SCL Zurich by Google. October 24, 2023. Overview

Key Facts

• Description: Covering topics ranging from Google Shopping to life without cookies, this in-depth summary distills key insights and takeaways from Google’s recent Search event in Zurich, with the author offering their own interpretations. The summary highlights presentations on SEO, SafeSearch, web migrations, structured data, and more, capturing the most relevant details for search marketers.
• Date: October 24, 2023
• Organizer: Google
• Speakers: Aleyda Solis, Andrey Lipatsev, Christian von Essen, John Mueller, Maria White, Mattias Wiesmann, Pierre Inzerillo, Ryan Levering.
• Host: Martin Splitt
• Place: Google’s office in Zurich
• Agenda:
  • Intro
  • Google Shopping
  • SEO for Luxury Sites by Maria White
  • What’s new in Search?
  • SafeSearch
  • Web migration horror stories by Aleyda Solis
  • Structured data updates
  • Life without cookies
  • Q&A

Use above links for fast navigation if you like to jump straight to a particular section. I’ll be not writing about some presentations because they can be found online.

Disclaimer

The event was not recorded, attendees were allowed to take photos but not videos. We were also asked to not attribute citations to a particular speaker. Because out of the context of the event, the words may sound different, don’t perceive any of them as citations. All the interpretations, insights, takeaways are my own. You cannot claim or infer that Googler said this or that based on this article.

Most of the things presented were not new. The importance of such meetups is the personal networking and whatever you can infer from what speakers and other attendees say.

Let’s dive in.

Google Shopping

Despite that all the information presented is available in Google’s documentation, it’s always useful to revise and learn what is particularly important for Google.

The very beginning

TLDR

Input from industry is welcome and waited for. Google wants to help users find what they search for and asks sellers to use feeds, Merchant and structured data. Shopping is increasingly complex. And here where rich data comes to help handle the challenges.

Insights

Rich experience on Google can be reached with:

• image
• title
• description
• url
• availability 
• price
• shipping.

Above refers to both organic and ads.

The product data is very structured and used in lots of places. Not only standard search or shopping tab in Google, but also in YouTube, Google Display Network, and AdSense for Shopping.

Integrations mechanisms include Google specific ones that require Merchant Center account — feeds and API, and open specifications with schema.org. When they say open, that’s literally so. You can view and engage into discussions via GitHub. Data integration in csv is possible but not preferred option by Google, if I got that correctly.

It is not something new, the data is already used by shopping.

To validate for consistency use Schema.org Validator, for rich text results use Google Search Console and Rich Results Tool.

3 major things that users care for

1. What do I want to buy? – Product
2. How can I buy it?  – Offer
3. Who sells the product? – Merchant

Product attributes that you should specify:

• Basic
  • Title
  • Description
  • Image
  • Good coverage (social sharing)
• Identity
  • Brand, product code -> GTIN
  • Manufacturer data
• Specific
  • Product relations:
    • Variants, product lines
  • Regulatory data:
    • Energy labels
    • Country of origin
    • Ingredients
  • Sustainability, ethical labels
  • Variant selection:
    • Material
    • Flavour
  • Medias:
    • Movies
    • 3D models
    • High-resolution images

Labels

Labels importance was particularly emphasized as they help to distinguish and differentiate. Certification labels define aspect of product and in some cases they are actually required by law, especially in EU. For example, Wish was suspended in France because out of a sample of 140 products, 45% of toys, 90% of electrical goods and 62% of jewelry items were dangerous. 

Strong brands will have all the labels. According to statistics, 64-82% of consumers don’t want to buy from brands that they don’t know. Which creates a problem for Google.

Certification labels are important not only for brands, but also for consumers. 

Certifications that are important for consumers include:

• Sustainability:
  • Material sourcing
  • CO2
• Food:
  • Allergens
  • Vegan
  • Kosher
• Protected designation of origin because some people want products from a particular location or local

Product Relationships

Relationship with other product is another hugely important thing. Google needs to understand how one product relates to another:

• Product type (A4 batteries, A4 paper)
• Consumables, spare parts
• Accessories
• Successor products.

Parent child relationship is not less important. That’s what Google also tries to understand from the mess of all data for products and seeks input from industry.

ISO 6523

This part is a bit tricky and hard to find in documentation. Basically it is a standardized identifier for the organization.

There is a meta standard for company identifiers:

• DUNS, GLN, LEI, National standards
• VAT codes, PEPPOL extention

You may use International Code Identifier (ICD) with Organization Identifier (OID). But it’s important that you don’t use the identifier attribute.

