Google has recently added a ‘Recommendations’ panel to Search Console as an experiment for some users. This new feature provides websites with optimisation opportunities and suggests actions that marketers or developers can take to improve their presence on Google Search.
Google states: “Recommendations offer you tips to help with indexing, crawling and serving based on the data Google collects in Search Console. The data was already available to you on Search Console, but now we’re helping to make it more accessible by providing direct recommendations”.
Google updates the recommendations on a “regular basis and may expire or change details over time”.
Not all sites will have recommendations at this stage and the feature will be rolling out slowly over the coming months, so it’s worth keepingan eye out for them. (If Google does not have any recommendations, it won’t show any).
This is how these new recommendations look in Search Console:
These recommendations may provide insights into improving your sites or client sites’ indexing, scrawling and serving in Google Search. Some may be obvious to experienced SEOs, some may prove to not be too helpful, while others may be super helpful.
You can read more about recommendations in Search Console.
Google also recently launched its latest core update in August with one of the aims being to surface useful content from small and independent sites.
This update is not just a normal core update as it takes into account the feedback Google heard since the ‘September 2023 helpful content update’ that seemed to have a negative impact on many small and independent publishers.
It aims to promote useful content from them after Google also listened to feedback it received since the release of the March 2024 core update.
John Mueller, Search Advocate at Google said: “This latest update takes into account the feedback we’ve heard from some creators and others over the past few months. As always, we aim to connect people with a range of high quality sites, including ‘small’ or ‘independent’ sites that are creating useful, original content on relevant searches. This update aims to better capture improvements that sites may have made, so we can continue to surface the best of the web and is an area we’ll continue to address in future updates”.
You can read more about the August 2024 core update.
If you want to know how the use of Search Console recommendations or how best to react to the August 2024 core update, please get in touch.