Hours were a wonderful addition to our monthly Webmaster Office Hours hangout. The questions and comments will help us adjust our documentation and tools by making them clearer and easier to use for everyone.
Highlights and key takeaways
We also repeated a few key points that web developers should have an eye on when building websites, such as:
- Indexing and rendering don’t happen at the same time. We may defer the rendering to a later point in time.
- Make sure the content you want in Search has metadata, correct HTTP statuses, and the intended canonical tag.
- Hash-based routing (URLs with “#”) should be deprecated in favour of the JavaScript History API in Single Page Apps.
- Links should have an href attribute pointing to a URL, so Googlebot can follow the links properly.
Make sure to watch this talk for more on indexing, dynamic rendering and troubleshooting your site. If you wanna learn more about things to do as a CMS developer or theme author or Structured Data, watch this talk.
We were excited to meet some of you at I/O as well as the global I/O extended events and share the latest developments in Search. To stay in touch, join the Webmaster Forum or follow us on Twitter, Google+, and YouTube.
Posted by Martin Splitt, Webmaster Trends Analyst
Our goal: helping webmasters and content creators
Great websites are the result of the hard work of website owners who make their content and services accessible to the world. Even though it’s simpler now to run a website than it was years ago, it can still feel like a complex undertaking. This is why we invest a lot of time and effort in improving Google Search so that website owners can spend more time focusing on building the most useful content for their users, while we take care of helping users find that content.
Most website owners find they don’t have to worry much about what Google is doing—they post their content, and then Googlebot discovers, crawls, indexes and understands that content, to point users to relevant pages on those sites. However, sometimes the technical details still matter, and sometimes a great deal.
For those times when site owners would like a bit of help from someone at Google, or an explanation for why something works a particular way, or why things appear in a particular way, or how to fix what looks like a technical glitch, we have a global team dedicated to making sure there are many places for a website owner to get help from Google and knowledgeable members of the community.
The first place to start for help is Google Webmasters, a place where all of our support resources (many of which are available in 40 languages) are within easy reach:
- Google Web Fundamentals: Provides technical guidance on building a modern website that takes advantage of open web standards.
- Google Search developer documentation: Describes how Google crawls and indexes a website. Includes authoritative guidance on building a site that is optimized for Google Search.
- Search Console Help Center: Provides detailed information on how to use and take advantage of Search Console, the best way for a website owner to understand how Google sees their site.
- The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide: Provides a complete overview of the basics of SEO according to our recommended best practices.
- Google webmaster guidelines: Describes policies and practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index or otherwise affected by an algorithmic or manual spam action that can negatively affect their Search appearance.
- Google Webmasters YouTube Channel
Our second path to getting help is through our Google Webmaster Central Help Forums. We have forums in 16 languages—in English, Spanish, Hindi, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, German, Russian, Turkish, Polish, Bahasa Indonesia, Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese and Korean. The forums are staffed with dedicated Googlers who are there to make sure your questions get answered. Aside from the Googlers who monitor the forums, there is an amazing group of Product Experts who generously offer their time to help other members of the community—many times providing greater detail and analysis for a particular website’s content than we could. The forums allow for both a public discussion and, if the case requires it, for private follow-up replies in the forum.
A third path for support to website owners is our series of Online Webmaster Office Hours — in English, German, Japanese, Turkish, Hindi and French. Anyone who joins these is welcome to ask us questions about website appearance in Google Search, which we will answer to the best of our abilities. All of our team members think that one of the best parts of speaking at conferences and events is the opportunity to answer questions from the audience, and the online office hours format creates that opportunity for many more people who might not be able to travel to a specialized event. You can always check out the Google Webmaster calendar for upcoming webmaster officer hours and live events.
While how a website behaves on the web is openly visible to all who can see it, we know that some website owners prefer not to make it known their website has a problem in a public forum. There’s no shame in asking for support, but if you have an issue for your website that seems sensitive—for which you don’t think you can share all the details publicly—you can call out that you would prefer to share necessary details only with someone experienced and who is willing to help, using the forum’s “Private Reply” feature.
Are there other things you think we should be doing that would help your website get the most out of search? Please let us know — in our forums, our office hours, or via Twitter @googlewmc.
Posted by Juan Felipe Rincón from Google’s Webmaster Outreach & Support team
Google I/O 2018 – What sessions should SEOs and Webmasters watch live ?
Google I/O 2018 is starting today in California, to an international audience of 7,000+ developers. It will run until Thursday night. It is our annual developers festival, where product announcements are made, new APIs and frameworks are introduced, and Product Managers present the latest from Google.
However, you don’t have to physically attend the event to take advantage of this once-a-year opportunity: many conferences and talks are live streamed on YouTube for anyone to watch. You will find the full-event schedule here.
Dozens upon dozens of talks will take place over the next 3 days. We have hand picked the talks that we think will be the most interesting for webmasters and SEO professionals. Each link shared will bring you to pages with more details about each talk, and you will find out how to tune in to the live stream. All times are California time (PCT). We might add other sessions to this list.
Tuesday, May 8th
3pm – Web Security post Spectre/Meltdown, with Emily Schechter and Chris Palmer – more info.
5pm – Dru Knox and Stephan Somogyi talk about building a seamless web with Chrome – more info.
Wednesday, May 9th
9.30am – Ewa Gasperowicz and Addy Osmani talk about Web Performance and increasing control over the loading experience – more info.
10.30am – Alberto Medina and Thierry Muller will explain how to make a WordPress site progressive – more info.
11.30am – Rob Dodson and Dominic Mazzoni will cover “What’s new in web accessibility” – more info.
3.30pm – Michael Bleigh will introduce how to leverage AMP in Firebase for a blazing fast website – more info.
4.30pm – Rick Viscomi and Vinamrata Singal will introduce the latest with Lighthouse and Chrome UX Report for Web Performance – more info.
Thursday, May 10th
8.30am – John Mueller and Tom Greenaway will talk about building Search-friendly JavaScript websites – more info.
9.30am – Build e-commerce sites for the modern web with AMP, PWA, and more, with Adam Greenberg and Rowan Merewood – more info.
12.30pm – Session on “Building a successful web presence with Google Search” by John Mueller and Mariya Moeva – more info.
This list is only a sample of the content at this year’s Google I/O, and there might be many more that are interesting to you! To find out about those other talks, check out the full list of web sessions, but also the sessions about Design, the Cloud sessions, the machine learning sessions, and more…
We hope you can make the time to watch the talks online, and participate in the excitement of I/O ! The videos will also be available on Youtube after the event, in case you can’t tune in live.
Posted by Vincent Courson, Search Outreach Specialist, and the Google Webmasters team
