December 22 Search News: latest news from Google

A recap of the work done in recent months on the Search world and other ecosystem products, but also a way to close out the year and say goodbye to 2022: Google has posted on YouTube the new installment of Search News, the video series that chronicles the behind-the-scenes work on algorithms and systems, examining the latest updates and announcements affecting Google Search.

Google Search News for December 22: the latest updates

Search Essentials, site names, ranking systems, and miscellaneous changes: the menu for this appointment, which follows the previous video by about three months, is quite dense, but the most noticeable change is in the lead. For once, in fact, John Mueller is not the sole host, but is joined by Lizzi Sassman (Senior Technical Writer) in presenting the latest news – and after several months, the recording returns to the office and not from home, a sign of a resumption of activities on a more regular basis after the pandemic.

The first item on the agenda is Google’s new Search Guidelines, now called Search Essentials , for which Sassman herself was the technical editor.

Here comes the Google Search Basics

The revamping of the old instructions for Webmasters had become necessary to bring the directions in line with the new reality of Search and the Web as a whole: as Lizzi Sassman summarizes, these are the really “essential” points for those who are creating sites that aspire to visibility on Google Search, and thus are crucial for SEO.

They start with technical requirements, with reporting on the “bare minimum necessary to make a page suitable for Google presence,” and continue with spam policies, which cover various things to avoid, such as misleading features, scams, fraud and copyright removals, and harassment cases. These basics, then, also include a limited set of key Search best practices, i.e., basic practices that, however, can have a high impact on the ranking and appearance of web content in Google Search.

More visibility to site names

It is John Mueller, on the other hand, who tells us about a visual evolution that, however, also testifies to Google’s focus on branding: since a few weeks ago, in fact, for searches from mobile devices in a specific set of languages (at this stage only English, French, Japanese, and German), experimentation with a new way of showing site names in search results has started, which gives more visual impact to this element in view of the fact that site names facilitate website identification.

To be precise, the change makes site names much more visible by reserving more space in the SERP preview snippet for the title link of the page, as seen in the image.

Determining the site name on Google is automatic, and Search uses a number of sources drawn from the site’s home page itself, such as WebSite structured data, content in <title> elements, header elements (such as <h1> elements), and og:site_name.

Also, with this change, the site’s favicon may be more prominent.

Updates to the documentation on ranking systems and the Search Console

The third piece of news then concerns the documentation on Google Search ranking systems: to avoid confusion between systematic updates and periodic updates, Google has introduced new terminology to define its interventions, distinguishing between system (a ranking algorithm that always works) and update (a single change to a ranking system).

Thus Google now provides several resources for keeping track of interventions: the main one covers more than 20 systems, including some that are now retired or integrated into later systems, and is a “great reference if you write about Google systems”; also very useful is the page with Google Search ranking updates, also listed with dates for the implementation and completion of each update, which can serve to double-check changes by Google when there are changes in site performance. Finally, Google devotes detailed documentation on the latest systems, such as for Helfpul Content and Product Reviews.

The last interesting cue to come from the video (before the customary greetings, with the two presenters “decked out for the holidays”) concerns an insight published on Google’s blog to explain how to use filters and limitations of Search Console data: often having a large amount of data (such as those found in various reports) can indeed overwhelm, if we fail to understand its meaning and relevance to our strategies.