Google Search at I/O 2018

Thursday, June 07, 2018

With the eleventh annual Google I/O
wrapped up, it’s a great time to reflect on some of the highlights.

What we did at I/O

The event was a wonderful way to meet many great people from various communities across the globe,
exchange ideas, and gather feedback. Besides many great
web sessions,
codelabs,
and office hours, we shared a few things with the community in two
sessions specific to Search:

• Deliver search-friendly JavaScript-powered websites
  with John Mueller and Tom Greenaway
• Build a successful web presence with Google Search
  with Mariya Moeva and John Mueller

The sessions included the launch of JavaScript error reporting in the
Mobile Friendly Test tool,
dynamic rendering (we will discuss this in more detail in a future post), and an explanation of
how CMS can use the Indexing and Search Console APIs to provide users with insights. For example,
Wix lets their users
submit their home page to the index
and see it in Search results instantly, and Squarespace created a
Google Search keywords report
to help webmasters understand what prospective users search for.

During the event, we also presented the
new Search Console in the
Sandbox area for people to try and were happy to get a lot of positive feedback, from people being
excited about the
AMP Status report
to others exploring how to improve their content for Search.

Hands-on codelabs, case studies and more

We presented the
Structured Data Codelab
that walks you through adding and
testing structured data.
We were really happy to see that it ended up being one of the top 20 codelabs by completions at
I/O. If you want to learn more about the benefits of using Structured Data, check out our
case studies.

During the in-person office hours we saw a lot of interest around HTTPS,
mobile-first indexing, AMP,
and many other topics. The in-person Office Hours were a wonderful addition to our monthly
Webmaster Office Hours hangout.
The questions and comments will help us adjust our documentation and tools by making them clearer
and easier to use for everyone.

Highlights and key takeaways

We also repeated a few key points that web developers should have an eye on when building
websites, such as:

• Indexing and rendering don’t happen at the same time. We may defer the rendering to a later
  point in time.
• Make sure the content you want in Search has metadata, correct HTTP statuses, and the intended
  canonical tag.
• Hash-based routing (URLs with #) should be deprecated in favour of the JavaScript
  History API in Single Page Apps.
• Links should have an href attribute pointing to a URL, so Googlebot can follow the links
  properly.

Make sure to
watch this talk for
more on indexing, dynamic rendering and troubleshooting your site. If you wanna learn more about
things to do as a CMS developer or theme author or Structured Data,
watch this talk.

We were excited to meet some of you at I/O as well as the
global I/O extended events
and share the latest developments in Search. To stay in touch, join the
Webmaster Forum
or follow us on
Twitter,
Google+, and
YouTube.

Posted by Martin Splitt, Webmaster Trends Analyst