Search and SEO in 2018
2018 is coming soon and people are starting to ask: what’s new? What should we do to keep up with changes in search and specifically in SEO in 2018? In this post, I’ll sum up the biggest changes in our world, and what you should be working on. The search landscape is changing Over the […]
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Engaging users through high quality AMP pages
To improve our users’ experience with AMP results, we are making changes to how we enforce our policy on content parity with AMP. Starting Feb 1, 2018, the policy requires that the AMP page content be comparable to the (original) canonical page content…
Engaging users through high quality AMP pages
To improve our users’ experience with AMP results, we are making changes to how we enforce our policy on content parity with AMP. Starting Feb 1, 2018, the policy requires that the AMP page content be comparable to the (original) canonical page content…
AMP news: Where are we now?
It has been a while since we did a post specifically on AMP. Not sure whether that is because AMP is becoming a common part of the publisher’s toolkit we all use, or that there’s just not that much AMP news to share. I took the liberty to collect some of the recent developments for […]
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What is HTTP/2 and how does it benefit SEO?
The HTTP/2 protocol was published in 2015 with the aim of creating a faster, more secure Internet. Adoption has been gradual and is ongoing, but there are clear benefits for marketers who make the upgrade. So what exactly is HTTP/2 and how does it affect SEO?
Accelerated Mobile Pages vs Facebook Instant Articles: Is Google winning the mobile war?
Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages and Facebook’s Instant Articles are both lightning-fast takes on the mobile web. But Google unveiled some stats at its I/O developer conference which indicate Google might be winning the war.
Metadata and SEO part 2: link rel metadata
In the first post of our metadata series, I discussed the meta tags in the <head> of your site. But there’s more metadata in the <head> that can influence the SEO of your site. In this second post, we’ll dive into link rel metadata. You can use link rel metadata to instruct browsers and Google, for example to point them to the AMP version […]
Ask Yoast: AMP for small business owners
You may have heard the term “AMP” very often lately. In 2015, Google pushed out this new concept called Accelerated Mobile Pages, in short AMP. AMP aims to make pages load instantly on mobile and, thereby, drastically improve the performance of the mobile web. You might wonder if you should get started with it too. Because, as […]
Rich Cards expands to more verticals
At Google I/O in May, we launched Rich Cards for Movies and Recipes, creating a new way for site owners to present previews of their content on the Search results page. Today, we’re expanding to two new verticals for US-based sites: Local restaurants and Online courses.
Evolution of search results for queries like [best New Orleans restaurants] and [leadership courses]: with rich cards, results are presented in new UIs, like carousels that are easy to browse by scrolling left and right, or a vertical three-pack that displays more individual courses
By building Rich Cards, you have a new opportunity to attract more engaged users to your page. Users can swipe through restaurant recommendations from sites like TripAdvisor, Thrillist, Time Out, Eater, and 10Best. In addition to food, users can browse through courses from sites like Coursera, LinkedIn Learning, EdX, Harvard, Udacity, FutureLearn, Edureka, Open University, Udemy, Canvas Network, and NPTEL.
If you have a site that contains local restaurant information or offers online courses, check out our developer docs to start building Rich Cards in the Local restaurant and Online courses verticals.
While AMP HTML is not required for Local restaurant pages and Online Courses rich cards, AMP provides Google Search users with a consistently fast experience, so we recommend that you create AMP pages to further engage users. Users consuming AMP’d content will be able to swipe near instantly from restaurant to restaurant or from recipe to recipe within your site.
Users who tap on your Rich Card will be taken near instantly to your AMP page, and be able to swipe between pages within your site.
Check out our developer site for implementation details.
To make it easier for you to create Rich Cards, we made some changes in our tools:
- The Structured Data Testing Tool displays markup errors and a preview card for Local restaurant content as it might appear on Search.
- The Rich Cards report in Search Console shows which cards across verticals contain errors, and which ones could be enhanced with more markup.
- The AMP Test helps validate AMP pages as well as mark up on the page.
What’s next?
We are actively experimenting with new verticals globally to provide more opportunities for you to display richer previews of your content.
If you have questions, find us in the dedicated Structured data section of our forum, on Twitter or on Google+.
Post by Stacie Chan, Global Product Partnerships
Rich Cards expands to more verticals
At Google I/O in May, we launched Rich Cards for Movies and Recipes, creating a new way for site owners to present previews of their content on the Search results page. Today, we’re expanding to two new verticals for US-based sites: Local restaurants and Online courses.