Example of the code from the image:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Organization",
  "name": "Google France",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "addressCountry": "FR",
    "streetAddress": "8 Rue de Londres",
    "addressLocality": "Paris",
    "postalCode": "75009"
  },
  "iso6523Code": [
    "0009:44306184100047",
    "9957: FR64443061841"
  ],
  "vatId": "FR64443061841",
  "telephone": "+33 1 42 68 53 00",
  "foundingDate": "2002-05-16"
}

What’s important in Offer

• Basic attributes
  • Price, availability
• Complex prices
  • Promotions, memberships, subscriptions
  • Quantity discount, VAT rate
  • Cross border: exchange rate, taxes
• Fulfillment
  • Lead time, delivery time, shipping method, shipping price
  • Basket size

Shipping

People enjoy free shipping so much that they are often ready to pay more for the product rather than pay for shipping at all. There’s currently an ongoing work in mapping shipping page to offer. 

SEO for Luxury Sites

Hopefully, this one will be online soon. Thus, not too many spoilers here. In short, websites for luxury fashion are minimalistic. Which means only a few images or even one image per page sometimes, without any text + some menus if you are lucky. 

The reasons for minimalism:

• Increase focus on product
• Avoid distractors
• Emphasis on brand
• Sense of elegance

Hence, major SEO focus:

• Javascript and CWV
• Content and context
• Digital PR and links

One doing SEO for fashion luxury websites should really be a pro with images.

What’s new in Search

The presentation started on a highly positive note. SEO is not going away. But it changes.

Everything else was major recent news. Some of which are available in this video by John Mueller.

It was highlighted once again that quality is important.

Quality affects:

• Ranking
• Look and feel of results
• Discover
• Crawling and indexing.

How to reduce the risk? Prepare for future changes:

• Use a flexible CMS or hosting platform -> Structured data changes should be easy.
• Don’t take content shortcuts -> Read the Quality Rater Guidelines.

INP (Interaction to Next Paint) is coming in March 2024. But don’t over-focus on CWV.

How SafeSearch Works

There’s SafeSearch and your website article in Google’s documentation where you can see all the info related to SafeSearch. Just to highlight a few things that are safe to know.

3 options in SafeSearch Settings:

• Filter
• Blur – this one is new
• Off

I found it interesting that for the pr0n query they chose to highlight a particular website.

If Google detects explicit content on your website, it might get filtered.

Google uses classifiers to detect explicit content. To find out if your website is filtered, go to Google and search for site:yourwebsite.com. Then set your SafeSearch settings to Filter and repeat the search. If the results changed, it is likely affected by SafeSearch filtering.

SafeSearch filtering is adaptive to the query, but checking whether pages of your domain are filtered is a good heuristic.

Explicit Content Moderation in Google

Search policies prohibit:

• Sexual abuse imagery or exploitation materials
• Non-consensual explicit images
• Involuntary fake pornography

Host explicit content responsibly:

• Google demotes sites with a high proportion of violent content
• Having access to video bytes increases Google’s confidence in your site.

Eliminating Child Sexual Abuse:

• Google Child Safety Toolkit
• protectingchildren.google/tools-for-partners/
• Classifiers and hash matching
• Partner-only free of charge service

Detection of explicit content in images:

• cloud.google.com/vision/docs/detecting-safe-search
• Paid service for everybody

Relevant links

Search policies – goo.gle/content-policies

Ranking / demotions – goo.gle/search-ranking

Video bytes – goo.gle/sites-safesearch

Important!

If you think that your website was filtered out by SafeSearch wrongly, ask for a review here: goo.gle/safesearch-review

Web migration horror stories

Aleyda traditionally created a new presentation for Halloween. See full article The Worst SEO Horror Stories in 2023 and How to Wake Up from these Nightmares.

Main threats that scare SEOs by their potential effect and level of control:

• Uncertainty of Generative Search: Aleyda discusses the different types of SGE snapshots and how they could impact organic traffic. This is especially relevant for those keen on understanding the AI’s role in SEO.
• Unpredictability of Core Updates: Aleyda advises becoming the “best answer” to user queries across various quality factors to withstand Google’s fickle core updates.
• Overlook of configurations affecting crawlability and indexability
• Lack of SEO validation of web migrations.

Presentation includes all the checklists, todos and tothinkofs that you might need in the process of planning and debugging your migration.

Proactive SEO Strategy

Aleyda notes it’s important to be proactive by setting an SEO quality framework through the whole SEO process, to minimize bugs/mistakes with education and validation processes. This includes:

• Education: Agree on using SEO configuration checklists when developing any update or release with relevant team members.
• Validation: Agree on a release validation workflow, before and after launching, taking “what-ifs” into account.
• Monitoring: Continuously monitor meaningful SEO configurations to ensure the desired status. Use real-time SEO crawlers to get alerts on unwanted changes.

