Sunday, December 31, 2023
I’m sure you’re all wondering why we have gathered you here today. That’s right: it’s the end of
year blog post in which we go over what happened in 2023 on Google Search Central, and have some
fun along the way!
Events
In 2023 we brought our flagship event series,
Google Search Central Live, to new
locations—on top of those that we usually visit like Singapore and Tokyo. We somehow ended
up in Jakarta, Mexico City, São Paulo, Taipei, and a bunch of other places, and the reception was
pretty fantastic everywhere; check this out:
We talked about all sorts of things that, based on the post event feedback, the audience found
valuable and useful. Like what, you ask? To list a couple, the
How Search Works talks and our
talks about AI
are particularly highly rated. Just like these two talks, everything else we talked about at the
events is on Search Central, so you just have to dig into the over 1000 pages worth of
documentation and blog posts!
Docs
Speaking of documentation, looking at the changelog, we were pretty
busy.
On the topic of crawling, we added a few more crawlers and product tokens to our
list of crawlers,
talked about caching, and documented in painful detail
the IP ranges Google’s crawlers and fetchers use.
We wrote a lot about structured data that
powers some Search features that help people find
vacation rentals, but also to enable
businesses to better
control their organization details
on our search result pages.
In indexing we declared that the road to
Mobile First Indexing is complete, it’s
just “indexing” now, and expanded our docs about
canonicalization.
The Search Console team was once again on steroids this year and the tool got a bunch of new
things: bulk data export, updated
user and permissions management,
and
association between the Merchant Center and Search Console.
On ranking, we published guidance about
AI-generated content, and went
into more detail about
creating helpful content. We also
added a Q&A about ranking updates to help with recurring questions.
More help
We’ve got more than just docs and events to help those needing guidance.
We continued with our podcast,
Search Off the Record,
where you can hear some behind the scenes information about Search, sometimes in ASMR format. If
you prefer videos, John kept publishing
Google Search News videos,
Daniel explored
Google SafeSearch
with Emma and
Google News with
Cherry. Martin kept doing Martin-things as
usual, sometimes as
fairy tales.
SEO Office Hours are now available in English and
Japanese, courtesy of
John and
Anna, where we answer some of the
questions that you submitted on this page. They’re
pretty fun, you should check them out!
And of course we have a vibrant
Search Central community
with pretty brilliant Product Experts that can assist with most issues when it comes to Google
Search, and more.
But enough with the sappy: if all this text (that we definitely didn’t generate with AI) wasn’t
enough, here’s a video that the team behind Search Central videos put together to send us off to
2024!
Thanks for reading, listening, and watching, and here’s to an exciting new year!