Evolution of search results for queries like [best New Orleans restaurants] and [leadership courses]: with rich cards, results are presented in new UIs, like carousels that are easy to browse by scrolling left and right, or a vertical three-pack that displays more individual courses
By building Rich Cards, you have a new opportunity to attract more engaged users to your page. Users can swipe through restaurant recommendations from sites like TripAdvisor, Thrillist, Time Out, Eater, and 10Best. In addition to food, users can browse through courses from sites like Coursera, LinkedIn Learning, EdX, Harvard, Udacity, FutureLearn, Edureka, Open University, Udemy, Canvas Network, and NPTEL.
If you have a site that contains local restaurant information or offers online courses, check out our developer docs to start building Rich Cards in the Local restaurant and Online courses verticals.
While AMP HTML is not required for Local restaurant pages and Online Courses rich cards, AMP provides Google Search users with a consistently fast experience, so we recommend that you create AMP pages to further engage users. Users consuming AMP’d content will be able to swipe near instantly from restaurant to restaurant or from recipe to recipe within your site.
Users who tap on your Rich Card will be taken near instantly to your AMP page, and be able to swipe between pages within your site.
Check out our developer site for implementation details.
To make it easier for you to create Rich Cards, we made some changes in our tools:
- The Structured Data Testing Tool displays markup errors and a preview card for Local restaurant content as it might appear on Search.
- The Rich Cards report in Search Console shows which cards across verticals contain errors, and which ones could be enhanced with more markup.
- The AMP Test helps validate AMP pages as well as mark up on the page.
What’s next?
We are actively experimenting with new verticals globally to provide more opportunities for you to display richer previews of your content.
If you have questions, find us in the dedicated Structured data section of our forum, on Twitter or on Google+.
Post by Stacie Chan, Global Product Partnerships
Five most important search marketing news stories of the week
This week, both LinkedIn and Facebook are beefing up their paid social offerings in different ways, while Google seeks to cut off Adwords revenues for fake news sites. And might Google be favouring desktop over its own AMP in its upcoming mobile-first index?
Interview with Maile Ohye (Google)
According to Maile Ohye of Google, “SEO is evolving into what Loren George McKechnie described as ‘search experience optimization’. It’s less about top ranking, and more about optimizing the searcher’s journey. It’s the intersection of content, UX, and as always, staying smart about search engines.” We had the chance to ask Maile a couple of questions, […]
Five most important search marketing news stories of the week
Welcome to our weekly round-up of all the latest news and research from around the world of search marketing and beyond.
Three reasons you might not need Google AMP after all
Mobile devices currently account for more than half of all internet use on a global level, and yet, many websites are still not mobile-friendly.
Publishers are struggling with AMP page monetization
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that many publishers using AMP are seeing these pages generate substantially less revenue than their non-AMP mobile pages.
Is Google killing mobile organic search?
Click-through rates for websites depend a great deal on their position in organic search results.
Technical SEO checklist: a webmaster’s guide to on-page optimisation
Presenting a guide to carrying out all the on-page checks that webmasters and SEOs need to carry out to ensure a website is optimised for search.
Guide to Google ranking factors – Part 7: Site-level signals
This week we move away from on-page content, and dive into site-level factors.
Google Search Index set to go ‘mobile-first’ within months
Google has announced that it will soon be splitting its index between mobile and desktop.
Using AMP? Try our new webpage tester
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is a great way to make content on your website accessible in an extremely fast way. To help ensure that your AMP implementation is working as expected , Search Console now has an enhanced AMP testing tool.
This testing tool is mobile-friendly and uses Google’s live web-search infrastructure to analyze the AMP page with the real Googlebot. The tool tests the validity of the AMP markup as well as any structured data on the page. If issues are found, click on them to see details, and to have the line in the source-code highlighted. For valid AMP pages, we may also provide a link to a live preview of how this page may appear in Google’s search results.
With the share button on the bottom right, you can now share a snapshot of the results that you’re currently seeing with others. This makes it easier to discuss issues with your team, whether they’re regular occurrences or one-time quirks that you need to iron out. Just click the share button and pass on the URL for this test snapshot. This share feature is now also available in the mobile-friendly testing tool.
We hope this tool makes it easier to create great AMP’d content while finding and resolving issues that may appear on your AMP pages. For any questions, feel free to drop by our webmaster’s help forum.
Posted by Ofir Roval & Yaniv Loewenstein, Search Console team
