Having up-to-date information during large, public events is critical, as the landscape changes by the minute. This guide highlights some tools that news publishers can use to create a data rich and engaging experience for their users.

Add Article structured data to AMP pages

Adding Article structured data to your news, blog, and sports article AMP pages can make the content eligible for an enhanced appearance in Google Search results. Enhanced features may include placement in the Top stories carousel, host carousel, and Visual stories. Learn how to mark up your article.
You can now test and validate your AMP article markup in the Rich Results Test tool. Enter your page’s URL or a code snippet, and the Rich Result Test shows the AMP Articles that were found on the page (as well as other rich result types), and any errors or suggestions for your AMP Articles. You can also save the test history and share the test results.
We also recommend that you provide a publication date so that Google can expose this information in Search results, if this information is considered to be useful to the user.

Mark up your live-streaming video content

If you are live-streaming a video during an event, you can be eligible for a LIVE badge by marking your video with BroadcastEvent. We strongly recommend that you use the Indexing API to ensure that your live-streaming video content gets crawled and indexed in a timely way. The Indexing API allows any site owner to directly notify Google when certain types of pages are added or removed. This allows Google to schedule pages for a fresh crawl, which can lead to more relevant user traffic as your content is updated. For websites with many short-lived pages like livestream videos, the Indexing API keeps content fresh in search results. Learn how to get started with the Indexing API.

For AMP pages: Update the cache and use components

Use the following to ensure your AMP content is published and up-to-date the moment news breaks.

Update the cache

When people click an AMP page, the Google AMP Cache automatically requests updates to serve fresh content for the next person once the content has been cached. However, if you want to force an update to the cache in response to a change in the content on the origin domain, you can send an update request to the Google AMP Cache. This is useful if your pages are changing in response to a live news event.

Use news-related AMP components

• <amp-live-list>: Add live content to your article and have it updated based on a source document. This is a great choice if you just want content to reload easily, without having to set up or configure additional services on your backend. Learn how to implement <amp-live-list>.
• <amp-script>: Run your own JavaScript inside of AMP pages. This flexibility means that anything you are publishing on your desktop or non-AMP mobile pages, you can bring over to AMP. <amp-script> supports Websockets, interactive SVGs, and more. This allows you to create engaging news pages like election coverage maps, live graphs and polls etc. As a newer feature, the AMP team is actively soliciting feedback on it. If for some reason it doesn't work for your use case, let us know.

If you have any questions, let us know through the forum or on Twitter.

Posted by Patrick Kettner and Naina Raisinghani, AMP team

We have heard users ask for better download capabilities in Search Console loud and clear - so we’re happy to let you know that more and better data is available to export.

You’ll now be able to download the complete information you see in almost all Search Console reports (instead of just specific table views). We believe that this data will be much easier to read outside SC and store it for your future reference (if needed). You’ll find a section at the end of this post describing other ways to use your Search Console data outside the tool.

Enhancement reports and more 

When exporting data from a report, for example AMP status, you’ll now be able to export the data behind the charts, not only the details table (as previously). This means that in addition to the list of issues and their affected pages, you’ll also see a daily breakdown of your pages, their status, and impressions received by them on Google Search results. If you are exporting data from a specific drill-down view, you can see the details describing this view in the exported file.

If you choose Google Sheets or Excel (new!) you’ll get a spreadsheet with two tabs, and if you choose to download as csv, you’ll get a zip file with two csv files.

Here is a sample dataset downloaded from the AMP status report. We changed the titles of the spreadsheet to be descriptive for this post, but the original title includes the domain name, the report, and the date of the export.

Performance report 

When it comes to Performance data, we have two improvements:

1. You can now download the content of all tabs with one click. This means that you’ll now get the data on Queries, Pages, Countries, Devices, Search appearances and Dates, all together. The download output is the same as explained above, Google sheets or Excel spreadsheet with multiple tabs and csv files compressed in a zip file.
2. Along with the performance data, you’ll have an extra tab (or csv file) called “Filters”, which shows which filters were applied when the data was exported.

Here is a sample dataset downloaded from the Performance report.

Additional ways to use Search Console data outside the tool

Since we’re talking about exporting data, we thought we’d take the opportunity to talk about other ways you can currently use Search Console data outside the tool. You might want to do this if you have a specific use case that is important to your company, such as joining the data with another dataset, performing an advanced analysis, or visualizing the data in a different way.

There are two options, depending on the data you want and your technical level.

Search Console API

If you have a technical background, or a developer in your company can help you, you might consider using the Search Console API  to view, add, or remove properties and sitemaps, and to run advanced queries for Google Search results data.

We have plenty of documentation on the subject, but here are some links that might be useful to you if you’re starting now:

1. The Overview and prerequisites guide walks you through the things you should do before writing your first client application. You’ll also find more advanced guides in the sidebar of this section, for example a guide on how to query all your search data.
2. The reference section provides details on query parameters, usage limits and errors returned by the API.
3. The API samples provides links to sample code for several programming languages, a great way to get up and running.

