An Information Blog

The history behind Google Webmasters Merriam-Webster claims the first known use of the word "webmaster" was in 1993, years before Google even existed. However, the term is becoming archaic, and according to the data found in books , its use is in sharp decline. A user experience study we ran revealed that very few web professionals identify themselves as webmasters anymore. They're more likely to call themselves Search Engine Optimizer (SEO), online marketer, blogger, web developer, or site owner, but very few "webmasters". We're changing our name In brainstorming our new name, we realized that there's not one term that perfectly summarizes the work people do on websites. To focus more on the topic that we talk about (Google Search), we're changing our name from "Google Webmasters Central" to "Google Search Central", both on our websites and on social media. Our goal is still the same; we aim to help people improve the visibi...

This past May , we announced that page experience signals would be included in Google Search ranking. These signals measure how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page and contribute to our ongoing work to ensure people get the most helpful and enjoyable experiences from the web. In the past several months, we’ve seen a median 70% increase in the number of users engaging with Lighthouse and Page Speed Insights, and many site owners using Search Console’s Core Web Vitals report to identify opportunities for improvement. Today we’re announcing that the page experience signals in ranking will roll out in May 2021. The new page experience signals combine Core Web Vitals with our existing search signals including mobile-friendliness , safe-browsing , HTTPS-security , and intrusive interstitial guidelines . The change for non-AMP content to become eligible to appear in the mobile Top Stories feature in Search will also roll out in May 2021. Any page that meets the G...

More than ever, users are relying on Google products to do their jobs, educate their kids, and stay in touch with loved ones. Our Google Product Experts (PEs) play a vital role in supporting these users in community forums, like the Webmaster Help Community , across many languages. For several years now, we have been inviting our most advanced PEs from around the world to a bi-annual, 3-day PE Summit. These events provide an opportunity not only to share latest product updates with PEs, but also to acknowledge and celebrate their tireless contributions to help our users. As the world was going into lockdown in March, we quickly decided that we don’t want to miss out on this annual celebration. So the summit team shifted focus and started planning an all virtual event which came to be called PES@Home. Through the house-themed virtual event platform, PEs participated in over 120 sessions in the "office", got a chance to engage with each other and Googlers in the "kitch...

The end of the year holiday season is a peak time for many merchants with special sales events such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday. As a merchant, you can help Google highlight your sales events by providing landing pages with relevant content and high quality images. Best Practices The following are recommended best practices for your landing pages: Create the page early. Make sure you create the page well before the sale so Googlebot has time to discover and index the page. Make sure you are not blocking Google from crawling the URL (the Google URL Inspection Tool can be used to check this). Follow standard SEO best practices. A list of SEO best practices for landing pages can be found in our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide . Link to the landing pages from your home page (or similar) to increase their prominence, helping users (and Google) find the landing page quicker. Use a recurring URL , not a new URL for each occurrence of the event. Give the landing ...

In November 2019 we announced the Search Console Training YouTube series and started publishing videos regularly. The goal of the series was to create updated video content to be used alongside Search documentation, for example in the Help Center and in the Developers site . The wonderful Google Developer Studio team (the engine behind those videos!) put together this fun blooper reel for the first wave of videos that we recorded in the Google London studio. So far we’ve published twelve episodes in the series, each focusing on a different part of the tool. We’ve seen it’s helping lots of people to learn how to use Search Console - so we decided to continue recording videos… at home! Please bear with the trucks, ambulances, neighbors, passing clouds, and of course the doorbell. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ In addition to the location change, we’re also changing the scope of the new videos. Instead of focusing on one report at a time, we’ll discuss how Search Console can help YOUR business. In each...

Quick summary : Starting today, we support shippingDetails schema.org markup as an alternative way for retailers to be eligible for shipping details in Google Search results. Since June 2020, retailers have been able to list their products across different Google surfaces for free, including on Google Search . We are committed to supporting ways for the ecosystem to better connect with users that come to Google to look for the best products, brands, and retailers by investing both in more robust tooling in Google Merchant Center as well as with new kinds of schema.org options. Shipping details, including cost and expected delivery times, are often a key consideration for users making purchase decisions. In our own studies, we’ve heard that users abandon shopping checkouts because of unforeseen or uncertain shipping costs. This is why we will often show shipping cost information in certain result types, including on free listings on Google Search (currently in the US, in English on...

Last year we released the robots.txt parser and matcher that we use in our production systems to the open source world. Since then, we've seen people build new tools with it, contribute to the open source library (effectively improving our production systems- thanks!), and release new language versions like golang and rust , which make it easier for developers to build new tools. With the intern season ending here at Google, we wanted to highlight two new releases related to robots.txt that were made possible by two interns working on the Search Open Sourcing team, Andreea Dutulescu and Ian Dolzhanskii .  Robots.txt Specification Test First, we are releasing a testing framework for robots.txt parser developers, created by Andreea. The project provides a testing tool that can validate whether a robots.txt parser follows the Robots Exclusion Protocol, or to what extent. Currently there is no official and thorough way to assess the correctness of a parser, so Andreea built a t...

