Posted by Aurora Morales & Martin Splitt, your Virtual Webmaster Unconference team

For the last few years, we’ve collaborated with the image licensing industry to raise awareness of licensing requirements for content found through Google Images. In 2018, we began supporting IPTC Image Rights metadata; in February 2020 we announced a new metadata framework through Schema.org and IPTC for licensable images. Since then, we’ve seen widespread adoption of this new standard by websites, image platforms and agencies of all sizes. Today, we’re launching new features on Google Images which will highlight licensing information for images, and make it easier for users to understand how to use images responsibly.

What is it?

Images that include licensing information will be labeled with a “Licensable” badge on the results page. When a user opens the image viewer (the window that appears when they select an image), we will show a link to the license details and/or terms page provided by the content owner or licensor. If available, we’ll also show an additional link that directs users to a page from the content owner or licensor where the user can acquire the image.

Left: Images result page with the Licensable badge
Right: Images Viewer showing licensable image, with the new fields Get the image on and License details

We’re also making it easier to find images with licensing metadata. We’ve enhanced the usage rights drop-down menu in Google Images to support filtering for Creative Commons licenses, as well as those that have commercial or other licenses.

Updated Usage Rights filter

What are the benefits to image licensors?

• As noted earlier, if licensing metadata is provided from the image licensor, then the licensable badge, license details page and image acquisition page will be surfaced in the images viewer, making it easier for users to purchase or license the image from the licensor
• If an image resides on a page that isn’t set up to let a user acquire it (e.g. a portfolio, article, or gallery page), image licensors can link to a new URL from Google Images which takes the user directly to the page where they can purchase or license the image
• For image licensors, the metadata can also be applied by publishers who have purchased your images, enabling your licensing details to be visible with your images when they’re used by your customers. (This requires your customers to not remove or alter the IPTC metadata that you provide them.)

We believe this is a step towards helping people better understand the nature of the content they’re looking at on Google Images and how they can use it responsibly.

How do I participate?

To learn more about these features, how you can implement them and troubleshoot issues, visit the Google developer help page and our common FAQs page.

To provide feedback on these features, please use the feedback tools available on the developer page for the licensable images features, the Google Webmaster Forum, and stay tuned for upcoming virtual office hours where we will review common questions.

What do image licensors say about these features?

“A collaboration between Google and CEPIC, which started some four years ago, has ensured that authors and rights holders are identified on Google Images. Now, the last link of the chain, determining which images are licensable, has been implemented thanks to our fruitful collaboration with Google. We are thrilled at the window of opportunities that are opening up for photography agencies and the wider image industry due to this collaboration. Thanks, Google.”
- Alfonso Gutierrez, President of CEPIC

“As a result of a multi-year collaboration between IPTC and Google, when an image containing embedded IPTC Photo Metadata is re-used on a popular website, Google Images will now direct an interested user back to the supplier of the image,” said Michael Steidl, Lead of the IPTC Photo Metadata Working Group. “This is a huge benefit for image suppliers and an incentive to add IPTC metadata to image files.”
- Michael Steidl, Lead of the IPTC Photo Metadata Working Group

“Google's licensable image features are a great step forward in making it easier for users to quickly identify and license visual content. Google has worked closely with DMLA and its members during the features' development, sharing tools and details while simultaneously gathering feedback and addressing our members' questions or concerns. We look forward to continuing this collaboration as the features deploy globally.”
- Leslie Hughes, President of the Digital Media Licensing Association

“We live in a dynamic and changing media landscape where imagery is an integral component of online storytelling and communication for more and more people. This means that it is crucial that people understand the importance of licensing their images from proper sources for their own protection, and to ensure the investment required to create these images continues. We are hopeful Google’s approach will bring more visibility to the intrinsic value of licensed images and the rights required to use them.”
- Ken Mainardis, SVP, Content, Getty Images & iStock by Getty Images

“With Google’s licensable images features, users can now find high-quality images on Google Images and more easily navigate to purchase or license images in accordance with the image copyright. This is a significant milestone for the professional photography industry, in that it's now easier for users to identify images that they can acquire safely and responsibly. EyeEm was founded on the idea that technology will revolutionise the way companies find and buy images. Hence, we were thrilled to participate in Google’s licensable images project from the very beginning, and are now more than excited to see these features being released."
- Ramzi Rizk, Co-founder, EyeEm

"As the world's largest network of professional providers and users of digital images, we at picturemaxx welcome Google's licensable images features. For our customers as creators and rights managers, not only is the visibility in a search engine very important, but also the display of copyright and licensing information. To take advantage of this feature, picturemaxx will be making it possible for customers to provide their images for Google Images in the near future. The developments are already under way."
- Marcin Czyzewski, CTO, picturemaxx

