Key Takeaways From Google Webmaster Conference


The recently concluded Google Webmaster Conference Product Summit at Mountain View, California, gave attendees the opportunity to get some key learnings on SEO. The Google Webmaster Conference is held all over the world to help website creators understand how to optimize their sites better. A number of vital issues were addressed by industry experts in the recent Google Webmaster conference through a q&a session. 

1. Structured Data to Rule the Roost

Structured data gives a hint to Google to help them understand the content better. It makes your page eligible to appear in rich results, appear in page-level features (recipes), be visible in search experiences and work on assistants.

In the future, Google will expand support for structured data to provide new experiences in the search result as well as Google Assistant. This includes adding new rich result types, above the numerous options already officially supported by Google.

2. Emoji Search Becoming a New Trend

Google announced that it took over a year to add support for emoji search. This includes Google’s ability to crawl, index and rank emojis. It was also revealed that Google sees over one million searches per day with emojis in the search terms.

3. Google Hates Deduplication

Google shared numerous tips regarding how Google handles duplicate content and how webmasters can help Google find out the canonical version through:

  • Using redirects
  • Using meaningful HTTP result codes
  • Checking rel=canonical links
  • Using hreflang for localization
  • Report cases of hijacking in the forum
  • Secure dependencies for secured pages
  • Keep canonical signals unambiguous

4. Google Crawlers Set Their Own Rules

Google also offered many tips around crawling and indexing, like:

  • Do not rely on caching rule as Google doesn’t obey them
  • Google minimizes its fetches so Googlebot might not fetch everything
  • Google checks your robot.txt before indexing
  • If 5XX error stops Google to reach the robot.txt, Google won’t crawl the site
  • Google renders what you generally see using the Chrome browser
  • 69% of the time Google gets a 200 response code when trying to access your robots.txt, 5% of the time 5XX response code, 20% of the time the robots.txt is unreachable

5. Google Looks for Context and Synonyms 

Textual synonym depends on the other query words. Context matters. 

Why You Should Care?

The Google Webmaster Conference didn’t release any new updates, but rather it was helpful in adding clarity around how Google’s systems work with respect to SEO. This will help all SEO practitioners around the world to build robust strategies and stay ahead of the competition. The conversation with Google Search team including search engineers and web developers gave attendees the opportunity to have direct conversations regarding many in-depth technical aspects of SEO.





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