Friday, December 30, 2022
You know what time it is: year in a review. With only a few days left of 2022 and with all the
quiet in the office, we thought it would be nice to reflect on this year from Search Central’s
perspective.
Search Console launches and guides,
weird and welcome documentation updates,
videos, events,
social networking online and in-real-life; boy what a year this was! Definitely looking forward to
what 2023 might have in store for us!
First, just when we thought Search Console would finally slow down with adding more reports and
features to the product, they added more. The
Video Index report
launched in July is one of the best ways for video publishers to debug and monitor how Google
perceives and indexes the videos they produce. Helping merchants around the world, the team added
new reports designed specifically for
online sellers and product review publishers.
And to put a cherry on top, the Search Console folks also added a new
API for URL Inspection.
While launching new things is great for products, code health is just as important. To wit, the
team cleaned up some legacy tools that had little impact on Google Search, such as the
URL Parameter Tool
and the International Targeting report.
Daniel, our team’s resident Search Console spy, also didn’t hold back: he taught us
new ways of visualizing and thinking about data
provided by Search Console. Honestly, until March when he published his guide about
connecting Search Console to Looker Studio,
we didn’t even know that’s possible. Plus, his guide about search performance data visualization
to help with search performance felt like giving out secrets for free.
Speaking of overcommunication, this year we introduced SpamBrain in our annual WebSpam review
post. Surprisingly to us, the larger search ecosystem seemed to have liked our new friend. Danny
and Alan blogged quite a bit about ranking updates:
Core updates,
Product review updates,
Helpful Content update.
Then these blog posts magically turned into
stand-alone help documentation.
So what about documentation updates? Well, Lizzi got rid of webmasters—the term that is. The
herculean work of
revamping the old Webmaster Guidelines
into something more manageable took many months, but it was definitely worth it. Together with
Cherry, Lizzi also replaced the old Search result screenshots with abstract diagrams that will
help a lot with localization.
Then we published a single-line update to our documentation that wreaked havoc on the internet. It
was 15 MegaBytes,
and this is the last time we talk about it.
But let’s talk about even more exciting stuff: we are back to in-person events and we couldn’t be
happier! Cherry brought back our first in-person events since 2019; it was fantastic to see the
community face to face, so we’ll try to do more of them. Martin went to way too many events as
usual, John and Lizzi recorded a podcast at a SEO conference (<-
weird). Speaking of podcasts, we have recorded over 50 episodes by now and somehow people still
seem to like them.
We expanded our social circles, too. Now you can find most of the Search Relations team members on
Mastodon and we also started experimenting with LinkedIn. Quite the change, considering none of
these platforms make it easy to post JIFs. But fear not, you can also catch us on
Twitter. In fact, why don’t
you drop us a tweet if you have comments, suggestions, or funny cat pictures?
Here’s to a fantastic 2023!