October 2023
- October 18:
- Added a reference to the Rich Results Test in the Subscription and paywalled structured data documentation, as this data type is now supported in the testing tool. Also added a Generative AI in Search considerations section. Added information about SGE (Search Generative Experience) to the Robots meta tag,
data-nosnippet
, and X-Robots-Tag specifications page for thenosnippet
andmax-snippet
rules. - Clarified in the favicon documentation that both the favicon file and the home page of the site must be allowed for crawling by Googlebot-Image and Googlebot respectively. Also removed information about the Google Favicon HTTP
user-agent
string throughout our documentation, as this is no longer used. The removal of the HTTPuser-agent
string means no changes for site owners. Google Favicon depended on theGooglebot-Image
andGooglebot
robots.txt user agent tokens, which remain supported.
- Added a reference to the Rich Results Test in the Subscription and paywalled structured data documentation, as this data type is now supported in the testing tool. Also added a Generative AI in Search considerations section. Added information about SGE (Search Generative Experience) to the Robots meta tag,
- October 17:
- Added a reminder to provide the timezone in Article structured data and clarified what happens if a timezone isn’t provided.
- Added mention about Googlebot’s timezone, which is PST.
- October 16: Added vehicle listing structured data documentation.
- October 13: Removed the host group visual element from the Visual Elements gallery, as it no longer appears in Google Search results.
September 2023
- September 29: Added more explanation about why Discover traffic may change over time.
- September 28: Added a new user agent token,
Google-Extended
, which acts as a new control that web publishers can use to manage whether their sites help improve Bard and Vertex AI generative APIs, including future generations of models that power those products. - September 27: Clarified how Google handles sites with a high proportion of CSAM content in our spam policies and ranking systems guide.
- September 26:
- Revamped two previously published blog posts into new documentation pages with tips to debug drops in search traffic and improve SEO with a Search Console bubble chart.
- Merged two introductory Search Console articles into one starter guide.
- September 22: Clarified in the developer’s guide that Google Search currently may not index content inside CSS content properties as that isn’t part of the DOM.
- September 14:
- Added new guidance about hosting third-party content and more explanation on what to do after a helpful content system update (perhaps you don’t need to do anything, or perhaps self-assess your content).
- Added new points about removing content or changing dates to the help page on how to create helpful, reliable people-first content.
- Removed the How-to rich result case study, as this feature is deprecated.
- Removed the How-to structured data documentation, as this rich result is no longer shown in search results, on both desktop and mobile devices. Read more in the blog post.
- Updated the FAQ structured data documentation to state that the feature is only shown for well-known, authoritative government and health websites.
- September 11: Fixed a typo in the user-agent string of the Google-InspectionTool common crawler.
- September 7: Updated the feature availability section in the site names documentation, as site names are now available in all languages where Google Search is available.
- September 6: Added transcript of September 2023 Google SEO Office Hours.
August 2023
- August 24: Added CSV to the list of indexable file types.
- August 15: Clarified that we only support standard schema.org enumeration values for local business opening hours, and these values must be in English per the schema.org specification.
- August 9: Added transcript of August 2023 Google SEO Office Hours.
- August 2:
- Removed unneeded mention of
"@id"
in the site names documentation. - Clarified in the local business structured data documentation that the
review
andaggregateRating
properties are only recommended for sites that capture reviews about other local businesses. This is not new information; see the guidelines about self-serving reviews and the update on our blog post from 2019 on this topic.
- Removed unneeded mention of
July 2023
- July 28: Added new sections to the site name documentation: what to do if your preferred site name isn’t selected, guidance around choosing an alternative name, and information about a known issue. Site names are now available on both desktop and mobile devices.
- July 20: Based on user feedback, we clarified what characters Google Search supports in URLs.
- July 19: Added a new case study about how video SEO features helped three global publishers reach their audiences.
- July 18: Removed the
related:
operator from the search operators documentation, as it’s no longer supported. - July 11: Added transcript of July 2023 Google SEO Office Hours.
June 2023
- June 13: Added examples of how to handle derivatives, integrals, and limits in the
potentialAction.mathExpression-input
field in theMathSolver
documentation. - June 7: Added transcript of June 2023 Google SEO Office Hours.
May 2023
- May 30: Added
.ai
to the list of TLDs that Google Search treats as a global TLD (gTLD). - May 26: Added a recommendation for adult sites with age gate interstitials.
- May 24:
- Updated the list of countries where the events search experience is launched to only include those where users can see that experience. The previous list also included regions where users could see events in Knowledge Panels.
