The world of search is constantly evolving. New tools, opportunities, and features are regularly arriving, sometimes existing things change, and sometimes we say goodbye to some things to make way for the new. To help you stay on top of things, we've started a new YouTube series called Google Search News.

With Google Search News, we want to give you a regular & short summary of what's been happening around Google Search, specifically for SEOs, publishers, developers, and webmasters. The first episode is out now, so check it out. 

(The first episode, now on your screen)

In this first episode, we cover:

• Recent updates to Search Console
• Changes in the webmaster office-hours setup
• Advances for rel=nofollow & related attributes
• Changes in review rich results
• New meta-tags & attributes for your pages' search previews
• Some recent Webmaster Conferences

We plan to make these updates regularly, and adjust the format over time as needed. Let us know what you think in the video comments!

Posted by John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Switzerland

Google I/O 2019 is starting tomorrow and will run for 3 days, until Thursday. Google I/O is our yearly developers festival, where product announcements are made, new APIs and frameworks are introduced, and Product Managers present the latest from Google to an audience of 7,000+ developers who fly to California.

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. Browse the full schedule of events, including a list of talks that we think will be interesting for webmasters to watch (all talks are in English). All the links shared below will bring you to pages with more details about each talk, and links to watch the sessions will display on the day of each event. All times are Pacific Central time (California time).

• Tuesday, May 7th
  
  4pm - Building Successful Websites: Case Studies for Mature and Emerging Markets, with Aancha Bahadur, Charlie Croom, Matt Doyle, Rudra Kasturi, and Jesar Shah



• Wednesday, May 8th
  
  10.30am - Enhance Your Search and Assistant Presence with Structured Data, with Aylin Altiok and Will Leszczuk
  
  11.30am - Create App-like Experiences on Google Search and the Google Assistant, with Allen Harvey
  
  11.30am - Rapidly Building Better Web Experiences with AMP, with Adam Greenberg and Naina Raisinghani
  
  6.30pm - Unlocking New Capabilities for the Web, with Pete LePage and Thomas Steiner



• Thursday, May 9th
  
  10.30am - Google Search: State of the Union, with John Mueller and Martin Splitt
  
  1.30pm - Google Search and JavaScript Sites, with Zoe Clifford and Martin Splitt

This list is only a small part of the agenda that we think is useful to webmasters and SEOs. There are many more sessions that you could find interesting! To learn about those other talks, check out the full list of “web” sessions, design sessions, Cloud sessions, machine learning sessions, and more. Use the filtering function to toggle the sessions on and off.

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

Sometimes, Google shows dates next to listings in its search results. In this post, we’ll answer some commonly-asked questions webmasters have about how these dates are determined and provide some best practices to help improve their accuracy.

How dates are determined

Google shows the date of a page when its automated systems determine that it would be relevant to do so, such as for pages that can be time-sensitive, including news content:

Google determines a date using a variety of factors, including but not limited to: any prominent date listed on the page itself or dates provided by the publisher through structured markup.

Google doesn’t depend on one single factor because all of them can be prone to issues. Publishers may not always provide a clear visible date. Sometimes, structured data may be lacking or may not be adjusted to the correct time zone. That’s why our systems look at several factors to come up with what we consider to be our best estimate of when a page was published or significantly updated.

How to specify a date on a page

To help Google to pick the right date, site owners and publishers should:

• Show a clear date: Show a visible date prominently on the page.
• Use structured data: Use the datePublished and dateModified schema with the correct time zone designator for AMP or non-AMP pages. When using structured data, make sure to use the ISO 8601 format for dates.

Guidelines specific to Google News

Google News requires clearly showing both the date and the time that content was published or updated. Structured data alone is not enough, though it is recommended to use in addition to a visible date and time. Date and time should be positioned between the headline and the article text. For more guidance, also see our help page about article dates.

If an article has been substantially changed, it can make sense to give it a fresh date and time. However, don't artificially freshen a story without adding significant information or some other compelling reason for the freshening. Also, do not create a very slightly updated story from one previously published, then delete the old story and redirect to the new one. That's against our article URLs guidelines.