Google Data Studio

Google Data Studio is a dashboarding solution that helps you unify data from different data sources, explore it, and tell impactful data stories. The tool provides a Search Console connector to import various metrics and dimensions into your dashboard. This can be valuable if you’d like to see Search Console data side-by-side with data from other tools.

If you’d like to give it a try, you can use this template to visualize your data - click “use template” at the top right corner of the page to connect to your data. To learn more about how to use the report and which insights you might find in it, check this step-by-step guide. If you just want to play with it, here’s a report based on that template with sample data.



 Let us know on Twitter if you have interesting use cases or comments about the new download capabilities, or about using Search Console data in general. And enjoy the enhanced data!

Posted by Sion Schori & Daniel Waisberg, Search Console team

It’s officially 2020 and people are starting to make plans for the year ahead. If you produce any type of event, you can help people discover your events with the event search experience on Google. 

Have a concert or hosting a workshop? Event markup allows people to discover your event when they search for "concerts this weekend" or "workshops near me." People can also discover your event when they search for venues, such as sports stadiums or a local pub. Events may surface in a given venue's Knowledge Panel to better help people find out what’s happening at that respective location.

Launching in new regions and languages

We recently launched the event search experience in Germany and Spain, which brings the event search experience on Google to nine countries and regions around the world. For a full list of where the event search experience works, check out the list of available languages and regions.

How to get your events on Google

There are three options to make your events eligible to appear on Google:

• If you use a third-party website to post events (for example, you post events on ticketing websites or social platforms), check to see if your event publisher is already participating in the event search experience on Google. One way to check is to search for a popular event shown on the platform and see if the event listing is shown. If your event publisher is integrated with Google, continue to post your events on the third-party website.
• If you use a CMS (for example, WordPress) and you don't have access to your HTML, check with your CMS to see if there's a plugin that can add structured data to your site for you. Alternatively, you can use the Data Highlighter to tell Google about your events without editing the HTML of your site.
• If you're comfortable editing your HTML, use structured data to directly integrate with Google. You’ll need to edit the HTML of the event pages.

Follow best practices

If you've already implemented event structured data, we recommend that you review your structured data to make sure it meets our guidelines. In particular, you should:

• Make sure you're including the required and recommended properties that are outlined in our developer guidelines.
• Make sure your event details are high quality, as defined by our guidelines. For example, use the description field to describe the event itself in more detail instead of repeating attributes such as title, date, location, or highlighting other website functionality.
• Use the Rich Result Test to test and preview your structured data.

Monitor your performance on Search

You can check how people are interacting with your event postings with Search Console:

• Use the Performance Report in Search Console to show event listing or detail view data for a given event posting in Search results. You can automatically pull these results with the Search Console API.
• Use the Rich result status report in Search Console to understand what Google could or could not read from your site, and troubleshoot rich result errors.

If you have any questions, please visit the Webmaster Central Help Forum.

Posted by Emily Fifer, Product Manager

A review snippet is a short excerpt of a review or a rating from a website, usually an average of the combined rating scores from many reviewers. This is one of the most used structured data types on the web, used by millions of web sites for many content types such as Book, Movie, Event, Product and more.

When Google finds valid reviews or ratings markup, we may show a rich result that includes stars and other summary info. This rich result can appear directly on search results or as part of a Google Knowledge panel, as shown in the screenshots below.

Today we are announcing support for review snippets in Google Search Console, including new reports to help you find any issues with your implementation and monitor how this rich result type is improving your performance. You can also use the Rich Results Test to review your existing URLs or debug your markup code before moving it to production.

Review snippet Enhancement report

To help site owners make the most of their reviews, a new review snippet report is now available in Search Console for sites that have implemented reviews or ratings structured data. The report allows you to see errors, warnings, and valid pages for markup implemented on your site.

In addition, if you fix an issue, you can use the report to validate it, which will trigger a process where Google recrawls your affected pages. The report is covering all the content types currently supported as review snippets. Learn more about the Rich result status reports.

Review snippet appearance in Performance report

The Search Console Performance report now allows you to see the performance of your review or rating marked-up pages on Google Search and Discover using the new “Review snippet” search appearance filter.

This means that you can check the impressions, clicks and CTR results of your review snippet pages and check their performance to understand how they are trending for any of the dimensions available. For example you can filter your data to see which queries, pages, countries and devices are bringing your review snippets traffic.

Review snippet in Rich Results Test

After adding Review snippets structured data to your pages, you can test them using the Rich Results Test tool. You can test a code snippet or submit a URL of a page. The test shows any errors or suggestions for your structured data.

These new tools should make it easier to understand how your marked-up review snippet pages perform on Search and to identify and fix review issues.

If you have any questions, check out the Google Webmasters community.

Posted by Tomer Hodadi and Yuval Kurtser, Search Console engineering team