Looking back at last year’s Webmaster Conference Product Summit

As a part of the Webmaster Conference series, last fall we held a Product Summit at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. It was slightly different from our previous events, with a number of product managers and engineers from Google Search taking part. We recorded the talks held there, and are happy to be able to make these available to all of you now.

In the playlist you’ll find:

• Web deduplication – How does Google recognize duplicate content across the web? What happens once a duplicate is found? How is a canonical URL selected? How does localization play a role?
• Google Images best practices – Take a look at how Google Images has evolved over the years, and learn about some of the best practices that you can implement on your site when it comes to images.
• Rendering – Find out more about rendering, and what it takes to do rendering of the web at scale. Take a look behind the scenes, and learn about some things a site owner could watch out for with regards to rendering.
• Titles, snippets, and result previews – What’s the goal of titles, snippets, and previews in Search? How do Google’s systems pick and generate a preview for a page? What are some of the elements that help users decide which page to click in Search?
• Googlebot & web hosting – Starting with a look at the popularity of different web servers, and the growth of HTTPS, you’ll find out more about how Google’s crawling for Search works, and what you can do to control it.
• Claim your Knowledge Panel – Knowledge Panels are a great way for people and organizations to be visible in Search. Find out more about the ways you can claim and update them for yourself or for your business.
• Improving Search over the years – Are dogs the same as cats? Should pages about New York be shown when searching for York? How could algorithms ever figure this out? How many 😊’s does it take to get Google’s attention? Google’s Paul Haahr takes you on a tour of some changes in Search.

We hope you find these videos insightful, useful, and a bit entertaining! And if you are not subscribed to the Webmasters Youtube channel, here’s your chance!

Posted by John Mueller, Search Advocate, Google Switzerland