More best practices for dates on web pages

In addition to the most important requirements listed above, here are additional best practices to help Google determine the best page to consider showing for a web page:

• Show when a page has been updated: If you update a page significantly, also update the visible date (and time, if you display that). If desired, you can show two dates: when a page was originally published and when it was updated. Just do so in a way that’s visually clear to your readers. If showing both dates, it’s also highly recommended to use datePublished and dateModified for AMP or non-AMP pages to make it easier for algorithms to recognize.
• Use the right time zone: If specifying a time, make sure to provide the correct timezone, taking into account daylight saving time as appropriate.
• Be consistent in usage. Within a page, make sure to use exactly the same date (and, potentially, time) in structured data as well as in the visible part of the page. Make sure to use the same timezone if you specify one on the page.
• Don’t use future dates or dates related to what a page is about: Always use a date for when a page itself was published or updated, not a date linked to something like an event that the page is writing about, especially for events or other subjects that happen in the future (you may use Event markup separately, if appropriate).
• Follow Google's structured data guidelines: While Google doesn't guarantee that a date (or structured data in general) specified on a page will be used, following our structured data guidelines does help our algorithms to have it available in a machine-readable way.
• Troubleshoot by minimizing other dates on the page: If you’ve followed the best practices above and find incorrect dates are being selected, consider if you can remove or minimize other dates that may appear on the page, such as those that might be next to related stories.

We hope these guidelines help to make it easier to specify the right date on your website's pages! For questions or comments on this, or other structured data topics, feel free to drop by our webmaster help forums.

Posted by John Mueller, Developer Advocate, Zurich

People come to Google to discover new brands and products throughout their shopping journey. On Search and Google Images, shoppers are provided with rich snippets like product description, ratings, and price to help guide purchase decisions.

Connecting potential customers with up-to-date and accurate product information is key to successful shopping journeys on Google, so today, we’re introducing new ways for merchants to provide this information to improve results for shoppers.

1. Search Console

   Many retailers and brands add structured data markup to their websites to ensure Google understands the products they sell. A new report for ‘Products’ is now available in Search Console for sites that use schema.org structured data markup to annotate product information. The report allows you to see any pending issues for markup on your site. Once an issue is fixed, you can use the report to validate if your issues were resolved by re-crawling your affected pages. Learn more about the rich result status reports

2. Merchant Center

   While structured data markup helps Google properly display your product information when we crawl your site, we are expanding capabilities for all retailers to directly provide up-to-date product information to Google in real-time. Product data feeds uploaded to Google Merchant Center will now be eligible for display in results on surfaces like Search and Google Images. This product information will be ranked based only on relevance to users’ queries, and no payment is required or accepted for eligibility. We’re starting with the expansion in the US, and support for other countries will be announced later in the year.

   Get started

   You don’t need a Google Ads campaign to participate. If you don’t have an existing account and sell your products in the US, create a Merchant Center account and upload a product data feed.

3. Manufacturer Center

   We’re also rolling out new features to improve your brand’s visibility and help customers find your products on Google by providing authoritative and up-to-date product information through Google Manufacturer Center. This information includes product description, variants, and rich content, such as high-quality images and videos that can show on the product’s knowledge panel.

These solutions give you multiple options to better reach and inform potential customers about your products as they shop across Google.

If you have any questions, be sure to post in our forum.

Posted by Bernhard Schindlholzer, Product Manager for Google Merchant Tools

With the New Year now underway, we'd like to offer some best practices and advice we hope will lead publishers to more success within Google News in 2019.

General advice

There is a lot of helpful information to consider within the Google News Publisher Help Center. Be sure to have read the material in this area, in particular the content and technical guidelines.

Headlines and dates

• Present clear headlines: Google News looks at a variety of signals to determine the headline of an article, including within your HTML title tag and for the most prominent text on the page. Review our headline tips.
• Provide accurate times and dates: Google News tries to determine the time and date to display for an article in a variety of ways. You can help ensure we get it right by using the following methods:
• Show one clear date and time: As per our date guidelines, show a clear, visible date and time between the headline and the article text. Prevent other dates from appearing on the page whenever possible, such as for related stories.
• Use structured data: Use the datePublished and dateModified schema and use the correct time zone designator for AMP or non-AMP pages. 

• Avoid artificially freshening stories: If an article has been substantially changed, it can make sense to give it a fresh date and time. However, don't artificially freshen a story without adding significant information or some other compelling reason for the freshening. Also, do not create a very slightly updated story from one previously published, then delete the old story and redirect to the new one. That's against our article URLs guidelines.