Key Recommendations

• Educate decision makers on the risks of overlooking SEO in migrations.
• Share and agree to use a migration checklist with developers.
• Store copies of old site versions to check configurations if needed.
• Recovery from Core Updates: If hit, use Google’s content quality questions for rapid assessment and recovery, as Aleyda suggests.
• Get alerts on URL type changes during migration.
• If SEO is overlooked, prioritize fixing redirects and configurations for top pages.
• Do full crawl comparison of old vs new site versions.
• Monitor old and new sites in Search Console for issues.

The presentation provides a comprehensive overview of technical and on-page factors to validate before, during, and after a site migration to avoid common horror stories. I highly recommend reviewing Aleyda’s slides for anyone planning a migration.

Structured Data Updates

Sources of data Google uses:

• Automatic extraction
• Feeds of data
• Webpage markup
• Humans

Shopping – Shipping and Returns

Markup examples

For “+$3.49 S&H to the US in 1 day”

"offers": { 
  "@type": "Offer",
  ...
  "shippingDetails": { 
    "@type": "OfferShippingDetails",
    "shippingRate": { 
      "@type": "MonetaryAmount", 
      "value": 3.49,
      "currency": "USD"
    },
    "shippingDestination": {
      "@type": "DefinedRegion",
      "addressCountry": "US",
      "deliveryTime": {
        "@type": "ShippingDeliveryTime", 
        "handlingTime": { 
          "@type": "QuantitativeValue",
          "minValue": 0, 
          "maxValue": 1,
          "unitCode": "DAY"
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

For “Swiss return policy: 60 days, free returns by mail”

"offers": { 
  "@type": "Offer",
  ...
  "hasMerchantReturnPolicy": {
    "@type": "MerchantReturn",
    "applicableCountry": "CH",
    "returnPolicyCategory": "https://schema.org/MerchantReturnFiniteReturnWindow",
    "merchantReturnDays": 60,
    "returnMethod": "https://schema.org/ReturnByMail",
    "returnFees": "https://schema.org/FreeReturn"
  }
}

How-to / FAQ turndown

The claim was that HowTo and FAQPage markups didn’t pass the quality review of search results features. Therefore it was decided to simplify the UI.

For HowTo, data quality was reasonable but there were some technical problems that lead to deprecation.

FAQ was spammy with over-aggressive use of the features, overtriggering and the data quality suffered. Google was working on fixing it, but the fix came too late and the feature was turned down.

It doesn’t mean that these features won’t be resurrected in the future. For example, initially FAQ was destined to use on the FAQ page of the website, just one page, not on every other page where you added FAQ section. Thus, maybe in the future it will return for this type of content in this or that way.

Schema.org type coercion

Google made it easier for us to specify “class enums” for interactions. Particularly for comment sections of your content. Values are expected to be of the type Action. For instance, for comments, it will be commentAction.

Syntax Graph Merge

Launched super-recently! Will impact validator.schema.org, RRT, and all Google ingestion.

Somewhat an advanced feature, but allows one to take advantage of the benefits of multiple syntaxes. That means, it’s not foolproof so be careful and use it only when you know what you are doing.

For example, you might need it for your long form content.

Code sample:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org", 
"@type": "NewsArticle",
"@id": "news-article",
"datePublished": "2015-02-05T00:00+08:00", 
"dateModified": "2015-02-05T01:00+08:00"
}
</script>

<div itemscope
itemtype="https://schema.org/NewsArticle"
itemid="news-article">
<div itemprop="text">
This is the text of the article is so long.
</div>
</div>

Date / Time Validations

Use ISO 8601 format for date and time annotations of datePublished and dateModified.

Without times and timezones Google has a lot of precision losses on a number of features including very used byline date. It’s important for events. Google has to guess the time zone if you don’t specify it and it may be off in some cases.

Discussion Forums for Perspectives in Google

Use DiscussionForumPosting markup. It will be helpful if you want to be featured in Perspectives. This markup is targeting discussion pages, both big platforms as well as embedded community forums. It will be used not only for Perspectives filter but also for other upcoming authentic content features.

Profile Pages

Use ProfilePage markup with mainEntity specified as Person markup. Good for authors pages.

Main target is to enhance platform creator information (for authorship-type features), but should also serve as a template for other “people” pages.

Events Features Deprecation

Yes, some events features are no longer in SERPs, but they are preparing something interesting for us quite soon.

Life After Cookies

It was a great talk and for some people in the audience it was totally new. You can find out all the information from the presentations with the following link: goo.gle/cookiecountdown

Thank you!

For reading this far. 

Here are two of my favorite photos from the event.

Lizzi Sassman and Gary Illyes in Google’s office in Zurich

From left to right: John Mueller, Martin Splitt, Olesia Korobka. In Google’s office in Zurich for SCL Zurich 2023. Yeah, I know Google doesn’t like selfies, but I don’t care!

You can go back to the beginning now.

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