Google Webmaster Conference Product Summit: Key Takeaways

The recent Webmaster Conference Product Summit conducted by Google at Mountain View California was attended by a plethora of SEO experts in the world.

Google conducts conferences regularly to discuss things that developers, SEOs, and publishers are keen about. Unlike other Google events, it was for a whole day filled with razzmatazz.

This conference was pretty awesome as it involved a Q & A session between the Google and industry experts. It shows that Google cares about what we as an SEO community feel.

·        Structured Data will Become Vital

We already know how well the structured data shows up results on SERPs. Structured data provides information about your content, products, and services to Google and helps it understand well.

It will become advantageous as you have more chances of appearing in featured snippets, knowledge graphs, on voices searches, etc.

Also, Google has planned to enhance and expand structured data to offer newer and better experiences in the SERPs.

·        Deduplication is Complicated

John Muller, the search expert at Google, says deduplication is really a complicated and cool concept. Also, Google gave some excellent tips on how webmasters can make Google understand the duplicate content.

The tips are as below:

1. Use redirects to clue us into your site redesign
2. Send meaningful HTTP result codes
3. Check rel-canonical links
4. Use hreflang links to localize
5. Report hijacking cases in the Google forums
6. Secure dependencies for secure pages
7. Keep canonical signals ambiguous

Here are some of the expert views on the Deduplication:

Web deduplication. Interesting. Identify and cluster dup pages. Pick representative urls, index unique pages. Forward signals to representative pages. #gwcps

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) November 4, 2019

Canonicalization: Final tips: Use redirects, send the right http results, check rel canonical, use hreflang for localization, report hijacking, keep canonical signals unambiguous. #gwcps

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) November 4, 2019

Canonicalization: Google must pick a canonical. Main thing is to avoid hijacking. Escalations via WTA forums. Second concern is user experience. Third, webmaster signals: redirects, rel canonical, sitemaps. #gwcps

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) November 4, 2019

Rendering: Fetching Problems – Limited access (robots.txt). Limited crawl volume (don’t want to overload your server). e.g. 50-60 fetches per page. 60-70% cache hit rate. About 20 fetches per page, or 20X #gwcps

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) November 4, 2019

·        Google Crawling and Indexing Tricks

Google has cleared up a couple of things about crawling in the conference, that is:

Fetching. Corners will be cut. Don’t rely on clever caching tricks. #gwcps pic.twitter.com/3sNuH3tZSp

— Jennifer Slegg (@jenstar) November 4, 2019

Note that Google:

1. Doesn’t obey HTTP caching, hence don’t rely on clever caching
2. May not fetch everything but will minimize the fetches
3. Says 20% of the time the site’s robot.txt files is unreachable and 5% of the time it gives a 5XX error
4. Warns to focus on robot.txt as it will not crawl your site if a 5XX error blocks Googlebot
5. Says Google gets 200 response code for almost 69% of the time while trying access a site’s robot.txt

Seriously? One out of four times googlebot cannot reach a site’s robots.txt? 🤯 then they won’t crawl the entire site!! #gwcps pic.twitter.com/wC49yC40zI

— Raffaele Asquer (@raffasquer) November 4, 2019

If the robots.txt is “unreachable” they won’t crawl the whole site #gwcps

— MyCool King (@iPullRank) November 4, 2019

·        Google has Issues with Rendering JavaScript

Did you know one way Google has issues with rendering JavaScript were some of the Cryptocurrency miners? The stuff they used would overload Google’s rendering engine and impact indexing, I think Google said.

FYI Crypto miners will break your rendering #gcwps pic.twitter.com/I3iNXaTPjx

— MyCool King (@iPullRank) November 4, 2019

·        HTTPS has more value than HTTP

Though HTTPS has been valued a lot higher than HTTP over the years, Google is believed to give more preference to HTTPS sites in the future.

This means websites with HTTPs will receive more traffic than HTTP sites.

HTTPS has really grown significantly in a few years, but there’s still a bunch of room. Use secure protocols, folks! #gwcps pic.twitter.com/DaZDAltuZF

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) November 4, 2019

75% of Googlebot crawling is HTTPS. #gwcps

— Jennifer Slegg (@jenstar) November 4, 2019

·        Google Understands Synonyms

We witnessed Google BERT update very recently, and in the summit too, Google’s Danny Sullivan stresses the point that Google will understand contexts and synonyms to provide the results.

I love this slide from @haahr on how context is so important in Google Search figuring out the *right* synonyms. #GWCPS pic.twitter.com/oKuMNUNjS7

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) November 4, 2019

·        Emojis are a Big Deal

It was always on the list and now Google supports emoji search. Google mentioned that they took over a year to add support for emojis, and the ability to crawl, index, and rank ion SERPs.

Barry Schwartz says that Google receives more than a million emoji search queries per day.

Google sees over one million searches on emojis per day 🤯 and it took Google a year to add the ability to search for emojis in search. #gwcps

— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) November 4, 2019

Google Webmaster Conference Product Summit Conclusion

The Google Webmaster Conference Product Summit didn’t announce any big update, but it was rather pleasant to discuss Google’s operative methods with respect to SEO.

It assists all the webmasters and SEOs in the world stay focused to innovate. Also, the Summit allowed all the participants to have a direct conversation with the Google search team.

You can view more insights on twitter from the experts by hashtag #gwcps. If you need or have any queries regarding in-depth technical stuff of SEO, shoot them to me in the comments.

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Jafar Sadhik

Jafar Sadhik is a Digital Media Planner at Wolftain Agency who is obsessed to understand ever-evolving Google search algorithms. He started off his career as a writer in 2013. The constant ranking fluctuations of content on SERPs tugged him to research and learn SEO. He loves to read thrillers in leisure and also the great admirer of Agatha Christie. You can reach him through Twitter or LinkedIn .

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• Google Webmaster Conference Product Summit: Key Takeaways - November 15, 2019