What happened in SEO this month?
Each month, Lumar’s in-house tech SEO experts hand-pick some of the SEO industry’s top news items from across the web to keep you up-to-date on all things SEO and website optimization.
This month, our SEO news roundup includes:
- Google’s plans to increase transparency around AI-generated content in search and ads
- Updates to Google’s crawl documentation
- New support for sale pricing in Google shopping SERP features.
- Support for AVIF image files added in Google Search
- Tips for improving website speed
Now, let’s dig into the key headlines from September…
Google wants to increase transparency around AI-generated content in search
In the near future, Google plans to incorporate AI content detection into Google Search and Google Ads and is exploring how to do the same for YouTube.
Last week, Google’s VP of Trust and Safety, Laurie Richardson, posted about the company’s plans to improve transparency around AI-generated content through its work with the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA).
Google joined the C2PA organization as a steering committee member earlier this year. It is a project of the Joint Development Foundation, a Washington-based 501c6 non-profit that brings together the efforts of the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) and Project Origin.
Google’s stated efforts to flag AI content to its users include implementing Google DeepMind’s SynthID; a technology that uses deep learning models and algorithms to watermark and identify AI-generated content.
Per Richardson:
“In joining the C2PA as a steering committee member, we’ve worked alongside the other members to develop and advance the technology used to attach provenance information to content … Over the coming months, we’ll bring this latest version of Content Credentials to a few of our key products.” (Read Richardson’s full post here.)
[Sources: The Verge and The Keyword ]
Google revamps its crawler documentation
Google has updated its crawler documentation, including more information on what Google product each crawler affects. The documentation also now gives robots.txt examples for each crawler.
Though there are no noted changes to crawler behavior, the documentation now features three pages, allowing for more detailed information while keeping the overview page concise.
Google has also expanded on its information about content encodings supported by Google crawlers and fetchers:
“Google’s crawlers and fetchers support the following content encodings (compressions): gzip, deflate, and Brotli (br). The content encodings supported by each Google user agent is advertised in the Accept-Encoding header of each request they make. For example, Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br.”
Google also introduced a section on “User-Triggered Fetchers,” explaining that these bots, activated by user requests within Google products, generally bypass robots.txt rules.
[Sources: Search Engine Journal ; Search Engine Land ; Google Documentation Changelog]
Google adds support for AVIF images
Late last month, Google added support for AVIF format images, per its documentation changelog.
Per the announcement on Google Search Central:
“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.
AVIF is an open image file format based on the AV1 video compression standard. It’s supported by all major web browsers, and images in AVIF image file format are supported by a variety of services and platforms on the web, including WordPress, Joomla, and CloudFlare.”
[Source: Google Search Central ]
Support added for sale pricing in merchant listing structured data
Google has now added support for sale pricing in merchant listing structured data (Product, Offer). Per Google Search Console:
“When you add Product markup to your page, it can be eligible for display in merchant listing experiences on Google Search, including the shopping knowledge panel, Google Images, popular product results, and product snippets. Merchant listings can highlight more specific data about a product, such as its price, availability, and shipping and return information.”
By adding support for the priceType property, Google says it is making it easier for merchants to specify sale pricing through structured data.
Per the updated document, the priceType property: “marks the full, original listing price of a product, if applicable. Only use this property if you want Google to show sale pricing for your product. You must set the priceType to the https://schema.org/ListPrice value (no other values are supported).”
They have also added new sale pricing examples.
You can learn more about schema markup for shopping SEO in this September episode of Search Off the Record, where Irina Tuduce from Google’s shopping team joins Google Search ambassadors John Mueller and Lizzi Sassman:
[Source: September 23 Google Documentation Update and Search Engine Land]
Google Search Central publishes tips for improving website speed
Google’s Martin Splitt has posted a new video focused on how to improve website speed — a core aspect of Google’s Core Web Vitals ranking system.
In the explainer video, Split recommends:
- Reducing the usage of JavaScript on your website
- Avoiding unnecessary URL redirects
- Optimizing your images
Watch the session:
[Source: Google Search Central, YouTube video posted on Sept. 18, 2024 ]
