Google New Rich Results Testing Tool

Google announced at 21/12/2017 that they have released a new-and-improved version of its Structured Data Testing Tool, available in beta as the Rich Results Test. The name of the tool "rich results" reflects – as noted in the announcement post – the fact that what Google had previously referred to as "rich snippets, rich cards, or enriched results" will now be called "rich results" as their official documentation moving forward.

Google said the new testing tool “focuses on the structured data types that are eligible to be shown as rich results.” This new version enables you to test all data sources on your pages, including the recommended JSON-LD, Microdata or RDFa. Google said this new version is a “more accurate reflection of the page’s appearance on Search and includes improved handling for Structured Data found on dynamically loaded content.”

The new Rich Results Testing tool currently only supports tests for Job posting, Recipe, Course, and Movie. Google said it will be adding support for other rich results over time.

The new google tool also has a drawback that, this tool does not currently show schema.org syntax errors, which currently used by millions of website.

Eligibility for rich results

The Structured Data Testing Tool never explicitly states whether a given page (or code block) is eligible for rich snippets. The closest the tool comes is to provide a "PREVIEW" link when results are capable of generating a rich result, and only then after you click through to the eligible data type.

Eligibility is now front-and-center in the Rich Results Test response, with pages that are eligible for rich results clearly labelled as such, along which data type ("Detected structured data") for which the page is eligible.

It's equally obvious when a submitted page isn't eligible for a rich result.

There is also a third category pertaining to rich result eligibility, seemingly triggered when a page could be eligible for rich results if errors were corrected.

Details on these errors are provided in a pane on the "Detected structured data" section of the test results.

Again, be cognizant that only job postings, recipes, courses and movies are currently supported by the tool, as per the prominent message at the top of a test results page.

Similar items: Rich products feature on Google Image Search

Image Search recently launched “Similar items” on mobile web and the Android Search app. The “Similar items” feature is designed to help users find products they love in photos that inspire them on Google Image Search. Using machine vision technology, the Similar items feature identifies products in lifestyle images and displays matching products to the user. Similar items supports handbags, sunglasses, and shoes and will cover other apparel and home & garden categories in the next few months.

The Similar items feature enables users to browse and shop inspirational fashion photography and find product info about items they’re interested in. Try it out by opening results from queries like [designer handbags].

Finding price and availability information was one of the top Image Search feature requests from our users. The Similar items carousel gets millions of impressions and clicks daily from all over the world.

To make your products eligible for Similar items, make sure to add and maintain schema.org product metadata on your pages. The schema.org/Product markup helps Google find product offerings on the web and give users an at-a-glance summary of product info.

To ensure that your products are eligible to appear in Similar items:

• Ensure that the product offerings on your pages have schema.org product markup, including an image reference. Products with name, image, price & currency, and availability meta-data on their host page are eligible for Similar items

• Test your pages with Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to verify that the product markup is formatted correctly
• See your images on image search by issuing the query “site:yourdomain.com.” For results with valid product markup, you may see product information appear once you tap on the images from your site. It can take up to a week for Googlebot to recrawl your website.

Right now, Similar items is available on mobile browsers and the Android Google Search App globally, and we plan to expand to more platforms in 2017.

If you have questions, find us in the dedicated Structured data section of our forum, on Twitter, or on Google+. To prevent your images from showing in Similar items, webmasters can opt-out of Google Image Search.

We’re excited to help users find your products on the web by showcasing buyable items. Thanks for partnering with us to make the web more shoppable!

Webspam Report 2016: How Google Fought Webspam

With 2017 well underway, we wanted to take a moment and share some of the insights we gathered in 2016 in our fight against webspam. Over the past year, we continued to find new ways of keeping spam from creating a poor quality search experience, and worked with webmasters around the world to make the web better.

We do a lot behind the scenes to make sure that users can make full use of what today’s web has to offer, bringing relevant results to everyone around the globe, while fighting webspam that could potentially harm or simply annoy users.

Webspam trends in 2016

• Website security continues to be a major source of concern. Last year we saw more hacked sites than ever - a 32% increase compared to 2015. Because of this, we continued to invest in improving and creating more resources to help webmasters know what to do when their sites get hacked. 
• We continued to see that sites are compromised not just to host webspam. We saw a lot of webmasters affected by social engineering, unwanted software, and unwanted ad injectors. We took a stronger stance in Safe Browsing to protect users from deceptive download buttons, made a strong effort to protect users from repeatedly dangerous sites, and we launched more detailed help text within the Search Console Security Issues Report.
• Since more people are searching on Google using a mobile device, we saw a significant increase in spam targeting mobile users. In particular, we saw a rise in spam that redirects users, without the webmaster’s knowledge, to other sites or pages, inserted into webmaster pages using widgets or via ad units from various advertising networks.

