Blog

The past, present, and future of robots.txt

In this episode of Search Off the Record, Gary, Lizzi, and Martin from the Google Search team are joined by special guest David Price, a Product Counsel for Google. They discuss human initiated crawl requests vs. bot initiated crawl requests, the robots.txt file, and more!

Episode transcript → https://goo.gle/sotr028-transcript 

Search Off the Record is a podcast series that takes you behind the scenes of Google Search with the Search Relations team.

Transcript for The past, present, and future of robots.txt

Search Off the Record takes you behind the scenes of Google Search and its inner workings! In each episode, the folks from the Search Relations team will give you background info on the decision-making behind launches, feature prioritization in Search Console, and the projects Google Search teams are working on. They will share fun stories

Inclusive language in Search

John and Martin are joined by guest stars Zineb Ait Bahajji and Bruno Cartoni from Google to talk all about inclusive language. The group discusses principles behind inclusive writing, examples in different languages, how Search handles indexing and ranking for inclusive writing, and more!

United Nation – Gender-inclusive language (available in English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Chinese) → https://goo.gle/3DsRws4 
Inclusive Language (Wikipedia) → https://goo.gle/3ouqZpX 
European Institute for Gender Equality → https://goo.gle/3Dsxrlx 
A guide to inclusive language in the workplace → https://goo.gle/3Eyozw1 
Google Developer Documentation Style Guide → https://goo.gle/3lIdLUR 

Episode transcript → https://goo.gle/sotr027-transcript

Search Off the Record is a podcast series that takes you behind the scenes of Google Search with the Search Relations team.

Transcript for Inclusive language in Search

Search Off the Record takes you behind the scenes of Google Search and its inner workings! In each episode, the folks from the Search Relations team will give you background info on the decision-making behind launches, feature prioritization in Search Console, and the projects Google Search teams are working on. They will share fun stories

Product reviews update and your site

We are now rolling out a new product reviews update, the first major update since April 2021, that may change how your product reviews rank in search results. We are also sharing new best practices when writing product reviews to augment the previous advice we shared. We also published a new documentation page that captures the complete set of best practices.

A 2021 update on mobile indexing

We first started working on mobile-first indexing a number of years ago. Since then, we switched to indexing the majority of web pages with Googlebot-Smartphone. We’ve now determined that some sites are still not ready to be shifted over due to various, unexpected challenges. Because of this, we’re now leaving the timeline open for the last steps of mobile-first indexing.

One year of Google Search Central

A year ago, we launched our new site and announced that we were leaving our beloved name, Google Webmasters, behind for a new moniker: Google Search Central. This year, we’ve been working with our internal SEO team to improve our content, writing lots of new documentation, migrating 13 local language blogs, and developing a new checklist for our home page.

The Future of SEO

Transcript for The Future of SEO

Search Off the Record takes you behind the scenes of Google Search and its inner workings! In each episode, the folks from the Search Relations team will give you background info on the decision-making behind launches, feature prioritization in Search Console, and the projects Google Search teams are working on. They will share fun stories

Help job seekers understand your job postings by including a complete description

We’ve uncovered an opportunity to improve your job posting pages, and it only takes a few changes to the description field.