SEARCHENGINES
Google Search Central Unconference 2022: Quick Recap
Mihai Aperghis (@mihaiaperghis), an SEO we reference here from time to time, is also a Google Product Expert and attended the Google Search Central Unconference the other week. He has written this blog post and I am posting it here as a super rare guest post on this site. Why? (1) Mihai rocks and (2) this site is about community and Product Experts are the essence of the Google community. I (Barry) personally was unable to attend due to a conflict. Note: Mihai did not ask for a link or a mention, but I added this so it is clear that he wrote this.
Google hosted the 2022 edition of the Search Central Virtual Unconference on April 27, making it the third global Google Unconference and fourth such event so far (counting the Japanese one that took place a few weeks earlier).
Quick Overview
For those unfamiliar with it, the Google Unconferences aim to provide discussion-focused sessions where participants (SEOs, developers, business owners, etc.) join online and share their experiences under a slightly more ‘informal’ structure, as opposed to traditional speaker events or even to Google office hours. The “facilitators” for each session (typically two people) have the sole responsibility of guiding discussions within the topic bounds, making sure all participants get heard and, since the sessions are not recorded, taking notes of the conversations that take place.
This year, the event was once again run by Martin Splitt, the Googler behind the Unconference idea, together with Cherry Sireetorn Prommawin from Google APAC.
Just as with editions from previous years (2021 and 2020), Product Experts such as myself were invited ahead of the event to propose session topics that they would then facilitate, should Martin and Cherry accept their proposals.
I won’t get into more details regarding the Unconference format, since I would probably just repeat what I covered in last year’s recap, so feel free to check that out if you’re curious.
One key difference for this year’s edition, however, was that the facilitator role was now open to everyone, thus allowing Product Experts to send the session proposal form to anyone they might see fit to moderate.
Sessions
Since this year’s proposal form was opened to more people, the number of proposed sessions was likely much higher than in previous years. Martin and Cherry ultimately selected 25 of them, which were then voted by people who wanted to attend based on their topic of interest.
Also different from last year was the number of participants, which this time was limited to a maximum of about 14 people (as opposed to 20-25 people). This made it easier for more people to speak up during the 45 minute session, as well have an ice breaker or have everyone introduce themselves without taking too much time.
All 25 sessions were ultimately kept, given that there were at least 5-6 people interested in each one. As usual, the sessions were split into two 45-minute blocks, which meant people could only attend one session in each slot:
Session slot A:
- Tech SEO Q&A, all your questions answered.
- E-commerce SEO Challenges
- Making the best use of Search Intent Optimization (SIO)
- International SEO
- Schema: JSON Successes and Challenges
- Organic and Paid Growth Collaborations
- How can SEOs and Web developers work better together?
- Exploring Google Search Console APIs
- Video SEO – Best practices for optimizing videos on Google
- Let’s discuss spam and low quality results
- Let’s talk about Product review sites
- Webmaster & Podcaster
- Where do you find help?
Sessions slot B:
- SEO A/B split testing ideas
- Content: It’s All About Trust, Transparency and (Human) Typing
- Can Google See This? Rendering Q&A
- Core Web Vitals and how to approach it
- Project Management for Digital and SEO
- User Journey R&D Discussion
- Is Search Console working for you?
- Site Troubleshooting
- Google Business Profile: Myths and Guidance.
- Localization and its Peculiarities
- Working with Images on the Web
- A positive thing in 2022.. Unconference in Spanish!
There were also two conclusion blocks, one after each slot, in which facilitators presented the main conclusions for each session (thus being a good idea for one of the facilitators in each session to be taking notes). Everything was padded by a 15 minutes intro and a quick wrap-up at the end.
If you’re curious about the full description for each session, you can find everything on the official event page.
The E-commerce SEO Challenges Session
Since people outside Google or the Product Experts program were able to join as facilitators, I decided to ask the wonderful Aleyda Solis to co-facilitate one of the sessions with me. Together we landed on a list of three potential topics, out of which the E-commerce SEO Challenges one was ultimately chosen and included in slot A.
