John Mueller
Search Advocate
John coordinates Google Search Relations efforts. He and his team connect the Google-internal world of Search engineering, to those who create and optimize public websites. Together, they help to bring more insights from the public web to Google Search teams, and help publishers make awesome websites that work well for users and search engines. Check out posts from John Mueller on the Google Search Central Blog.
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Robots Refresher: robots.txt — a flexible way to control how machines explore your website
Friday, March 7, 2025 A long-standing tool for website owners, robots.txt has been in active use for over 30 years and is broadly supported by crawler operators (such as tools for site owners, services, and search engines). In this edition of the
March 7, 2025
Robots Refresher: introducing a new series
Monday, February 24, 2025 Every now and then we get questions about robots.txt, robots meta tags, and the control functionality that they offer. Following our December series on crawling, we thought this would be the perfect time to put together a
February 24, 2025
Search Central Live is going to New York City
Thursday, February 13, 2025 We're excited to announce that Search Central Live is coming to New York City for the first time on March 20, 2025. The Google Search team has organized events in the city several times, but this time we're bringing our
February 13, 2025
Farewell, Sitelinks Search Box
Monday, October 21, 2024 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. With that, and to help simplify the search results, we'll be removing this
October 21, 2024
New Search experiences in South Africa: Badges and refinement chips
Monday, September 16, 2024 We're sharing more information about our new search experiences in South Africa, and how South African platforms can express interest and participate. With these new experiences, users in South Africa running travel and
September 16, 2024
Supporting AVIF in Google Search
Friday, August 30, 2024 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
August 30, 2024
What to know about our August 2024 core update
Thursday, August 15, 2024 Today, we launched our August 2024 core update to Google Search. This update is designed to continue our work to improve the quality of our search results by showing more content that people find genuinely useful and less
August 15, 2024
Mobile-indexing-vLast-final-final.doc
Monday, June 3, 2024 We're embarking on our final last step (that's the plan!) of our migration to a mobile-first index for Google Search: the small set of sites we've still been crawling with desktop Googlebot will be crawled with mobile Googlebot
June 3, 2024
Search Central Live 2024 in Warsaw, Poland
Monday, March 25, 2024 We're excited to announce a Search Central Live event in Warsaw, Poland on April 24, 2024. Search Central Live is our global Google Search event series specifically for site owners, publishers, and SEOs. We'd love to invite
March 25, 2024
Search Central Live 2024 in Bucharest, Romania
Monday, March 4, 2024 We're excited to announce a Search Central Live event in Bucharest, Romania on April 4, 2024. Search Central Live is our global Google Search event series specifically for site owners, publishers, and SEOs. We'd love to invite
March 4, 2024
Mobile-first indexing has landed - thanks for all your support
Tuesday, October 31, 2023 It's been a long road, getting from there to here. We're delighted to announce that the trek to Mobile First Indexing is now complete. Google Search started focusing more and more on mobile devices starting in 2015, with the
October 31, 2023
Changes to HowTo and FAQ rich results
Tuesday, August 8, 2023 To provide a cleaner and more consistent search experience, we're changing how some rich results types are shown in Google's search results. In particular, we're reducing the visibility of FAQ rich results, and limiting How-To
August 8, 2023
November Google SEO Office Hours
Tuesday, November 29, 2022 Thanks to everyone who submitted questions for the November edition of the Google SEO office hours! In this episode, you'll hear answers from folks on the Google Search team: Gary Illyes, Lizzi Sassman, John Mueller, Alan
November 29, 2022
A 2021 update on mobile-indexing
Friday, November 26, 2021 We first started working on mobile-first indexing a number of years ago. Since then, we've switched to indexing the majority of web pages with Googlebot-Smartphone. Our existing plan was to complete mobile-first indexing by
November 26, 2021
Looking back at last year's Webmaster Conference Product Summit
Tuesday, April 07, 2020 As a part of the Webmaster Conference series, last fall we held a Product Summit at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California. It was slightly different from our previous events, with a number of product managers and
