April 2023 Search News: let’s recap what is new at Google’s
First appointment of the year for Search News, the series in which John Mueller gives us a quick overview of all the latest updates affecting the world of Google Search and, more broadly, the other products in the Google ecosystem, to give site owners and operators a way to keep track of none of these interventions. In the April 2023 episode, our regular host (back to record from home for the occasion, little trivia) takes us through the news on Search Console data exports, revamped search guidelines, status dashboards, and more.
Google Search News of April 2023: the most recent changes to the Search system
The first point Mueller mentioned concerns the addition of the ability to collectively export data to Search Console, the platform that provides site owners with useful insights into the relationship between their site and Search: the bulk data export feature improves operations because it brings performance data to Google BigQuery.
BigQuery is essentially a giant database for all kinds of information: when data is actually stored here, we can run complex queries on it or export it further to other systems.
Collective data exporting allows us to send all performance data available to our property, except for anonymous queries, and overcomes the daily limit of rows of data in the UI. This is especially useful for larger websites with many thousands of pages or queries per day, the Googler points out, while for smaller sites the Search Analytics API or the Looker Studio connector are usually sufficient.
New guidelines for content (and SEO)
Turning more specifically to interventions affecting SEO, Mueller also analyzes the latest changes made to Google’s official documentation for Search.
It starts, inevitably, with the guide on the use of AI-generated content for Search, which has become necessary in light of the extreme popularity in recent times of tools to help brainstorm and create content. Google therefore saw fit to clarify some key points to site owners, reiterating that the ranking systems aim to reward high-quality original content that demonstrates authority, expertise and trustworthiness – i.e., the parameters of E-E-A-T. For years, then, the focus of the search engine’s algorithms has been on the quality of the content, rather than on how the content was produced, and this over time “has helped us deliver reliable, high-quality results to users.”
As also stated in the useful content writing guidelines, then, we also need to think about “who, how, and why regarding the content,” i.e., show who wrote the information, give details on how it was produced, and, most importantly, do not lose sight of the main goal (the why) of any content, which is to help people.
Using automation systems, including artificial intelligence, to generate content with the primary purpose of manipulating search result rankings is a violation of Google’s spam rules, Mueller states, but that does not mean that any use of automation is spam or considered spam.
Automation, the video recalls, has been used to generate useful content, such as sports scores, weather forecasts and transcripts, and artificial intelligence can also help people generate great and useful content for the web. In short, ultimately the appropriate use of artificial intelligence or automation is not contrary to Google’s guidelines, and in any case all content we produce-whether it is created with AI support or not-should be evaluated according to Google’s guidance, so that it is easier to “stay in line with what our systems are trying to reward and what users like to discover in Search.”
The status dashboard for Search
For the past few weeks, Google has also launched a new page that provides information about the status of services that are part of Search and allows users to view at a glance the current status of the services listed.
Specifically, this dashboard provides a transparent overview of changes to Search, but also of any incidents – in the three phases of Search’s operation, i.e., crawling, indexing, or publishing – which, although extremely rare, are still not inevitable (and “a place” was needed to inform site owners of the incident). Thus, through collaboration with Google’s site reliability engineers, the ” Google Search Status Dashboard” was born, which precisely allows one to scroll through all events related to crawling, indexing, or widespread problem and bug detection mechanisms of the recent past.
In addition to incidents, the dashboard itself also provides a track of major changes to the ranking system – for example, we can see references to the most recent updates such as the March 2023 Core Update or the Reviews System update a few days ago.
Changes to the official documentation to support developers and site managers
In recent months, then, there have been a number of updates to the help pages on different topics that are of interest to developers (according to Google’s vocabulary), but on closer inspection, also to those involved in site management and SEO.
The first is the substantial change to the guidelines for search quality raters, the external contributors who are tasked with evaluating major changes implemented by Google in Search, and specifically the addition of a second E to the old EAT paradigm. In other words, now the quality raters (but also Google’s automated systems) look for the E-E-A-T of each page, that is, the appropriate levels of Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthyness of the content creator and the site as a whole.
Also recently changed is some of the documentation for rel=canonical link annotations, which give search engines a hint regarding the preferred page for indexing within a group of pages with similar content, and now Google also presents a page that shows a gallery of the most common visual elements that appear in Search, so that everyone has a way to have appropriate references.
Last, but not least, is the revamped guide with best practices for links, which provides useful recommendations for managing site links (including, if not especially, when structuring the site with a web designer, so that a linking system that works well for Google is set up from the start).
Other news from the Google world
Finally, before the usual greetings John Mueller talked about two other recent interventions in the Big G ecosystem. The first concerns Search Console, with an update to the user and permission management features in Search Console and the addition of a video indexing report, as well as some updates to merchant listings.
On Web.dev, on the other hand, an article was published on the most important interventions to improve Core Web Vitals on the site for 2023, which offers easy-to-follow and applicable directions for most sites to improve our pages while respecting these essential parameters, which, as we know, are methods for quantifying and measuring the experience of real users on our site.