“Google has consulted and collaborated closely with Alamy and other key figures in the photo industry on this project. Licensable tags will reduce confusion for consumers and help inform the wider public of the value of high quality creative and editorial images.”
- James Hall, Product Director, Alamy

“Google Images’ new features help both image creators and image consumers by bringing visibility to how creators' content can be licensed properly. We are pleased to have worked closely with Google on this feature, by advocating for protections that result in fair compensation for our global community of over 1 million contributors. In developing this feature, Google has clearly demonstrated its commitment to supporting the content creation ecosystem.
- Paul Brennan, VP of Content Operations, Shutterstock

"Google Images’ new licensable images features will provide expanded options for creative teams to discover unique content. By establishing Google Images as a reliable way to identify licensable content, Google will drive discovery opportunities for all agencies and independent photographers, creating an efficient process to quickly find and acquire the most relevant, licensable content."
- Andrew Fingerman, CEO of PhotoShelter

Posted by Francois Spies, Product Manager, Google Images

Earlier this year Google launched a new way for shoppers to find clothes, shoes and other retail products on Search in the U.S. and recently announced that free retail listings are coming to product knowledge panels on Google Search. These new types of experiences on Google Search, along with the global availability of rich results for products, enable retailers to make information about their products visible to millions of Google users, for free.

The best way for retailers and brands to participate in this experience is by annotating the product information on their websites using schema.org markup or by submitting this information directly to Google Merchant Center. Retailers can refer to our documentation to learn more about showing products for free on surfaces across Google or adding schema.org markup to a website.

While the processes above are the best way to ensure that product information will appear in this Search experience, Google may also include content that has not been marked up using schema.org or submitted through Merchant Center when the content has been crawled and is related to retail. Google does this to ensure that users see a wide variety of products from a broad group of retailers when they search for information on Google.

While we believe that this approach positively benefits the retail ecosystem, we recognize that some retailers may prefer to control how their product information appears in this experience. This can be done by using existing mechanisms for Google Search, as covered below.

Controlling your preview preferences

There are a number of ways that retailers can control what data is displayed on Google. These are consistent with changes announced last year that allow website owners and retailers specifically to provide preferences on which information from their website can be shown as a preview on Google. This is done through a set of robots meta tags and an HTML attribute. 

Here are some ways you can implement these controls to limit your products and product data from being displayed on Google:

"nosnippet" robots meta tag

Using this meta tag you can specify that no snippet should be shown for this page in search results. It completely removes the textual, image and rich snippet for this page on Google and removes the page from any free listing experience.

"max-snippet:[number]" robots meta tag

This meta tag allows you to specify a maximum snippet length, in characters, of a snippet for your page to be displayed on Google results. If the structured data (e.g. product name, description, price, availability) is greater than the maximum snippet length, the page will be removed from any free listing experience.

"max-image-preview:[setting]" robots meta tag

This meta tag allows you to specify a maximum size of image preview to be shown for images on this page, using either "none", "standard", or "large".

“data-nosnippet” HTML attribute

This attribute allows you to specify a section on your webpage that should not be included in a snippet preview on Google. When applied to relevant attributes for offers (price, availability, ratings, image) removes the textual, image and rich snippet for this page on Google and removes the listing from any free listing experiences.

Additional notes on these preferences:

• The above preferences do not apply to information supplied via schema.org markup on the page itself. The schema.org markup needs to be removed first, before these opt-out mechanisms can become active. 

• The opt-out preferences do not apply to product data submitted through Google Merchant Center, which offers specific mechanisms to opt-out products from appearing on surfaces across Google.

Use of mechanisms like nosnippet and data-nosnippet only affect the display of data and eligibility for certain experiences. Display restrictions don’t affect the ranking of these pages in Search. The exclusion of some parts of product data from display may prevent the product from being shown in rich results and other product results on Google.

We hope these options make it easier for you to maximize the value you get from Search and achieve your business goals. These options are available to retailers worldwide and will operate the same for results we display globally. For more information, check out our developer documentation on meta tags. 

Should you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us, or drop by our webmaster help forums.

Posted by Bernhard Schindlholzer, Product Manager

Signed Exchanges (SXG) is a subset of the emerging family of specifications called Web Packaging, which enables publishers to safely make their content portable, while still keeping the publisher’s integrity and attribution. In 2019, Google Search started linking to signed AMP pages served from Google’s cache when available. This feature allows the content to be prefetched without loss of privacy, while attributing the content to the right origin.

Today we are happy to announce that sites implementing SXG for their AMP pages will be able to understand if there are any issues preventing Google from serving the SXG version of their page using the Google AMP Cache. 