How we fought spam in 2016

• We continued to refine our algorithms to tackle webspam. We made multiple improvements to how we rank sites, including making Penguin (one of our core ranking algorithms) work in real-time.
• The spam that we didn’t identify algorithmically was handled manually. We sent over 9 million messages to webmasters to notify them of webspam issues on their sites. We also started providing more security notifications via Google Analytics.
• We performed algorithmic and manual quality checks to ensure that websites with structured data markup meet quality standards. We took manual action on more than 10,000 sites that did not meet the quality guidelines for inclusion in search features powered by structured data.

Working with users and webmasters for a better web

• In 2016 we received over 180,000 user-submitted spam reports from around the world. After carefully checking their validity, we considered 52% of those reported sites to be spam. Thanks to all who submitted reports and contributed towards a cleaner and safer web ecosystem!
• We conducted more than 170 online office hours and live events around the world to audiences totaling over 150,000 website owners, webmasters and digital marketers.
• We continued to provide support to website owners around the world through our Webmaster Help Forums in 15 languages. Through these forums we saw over 67,000 questions, with a majority of them being identified as having a Best Response by our community of Top contributors, Rising Stars and Googlers. 
• We had 119 volunteer Webmaster Top Contributors and Rising Stars, whom we invited to join us at our local Top Contributor Meetups in 11 different locations across 4 continents (Asia, Europe, North America, South America). 

We think everybody deserves high quality, spam-free search results. We hope that this report provides a glimpse of what we do to make that happen.

Google Redesigns its Logo

Google is introduced a new logo yesterday and this is the fifth such modification since the search engine giant started in 1998. Just a month after unveiling a major restructuring of the company, Google is updated its logo.

But why change it up? A post at the Google Blog explains:

Once upon a time, Google was one destination that you reached from one device: a desktop PC. These days, people interact with Google products across many different platforms, apps and devices—sometimes all in a single day. You expect Google to help you whenever and wherever you need it, whether it’s on your mobile phone, TV, watch, the dashboard in your car, and yes, even a desktop! 

Today we’re introducing a new logo and identity family that reflects this reality and shows you when the Google magic is working for you, even on the tiniest screens. As you’ll see, we’ve taken the Google logo and branding, which were originally built for a single desktop browser page, and updated them for a world of seamless computing across an endless number of devices and different kinds of inputs (such as tap, type and talk).

The new Google logo is still a wordmark, but it's now using a sans-serif typeface, making it look a lot more modern, playful and similar to the one being used by Google's newly created holding company, Alphabet.

The colors are softer than they used to be. The logo bears a bit more resemblance to the logo of Google's new parent company, Alphabet, as well. Alphabet's wordmark has a similarly unadorned look, and this update makes the two companies' design language fall more inline.

The revamped logo, used to identify most of its apps, bids farewell to the little blue "g" icon and replaces it with a uppercase "G" colored in blue, red, yellow and green to match the full logo.

Google Is Hiring An Program Manager, Search Engine Optimization

Google is Hiring An Program Manager, Search Engine Optimization, based on a recent job posting on the Google Careers portal.

The Google job listing is for a “Program Manager, Search Engine Optimization.” The description of the job makes it clear that this is about Online marketing:

As a Program Manager for Technical SEO, you will work with cross-functional teams across Marketing, Sales, Product Development, Engineering and more to help drive organic traffic and business growth. You will take part in website development and optimization, help shape blog and social strategy, improve website code hygiene and define web architecture for international websites.

The Technical SEO manager will be required to work with many different departments within Google including marketing, sales, product development and engineering. "You will take part in website development and optimization, help shape blog and social strategy, improve website code hygiene and define web architecture for international websites," the job description reads.

The responsibilities include:

1. Architect, design, develop and maintain innovative, engaging and informative sites for a worldwide audience. 
2. Maintain and develop the web code to ensure quality, content and readability by search engines. 
3. Keep pace with SEO, search engine and internet marketing industry trends and developments and report changes as needed. 
4. Advise, collaborate with, and synthesize feedback from Marketing, Product and Engineering partners to push for technical SEO best practices.

The qualifications include:

1. BA/BS degree in Computer Science, Engineering or equivalent practical experience. 
2. 4 years of experience developing websites and applications with SQL, HTML5, and XML. 
3. 2 years of SEO experience. 
4. Experience with Google App Engine, Google Custom Search, Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics and experience creating and maintaining project schedules using project management systems. 
5. Experience working with back-end SEO elements such as .htaccess, robots.txt, metadata and site speed optimization to optimize website performance. 
6. Experience in quantifying marketing impact and SEO performance and strong understanding of technical SEO (sitemaps, crawl budget, canonicalization, etc.). 
7. Knowledge of one or more of the following: Java, C/C++, or Python. 
8. Excellent problem solving and analytical skills with the ability to dig extensively into metrics and analytics.

For many working at Google is a dream job, and for those search engine optimisation experts who have always fancied a look behind the curtain, this could prove the ideal opportunity to get right to the root of the science of search. Well, that’s probably a given if Google needs help ranking itself in its own search engine.