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 went well or wrong ourselves, we picked the announcements on our@GoogleWMC Twitter account that users interacted with the most, and decided to reflect on those.

We had launches that you appreciated a lot. For example, weannounced at Google I/O thatGooglebot is becoming evergreen, meaning that it's always going to use an up-to-date version of Chromium for rendering. We hope that this will make it easier for developers to create stunning, modern, and snappy JavaScript experiences, by tapping onto the power of over 1000 new features and interfaces that are now supported.

Speaking of robots, together with theoriginal author of the Robots Exclusion Protocol, other search engines, and input from webmasters, we submitted anInternet Draft to the IETF in order to start standardizing the 25-year-old protocol.

LikeTwitter users, we also thought it's anexciting project which lays down the rules of crawling for good, although it doesn't change anything for most.

But we haven't stopped there with touching ancient protocols: we also rethought how we need to treatnofollow links to keep up with the evolution of the web. It was an announcement that seemed to be welcomed by most Twitter users, and for a good reason: having a"hint" model forrel="nofollow" may help us reward those who create high quality content more, by serving even better results to our users.

One of the most tweeted – and also most humbling – moments this year was when welost a part of our index, which caused Search Console to misbehave, and also had rendering failures roughly the same time. Since Google Search works like a well oiled machine most of the time, we didn't have processes to quickly communicate issues to those who should know about them: webmasters. Lacking a proper process and channel to communicate these issues was a mistake and we are still working hard to rectify it, however one thing is clear: we need to do more on the critical communication side of things.

We do like to communicate, in general:we shoot videos, we go to conferences, big and small, where we reach thousands of webmasters and SEOs, and in 2019 we extended our reach with theWebmaster Conference, which landed in 35 locations around the world in 12 languages. Not to mention theweather reports on ourYouTube channel.

We hope you had a fantastic year and the new year will bring you even more success. If you need help with the latter, you can followour blogs,@googlewmc on Twitter, or you could join us at aWebmaster Conference near you!

Posted byJohn Mueller, Cheese Connoisseur, andGary Illyes the house elf