Google Search News for January 2020

Friday, January 31, 2020

We hope the year 2020 has started off well for you, and wanted to bring a brief update of some of the changes around Google Search since our
last episode. We aim to do this in our YouTube Series called
Google Search News.

In the January 2020 episode, we cover:

• Updates in
  Search Console, a tool from
  Google to help you succeed with your website in Google Search. Since the last episode, we celebrated the
  two-year anniversary
  of the new Search Console, updated the
  Discover report, and made the Index Coverage report
  more comprehensive. Another big change was the
  new messaging system, which integrates directly with various reports.
• Updated
  Mobile-First Indexing documentation
  and some tips, such as making sure your mobile site reflects your full content (we won’t use the
  desktop version at all, once we switch your site over). Also, if you use separate mobile URLs
  (commonly called m-dot URLs), make sure to use them consistently within your structured data too.
• The deprecation of support for
  data-vocabulary.org structured data
  was recently announced. This markup was mostly used for breadcrumb markup, so if you added that early on, you should double-check the
  breadcrumb report
  in Search Console.
• We make regular updates in Google Search—our website on
  How Search Works
  has more on the backgrounds, if you’re curious. In this episode we covered
  BERT
  – a modern way for computers to understand natural language – as well as various updates mentioned on our
  Search Liaison
  &
  Webmaster Central
  Twitter profiles.
• Chrome has posted on its
  handling of mixed-content,
  and we started sending notices to
  sites using old HTTPS / TLS protocols.
• Googlebot’s rendering has continued to move forward with
  the new user agent, which is being used more and more for crawling.
• and, last but not least, if you’d like to find out more about Search Console, check out our new
  Search Console training video series!

We hope you find these updates useful! Let us know in the video comments, or on Twitter, if there’s something we can improve on.

Posted by
John Mueller, Google Search-Relations team, Zurich