Search Console Recommendations, Google Trends, and more! (November ‘24)

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JOHN MUELLER: Hello, and welcome back to the "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, Search results, Google
Trends, and, of course, a short mention of AI.
How could it already be so late in the year?
Time is fleeting.
What does that even mean?
Anyway, let's delve right in.
First up, some cool Search Console news, namely,
Recommendations.
This makes it easier to spot patterns and get insights
about your site.
They're especially helpful if you're not a regular user.
For example, it could tell you that all structured data
of one type is incorrectly implemented.
Recommendations have not yet been rolled out to all websites
and are only shown when relevant.
We're still working on these.
So, please, send us feedback if you see something surprising.
Also, let us know if there's something new for us
to add there as well.
It's still early days for these recommendations.
We plan to add more over time.
Also, in Search Console, we updated the performance report
to make it easier to keep filters and settings when
switching websites.
The performance report gives you information
on how and when your site is shown in Google Search results.
This particular change came out of feedback from you all.
So thank you for that.
We have a few more things planned
for the performance report.
So stay tuned.
And talking about Search results,
Google removed the cache page link and the cache operator.
This change doesn't affect your site's visibility in search.
So there's nothing for you to do.
We also added a link to the Internet Archive
with this update.
The Internet Archive is an American nonprofit
that, among other things, crawls and stores copies of web pages.
To see how Google sees your pages, use Search Console.
With the removal of cached cash pages,
the No Archive meta tag no longer has any functionality.
We removed it from our documentation.
It's fine to keep it on pages.
It doesn't do anything for Google Search.
But you might use it elsewhere.
Also, in the Search results, you may find pages
with an srsltid parameter.
This comes from merchant centers auto-tagging
for e-commerce sites.
It's used to give site owners conversion metrics.
This parameter is added after the search results are complete.
It doesn't come from or effect crawling or indexing.
So it's not possible to control it with canonicalization,
robots.txt, or meta tags.
If you want to toggle auto-tagging for your site,
I've included a link to the Help Center in the description.
Google Trends is up next.
Google Trends has updated some of its functionality,
in particular, the Trending Now experience.
This helps you to discover emerging trends and patterns
in real-time.
With this update, you have access
to fresher data from more countries and regions.
We've recently put out a video series
that covers some of the Google Trends functionality.
In particular, there's a video and documentation
for search marketing and SEOs.
It gives you some ideas on how you can use trends to better
understand your site's users and to find topics
that you could prepare for.
I do want to caution that it's easy to go overboard
with tools like these.
You don't have to create pages to cover
every possible related search term.
It's important that the content which you publish actually
adds value to the web overall and that it doesn't just
repeat what others have said.
Be selective.
Focus on your own expertise.
Focus on your users that are likely to be
relevant for your business.
And, now, over to some cool things from the SEO community.
First up is a fun tune, AI-generated, by Alizée Baudez.
I'll link to these in the description below.
I realize, using generative AI for something creative
is a bit controversial.
But I thought this was fun.
If you're an SEO or digital marketer
and making music with AI or not, please, drop your link
into the comments here.
I'd love to take a listen.
Next, I found Crystal Carter's presentation
on brand recognition for generative AI
really interesting.
We'll see how it all pans out.
But it's awesome to see folks brainstorm and talk
about the possibilities.
And getting back to more traditional SEO work, Raquel
González wrote a nice guide on international SEO mistakes
and fixes.
International SEO is hard.
And I was happy to see my personal pet peeve mentioned,
Geo IP redirects.
What's your personal pet peeve with international SEO?
Let me know in the comments.
And just a bit more.
Let's see.
We've updated our pages for video SEO, title links, Google
crawlers, and core updates.
Let us know, with the feedback links,
if we can make things even clearer.
Also in the documentation, we clarified
that indexing API is really only for the content types mentioned
and that URLs with a hash symbol can't
be used for canonicalization.
On YouTube, we launched a second season of "SEO Made Easy"
and a series of Google Trends tutorials.
Then, the team has put on a number of events in new places,
from Malaysia to Turkey.
It's been great meeting folks.
Where should we go next year?
And last but not least, we added support for the AVIF image
format in Google Images.
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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