This week there have been some exciting changes in the world of SEO that could have some wide-ranging impacts moving forwards as well as some announcements that we have been waiting for seemingly forever.
So let’s dive straight in.
NEW ADDITION TO THE GOOGLEBOT FAMILY
Meet the Google-InspectionTool. You can expect its arrival during the reviews of your website using tools like the Rich Result Test and URL inspection in the Search Console.
Here are the user agents for mobile and desktop:
For Mobile:
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Google-InspectionTool/1.0)
For Desktop:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Google-InspectionTool/1.0)
In terms of tokens, there are also two of them. It can swing by your site using either its own specific token or the general one:
- Google-InspectionTool
- Googlebot
Besides the user agent and token, it carries on the legacy of the “standard” Googlebot.
MORE LANGUAGES FOR TRANSLATED SEARCH RESULTS
Previously, Google had the capacity to translate snippets and pages into just six languages: Indonesian, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu.
But the search giant has stepped up its game and now supports translations in a total of 13 languages: Bengali, English, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Portuguese, Spanish, Tamil, and Telugu.
And just a friendly reminder: Back in May 2022, a special feature was added to GSC, the Search appearance -> Translated results filter. This handy tool helps you get a better understanding of who’s reading your content and which parts of it Google is translating into different languages.
THE TRANSITION TO MFI IS COMPLETE
*MFI – mobile-first indexing
Google has been steadily migrating the entire web to MFI over a span of six years. On May 22nd, Mueller made a remark indicating that they’ve finally wrapped up migrating the last set of websites.
That being said, there are still a few outliers. To paraphrase Mueller, there remains a small percentage of websites that aren’t suitable for MFI, and as a result, these will continue to be indexed based on their desktop version.
AMP CRAWL ISSUES BUG IN GSC
It has been noted that the console has inexplicably begun to report errors for AMP, and interestingly, these errors might show up even for wrong domains. This anomaly began on May 12th, and so far, there hasn’t been any official announcement claiming that everything has been fixed.
WEBSITE NAME IS NOW AVAILABLE FOR SUBDOMAINS
Last year, Google started to display not just the title and URL in the search results snippets, but also the website’s name, initially on mobile and later on desktops as well.
What’s new is that if your site has a subdomain, say for news or something similar, Google will now display the specific name of that subdomain in the search results, rather than the name of your main site.
(TEST) NEW INTERFACE FOR PRODUCT RESULTS
The search function now does more than just find products matching your query and showcasing seller websites. It goes the extra mile by providing you with valuable insights into pricing, delivery speed, and even calculates taxes for you.
Google began to evolve in this direction back in October 2022. They’ve been diligently refining the feature since then, and it’s now better than ever.
