Sunday, December 31, 2023
I'm sure you're all wondering why we have gathered you here today. That's right: it's the end of year blog post in which we go over what happened in 2023 on Google Search Central, and have some fun along the way!
Events
In 2023 we brought our flagship event series, Google Search Central Live, to new locations—on top of those that we usually visit like Singapore and Tokyo. We somehow ended up in Jakarta, Mexico City, São Paulo, Taipei, and a bunch of other places, and the reception was pretty fantastic everywhere; check this out:
We talked about all sorts of things that, based on the post event feedback, the audience found valuable and useful. Like what, you ask? To list a couple, the How Search Works talks and our talks about AI are particularly highly rated. Just like these two talks, everything else we talked about at the events is on Search Central, so you just have to dig into the over 1000 pages worth of documentation and blog posts!
Docs
Speaking of documentation, looking at the changelog, we were pretty busy.
On the topic of crawling, we added a few more crawlers and product tokens to our list of crawlers, talked about caching, and documented in painful detail the IP ranges Google's crawlers and fetchers use.
We wrote a lot about structured data that powers some Search features that help people find vacation rentals, but also to enable businesses to better control their organization details on our search result pages.
In indexing we declared that the road to Mobile First Indexing is complete, it's just "indexing" now, and expanded our docs about canonicalization.
The Search Console team was once again on steroids this year and the tool got a bunch of new things: bulk data export, updated user and permissions management, and association between the Merchant Center and Search Console.
On ranking, we published guidance about AI-generated content, and went into more detail about creating helpful content. We also added a Q&A about ranking updates to help with recurring questions.
More help
We've got more than just docs and events to help those needing guidance.
We continued with our podcast, Search Off the Record, where you can hear some behind the scenes information about Search, sometimes in ASMR format. If you prefer videos, John kept publishing Google Search News videos, Daniel explored Google SafeSearch with Emma and Google News with Cherry. Martin kept doing Martin-things as usual, sometimes as fairy tales.
SEO Office Hours are now available in English and Japanese, courtesy of John and Anna, where we answer some of the questions that you submitted on this page. They're pretty fun, you should check them out!
And of course we have a vibrant Search Central community with pretty brilliant Product Experts that can assist with most issues when it comes to Google Search, and more.
But enough with the sappy: if all this text (that we definitely didn't generate with AI) wasn't enough, here's a video that the team behind Search Central videos put together to send us off to 2024!
Thanks for reading, listening, and watching, and here's to an exciting new year!