Notes from the Google Webmaster Hangout on the 10th of May 2019.
How-to and FAQ Reports Now Available in GSC
Sites which feature the new How-to and FAQ structured mark-up will have access to these reports within Google Search Console.
No Search Result Fluctuations Expected After The Launch of New Googlebot
While there may be some movement, websites which are currently in Google’s index shouldn’t see any noticable fluctuations in search results after the update to Google’s rendering engine this month.
Rendering JavaScript Content Will Still Take Longer than HTML Content
Despite the new update to Googlebot, JavaScript still needs to be rendered in a second wave of indexing. When indexing Javascript content, the rendering will still take a little more time but this is typically no longer than a couple of days depending on the site.
Chrome 74 Has a Slight Impact on Google’s Ability to Trigger Infinite Scroll
Due to new features now being supported in Chrome 74 (for example intersection observer), infinite scroll can now be used without a polyfill. However, Martin recommends retaining the polyfill until the testing tools are updated, so these changes can be thoroughly tested.
Evergreen Googlebot Has Been Fully Rolled Out
The new evergreen Googlebot has been in testing for several months and was crawling 10% of the web last November, but is now 100% live. The URL Inspection and Mobile-friendly testing tools are being updated to reflect this and will be launched soon.
Crawl Budget Not Affected by Response Time of Third Party Tags
For Google, crawl budget is determined by how many pages and resources they fetch from a website per day. If a page has a large response time they may crawl the site less to avoid overloading the server, but this will not be affected by any third party tags on the page.
Content Hidden in Tabs on Mobile Sites Will Not Appear in Featured Snippets
Content which is contained behind a tab on a mobile site will not appear within featured snippets in search results, this is due to Google only wanting to show something in a snippet if they can be sure the user will be able to easily find the content when they visit the page.
For more insights from Google, check out our recap from Google I/O 2019 with all of the key takeaways for SEOs