Duplicate content

Google News seeks to reward independent, original journalistic content by giving credit to the originating publisher, as both users and publishers would prefer. This means we try not to allow duplicate content—which includes scraped, rewritten, or republished material—to perform better than the original content. In line with this, these are guidelines publishers should follow:

• Block scraped content: Scraping commonly refers to taking material from another site, often on an automated basis. Sites that scrape content must block scraped content from Google News.
• Block rewritten content: Rewriting refers to taking material from another site, then rewriting that material so that it is not identical. Sites that rewrite content in a way that provides no substantial or clear added value must block that rewritten content from Google News. This includes, but is not limited to, rewrites that make only very slight changes or those that make many word replacements but still keep the original article's overall meaning.
• Block or consider canonical for republished content: Republishing refers to when a publisher has permission from another publisher or author to republish an original work, such as material from wire services or in partnership with other publications.
  Publishers that allow others to republish content can help ensure that their original versions perform better in Google News by asking those republishing to block or make use of canonical.
  Google News also encourages those that republish material to consider proactively blocking such content or making use of the canonical, so that we can better identify the original content and credit it appropriately.
• Avoid duplicate content: If you operate a network of news sites that share content, the advice above about republishing is applicable to your network. Select what you consider to be the original article and consider blocking duplicates or making use of the canonical to point to the original.

Transparency

• Be transparent: Visitors to your site want to trust and understand who publishes it and information about those who have written articles. That's why our content guidelines stress that content should have posts with clear bylines, information about authors, and contact information for the publication.
• Don't be deceptive: Our content policies do not allow sites or accounts that impersonate any person or organization, or that misrepresent or conceal their ownership or primary purpose. We do not allow sites or accounts that engage in coordinated activity to mislead users. This includes, but isn't limited to, sites or accounts that misrepresent or conceal their country of origin or that direct content at users in another country under false premises.

More tips

• Avoid taking part in link schemes: Don't participate in link schemes, which can include large-scale article marketing programs or selling links that pass PageRank. Review our page on link schemes for more information.
• Use structured data for rich presentation: Both those using AMP and non-AMP pages can make use of structured data to optimize your content for rich results or carousel-like presentations.
• Protect your users and their data: Consider securing every page of your website with HTTPS to protect the integrity and confidentiality of the data users exchange on your site. You can find more useful tips in our best practices on how to implement HTTPS.

Here's to a great 2019!

We hope these tips help publishers succeed in Google News over the coming year. For those who have more questions about Google News, we are unable to do one-to-one support. However, we do monitor our Google News Publisher Forum—which has been newly-revamped—and try to provide guidance on questions that might help a number of publishers all at once. The forum is also a great resource where publishers share tips and advice with each other.
Posted by Danny Sullivan, Public Liaison for Search

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

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 tools to help more people discover your livestreams in Search and Assistant. With livestream structured data and the Indexing API, you can let Google know when your video is live, so it will be eligible to appear with a red "live" badge:

Add livestream structured data to your page

If your website streams live videos, use the livestream developer documentation to flag your video as a live broadcast and mark the start and end times. In addition, VideoObject structured data is required to tell Google that there's a video on your page.

Update Google quickly with the Indexing API

The Indexing API now supports pages with livestream structured data. We encourage you to call the Indexing API to request that your site is crawled in time for the livestream. We recommend calling the Indexing API when your livestream begins and ends, and if the structured data changes.
For more information, visit our developer documentation. If you have any questions, ask us in the Webmaster Help Forum. We look forward to seeing your live videos on Google!
Posted by Danielle Marshak, Product Manager

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.

A screenshot of an example search result for a page titled “How do I remove a cable that is stuck in a USB port” with a list of the top answers from the page.

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.

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

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 specification called speakable for eligible publishers to mark up sections of a news article that are most relevant to be read aloud by the Google Assistant.

When people ask the Google Assistant -- "Hey Google, what's the latest news on NASA?", the Google Assistant responds with an excerpt from a news article and the name of the news organization. Then the Google Assistant asks if the user would like to hear another news article and also sends the relevant links to the user's mobile device.

As a news publisher, you can surface your content on the Google Assistant by implementing Speakable markup according to the developer documentation. This feature is now available for English language users in the US and we hope to launch in other languages and countries as soon as a sufficient number of publishers have implemented speakable. As this is a new feature, we are experimenting over time to refine the publisher and user experience.

If you have any questions, ask us in the Webmaster Help Forum. We look forward to hearing from you!

Posted by TV Raman, Senior Staff Software Engineer

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 many jobs are filled relatively quickly. Removal of expired postings is important because nothing's worse than finding a great job only to discover it's no longer accepting applications.

