Google Search Console is rolling out a new recommendations feature where Google will show you site improvement recommendations. These recommendations are based on the data in Search Console and aim to help improve your site’s performance on Google Search.

Google wrote, “We are excited to announce Search Console recommendations, a new feature that provides websites with optimization opportunities and suggests actions they can take to improve their presence on Google Search.”

Here is what it looks like:

Note that this is an experimental feature and you might not see it for two reasons:

(1) Google has no recommendations for your site (maybe you do perfect SEO).

(2) It has not yet rolled out to your site yet.

Google explained, “This is still an experimental feature, and not all sites will have recommendations at this stage, we’ll be rolling out this feature slowly over the coming months.” So it might take months for you to see it. And even when it is fully active, even “after complete rollout, we’ll only provide recommendations when we have a recommendation available for your website,” Google added. So far very few people see this yet in their Search Console account.

The Recommendations would be seen in the Overview section of the Google Search Console dashboard.

Google also said that the recommendations are updated on a regular basis, so if you see one today, you might not see it tomorrow. If you don’t see one today, you might see a new one tomorrow.

Just because Google shows a recommendation, it does not mean you need to take action on it. You, as the site owner or SEO expert might know better.

Google said these are the types of recommendations you might see:

• Issues (something that could be fixed)
• Opportunities (something that could improve your traffic)
• Configuration (something that could make your work easier)

The recommendations “can help you prioritize your search optimization efforts, such as using structured data to help Google understand your content, adding sitemaps, and checking out trending queries and pages,” Google wrote.

John Mueller of Google was asked how this may help those sites hit by the helpful content update in September. He wrote on LinkedIn, “no, these sites are not treated in any special way here (neither more nor fewer suggestions). It’s very early days with this feature, some of the automatic recommendations will be shaky or even bad (hopefully very few though), but I wouldn’t want to exclude any site that’s having a hard time finding their footing.”

John also said he does not expect these recommendations to replace the current Search Console alerts, John wrote, ” I don’t expect these to go away, but I’d like to have them be a bit smarter. The problem with “1 out of 150291 pages” is that you might really care about that particular one, and it’s hard for us to know. We could guess better perhaps.”

Of course, the big joke is are these recommendations going to be as “useful” as the recommendations you see in Google Ads or AdSense.

Thanks Daniel Waisberg!

This is a super cool launch, one step in the direction of making Search Console more actionable and useful 💡 We’re rolling it out slowly, but in the coming months this will grow and flourish! https://t.co/H2To1SneP3

— Daniel Waisberg (@danielwaisberg) August 5, 2024

Here is one user that sees it but most do not:

pic.twitter.com/6vh237CkDk

— Ludvig Hoel (@LudvigHoel) August 6, 2024

Forum discussion at X and LinkedIn.

Here is the big monthly Google webmaster report, where I catch you up on what changes with Google Search related to Google updates, ranking volatility, SEO, Search Console, UI changes, local and much more. This month we had intense ranking volatility all month, we had autocomplete updates, deepfakes algorithm changes and a big search indexing bug.

On top of all of that, Google Search Console had extended delays but that is no sign of a core update. You can now add shipping and return info to Google Search Console. Reddit did not block Google despite what many thought, but they did block Bing.

We saw a lot of changes with AI Overviews, Google Search Notes is gone now, Gooogle is testing country labels for search snippets, Google is degrading X in Search maybe and more. Google also posted its earnings report and more.

Here are a lot of additional top headlines for the past month:

Google Algorithm Updates:

Google SEO:
Google Search Console:
Google AI Overviews:
Google User Interface:
Google Business Profiles & Local:
Other Google:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This week we covered how Google said the core update isn’t extremely far away. We also reported on super intense Google Search ranking volatility change later this week and then the ongoing volatility with Google Search over the past few weeks. Google updated its algorithms to demote deepfake content. Google also improved its Autocomplete predictions in the wake of the Trump controversy. There was this excellent deep dive on how Google indexes JavaScript. Google may be showing fewer X posts in Search and is testing changing the X carousel to “latest posts from.” Google is also testing “hidden gem stores,” which is weird. Google is testing knowledge panels with videos. Google Discover is promoting AI Overviews for the Olympics. There is new data on how Google mixes ads into organic results. Google Ads launched new PMax reporting and AI tools. There was another Google Ads reporting outage yesterday. Google Merchant Center has a section for “more found by Google.” Google Ads now integrates with Merchant Center AI image tool. Google Ads click-to WhatsApp messaging seems to be rolling out. Google Ads as a new “for your consideration” ad format. Google Business Profiles now lets you take a photo of your menu. Microsoft earnings showed Bing Ads revenue up 19%. I also posted the big Google Webmaster Report for August 2024. That was the search news this week at the Search Engine Roundtable.

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