Google Search News for January 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 free 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