Faceted navigation is a great way to help users find what they need on your site, but it can create an SEO nightmare if not implemented carefully. Why? Because it can generate a near-infinite number of URLs, which causes all sorts of crawling problems.

The Search Central Live events in Kuala Lumpur and Taipei were nothing short of amazing, in large thanks to the over 600 people who attended the events! We were thrilled to see the level of enthusiasm and engagement from attendees even if, on the day prior to the Taipei event, we collectively had to deal with typhoon Kong Rey, the first supertyphoon in Taiwan's history to make landfall after mid-October. Here's a deeper dive into what made these events so special and what's next.

To better help you monitor the recent performance of your content, we're launching the '24 hours' view to the SC performance reports and improving the freshness of the data. We're rolling out these changes to all properties gradually over the next few months, so you might not see changes right away.

Allow us to cache, pretty please. As the internet grew over the years, so did how much Google crawls. While Google's crawling infrastructure supports heuristic caching mechanisms, in fact always had, the number of requests that can be returned from local caches has decreased: 10 years ago about 0.026% of the total fetches were cacheable, which is already not that impressive; today that number is 0.017%.

You may have heard that Google Search needs to do a bit of work before a web page can show up in Google Search results. One of these steps is called crawling. Crawling for Google Search is done by Googlebot, a program running on Google servers that retrieves a URL and handles things like network errors, redirects, and other small complications that it might encounter as it works its way through the web. But there are a few details that aren't often talked about. Each week this month we're going to explore some of those details as they may have a significant effect on how your sites are crawled.

We're looking forward to meeting you at the Google office in Zurich for Search Central Live Zurich 2024 on Dec 12, 2024. Join us for presentations, Q&A and networking on December 12, 2024.

Earlier this year, as part of our work to fight spam and deliver a great Search experience, we launched a spam policy to combat site reputation abuse. We're clarifying our policy language to further target this type of spammy behavior. We're making it clear that using third-party content on a site in an attempt to exploit the site's ranking signals is a violation of this policy - regardless of whether there is first-party involvement or oversight of the content.

It's been over ten years since we initially announced the sitelinks search box in Google Search, and over time, we've noticed that usage has dropped. To help simplify the search results, we'll be removing this visual element starting on November 21, 2024.

Our first two Search Central Live events in Asia this year have been wrapped up and we finished looking back at what we've learned and what we can do better.

Google's Store Ratings have been helping US merchants highlight the high quality experiences other shoppers have had right from Search, and we're now bringing store ratings to English-language shopping searches in Australia, Canada, India and the United Kingdom.

We're sharing more information about our new search experiences in South Africa, and how South African platforms can express interest and participate.

This post is about the new Google Trends Tutorials YouTube series. In these videos you'll learn how to use Google Trends to analyze patterns in Google Search and Youtube searches, and use them to create interesting content online.

Over the recent years, AVIF has become one of the most commonly used image formats on the web. We're happy to announce that AVIF is now a supported file type in Google Search, for Google Images as well as any place that uses images in Google Search. You don't need to do anything special to have your AVIF files indexed by Google.

As previously announced, we're coming to Kuala Lumpur and to Taipei in the last quarter of 2024. And yes, we're very excited! The KL event will be in English and the Taipei event will be conducted in Mandarin (Traditional Chinese).

This post announces the August 2024 core update to Google Search. This update is designed to continue our work to improve the quality of our search results by showing more content that people find genuinely useful and less content that feels like it was made just to perform well on Search.

This post announces Search Console recommendations, a new feature that provides websites with optimization opportunities and suggests actions they can take to improve their presence on Google Search.

This post discusses a new and easier way to add shipping or return information directly in Search Console.

We're coming back to Thailand with Search Central Live! As mentioned in our blog post about our APAC plans for SCL, we now have a date and a site where you can sign up for a chance to secure your spot at Search Central Live Bangkok 2024.

We're adding support for return policies at the organization level, which means you'll be able to specify a general return policy for your business instead of having to define one for each individual product you sell.

The Google Search Central LinkedIn channel is (finally) here!

The last step of our migration to a mobile-first index will soon be complete: the small set of sites we've still been crawling with desktop Googlebot will be crawled with mobile Googlebot after July 5, 2024. Most websites do not need to do anything!

Search Central Live is coming back to the Asia Pacific region, bringing you insights from Google Search, fun networking opportunity, and more! This year we're aiming to visit Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Thailand.

This post discusses an update to Search Console's user and permissions to improve the accuracy and reflect the actual state of unused ownership tokens.

We're excited to announce a Search Central Live event in Warsaw, Poland on April 24, 2024. Search Central Live is our global Google Search event series specifically for site owners, publishers, and SEOs.

Today we announced the March 2024 core update. This is designed to improve the quality of Search by showing less content that feels like it was made to attract clicks, and more content that people find useful. We also shared that we have new spam policies to better handle the practices that can negatively impact Google's search results. In this post, we'll go into more detail for creators about both the update and the spam policies.

We're excited to announce a Search Central Live event in Bucharest, Romania on April 4, 2024. Search Central Live is our global Google Search event series specifically for site owners, publishers, and SEOs.

In 2022, Google expanded support for Product structured data, enabling enhanced product experiences in Google Search. Then, in 2023 we added support for shipping and returns structured data. Today, we are adding structured data support for Product variants, allowing merchants to easily show more variations of the products they sell, and show shoppers more relevant, helpful results. Providing variant structured data will also complement and enhance merchant center feeds, including automated feeds.

Following our latest update on our preparations for the DMA (Digital Markets Act), we're sharing more details about what publishers can expect to see in regards to new search results in European Economic Area (EEA) countries, and how they can express interest in these experiences.

Today we're publishing a refreshed, more pocket-sized version of the SEO Starter Guide with a better focus on a starter audience and the topics we think a person who's just dipping their toes in SEO should focus on and why.

We're excited to announce that Search Central Live is coming to Buenos Aires on March 5, 2024. Following successful events throughout the world last year, we're continuing our mission to help website owners to enhance their site's performance in Google Search.

We're excited to announce that Search Central Live is returning to São Paulo on February 29, 2024. Following our successful events last year, we're continuing our mission to help Brazilian businesses enhance their site's performance in Google Search.