Today we're releasing the Indexing API to address this problem. This API allows any site owner to directly notify Google when job posting pages are added or removed. This allows Google to schedule job postings for a fresh crawl, which can lead to higher quality user traffic and job applicant satisfaction. Currently, the Indexing API can only be used for job posting pages that include job posting structured data.

For websites with many short-lived pages like job postings, the Indexing API keeps job postings fresh in Search results because it allows updates to be pushed individually. This API can be integrated into your job posting flow, allowing high quality job postings to be searchable quickly after publication. In addition, you can check the last time Google received each kind of notification for a given URL.

Follow the Quickstart guide to see how the Indexing API works. If you have any questions, ask us in the Webmaster Help Forum. We look forward to hearing from you!

Posted by Zach Clifford, Software Engineer

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

Last year, we launched job search on Google to connect more people with jobs. When you provide Job Posting structured data, it helps drive more relevant traffic to your page by connecting job seekers with your content. To ensure that job seekers are getting the best possible experience, it's important to follow our Job Posting guidelines.

We've recently made some changes to our Job Posting guidelines to help improve the job seeker experience.

• Remove expired jobs
• Place structured data on the job's detail page
• Make sure all job details are present in the job description

Remove expired jobs

When job seekers put in effort to find a job and apply, it can be very discouraging to discover that the job that they wanted is no longer available. Sometimes, job seekers only discover that the job posting is expired after deciding to apply for the job. Removing expired jobs from your site may drive more traffic because job seekers are more confident when jobs that they visit on your site are still open for application. For more information on how to remove a job posting, see Remove a job posting.

Place structured data on the job's detail page

Job seekers find it confusing when they land on a list of jobs instead of the specific job's detail page. To fix this, put structured data on the most detailed leaf page possible. Don't add structured data to pages intended to present a list of jobs (for example, search result pages) and only add it to the most specific page describing a single job with its relevant details.

Make sure all job details are present in the job description

We've also noticed that some sites include information in the JobPosting structured data that is not present anywhere in the job posting. Job seekers are confused when the job details they see in Google Search don't match the job description page. Make sure that the information in the JobPosting structured data always matches what's on the job posting page. Here are some examples:

• If you add salary information to the structured data, then also add it to the job posting. Both salary figures should match.
• The location in the structured data should match the location in the job posting.
  

Providing structured data content that is consistent with the content of the job posting pages not only helps job seekers find the exact job that they were looking for, but may also drive more relevant traffic to your job postings and therefore increase the chances of finding the right candidates for your jobs.

If your site violates the Job Posting guidelines (including the guidelines in this blog post), we may take manual action against your site and it may not be eligible for display in the jobs experience on Google Search. You can submit a reconsideration request to let us know that you have fixed the problem(s) identified in the manual action notification. If your request is approved, the manual action will be removed from your site or page.

For more information, visit our Job Posting developer documentation and our JobPosting FAQ.

Posted by Anouar Bendahou, Trust & Safety Search Team

Over the years, the different ways you can choose to highlight your website's content in search has grown dramatically. In the past, we've called these rich snippets, rich cards, or enriched results. Going forward - to simplify the terminology -  our documentation will use the name "rich results" for all of them. Additionally, we're introducing a new rich results testing tool to make diagnosing your pages' structured data easier.

The new testing tool focuses on the structured data types that are eligible to be shown as rich results. It allows you to test all data sources on your pages, such as JSON-LD (which we recommend), Microdata, or RDFa. The new tool provides a more accurate reflection of the page’s appearance on Search and includes improved handling for Structured Data found on dynamically loaded content. The tests for Recipes, Jobs, Movies, and Courses are currently supported -- but this is just a first step, we plan on expanding over time.

Testing a page is easy: just open the testing tool, enter a URL, and review the output. If there are issues, the tool will highlight the invalid code in the page source. If you're working with others on this page, the share-icon on the bottom-right lets you do that quickly. You can also use preview button to view all the different rich results the page is eligible for. And … once you're happy with the result, use Submit To Google to fetch & index this page for search.

Want to get started with rich snippets rich results? Check out our guides for marking up your content. Feel free to drop by our Webmaster Help forums should you have any questions or get stuck; the awesome experts there can often help resolve issues and give you tips in no time!

