John Mueller, Search Advocate at Google, discusses how images work on Google, how to use images to achieve the goals you have for your website and SEO best practices for images.
Video Transcript
Hi everyone, and welcome back to the google search news. I hope life is treating you reasonably well wherever you are. I’m your host today, John Mueller, here from google Switzerland with this show. We want to give you a regular summary of what’s been happening around Google Search, specifically for website owners, publishers, and SEOs. If you find these useful, which I hope you do. And if you’d like to stay up to date, make sure to subscribe to the channel. It’s been a while since we last saw each other. There’s been so much keeping us busy lately, which is why it’s good to have these videos from time to time.
Highlights
In this episode, we’ll be covering an update of the page experience ranking change video best practices search console, and more.
Page Experience and Core Web Vitas Ranking Change
So, without further ado, let’s dive right in. Starting us off is the page experience change. As you may recall, this is an upcoming ranking change which takes into account the user experience on web pages. It includes technical elements like HTTPS as well as quantifiable metrics for speed and responsiveness.
We just published some additional information on this change. Here are a few highlights. First off, you have more time we move the start of the rollout to mid-June. The change will take place slowly over the course of two months. On a per-page basis, this gives you a bit more time to improve your website before things start off. And to be clear, this is just one of many factors that our systems take into account. There’s no need to do a scramble. Take the time to find good solutions for your websites and your users. Every website is a bit different. The core web vitals part of the ranking factor is based on real user metrics, which take a while to be collected, and which are automatically updated over time. Making improvements at any point will be reflected there. A website doesn’t need to be and rarely is perfect. From the start, you’ll start to see positive results as your pages pass the needs improvement mark. We also plan on using these factors for the top stories carousel and within google news.
Additionally, signed exchanges will be available for all web pages. In short signed, exchanges is a setup that enables google search to pre-fetch your pages in a privacy preserving way to make the experience for your users even better. There are a lot of details in the blog post and even more answers in an FAQ post in our help forum. I’ll link to these below.
Wow, so much information about this particular search change. I hope it’s not too much but let me know if there’s something we should cover. More luckily, there are also folks outside of google who are fantastic at explaining some of the technical details and practical aspects. For example, recently, I saw an amazing guide on cumulative layout shift or CLS, which is a part of the core web vitals. It includes explanations about the metric, different ways to measure it, and a bunch of really practical tips on how to improve your pages for it. The guide was written by Jess Peck, and I’ll link to it in the description as well.
Video Best Practices
Next up, and it almost feels a bit recursive to talk in a video about a video about videos. Anyway, here’s an update on video best practices. Video is a fantastic way of reaching people, and it doesn’t even need to be a news video. Like this one, we’ve been improving how videos are shown in search results to help your site. To take advantage of these changes, we’ve updated and expanded our documentation on video best practices. This includes a video from Danielle, who actually works on the video search team here at google. Wow, in the updated documentation, you can learn how to help google to find your videos for indexing. Additionally, you can learn about ways to express how you’d like your videos to be highlighted in search. If you’ve been including videos in your web pages, you may already be aware of some of these things. Regardless I strongly recommend double checking to make sure you’re using all the available features to your best advantage. And of course, if you haven’t been making videos for your web pages, perhaps it’s worth giving it a shot.
Search Console Updates
Now over to our evergreen topic, google search console. Search console is a way of finding out how your website is doing with regards to google search. Where and how are people finding your website, are there issues holding your site back, there’s much more though to get started. Just verify ownership of your site’s domain name. Within search console, we recently added regex support in the performance report. With regex, some people mistakenly call it regex. You can enter patterns instead of words for matching. You can use it for the search queries as well. As the pages shown in the report, it’s been one of the most requested features for search console, so it’s cool to see it here now.
Additionally, we’ve added a special report for the page experience update, which covers all of the elements involved. At a glance, you can see how your site is doing in particular, how many pages are seen as reaching the fairly high threshold of good across the metrics, how the site is doing in terms of mobile usability, and all of the other aspects of the page experience factor. This is the first time we’ve put together such a comprehensive report for a specific ranking change, and we hope it makes it easier for you to improve your website for your users.
More Content
That’s almost it. But wait, there’s a bit more to mention. For example, the web creators team at google has been busy making lots of content for all of the amazing folks like you, perhaps who regularly create content of their own for the web. This includes but isn’t limited to bloggers. For example, the team has created videos and articles to help with complex topics like monetization and better understanding of your audience. Similarly, on this channel, we’ve started a series on sustainable monetized websites where we cover other aspects of monetization. In particular, explaining how to take into account the various policies and guidelines that apply. Finally, also on this channel, we’ve been actively publishing search central lightning talk videos. These are short videos on specific topics similar to how we might present them at events physical events are not taking place for now. So, we hope these tied you over. They cover important topics and hopefully make it a bit easier for you to be successful on the web and on the topic of events.
Google I/O
I also wanted to call out Google I/O. It’s taking place mid-May and will be held virtually. There are lots of sessions including some live ask me anything slots. I’m sure it’ll be neat, so make sure to register ahead of time.
Take Away
And that’s all for now, folks. Thank you for watching this episode. It always feels good to me to look back and pull together the things that really stood out. I hope you find it useful and insightful as well. If there are elements you’d like to have covered differently, then please let us know in the comments below, or drop me a note on twitter. If you’d like to see more of these episodes, make sure to subscribe to the channel. We’re regularly publishing new videos here. I’m sure there’s something coming up which you’ll appreciate as well. And as always, I look forward to seeing you all again in one of the future episodes of the google search news. Bye, everyone.
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