Use the AMP report to check if your site has any SXG related issues - look for issues with 'signed exchange' in their name. We will also send emails to alert you of new issues as we detect them. 

To help with debugging and to verify a specific page is served using SXG, you can inspect a URL using the URL Inspection Tool to find if any SXG related issues appear on the AMP section of the analysis.

You can diagnose issues affecting the indexed version of the page or use the “live” option which will check validity for the live version currently served by your site. 

To learn more about the types of SXG issues we can report on, check out this Help Center Article on SXG issues. If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the Webmasters community or the Google Webmasters Twitter handle.

Posted by Amir Rachum, Search Console Software Engineer & Jeffrey Jose, Google Search  Product Manager. 

A few weeks ago we held another Webmaster Conference Lightning Talk, this time about Rich Results and Search Console. During the talk we hosted a live chat and a lot of viewers asked questions - we tried to answer all we could, but our typing skills didn’t match the challenge… so we thought we’d follow up on the questions posed in this blog post.

If you missed the video, you can watch it below: it discusses how to get started with rich results and use Search Console to optimize your search appearance in Google Search.

Rich Results & Search Console FAQs

Over the past year, we have been working to upgrade the infrastructure of the Search Console API, and we are happy to let you know that we’re almost there. You might have already noticed some minor changes, but in general, our goal was to make the migration as invisible as possible. This change will help Google to improve the performance of the API as demand grows.

Note that if you’re not querying the API yourself you don't need to take action. If you are querying the API for your own data or if you maintain a tool which uses that data (e.g. a WordPress plugin), read on. Below is a summary of the changes:

1. Changes on Google Cloud Platform dashboard: you’ll see is a drop in the old API usage report and an increase in the new one.
2. API key restriction changes: if you have previously set API key restrictions, you might need to change them.
3. Discovery document changes: if you’re querying the API using a third-party API library or querying the Webmasters Discovery Document directly, you will need to update it by the end of the year.

Please note that other than these changes, the API is backward compatible and there are currently no changes in scope or functionality.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) changes

In the Google Cloud Console dashboards, you will notice a traffic drop for the legacy API and an increase in calls to the new one. This is the same API, just under the new name.

Image: Search Console API changes in Google Cloud Console

You can monitor your API usage on the new Google Search Console API page.

API key restriction changes

As mentioned in the introduction, these instructions are important only if you query the data yourself or provide a tool that does that for your users.

To check if you have an API restriction active on your API key, follow these steps in the credentials page and make sure the Search Console API is not restricted. If you have added an API restriction for your API keys you will need to take action by August 31.

In order to allow your API calls to be migrated automatically to the new API infrastructure, you need to make sure the Google Search Console API is not restricted.

• If your API restrictions are set to “Don’t restrict key” you’re all set.
• If your API restrictions are set to “Restrict key”, the Search Console API should be checked as shown in the image below.

Image: Google Search Console API restrictions setting

Discovery document changes

If you’re querying the Search Console API using an external API library, or querying the Webmasters API discovery document directly you will need to take action as we’ll drop the support in the Webmasters discovery document. Our current plan is to support it until December 31, 2020 - but we’ll provide more details and guidance in the coming months.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the Webmasters community or the Google Webmasters Twitter handle.

Posted by Nati Yosephian, Search Console Software Engineer

Mobile-first indexing has been an ongoing effort of Google for several years. We've enabled mobile-first indexing for most currently crawled sites, and enabled it by default for all the new sites. Our initial plan was to enable mobile-first indexing for all sites in Search in September 2020. We realize that in these uncertain times, it's not always easy to focus on work as otherwise, so we've decided to extend the timeframe to the end of March 2021. At that time, we're planning on switching our indexing over to mobile-first indexing.

For the sites that are not yet ready for mobile-first indexing, we’ve already mentioned some issues blocking your sites in previous blog posts. Now that we’ve done more testing and evaluation, we have seen a few more issues that are worth mentioning to better prepare your sites.

Make sure Googlebot can see your content

In mobile-first indexing, we will only get the information of your site from the mobile version, so make sure Googlebot can see the full content and all resources there. Here are some things to pay attention to:

Robots meta tags on mobile version

You should use the same robots meta tags on the mobile version as those on the desktop version. If you use a different one on the mobile version (such as noindex or nofollow), Google may fail to index or follow links on your page when your site is enabled for mobile-first indexing.

Lazy-loading on mobile version

Lazy-loading is more common on mobile than on desktop, especially for loading images and videos. We recommend following lazy-loading best practices. In particular, avoid lazy-loading your primary content based on user interactions (like swiping, clicking, or typing), because Googlebot won't trigger these user interactions.