Quick summary: Starting November 2020, Googlebot will start crawling some sites over HTTP/2. Ever since mainstream browsers started supporting the next major revision of HTTP, HTTP/2 or h2 for short, web professionals asked us whether Googlebot can crawl over the upgraded, more modern version of the protocol. Today we're announcing that starting mid November 2020, Googlebot will support crawling over HTTP/2 for select sites. What is HTTP/2 As we said, it's the next major version of HTTP , the protocol the internet primarily uses for transferring data. HTTP/2 is much more robust, efficient, and faster than its predecessor, due to its architecture and the features it implements for clients (for example, your browser) and servers. If you want to read more about it, we have a long article on the HTTP/2 topic on developers.google.com . Why we're making this change In general, we expect this change to make crawling more efficient in terms of server resource usage. With h2...

The first Virtual Webmaster Unconference successfully took place on August 26th and, as promised, we’d like to share the main findings and conclusions here. How did the event go? As communicated before, this event was a pilot, in which we wanted to test a) if there was an appetite for a very different type of event, and b) whether the community would actively engage in the discussions. To the first question, we were overwhelmed with the interest to participate; it definitely exceeded our expectations and it gives us fuel to try out future iterations. Despite the frustration of many, who did not receive an invitation, we purposefully kept the event small. This brings us to our second point: it is by creating smaller venues that discussions can happen comfortably. Larger audiences are perfect for more conventional conferences, with keynotes and panels. The Virtual Webmaster Unconference, however, was created to hear the attendees’ voices. And we did. What did we learn in the s...

For the last few years, we’ve collaborated with the image licensing industry to raise awareness of licensing requirements for content found through Google Images. In 2018, we began supporting IPTC Image Rights metadata ; in February 2020 we announced a new metadata framework through Schema.org and IPTC for licensable images. Since then, we’ve seen widespread adoption of this new standard by websites, image platforms and agencies of all sizes. Today, we’re launching new features on Google Images which will highlight licensing information for images, and make it easier for users to understand how to use images responsibly. What is it? Images that include licensing information will be labeled with a “Licensable” badge on the results page. When a user opens the image viewer (the window that appears when they select an image), we will show a link to the license details and/or terms page provided by the content owner or licensor. If available, we’ll also show an additional link that direc...

Earlier this year Google launched a new way for shoppers to find clothes, shoes and other retail products on Search in the U.S. and recently announced that free retail listings are coming to product knowledge panels on Google Search . These new types of experiences on Google Search, along with the global availability of rich results for products, enable retailers to make information about their products visible to millions of Google users, for free. The best way for retailers and brands to participate in this experience is by annotating the product information on their websites using schema.org markup or by submitting this information directly to Google Merchant Center. Retailers can refer to our documentation to learn more about showing products for free on surfaces across Google or adding schema.org markup to a website . While the processes above are the best way to ensure that product information will appear in this Search experience, Google may also include content that has n...

Signed Exchanges (SXG) is a subset of the emerging family of specifications called Web Packaging , which enables publishers to safely make their content portable, while still keeping the publisher’s integrity and attribution. In 2019, Google Search started linking to signed AMP pages served from Google’s cache when available. This feature allows the content to be prefetched without loss of privacy, while attributing the content to the right origin. Today we are happy to announce that sites implementing SXG for their AMP pages will be able to understand if there are any issues preventing Google from serving the SXG version of their page using the Google AMP Cache.  Use the AMP report to check if your site has any SXG related issues - look for issues with 'signed exchange' in their name. We will also send emails to alert you of new issues as we detect them.  To help with debugging and to verify a specific page is served using SXG, you can inspect a URL using the URL Inspe...

While the in-person Webmaster Conference events are still on hold , we continue to share insights and information with you in the Webmaster Conference Lightning Talks series on our YouTube channel . But we understand that you might be missing the connection during live events, so we’d like to invite you to join a new event format: the first Virtual Webmaster Unconference , on August 26th, at 8AM PDT ! What is the Virtual Webmaster Unconference? Because we want you to actively participate in the event, this is neither a normal Webmaster Conference nor a typical online conference. This event isn't just for you - it's your event. In particular, the word "Unconference" means that you get to choose which sessions you want to attend and become an active part of. You will shape the event by taking part in discussions, feedback sessions and similar formats that need your input.  It's your chance to collaborate with other webmasters, SEOs, developers, di...