Google Search Central

Faceted navigation is a great way to help users find what they need on your site, but it can create an SEO nightmare if not implemented carefully. Why? Because it can generate a near-infinite number of URLs, which causes all sorts of crawling problems.

The Search Central Live events in Kuala Lumpur and Taipei were nothing short of amazing, in large thanks to the over 600 people who attended the events! We were thrilled to see the level of enthusiasm and engagement from attendees even if, on the day prior to the Taipei event, we collectively had to deal with typhoon Kong Rey, the first supertyphoon in Taiwan’s history to make landfall after mid-October. Here’s a deeper dive into what made these events so special and what’s next.

To better help you monitor the recent performance of your content, we’re launching the ’24 hours’ view to the SC performance reports and improving the freshness of the data. We’re rolling out these changes to all properties gradually over the next few months, so you might not see changes right away.

Allow us to cache, pretty please. As the internet grew over the years, so did how much Google crawls. While Google’s crawling infrastructure supports heuristic caching mechanisms, in fact always had, the number of requests that can be returned from local caches has decreased: 10 years ago about 0.026% of the total fetches were cacheable, which is already not that impressive; today that number is 0.017%.

You may have heard that Google Search needs to do a bit of work before a web page can show up in Google Search results. One of these steps is called crawling. Crawling for Google Search is done by Googlebot, a program running on Google servers that retrieves a URL and handles things like network errors, redirects, and other small complications that it might encounter as it works its way through the web. But there are a few details that aren’t often talked about. Each week this month we’re going to explore some of those details as they may have a significant effect on how your sites are crawled.

We’re looking forward to meeting you at the Google office in Zurich for Search Central Live Zurich 2024 on Dec 12, 2024. Join us for presentations, Q&A and networking on December 12, 2024.

Earlier this year, as part of our work to fight spam and deliver a great Search experience, we launched a spam policy to combat site reputation abuse. We’re clarifying our policy language to further target this type of spammy behavior. We’re making it clear that using third-party content on a site in an attempt to exploit the site’s ranking signals is a violation of this policy – regardless of whether there is first-party involvement or oversight of the content.

It’s been over ten years since we initially announced the sitelinks search box in Google Search, and over time, we’ve noticed that usage has dropped. To help simplify the search results, we’ll be removing this visual element starting on November 21, 2024.

Our first two Search Central Live events in Asia this year have been wrapped up and we finished looking back at what we’ve learned and what we can do better.

Google’s Store Ratings have been helping US merchants highlight the high quality experiences other shoppers have had right from Search, and we’re now bringing store ratings to English-language shopping searches in Australia, Canada, India and the United Kingdom.

We’re sharing more information about our new search experiences in South Africa, and how South African platforms can express interest and participate.

This post is about the new Google Trends Tutorials YouTube series. In these videos you’ll learn how to use Google Trends to analyze patterns in Google Search and Youtube searches, and use them to create interesting content online.

Over the recent years, AVIF has become one of the most commonly used image formats on the web. We’re happy to announce that AVIF is now a supported file type in Google Search, for Google Images as well as any place that uses images in Google Search. You don’t need to do anything special to have your AVIF files indexed by Google.

As previously announced, we’re coming to Kuala Lumpur and to Taipei in the last quarter of 2024. And yes, we’re very excited! The KL event will be in English and the Taipei event will be conducted in Mandarin (Traditional Chinese).

This post announces the August 2024 core update to Google Search. This update is designed to continue our work to improve the quality of our search results by showing more content that people find genuinely useful and less content that feels like it was made just to perform well on Search.

This post announces Search Console recommendations, a new feature that provides websites with optimization opportunities and suggests actions they can take to improve their presence on Google Search.

This post discusses a new and easier way to add shipping or return information directly in Search Console.

We’re coming back to Thailand with Search Central Live! As mentioned in our blog post about our APAC plans for SCL, we now have a date and a site where you can sign up for a chance to secure your spot at Search Central Live Bangkok 2024.

The Google Search Central LinkedIn channel is (finally) here!

We’re adding support for return policies at the organization level, which means you’ll be able to specify a general return policy for your business instead of having to define one for each individual product you sell.