Tag Archives: search results

AMP NewsLab Office Hours in your language

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is a global, industry-wide initiative, with publishers large and small all focused on the same goal: a better, faster mobile web.
We’ve had a great response to our English language AMP office hours, but we know that English isn’t everyone’s native language.

For the next two weeks, we’re rolling out a new series of office hours in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, and Indonesian and invite everyone to learn about AMP in their native language. Product Managers, Technical Managers, & Engineers at Google, will get to speak in their native tongue, and answer any questions you may have on AMP.

First we will reintroduce you to AMP and how it works, before diving into the technical specs and various components of AMP. You can add your questions via the Q and A app on the event pages below, and we will answer them during the office hours. You can also watch them on the News Lab YouTube page after the event.
Check out the lineup below and join the discussion.

  • French
  • Italian
    • Introduction to AMP - Mar. 8 @ 1500 CET with Luca Forlin Head of International Play Newsstand Partnerships
    • AMP Anatomy - Mar. 15 @ 1500 CET with Flavio Palandri Antonelli, AMP Software Engineer
  • German
    • Introduction to AMP - Mar. 9 @ 1700 CET with Nadine Gerspacher, Partner Development Manager
    • AMP Anatomy - Mar. 18 @ 1600 CET with Paul Bakaus, Developer Advocate
  • Spanish
    • Introduction to AMP - Mar. 9 @ 1430 CET with Demian Renzulli, Technical Solutions Consultant
    • AMP Anatomy - Mar. 16 @ 1430 CET with Julian Toledo, Developer Advocate
  • Brazilian Portuguese
    • Introduction to AMP - Mar. 10 @ 1430 BRT with Carol Soler, Strategic Partner Manager
    • AMP Anatomy - Mar. 17 @ 1430 BRT with Breno Araújo, Technology Manager
  • Russian
  • Japanese
  • Indonesian

Posted by Tomo Taylor, AMP Community Manager

AMP error report preview in Search Console

More and more sites are implementing Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) for news content, so we've decided to provide a preview of error reports in Search Console to help you get ready for the upcoming official AMP launch and get early feedback from you. You can find these reports under Search Appearance - Accelerated Mobile Pages. The goal here is to make it easier to spot issues in your AMP implementation across the whole website. In order to get started with AMP on Google Search, you'll need to create matching, valid AMP pages where relevant, ensure that they use the NewsArticle schema.org markup, and link them appropriately.

The AMP error report gives an overview of the overall situation on your site, and then lets you drill down to specific error types and URLs. This process helps you quickly find the most common issues, so that you can systematically address them in your site's AMP implementation (potentially just requiring tweaks in the templates or plugin used for these pages).

Curious about AMP and how it might fit in with your site? Here's a demo preview of AMP in search, more on how AMP works, and a guide to getting started with AMP. If you think AMP would be a good fit for your website, implementing it might ultimately be as easy as installing a plugin in your CMS, so check with your provider. AMP hasn't officially launched in Google Search, so there's still time to get set up -- feedback & patience will be appreciated by your CMS & plugin providers. Stay tuned for more updates on the AMP Project blog.

We're only getting started -- this is a first step at AMP error reporting. We'll be refining this report in the near future, and we'd love to get your feedback to help us. Let us know in the comments here how things work out for you.

Posted by John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Zurich

Updating Our Search Quality Rating Guidelines

Developing algorithmic changes to search involves a process of experimentation. Part of that experimentation is having evaluators—people who assess the quality of Google’s search results—give us feedback on our experiments. Ratings from evaluators do not determine individual site rankings, but are used help us understand our experiments. The evaluators base their ratings on guidelines we give them; the guidelines reflect what Google thinks search users want.

In 2013, we published our human rating guidelines to provide transparency on how Google works and to help webmasters understand what Google looks for in web pages. Since that time, a lot has changed: notably, more people have smartphones than ever before and more searches are done on mobile devices today than on computers.

We often make changes to the guidelines as our understanding of what users wants evolves, but we haven’t shared an update publicly since then. However, we recently completed a major revision of our rater guidelines to adapt to this mobile world, recognizing that people use search differently when they carry internet-connected devices with them all the time. You can find that update here (PDF).

This is not the final version of our rater guidelines. The guidelines will continue to evolve as search, and how people use it, changes. We won’t be updating the public document with every change, but we will try to publish big changes to the guidelines periodically.

We expect our phones and other devices to do a lot, and we want Google to continue giving users the answers they're looking for—fast!


Posted by Mimi Underwood, Sr. Program Manager, Search Growth & Analysis

An update on how we tackle hacked spam

Recently we have started rolling out a series of algorithmic changes that aim to tackle hacked spam in our search results. A huge amount of legitimate sites are hacked by spammers and used to engage in abusive behavior, such as malware download, promotion of traffic to low quality sites, porn, and marketing of counterfeit goods or illegal pharmaceutical drugs, etc.

Website owners that don’t implement standard best practices for security can leave their websites vulnerable to being easily hacked. This can include government sites, universities, small business, company websites, restaurants, hobby organizations, conferences, etc. Spammers and cyber-criminals purposely seek out those sites and inject pages with malicious content in an attempt to gain rank and traffic in search engines.

We are aggressively targeting hacked spam in order to protect users and webmasters.

The algorithmic changes will eventually impact roughly 5% of queries, depending on the language. As we roll out the new algorithms, users might notice that for certain queries, only the most relevant results are shown, reducing the number of results shown:

This is due to the large amount of hacked spam being removed, and should improve in the near future. We are continuing tuning our systems to weed out the bad content while retaining the organic, legitimate results. If you have any questions about these changes, or want to give us feedback on these algorithms, feel free to drop by our Webmaster Help Forums.

Posted by Ning Song, Software Engineer

Surfacing content from iOS apps in Google Search

We’ve been helping users discover relevant content from Android apps in Google search results for a while now. Starting today, we’re bringing App Indexing to iOS apps as well. This means users on both Android and iOS will be able to open mobile app content straight from Google Search.

Indexed links from an initial group of apps we’ve been working with will begin appearing on iOS in search results both in the Google App and Chrome for signed-in users globally in the coming weeks:

How to get your iOS app indexed

While App Indexing for iOS is launching with a small group of test partners initially, we’re working to make this technology available to more app developers as soon as possible. In the meantime, here are the steps to get a head start on App Indexing for iOS:

  1. Add deep linking support to your iOS app.
  2. Make sure it’s possible to return to Search results with one click.
  3. Provide deep link annotations on your site.
  4. Let us know you’re interested. Keep in mind that expressing interest does not automatically guarantee getting app deep links in iOS search results.

If you happen to be attending Google I/O this week, stop by our talk titled “Get your app in the Google index” to learn more about App Indexing. You’ll also find detailed documentation on App Indexing for iOS at g.co/AppIndexing. If you’ve got more questions, drop by our Webmaster help forum.


Posted by Eli Wald, Product Manager