You may have heard that Google Search needs to do a bit of work before a web page can show up in Google Search results. One of these steps is called crawling. Crawling for Google Search is done by Googlebot, a program running on Google servers that retrieves a URL and handles things like network errors, redirects, and other small complications that it might encounter as it works its way through the web. But there are a few details that aren't often talked about. Each week this month we're going to explore some of those details as they may have a significant effect on how your sites are crawled.

We're looking forward to meeting you at the Google office in Zurich for Search Central Live Zurich 2024 on Dec 12, 2024. Join us for presentations, Q&A and networking on December 12, 2024.

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 behavior. We're making it clear that using third-party content on a site in an attempt to exploit the site's ranking signals is a violation of this policy — regardless of whether there is first-party involvement or oversight of the content.

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 on November 21, 2024.

Our first two Search Central Live events in Asia this year have been wrapped up and we finished looking back at what we've learned and what we can do better.

Google's Store Ratings have been helping US merchants highlight the high quality experiences other shoppers have had right from Search, and we're now bringing store ratings to English-language shopping searches in Australia, Canada, India and the United Kingdom.

We're sharing more information about our new search experiences in South Africa, and how South African platforms can express interest and participate.

This post is about the new Google Trends Tutorials YouTube series. In these videos you'll learn how to use Google Trends to analyze patterns in Google Search and Youtube searches, and use them to create interesting content online.

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 uses images in Google Search. You don't need to do anything special to have your AVIF files indexed by Google.

As previously announced, we're coming to Kuala Lumpur and to Taipei in the last quarter of 2024. And yes, we're very excited! The KL event will be in English and the Taipei event will be conducted in Mandarin (Traditional Chinese).