According to John Mueller, Google has recently made important updates, here is the transcript:
Change in Google Search Console
Google Search Console has recently taken a big step moving towards a new interface recently.
Search Console is free tool that gives Webmasters and Site owners’ information on how Google Search interacts with their website?
The most visible change is that the old homepage and dashboard are now replaced with the new one.
This is a big step for the team and allows them to focus more on interesting new features with the millions of websites who use these tools.
They haven’t moved everything over yet and some features are still linked from the new search console for now but stay tuned search console will continue to evolve.
New rel attributes for Outbound Links
15 years ago Google introduced the rel= “nofollow” attribute links. The web have evolved significantly since then, so recently Google gave it a bit of revamp and expanded it. They have announced two new attributes for outbound links rel= “ugc” and rel= “sponsored”.
The below charts shows the detailed information about the new attributes:
rel Value |
Description |
| rel= “sponsored” | Mark links that are advertisements or paid placements (commonly called paid link) as sponsored. |
| rel= “ugc” | We recommend marking user-generated content (UGC) links, such as comments and forum posts as UGC
If you want to recognize and reward trustworthy contributors, you might remove this attribute from links posted by members or users who have consistently made high-quality contributions overtime. |
|
rel= “nofollow” |
Use the nofollow when other values don’t apply, and you would rather Google not associate your site with or crawl the linked page from your site. |
All of these are considered hints for ranking purposes.
Starting from March 2020, Google will also be treating these as hints to help them discover the new pages. This helps them to better understand overall the web.
Do you need to make the changes to your existing websites too?
No, the existing sites don’t need to make any changes but this has been clear with rel= “ugc” and rel= “sponsored” is an option.
Making Review Results More Helpful
Recently, Google changes when review starts are started to show in Search Results, this particular change has two different parts:
- Review Rich Results are only shown for certain types of items, where reviews really make a sense.
- Local business, organisations or subtype of these includes reviews about itself on its own websites; those would not be shown in Google Search Results.
This includes both reviews at business collected itself on itself as well as those from third party providers that are embedded widgets.
Reviews about other supported items will continue to be shown as before.
New Meta Tags for Snippets/Previews
On September 24th 2019, Google announced a set of new meta tags that give public search globally the ability to express preference regarding how much of their pages content is shown as a preview in search results.
In particular, there are meta tags that let you specify how many characters may be shown in a test snippet, whether how large an image preview may be and how long a video preview may be shown.
Additionally, there is an HTML attribute that can be used to restrict parts of text from being shown as a preview, called the “datanote snippets” attribute. This feature will become available later this year. Next of these are documentation goes into how end pages and how structured data may shown in searches.
Here is the video which recently was updated on Google Webmasters Youtube Page.
