Google Search Central Blog

Simplifying the search results page



As part of our ongoing efforts to
simplify the Google Search results page, we will be phasing out support for a few
structured data features in
Search. We regularly evaluate the usefulness of Search features, bot...
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Adding markup support for loyalty programs



Member benefits, such as lower prices and earning loyalty points are a major factor considered by
shoppers when buying products online. Today we're adding support for defining loyalty programs under
Organization structur...
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Robots Refresher: page-level granularity



With the robots.txt file, site owners
have a simple way to control which parts of a website are accessible by crawlers.
To help site owners further express how search engines and web
crawlers can use their pages, the web standards...
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Search Central Live is going to Madrid



We're very excited to announce that Search Central Live is going to Madrid for the first time on April 9!
The event will have a mix of presenters from the Google Search, News, and Partnerships teams and the content
will be del...
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First Search Central Live in South Africa



On April 2, 2025 we'll be in Johannesburg, South Africa for the very first Search Central Live event in Africa!
We're excited to welcome you at Search Central Live South Africa and talk about all things Google Search!

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Robots Refresher: introducing a new series



Every now and then we get questions about robots.txt, robots meta tags, and the control
functionality that they offer. Following our December series on crawling,
we thought this would be the perfect time to put together ...
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Search Central Live is going to New York City


We're excited to announce that Search Central Live is coming to New York City for the first time on March 20, 2025.
The Google Search team has organized events in the city several times, but this time we're bringing our main Search event t...
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Search Central Live is returning to Brazil


We're excited to announce that Search Central Live is returning to São Paulo in 2025. Following our
successful events in 2023 and 2024, we're continuing our mission to help Brazilian businesses enhance
their site's performance ...
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Crawling out of December: the 2024 recap



It might happen that by the end of this post you're going to try to decide who wrote this blog
post, a large language model (LLM) or Gary. And you'd be right to ponder that and delve into the
intricacies of the language ...
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Crawling December: CDNs and crawling



Content delivery networks (CDNs) are particularly well suited for decreasing latency of your
website and in general keeping web traffic-related headaches away. This is their primary purpose
after all: speedy delivery of ...
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Crawling December: Faceted navigation



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...
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Crawling December: HTTP caching


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...
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Updating our site reputation abuse policy


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 behavio...
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Farewell, Sitelinks Search Box


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...
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Supporting AVIF in Google Search



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 ...
SEO

What to know about our August 2024 core update


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 th...
SEO