For example, if your page has 10 primary images on the desktop version, and the mobile version only has 2 of them, with the other 8 images loaded from the server only when the user clicks the “+” button:

(Caption: desktop version with 10 thumbnails / mobile version with 2 thumbnails)

In this case, Googlebot won’t click the button to load the 8 images, so Google won't see those images. The result is that they won't be indexed or shown in Google Images. Follow Google's lazy-loading best practices, and lazy load content automatically based on its visibility in the viewport.

Be aware of what you block

Some resources have different URLs on the mobile version from those on the desktop version, sometimes they are served on different hosts. If you want Google to crawl your URLs, make sure you're not disallowing crawling of them with your robots.txt file.

For example, blocking the URLs of .css files will prevent Googlebot from rendering your pages correctly, which can harm the ranking of your pages in Search. Similarly, blocking the URLs of images will make these images disappear from Google Images.

Make sure primary content is the same on desktop and mobile

If your mobile version has less content than your desktop version, you should consider updating your mobile version so that its primary content (the content you want to rank with, or the reason for users to come to your site) is equivalent. Only the content shown on the mobile version will be used for indexing and ranking in Search. If it’s your intention that the mobile version has less content than the desktop version, your site may lose some traffic when Google enables mobile-first indexing for your site, since Google won't be able to get the full information anymore.

Use the same clear and meaningful headings on your mobile version as on the desktop version. Missing meaningful headings may negatively affect your page's visibility in Search, because we might not be able to fully understand the page.

For example, if your desktop version has the following tag for the heading of the page:

<h1>Photos of cute puppies on a blanket</h1>

Your mobile version should also use the same heading tag with the same words for it, rather than using headings like:

<h1>Photos</h1> (not clear and meaningful)

<div>Photos of cute puppies on a blanket</div> (not using a heading tag)

Check your images and videos

Make sure the images and videos on your mobile version follow image best practices and video best practices. In particular, we recommend that you perform the following checks:

Image quality

Don’t use images that are too small or have a low resolution on the mobile version. Small or low-quality images might not be selected for inclusion in Google Images, or shown as favorably when indexed.

For example, if your page has 10 primary images on the desktop version, and they are normal, good quality images. On the mobile version, a bad practice is to use very small thumbnails for these images to make them all fit in the smaller screen:

(Caption: desktop version with normal thumbnails / mobile version tiny thumbnails)

In this case, these thumbnails may be considered “low quality” by Google because they are too small and in a low resolution.

Alt attributes for images

As previously mentioned, remember that using less-meaningful alt attributes might negatively affect how your images are shown in Google Images.

For example, a good practice is like the following:

<img src="dogs.jpg" alt="A photo of cute puppies on a blanket"> (meaningful alt text)

While bad practices are like the following:

<img src="dogs.jpg" alt> (empty alt text)

<img src="dogs.jpg" alt="Photo"> (alt text not meaningful)

Different image URLs between desktop and mobile version

If your site uses different image URLs for the desktop and mobile version, you may see a temporary traffic loss from Google Images while your site transitions to mobile-first indexing. This is because the image URLs on the mobile version are new to the Google indexing system, and it takes some time for the new image URLs to be understood appropriately. To minimize a temporary traffic loss from search, review whether you can retain the image URLs used by desktop.

Video markup

If your desktop version uses schema.org's VideoObject structured data to describe videos, make sure the mobile version also includes the VideoObject, with equivalent information provided. Otherwise our video indexing systems may have trouble getting enough information about your videos, resulting in them not being shown as visibly in Search.

Video and image placement

Make sure to position videos and images in an easy to find location on the mobile version of your pages. Videos or images not placed well could affect user experience on mobile devices, making it possible that Google would not show these as visibly in search.

For example, assume you have a video embedded in your content in an easy to find location on desktop:

On mobile, you place an ad near the top of the page which takes up a large part of the page. This can result your video being moved off the page, requiring users to scroll down a lot to find the video:

(Caption: video on mobile is much less visible to users)

In this case, the page might not be deemed a useful video landing page by our algorithms, resulting in the video not being shown in Search.

You can find more information and more best practices in our developer guide for mobile-first indexing.

Mobile-first indexing has come a long way. It's great to see how the web has evolved from desktop to mobile, and how webmasters have helped to allow crawling and indexing to match how users interact with the web! We appreciate all your work over the years, which has helped to make this transition fairly smooth. We’ll continue to monitor and evaluate these changes carefully. If you have any questions, please drop by our Webmaster forums or our public events.

Posted by Yingxi Wu, Google Mobile-First Indexing team