Summing Up the Google Webmaster Conference 2019

Google recently announced the hosting of free Google Webmaster conferences worldwide to help enhance the site’s performance in search.

Intended to match the requirements of the webmasters, Google states that “These events are primarily located where it’s difficult to access search conferences or information about Google Search, or where there’s a specific need for a Search event. For example, if we identify that a region has problems with hacked sites, we may organize an event focusing on that specific topic.”

Let’s take a look at some key takeaways from the conference.

What’s New in Search

Before the speakers announced new features, tips, and other cool things, they gave us a brief overview of a feature with paramount importance—Search.

Search as we know, organizes the world’s information and makes it universally accessible and useful.

They mentioned that every time you search, there are thousands of web pages with helpful information. However, Google figures out which results to show, long before you even type, to provide the best information.

So here’s what’s new in Search:

• Image Search

Google announced that there are major changes coming to image search in 2019. Google will now use labels, context, and title with images.

Since users love websites with large and high-quality images that showcase great content, Google plans on introducing the High-resolution opt-in program wherein, websites will soon be able to opt-in images for their websites.

• Structured Data

Google announced these three new types of structured data:

– How to
– Q&A
– Faqs

AMP: Signed Exchange: The Essence

The Signed Exchange feature by Google allows you to use cookies to measure analytics as well as customize content. Here is how Google describes this feature-

“Signed HTTP Exchange (or “SXG”) is a subset of the emerging technology called Web Packages, which enables publishers to safely make their content portable, i.e. available for redistribution by other parties, while still keeping the content’s integrity and attribution. Portable content has many benefits, from enabling faster content delivery to facilitating content sharing between users, and simpler offline experiences.”

Google Search Console

A free service to maintain, troubleshoot, and monitor your site’s presence in Google’s Search Results, Google announced the following four new updates in it:

1. Accessible to Mobile

• The Console is now accessible to mobile as well so you can access it on the go.

2. Actionable Insights

• Instead of having just 3 months of data in the reports, the Search Console reports will now have over 16 months of data.
• It allows you to add various filters according to query, country, device and can carry out various comparisons. For example, a comparison between various queries (which query worked well) in a specific time range.

3. Improved User Flow

• The recent update gives owners full control over properties in the console. There is an option to give, let’s say, the developers a “read-only” view of any specific page.

4. Faster Feedback Loop

• It is now easy to validate fix errors. The Search Console now immediately starts checking pages to instantly update if the validation is a pass or fail.
• After 2 to 3 days, Google will crawl all other pages and send an email directly.

6 Pillars of SEO

The speakers then spoke about the 6 pillars of SEO-

• Quality Content: While it is important to your users, Google also rewards it with higher search rankings.
• Search Friendly: Search must understand your content to serve it to users. Hence it is a good idea to create titles and description in order to help Google understand images. It is best to avoid using text inside the images and use structured data when possible.
• Mobile Friendly: Since users access their mobile devices more than a desktop.
• Fast: Users hate slow websites.
• Secure: Users don’t want their privacy to break.
• Structured: It helps serve users better than your content.

Web Security

Website security is a critical component to secure and protect websites. Here is what the speakers at the conference stressed upon:

1. Hacked Content

• URL Injection: The creation of new pages on a website by a hacker that contains spam words/links.
• Malware: A malicious program or file that is harmful to a computer such as viruses, trojan horses, and spyware.
• Cloaking: A SEO technique wherein the content presented to the end user does not match the content presented to the search engine.

2. HTTPS – all website: The use of Secure Socket Layer (SSL) for securing communication between the browser and web server.

3. Harmful Content: Protecting your computer with documents, photos, or other attachments that may contain a virus.

Google AdSense (Publisher Policies)

To get their website AdSense approved is a dream of many publishers. Having said that, the approval rate is as low as 12%!

To help us with AdSense, Google spoke about the best publisher policies at the conference-

SEO Myth Busting

The speakers at the conference also busted some much-needed SEO myths.

All in all, it was a wonderful experience to learn from the eminent speakers at the Google Webmaster Conference. It would be interesting to use all these features and see how valuable they can be for search optimizers and developers.

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