Posted by Shachar Pooyae, Software Engineer

Lately we’ve been receiving feedback from users seeing non-events like coupons or vouchers showing up in search results where “events” snippets appear. This is really confusing for users and also against our guidelines, where we have added additional clarification.

So, what’s the problem?

We’ve seen a number of  publishers in the coupons/vouchers space use the “event” markup to describe their offers. And as much as using a discount voucher can be a very special thing, that doesn’t make coupons or vouchers events or “saleEvents”. Using Event markup to describe something that is not an event creates a bad user experience, by triggering a rich result for something that will happen at a particular time, despite no actual event being present.

Here are some examples to illustrate the issue:

Since this creates a misleading user experience, we may take manual action on such cases. In case your website is affected by such a manual action, you will find a notification in your Search Console account. If a manual action is taken, it can result in structured data markup for the whole site not being used for search results.  

While we’re specifically highlighting coupons and vouchers in this blogpost, this applies to all other non-event items being annotated with “event” markup as well -- or, really, for applying a type of markup to something other than the type of thing it is meant to describe.

For more information, please visit our developer documentation or stop by our Webmaster Forum in case you have additional questions!

Posted by Sven Naumann, Trust & Safety Search Team

In June, we announced a new experience that put the convenience of Search into the hands of job seekers. Today, we are taking the next step in improving the job search experience on Google by adding a feature that shows estimated salary information from the web alongside job postings, as well as adding new UI features for users.

Salary information has been one of the most requested additions from job seekers. This helps people evaluate whether a job is a good fit, and is an opportunity for sites with estimated salary information to:

• Increase brand awareness: Estimated salary information shows a representative logo from the estimated salary provider.

• Get more referral traffic: Users can click through directly to salary estimate pages when salary information surfaces in job search results.

If your site provides salary estimates, you can take advantage of these changes in the following ways:

Specify actual salary information

Actual salary refers to the base salary information that is provided by the employer. If your site publishes job listings, you can add JobPosting structured data and populate the baseSalary property to be eligible for inclusion in job search results.

This salary information will be made available in both the list and the detail views.

Provide estimated salary information

In cases where employers don’t provide actual salary, job seekers may see estimated salaries sourced from multiple partners for the same or similar occupation. If your site provides salary estimate information, you can add Occupation structured data to be eligible for inclusion in job search results.  

Include exact location information

We've heard from users that having accurate, street-level location information helps them to focus on opportunities that work best for them. Sites that publish job listings can do this can do this by using the jobLocation property in JobPosting structured data.

Validate your structured data

To double-check the structured data on your pages, we'll be updating the Structured Data Testing Tool and the Search Console reports in the near future. In the meantime, you can monitor the performance of your job postings in Search Analytics. Stay tuned!

Since launching this summer, we’ve seen over 60% growth in number of companies with jobs showing on Google and connected tens of millions of people to new job opportunities. We are excited to help users find jobs with salaries that meet their needs, and to route them to your site for more information. We invite sites that provide salary estimates to mark up their salary pages using the Occupation structured data. Should you have any questions regarding the use of structured data on your site, feel free to drop by our webmaster help forums.

Posted by Nick Zakrasek, Product Manager

In Google’s mission to organize the world's information, we want to guide Google users to the highest quality content, the principle exemplified in our quality rater guidelines. Professional publishers provide the lion’s share of quality content that benefits users and we want to encourage their success.

The ecosystem is sustained via two main sources of revenue: ads and subscriptions, with the latter requiring a delicate balance to be effective in Search. Typically subscription content is hidden behind paywalls, so that users who don’t have a subscription don’t have access. Our evaluations have shown that users who are not familiar with the high quality content behind a paywall often turn to other sites offering free content. It is difficult to justify a subscription if one doesn't already know how valuable the content is, and in fact, our experiments have shown that a portion of users shy away from subscription sites. Therefore, it is essential that sites provide some amount of free sampling of their content so that users can learn how valuable their content is.

The First Click Free (FCF) policy for both Google web search and News was designed to address this issue. It offers promotion and discovery opportunities for publishers with subscription content, while giving Google users an opportunity to discover that content. Over the past year, we have worked with publishers to investigate the effects of FCF on user satisfaction and on the sustainability of the publishing ecosystem. We found that while FCF is a reasonable sampling model, publishers are in a better position to determine what specific sampling strategy works best for them. Therefore, we are removing FCF as a requirement for Search, and we encourage publishers to experiment with different free sampling schemes, as long as they stay within the updated webmaster guidelines. We call this Flexible Sampling.

