If you’re looking to improve your website’s performance and search rankings, there are several new features and updates from Google Search that you should know about. In this article, we’ll cover the latest news from Google, including new data exports, fresh search guidelines, a status dashboard, and more.
New Search Console data exports
One of the most significant updates from Google is the new bulk data export feature for Search Console. This functionality brings performance data to Google BigQuery, a giant database for all kinds of information. With this feature, you can run complex queries over the data or export it to other systems. The bulk data export gives you all the performance data available for your website, except for anonymized queries. It’s particularly useful for larger websites with many thousands of pages or queries per day. If you’re working on a smaller site, the Looker Studio connector or the Search Analytics API are often enough.
Fresh search guidelines
Google recently published guidance on the use of AI-generated content for search. The search engine’s ranking systems aim to reward original high-quality content that demonstrates authoritativeness, expertise, and trustworthiness. Google recommends thinking about who, how, and why regarding your content. Using automation, including AI, to generate content with the primary purpose of manipulating ranking in search results is a violation of Google’s spam policies. However, this doesn’t mean that all use of automation is spam. Automation has been used to generate helpful content, such as sports scores, weather forecasts, and transcripts. AI can also help people to generate great and helpful content for the web.
Status dashboard for Google Search
Another new feature from Google is the status dashboard for transparency on changes and incidents in Search. Incidents regarding crawling, indexing, or serving are rare, but if they happen, the dashboard informs site owners. It tracks bigger ranking system changes and provides both RSS for feed reader and a JSON version. It gives an easy overview of the latest changes, such as the latest core update from March and recent product reviews updates listed there. The product reviews ranking system now covers a bunch of new languages.
Updates in search developer’s documentation
Google also made some updates in its search developer’s documentation. One of the updates is for the search quality rater guidelines, where they added an E for Experience to the existing EAT, for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. They also updated some documentation for the rel=canonical link annotations, which give search engines a hint regarding your preferred page for indexing. They added a gallery of the most common visual elements shown in search, which is useful when you want to talk about a specific part of search.
Conclusion
Google is constantly updating its search engine to provide better results and experiences for users. As a website owner, it’s essential to keep up with these changes to ensure that your website is performing well and getting the visibility it deserves. By utilizing the new data exports, fresh search guidelines, status dashboard, and other updates, you can make sure that your website is up-to-date and optimized for success.