- In November 2020 we accidentally updated the Google Read Aloud user agent string in our documentation, replacing the
+https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1061943
crawler documentation URL with+https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/overview-google-crawlers
. We reverted that change.
- May 22: Updated our documentation on site names to mention subdomains.
- May 17:
- Updated the translated results documentation to include the following languages: Bengali, English, French, German, Marathi, Portuguese, Spanish, Tamil, Telugu.
- Added a new crawler, Google-InspectionTool to the list of Google crawlers.
- May 10:
- Added a new recommendation for Digital Source Type to the Image Metadata documentation.
- Added a banner to pages about Core Web Vitals for informing about Interaction to Next Paint (INP) as a replacement for FID in March 2024.
- May 4:
- Moved the video
description
property to the recommended table, as it’s no longer required. - Added transcript of May 2023 Google SEO Office Hours.
- Moved the video
- May 2: Updated our documentation about canonicalization with explicit recommendations for syndicated content.
April 2023
- April 28: Removed the opt out section from Education Q&A structured data documentation.
- April 26: Increased the maximum number of return countries (
applicableCountry
) from 25 to 50 in the return policy information in the Product structured data documentation. - April 24: Reorganized the page about Google’s crawlers so the user agents are now in logical clusters based on their capabilities and triggers.
- April 21: Added more information about the different crawlers Google uses, along with the JSON formatted list of IP addresses the different crawlers use.
- April 20: Added a new generic crawler,
GoogleOther
, to the list of Google crawlers. - April 19: Updated the guidance on creating helpful content to include page experience, revised the page experience help page, partially moving content to a new Core Web Vitals page.
- April 17: Added return policy information to the Product structured data documentation.
- April 12: Added transcript of April 2023 Google SEO Office Hours.
- April 3: Updated the eligibility criteria for the package tracking documentation Early Adoption Program to focus on India, Japan, and Brazil.
March 2023
- March 17: We further clarified that the 15MB fetch size limit applies to each fetch of the individual subresources referenced in the HTML as well (in particular, JavaScript and CSS files).
- March 13:
- Updated the User Agent string for AdsBot Mobile Web Android. If you hardcoded the old value in your code, update the string to avoid potential bugs.
- Added an overview page for the Google SEO Office Hours.
- March 9: Added transcript of March 2023 Google SEO Office Hours.
- March 2: Removed South Korea from the available regions for the job search experience on Google.
February 2023
- February 23: Removed the hosting location requirement from the favicon documentation; you don’t need to host the favicon in the same domain in order to be eligible for a favicon in Google Search results.
- February 22: Clarified that Discover uses many of the same signals as Search, in both the Discover documentation and the helpful content system page.
- February 15: Added new best practices for links.
- February 13:
- Simplified the wording in the Policy circumvention section of our spam policies based on user feedback.
- Based on user feedback, we revamped our documentation about sitemaps. Notably, we reduced duplication between the sitemaps protocol and our documentation, added more examples to our documentation about sitemap extensions, and added a new document about how to combine sitemap extensions.
- February 10: Added the
GoogleProducer
user agent to the list of Google crawlers (this is not a new user agent; this is a documentation update only). - February 8: Added new guidance about thinking in terms of “Who, How, and Why” in relation to how content is produced.
- February 3: Clarified why JSON-LD is recommended for structured data: it’s because it’s generally the easiest for website owners to implement and maintain. All 3 supported formats are equally fine for Google, as long as they are valid and implemented properly per the feature’s documentation.
- February 2: Refreshed our documentation about canonicalization. To better help site owners, the original documentation is split in three distinct sections:
- February 1: Added a new section for Authors on the Google Search Central Blog.
January 2023
- January 31: Added transcript of January 2023 Google SEO Office Hours.
- January 25: Added a new case study about how Vimeo improved Video SEO at scale for their customers by using the
indexifembedded
rule combined withnoindex
and adding structured data. - January 23:
- Added guidance about what to include in the RSS feed for the Follow feature in Google Discover: the
<title>
element and your per item<link>
elements. - Updated the Images best practices to clarify that Google parses
<img>
elements (even when they’re enclosed in other elements such as<picture>
elements) when indexing images. Also updated the alt text and filenames in the examples to be more descriptive.
- Added guidance about what to include in the RSS feed for the Follow feature in Google Discover: the
- January 6: Clarified that
www
andm
prefixes for domain names are generally considered as root domain names for Site Names in Google Search. - January 5: Added information about the
If-Modified-Since
request header to our documentation about managing crawl budget. - January 3: Removed the 110 character limit for the
headline
property in the Article structured data documentation. There’s no hard character limit; instead, we recommend that you write concise titles as long titles may be truncated on some devices.