One of the original motivations for FCF is to address the issues surrounding cloaking, where the content served to Googlebot is different from the content served to users. Spammers often seek to game search engines by showing interesting content to the search engine, say healthy food recipes, but then showing users an offer for diet pills. This “bait and switch” scheme creates a bad user experience since users do not get the content they expected. Sites with paywalls are strongly encouraged to apply the new structured data to their pages, because without it, the paywall may be interpreted as a form of cloaking, and the pages would then be removed from search results.

Based on our investigations, we have created detailed best practices for implementing flexible sampling. There are two types of sampling we advise: metering, which provides users with a quota of free articles to consume, after which paywalls will start appearing; and lead-in, which offers a portion of an article’s content without it being shown in full.

For metering, we think that monthly (rather than daily) metering provides more flexibility and a safer environment for testing. The user impact of changing from one integer value to the next is less significant at, say, 10 monthly samples than at 3 daily samples. All publishers and their audiences are different, so there is no single value for optimal free sampling across publishers. However, we recommend that publishers start by providing 10 free clicks per month to Google search users in order to preserve a good user experience for new potential subscribers. Publishers should then experiment to optimize the tradeoff between discovery and conversion that works best for their businesses.

Lead-in is generally implemented as truncated content, such as the first few sentences or 50-100 words of the article. Lead-in allows users a taste of how valuable the content may be. Compared to a page with completely blocked content, lead-in clearly provides more utility and added value to users.

We are excited by this change as it allows the growth of the premium content ecosystem, which ultimately benefits users. We look forward to the prospect of serving users more high quality content!

Posted by Cody Kwok, Principal Engineer

When you want to bake cupcakes, but you don't know what kind, Image Search can help you make a decision. Finding an image with a recipe can be challenging: you might end up on a page that has only pictures of these delicious things, or a cupcake fan site that doesn't have recipes, but everything else about them.
To help users find exactly what they want, Image Search on mobile devices now includes relevant badges on the thumbnails. Currently we have badges for recipes, videos, products, and animated images (GIFs).

If you have images on your site, you can help users identify the type of content associated with the image by using appropriate structured data on your pages. This helps users find relevant content quickly, and sends better targeted traffic to your site.
If you're publishing recipes, add Recipe markup on your page, for products, add Product markup, and for videos, add Video markup. Our algorithms will automatically badge GIFs, without the need of any markup. While we can't guarantee that badges will always be shown, adding the recommended structured data fields in addition to the required fields may increase the chance of adding a badge to your image search results.
You can use the Structured Data Testing Tool to verify that your pages are free of errors, and therefore eligible for the new Image Search badges. In addition, the Rich Cards report in Search Console can provide aggregate stats on your markup.
If you have questions about the feature, please ask us in the Webmaster Help Forum.
Posted by Assaf Broitman, Image Search team

July 20, 2017 update: Starting today, impressions and clicks stats for job listing pages and job details pages are available in the Search Analytics report in Search Console. Read more about how Jobs impressions and clicks are counted in the help centre. If you have questions, head to the webmaster forums.

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At Google I/O this year, we announced Google for Jobs, a new company-wide initiative focused on helping both job seekers and employers, through collaboration with the job matching industry. One major part of this effort is launching an improved experience for job seekers on Google Search. We’re happy to announce this new experience is now open for all developers and site owners.
For queries with clear intent like [head of catering jobs in nyc] or [entry level jobs in DC], we’ll show a job listings preview, and each job can expand to display comprehensive details about the listing:

For employers or site owners with job content, this feature brings many benefits:

• Prominent place in Search results: your postings are eligible to be displayed in the in the new job search feature on Google, featuring your logo, reviews, ratings, and job details.
• More, motivated applicants: job seekers can filter by various criteria like location or job title, meaning you’re more likely to get applicants who are looking exactly for that job.
• Increased chances of discovery and conversion: job seekers will have a new avenue to interact with your postings and click through to your site.

Get your job listings on Google

Implementation involves two steps:

1. Mark up your job listings with Job Posting structured data.
2. Submit a sitemap (or an RSS or Atom feed) with a <lastmod> date for each listing.

