On December 4th, we had the great opportunity to attend the Google Webmaster Conference in Tel Aviv, Israel. These conferences are held several times per year around the globe. It provides the most recent & valuable information to SEO’s, Website developers, and digital marketers to improve their Google Search skills.
There is no better place to learn about Google’s upcoming updates & ask for feedback since you are in direct contact with industry experts such as John Muller, and the Google Search Team.
The main topics covered at the WMC were:
- Crawling & Javascript
- Indexing
- Mobile-First Indexing
- AMP
- BERT & Core Updates
- Web
- Speed
- Flexible and robust
- Security
- Search Console
Crawling & Javascript
New guidelines for Pagination coming soon after the rel next/prev deprecation
The evergreen GoogleBot
Rendering in 2019 (5 seconds at median) within minutes 90th percentile.
Crawling JS needs Smart SEOS
Performance Matters!
Tips for JS sites
Indexing
During the last months:
- Rel nofollow is a hint
- New rel=sponsored, rel=ugc
- DMOZ / ODP went away
- Lots of Structured data news
Mobile-first indexing
More than 50% of websites are now in MFI, it seems that during next year they would force to move the 100%.
If you are still with an M-dot site migrate to a single URL (responsive / Dynamic serving) and avoid problems.
Typical Mobile Indexing Issues:
- Blocked by robots.txt
- Missing full images, alt-texts, videos
- Loading on interaction (scroll or click) rather than on page-load.
- Inconsistent robots meta tags / Structured data.
AMP
BERT & Core Updates
Web
The pillars of a Delightful UX are Fast and reliable, Secure, Integrated and Engaged.
Speed
Flexible and Robust
Secure
- Use Strong Password using Passphrases and not only Words and save them in a password manager.
- Enable 2FA Everywhere
- Use WebAuthn for Websites
- Implement HTTPS correctly: (2048 bit keys, Use Server-side 301 redirects, don’t block HTTPS pages by Robots.txt and enable HSTS)
- Keep your systems up-to-date (Servers, Hosting, CMS) and Use Automatic Updates are possible to avoid surprises
Search Console
The Search Console Product and Engineering team was there and explained to us many interesting topics mainly:
- The Good use that you can do for Structured Data with the Url Inspection.
- They presented the new Messages Feature https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/12/search-console-messages.html
- How the User Research team of GSC works using our feedback.
To close the recap from Yesterday many thanks to all the Google Search Team for the great afternoon that we spent in the Google Webmaster Conference in Tel Aviv and looking forward to attending other GWC in the near future.
If you have some doubts about the takeaways/recap feel free to comment.
