Google Search Central News & Google Updates

Adding support for Organization-level return policies

For specifying general return policy for an entire site on Organization Structured Data.

Removing home activity documentation

Home activity structured data results will no longer appears in Google Search Results

EPUB (Electronic Publication (.epub)) file type added on indexable file types.

Google added two new GoogleBot to fecthing image and video bytes: GoogleOther-Image and GoogleOther-Video

Google introduced new AI Overview on SERP.

The March 2024 core update is more complex than usual, involving changes to multiple core systems to better identify helpful content. Google has enhanced its ranking systems with various innovative signals and approaches, moving away from relying on a single system. The update rollout may take up to a month, causing more fluctuations in rankings. Creators don’t need to take any special actions if they’ve been producing content meant for people. Those experiencing lower rankings are encouraged to read Google’s guidance on creating helpful, reliable, people-first content.

Google is updating its spam policies to reduce low-quality content in search results, targeting expired websites repurposed for spam, obituary spam, and content created primarily to match specific search queries. The updates refine core ranking systems to better identify unhelpful, poor user experience content made for search engines rather than people.

Expected to reduce low-quality content by 40%, these measures include stricter policies on scaled content abuse, addressing automated or human-generated content designed to manipulate rankings, and site reputation abuse, where low-quality third-party content exploits a site’s reputation. Additionally, repurposed expired domains intended to boost low-quality content’s search rankings are now considered spam. Enforcement begins in two months, allowing site owners time to adjust.

Google announced Vacation Rental Structured Data on 4 December 2024. This structured data make it easier for travelers discover the best lodging options.

Google has announced new structured data for profile pages and discussion forums to be used in Google Search.

Profile Page Structured Data

ProfilePage markup allows creators (person or organization) to identify information such as their name, social media links, and profile photo.

Discussion Forum Structured Data

DiscussionForumPosting markup is designed for forum websites. This structured data enables discussions to be displayed on the search engine results page (SERP).

Google announced Course Structured Data to provide course information (pricing, educational level, ratings…) on SERP.

Google announced vehicle listing structured data on October 16, 2023.

Google announced reducing the visibility of HowTo and FAQ rich results on SERP. HowTo structured data would be visible only on desktop and FAQ structured data would be only visible to well-known authoritative government and health websites.

Update on September 14, 2023: Google deprecated HowTo visibility on desktop and mobile.

Site names were introduced to make it easier to identify search results in the SERP.

Note: On September 7, 2023, site names became available for all languages. When first announced, they were available only in English, French, Japanese, and German.

Google removed image and video extensions from sitemaps.

More explanations will be added to provide a clearer understanding of structured data issues in Search Console.

For example, while the comment snippets used to say Missing field, it has now changed to Missing field “name” (in the “author” field).

A new update was released 1 year after the 2 different product review updates that Google previously published.

December 1, 2021

Product Review Updates and Your Website

April 8, 2021

What Creators Need to Know About Google’s Product Reviews Update

Google launched a Search Console report to help site owners understand their desktop pages’ performance regarding page experience before desktop became a ranking signal. The same three Core Web Vitals metrics (LCP, FID, and CLS) and their thresholds applied for desktop ranking, along with existing signals like HTTPS security and absence of intrusive interstitials. Mobile-friendliness remained a factor for mobile ranking only. For sites with separate desktop and mobile URLs, the desktop signal was based on the URLs seen by desktop users.

Even if a noindex tag is given to a page, it can be indexed within that page when it is placed on another page with an iframe tag with the indexifembedded tag.

Google announced Practice Problems and Math Solvers Structured Data.

Google launched a Google News performance report to better understand user behavior on Google News on Android and IOS as well as on news.google.com.

Some features improved in the Search Console. The list of changes include:

• Removal of the generic “crawl anomaly” issue type – all crawls errors should now be mapped to an issue with a finer resolution.
• Pages that were submitted but blocked by robots.txt and got indexed are now reported as “indexed but blocked” (warning) instead of “submitted but blocked” (error)
• Addition of a new issue: “indexed without content” (warning)
• Soft 404 reporting is now more accurate

Matt Cutts announced that the Penguin 2.0 algorithm rolled out on May 22, 2013. The update has also been fully implemented for other languages worldwide. Penguin 2.0 affected 2.3% of English-US queries. The impact of Penguin varies by language, with higher webspam levels causing more significant effects.

Google added “Googlebot activity reports”, “Crawl Rate Control”, “Enhanced image search” and “Number of URLs submitted on Sitemaps”

Googlebot Activity Reports

Google added support for Polish.

HTTPS Sites verification became available on the webmaster tool.

Google added a meta tag verification option for the Webmaster tool (now called Search Console).

Announced on March 1, 2006, the average top position for sets of queries and mobile search queries (for only the top search queries if they were available for the website).

Google added 4 more languages for sitemaps and user interfaces.

• Danish
• Finnish
• Norwegian
• Swedish

Google uploaded the new Sitemap Generator Version 1.4.

Google shared a list of third-party sitemap creators on code.google.com on November 23, 2005.

Note: Some tools may not be working, because it’s been a long time.

Google announced Sitemap Generator Version 1.3.

Google shared a list of available languages.

• Brazilian Portuguese
• Dutch
• French
• German
• Italian
• Korean
• Russian
• Simplified Chinese
• Spanish
• Traditional Chinese
• UK English
• US English