Sachin

  Quick summary: Starting November 2020, Googlebot will start crawling some sites over HTTP/2. Ever since mainstream browsers started supporting the next major revision of HTTP,  HTTP/2 or h2  for short, web professionals  asked us  whether Googlebot can crawl over the upgraded, more modern version of the protocol. Today we're announcing that starting mid November 2020, Googlebot will support crawling over HTTP/2 for select sites. What is HTTP/2 As we said, it's the next  major version of HTTP , the protocol the internet primarily uses for transferring data. HTTP/2 is much more robust, efficient, and faster than its predecessor, due to its architecture and the features it implements for clients (for example, your browser) and servers. If you want to read more about it, we have a long article on the  HTTP/2 topic on developers.google.com . Why we're making this change In general, we expect this change to make crawling more efficient in terms of server r...

  Last year we released the   robots.txt parser and matcher   that we use in our production systems to the open source world. Since then, we've seen people build new tools with it,   contribute   to the open source library (effectively improving our production systems- thanks!), and release new language versions like   golang   and   rust , which make it easier for developers to build new tools. With the intern season ending here at Google, we wanted to highlight two new releases related to robots.txt that were made possible by two interns working on the Search Open Sourcing team,  Andreea Dutulescu  and  Ian Dolzhanskii .  Robots.txt Specification Test First, we are releasing a  testing framework  for robots.txt parser developers, created by Andreea. The project provides a testing tool that can validate whether a robots.txt parser follows the Robots Exclusion Protocol, or to what extent. Currently there is no officia...

  Quick summary : Starting today, we support   shippingDetails  schema.org markup   as an alternative way for retailers to be eligible for shipping details in Google Search results. Since June 2020, retailers have been able to list their products across different Google surfaces for free,  including on Google Search . We are committed to supporting ways for the ecosystem to better connect with users that come to Google to look for the best products, brands, and retailers by investing both in more robust tooling in  Google Merchant Center  as well as with new kinds of schema.org options. Shipping details, including cost and expected delivery times, are often a key consideration for users making purchase decisions. In our own studies, we’ve heard that users abandon shopping checkouts because of unforeseen or uncertain shipping costs. This is why we will often show shipping cost information in certain result types, including on free listings on Google Sea...

  In November 2019 we announced the   Search Console Training   YouTube series and started publishing videos regularly. The goal of the series was to create updated video content to be used alongside Search documentation, for example in the   Help Center   and in the   Developers site . The wonderful Google Developer Studio team (the engine behind those videos!) put together this fun blooper reel for the first wave of videos that we recorded in the Google London studio. So far we’ve published twelve episodes in the series, each focusing on a different part of the tool. We’ve seen it’s helping lots of people to learn how to use Search Console - so  we decided to continue recording videos… at home!  Please bear with the trucks, ambulances, neighbors, passing clouds, and of course the doorbell. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ In addition to the location change, we’re also changing the scope of the new videos. Instead of focusing on one report at a time, we’ll discuss how ...

  The first Virtual Webmaster Unconference successfully took place on August 26th and, as promised, we’d like to share the main findings and conclusions here. How did the event go? As communicated before, this event was a pilot, in which we wanted to test a) if there was an appetite for a very different type of event, and b) whether the community would actively engage in the discussions. To the first question, we were overwhelmed with the interest to participate; it definitely exceeded our expectations and it gives us fuel to try out future iterations. Despite the frustration of many, who did not receive an invitation, we purposefully kept the event small. This brings us to our second point: it is by creating smaller venues that discussions can happen comfortably. Larger audiences are perfect for more conventional conferences, with keynotes and panels. The Virtual Webmaster Unconference, however, was created to hear the attendees’ voices. And we did. What did we learn in the ses...