If you have more than 100,000 job postings or more than 10,000 changes per day, you can express interest to use the High Change Rate feature.
If you already publish your job openings on another site like LinkedIn, Monster, DirectEmployers, CareerBuilder, Glassdoor, and Facebook, they are eligible to appear in the feature as well.
Job search is an enriched search experience. We’ve created a dedicated guide to help you understand how Google ranking works for enriched search and practices for improving your presence

Keep track of how you’re doing and fix issues

There’s a suite of tools to help you with the implementation:

• Validate your markup with the Structured Data Testing Tool
• Preview your listing in the Structured Data Testing Tool
• Keep track of your sitemap status in Search Console
• See aggregate stats and markup error examples in Search Console

In the coming weeks, we’ll add new job listings filters in the Search Analytics report in Search Console, so you can track clicks and impressions for your listings.
As always, if you have questions, ask in the forums or find us on Twitter!

Posted by Nick Zakrasek, Product Manager

Image Search recently launched “Similar items” on mobile web and the Android Search app. The “Similar items” feature is designed to help users find products they love in photos that inspire them on Google Image Search. Using machine vision technology, the Similar items feature identifies products in lifestyle images and displays matching products to the user. Similar items supports handbags, sunglasses, and shoes and will cover other apparel and home & garden categories in the next few months.

The Similar items feature enables users to browse and shop inspirational fashion photography and find product info about items they’re interested in. Try it out by opening results from queries like [designer handbags].

Finding price and availability information was one of the top Image Search feature requests from our users. The Similar items carousel gets millions of impressions and clicks daily from all over the world.

To make your products eligible for Similar items, make sure to add and maintain schema.org product metadata on your pages. The schema.org/Product markup helps Google find product offerings on the web and give users an at-a-glance summary of product info.

To ensure that your products are eligible to appear in Similar items:

• Ensure that the product offerings on your pages have schema.org product markup, including an image reference. Products with name, image, price & currency, and availability meta-data on their host page are eligible for Similar items

• Test your pages with Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to verify that the product markup is formatted correctly
• See your images on image search by issuing the query “site:yourdomain.com.” For results with valid product markup, you may see product information appear once you tap on the images from your site. It can take up to a week for Googlebot to recrawl your website.

Right now, Similar items is available on mobile browsers and the Android Google Search App globally, and we plan to expand to more platforms in 2017.

If you have questions, find us in the dedicated Structured data section of our forum, on Twitter, or on Google+. To prevent your images from showing in Similar items, webmasters can opt-out of Google Image Search.

We’re excited to help users find your products on the web by showcasing buyable items. Thanks for partnering with us to make the web more shoppable!

Posted by Julia E, Product Manager on Image Search

At Google I/O in May, we launched Rich Cards for Movies and Recipes, creating a new way for site owners to present previews of their content on the Search results page. Today, we’re expanding to two new verticals for US-based sites: Local restaurants and Online courses.

Evolution of search results for queries like [best New Orleans restaurants] and [leadership courses]: with rich cards, results are presented in new UIs, like carousels that are easy to browse by scrolling left and right, or a vertical three-pack that displays more individual courses

By building Rich Cards, you have a new opportunity to attract more engaged users to your page. Users can swipe through restaurant recommendations from sites like TripAdvisor, Thrillist, Time Out, Eater, and 10Best. In addition to food, users can browse through courses from sites like Coursera, LinkedIn Learning, EdX, Harvard, Udacity, FutureLearn, Edureka, Open University, Udemy, Canvas Network, and NPTEL.

If you have a site that contains local restaurant information or offers online courses, check out our developer docs to start building Rich Cards in the Local restaurant and Online courses verticals.

While AMP HTML is not required for Local restaurant pages and Online Courses rich cards, AMP provides Google Search users with a consistently fast experience, so we recommend that you create AMP pages to further engage users. Users consuming AMP’d content will be able to swipe near instantly from restaurant to restaurant or from recipe to recipe within your site.

Users who tap on your Rich Card will be taken near instantly to your AMP page, and be able to swipe between pages within your site.

Check out our developer site for implementation details.

To make it easier for you to create Rich Cards, we made some changes in our tools:

• The Structured Data Testing Tool displays markup errors and a preview card for Local restaurant content as it might appear on Search.
• The Rich Cards report in Search Console shows which cards across verticals contain errors, and which ones could be enhanced with more markup.
• The AMP Test helps validate AMP pages as well as mark up on the page.

What’s next?

We are actively experimenting with new verticals globally to provide more opportunities for you to display richer previews of your content.

If you have questions, find us in the dedicated Structured data section of our forum, on Twitter or on Google+.

Post by Stacie Chan, Global Product Partnerships