April 7, 2020
How to pause your business online in Google Search
Thursday, March 26, 2020 As the effects of the coronavirus grow, we've seen businesses around the world looking for ways to pause their activities online. With the outlook of coming back and being present for your customers, here's an overview of our
March 26, 2020
Announcing mobile first indexing for the whole web
Thursday, March 05, 2020 It's been a few years now that Google started working on mobile-first indexing - Google's crawling of the web using a smartphone Googlebot. From our analysis, most sites shown in search results are good to go for mobile-first
March 5, 2020
Google Search News for January 2020
Friday, January 31, 2020 We hope the year 2020 has started off well for you, and wanted to bring a brief update of some of the changes around Google Search since our last episode. We aim to do this in our YouTube Series called Google Search News. In
January 31, 2020
An update on 2019
Friday, December 27, 2019 With 2020 hanging above our heads much the same way that bricks don't, people start reflecting on what they achieved this year, what went wrong, and how they could improve. We're no different, but instead of choosing what
December 27, 2019
Google Search News: coming soon to a screen near you
Friday, September 27, 2019 The world of search is constantly evolving. New tools, opportunities, and features are regularly arriving, sometimes existing things change, and sometimes we say goodbye to some things to make way for the new. To help you
September 27, 2019
More options to help websites preview their content on Google Search
Tuesday, September 24, 2019 Google uses content previews, including text snippets and other media, to help people decide whether a result is relevant to their query. The type of preview shown depends on many factors, including the type of content a
September 24, 2019
You #AskGoogleWebmasters, we answer
Thursday, August 15, 2019 We love to help folks make awesome websites. For a while now, we've been answering questions from developers, site-owners, webmasters, and of course SEOs in our office hours hangouts, in the help forums, and at events.
August 15, 2019
How to discover and suggest Google-selected canonical URLs for your pages
Tuesday, March 26, 2019 Sometimes a web page can be reached by using more than one URL. In such cases, Google tries to determine the best URL to display in search and to use in other ways. We call this the "canonical URL." There are ways site owners
March 26, 2019
Help Google Search know the best date for your web page
Monday, March 11, 2019 Sometimes, Google shows dates next to listings in its search results. In this post, we'll answer some commonly-asked questions webmasters have about how these dates are determined and provide some best practices to help improve
March 11, 2019
Consolidating your website traffic on canonical URLs
Wednesday, February 06, 2019 In Search Console, the Performance report currently credits all page metrics to the exact URL that the user is referred to by Google Search. Although this provides very specific data, it makes property management more
February 6, 2019
Mobile-First indexing, structured data, images, and your site
Wednesday, December 19, 2018 It's been two years since we started working on "mobile-first indexing"—crawling the web with smartphone Googlebot, similar to how most users access it. We've seen websites across the world embrace the mobile web, making
December 19, 2018
Collaboration and user management in the new Search Console
Wednesday, August 29, 2018 As part of our reinvention of Search Console, we have been rethinking the models of facilitating cooperation and accountability for our users. We decided to redesign the product around cooperative team usage and
August 29, 2018
Introducing the new Search Console
Monday, January 08, 2018 A few months ago we released a beta version of a new Search Console experience to a limited number of users. We are now starting to release this beta version to all users of Search Console, so that everyone can explore this
January 8, 2018
Rendering AJAX-crawling pages
Monday, December 04, 2017 The AJAX crawling scheme was introduced as a way of making JavaScript-based webpages accessible to Googlebot, and we've previously announced our plans to turn it down. Over time, Google engineers have significantly improved
December 4, 2017
The new Search Console: a sneak peek at two experimental features
Tuesday, August 01, 2017 Search Console was initially launched with just four reports more than a decade ago. Today, the product includes more than two dozen reports and tools covering AMP, structured data, and live testing tools, all designed to
August 1, 2017
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