The Current State of SEO, Revamped Search Console Emails, and more! (January ‘25)

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JOHN MUELLER: Hello, and welcome to the New Year's episode
of "Google Search News."
I hope life is treating you reasonably well,
wherever you are.
My name is John Mueller.
I'm your host today here from Google Switzerland.
Today, we have news about Search Console and Almanac, Google
Search, and crawling-- oh, and AI, of course.
Time is of essence.
So let's delve right in.
First up, in Search Console, we have an exciting update
in your performance report.
Search Console helps you to monitor your site in Google.
And the performance reports gives you information
about how well it's performing.
Fresh in Search Console is hourly data
for the past 24 hours.
So if your site suddenly becomes popular on Google,
you can monitor that live.
This is exciting to see and see again an hour later or an hour
after that.
We mentioned Search Console recommendations last time.
This feature is now available to all sites with recommendations
to show.
One new insight is a check for the homepage's indexing status,
which requires domain-level verification.
Another neat insight tells you when
your website has measurable site-wide crawling issues.
The trigger is currently set to 5%
so that it can flag temporary server issues.
We'll continue to tune these recommendations and insights.
Let us know in the report whether you found them useful.
And of course, send us any suggestions
you might have for future recommendations.
We also recently revamped the design of the emails
that we send through Search Console.
This makes them a bit more unified and modern.
We're currently going through all message templates
to update wording here and there.
For example, very few people have called themselves
"webmaster" in the recent years.
And we're cleaning up those leftover bits.
You'll see the new phrasing over time
as the updates are completed.
Stay tuned.
Moving over to Google Search, the search quality team
has recently launched two core updates.
We consider various parts of Google Search
to be included in the core.
And these core updates were for different components.
Additionally, we updated our site abuse policy
and added more specifics on that to the documentation.
Finally, we also launched a spam update.
Updates like these are announced on our Search Status dashboard.
If you want to know first, there are
feeds available that you can subscribe to
with any RSS reader.
Additionally in Search, we retire the sitelinks search box
and no longer use its structured data.
You don't have to remove any structured data from your pages
for this change.
An overview of the current state of SEO
was published in the Web Almanac.
The Web Almanac is regularly compiled
by a number of industry experts and Google employees.
It's powered by the HTTP Archive, a repository
of public websites.
The SEO chapter has a nice look at the state of SEO
at the moment based on this repository.
It starts off by looking at robots.txt file usage.
Did you know that almost 84% of websites have a robots.txt file?
This is your chance to pick up more data for the office trivia
contest.
So check it out.
And now over to crawling by our friend, Googlebot.
Together with other search engineers,
Gary and Martin from IT wrote comprehensive blog posts
about crawling.
The information here is less suited for trivia contests
and more for when you want to double-check some details
about edge cases in crawling.
From the engine room, you can read about how and why Googlebot
crawls, how HTTP caching plays a role, and fascinating thoughts
on faceted navigation.
We'll possibly add more to this series
once we crawl back to the office.
Check them out if you love technical SEO details.
Every time I do these episodes, I
look around for pieces to share from the SEO community.
Today, I have three that are relatively niche,
but great to expand your horizons.
First up, "A Look at Incorporating Machine Learning
for SEO Tasks," written by [INAUDIBLE]-- it's complex,
but written so that you can follow along,
even if you don't do much coding.
Then we have "Looker Studio Dashboards," compiled by Dario.
Looker Studio is great for visualizing Search Console,
analytics, and other data.
And these dashboards do look amazing.
You can do this, too, I'm sure.
And finally, we have Dan on "Getting Buy-in from High-level
Leads for SEO."
Bigger companies can be complex, I know.
So if you work with one, you might find these ideas useful.
But wait, that's not all.
Here are some other short updates.
First up is AI, of course.
I used AI to help write some of the script here.
And it says I should tell you that AI is awesome.
Well, anyway, we recently launched a lot of AI tools
at Google.
They're pretty neat.
My favorites are Gemini's Deep Research mode
and Mariner for Chrome, which can control your browser.
These are not available everywhere currently.
I check out the videos to see more.
Let's also talk about events briefly.
Since last time, you might have met us in Taiwan or Switzerland,
India or Ireland, perhaps even Spain or Austria.
We try to bring our insights to you wherever you are.
If these events didn't work for you,
you can catch us here on this YouTube channel.
Among other videos, we recently finished both a Google Trends
tutorial series and an SEO Made Easy series.
Check them out.
Well, there you have it.
This episode of "Google Search News" is now complete.
Thank you for tuning in.
I hope this video was useful.
And please add feedback and comments here.
We read them all.
If you subscribe to this channel,
we'll let you know when another episode is ready.
Bye.
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