Being such a popular topic, we managed to have a full room of outstanding people from highly diverse backgrounds. There were in-house SEOs, agency owners, webmasters and marketers, from highly experienced technical people to folks who only recently started learning the ropes.
With her vast experience running conversations on SEO topics, such as with the weekly #SEOFOMO Twitter chat, Aleyda skillfully guided the discussion around some of the popular E-commerce SEO issues, such as product variations and structured data, facets and navigation indexing, but also dealing with SEO implementation costs and getting buy-in from management or leadership people. I took the note-taking job this time, focusing on getting everyone’s opinion down in order to draft a few takeaways.
Since there will likely be an official Google blog post that will provide more details on each session’s conclusions, I won’t really delve into more details here.
What I can say though is that it was an excellent session. Almost everyone that joined had a story, a perspective or an opinion they wanted to share, which made for a really pleasant conversation.
After the session timer ran out, everybody was moved back to the main room to listen to all of the slot A session conclusions, where I was happy to present our own.
Slot B and Wrap Up
Since I had no session to facilitate in slot B, I happily chose to attend the Working with Images on the Web one, which was masterfully moderated by Roxana Stingu and Olesia Korobka.
The topics discussed ranged from image indexing and meta data, to AI, MUM and other cutting-edge info that I was completely unaware of up until then (seems it’s harder to keep up with everything in SEO nowadays!).
After the session ended, facilitators from all slot B sessions presented their takeaways, after which we bidded farewell to everyone and called it an evening (or morning, or night, depending on where everyone was joining from).
All in all, I’m really happy for how the event turned out and very grateful to Martin and the Google team for giving SEO enthusiasts the opportunity to facilitate sessions. If you haven’t joined any of the Unconference events so far, I highly recommend you keep an eye out for the next one. Something tells me there will be (hopefully many) more editions coming soon.
I am so happy that everyone at the #scunconf seems to have had a great time. Now I shall catch up on a lot of sleep 🤣
— Martin Splitt (@g33konaut) April 27, 2022
Forum discussion at Twitter.
Source: www.seroundtable.com
SEARCHENGINES
Google Search Bard, It’s ChatGPT Feature, To Trusted Testers

Well, we knew it was coming and here it is, Bard – Google’s answer to ChatGPT. Google is now having its trusted testers test out Bard and will soon roll it out more widely to users in Google Search and others products in the coming weeks, Google announced. It is not called Apprectice Bard but rather Bard.
I covered this when the news broke at Search Engine Land and as I pointed out, right now, Google does not have an answer for how to attribute or link to answers Bard generates – yet. But I do suspect Google will have some answer for it. I also mentioned that Google has been writing knowledge panels using AI and other methods since 2018 and said then it is not stealing. So it will be interesting to see what Google ends up doing here.
Bard is Google’s experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA, where Google can answer questions that might not have one right answer. Google said they will roll this out more widely in the coming weeks but for now, only trusted testers (who is outsourced to a third-party company) will be able to play with it.
Google said, “Soon, you’ll see AI-powered features in Search that distill complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats, so you can quickly understand the big picture and learn more from the web: whether that’s seeking out additional perspectives, like blogs from people who play both piano and guitar, or going deeper on a related topic, like steps to get started as a beginner. These new AI features will begin rolling out on Google Search soon.”
Here is a screenshot they shared of how it might look in Google Search:
This is how it might look like in Google Search (without the attribution part…).
This is the Bard direct interface, not in search:
I am super excited to see how this evolves at Google, Bing and others.
It is not too far off from the leaks of the Bing ChatGPT interface.
Here is Sundar Pichai’s tweets:
2/ Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence, and creativity of our large language models. It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses. Today we’re opening Bard up to trusted external testers. pic.twitter.com/QPy5BcERd6
— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) February 6, 2023
4/ As people turn to Google for deeper insights and understanding, AI can help us get to the heart of what they’re looking for. We’re starting with AI-powered features in Search that distill complex info into easy-to-digest formats so you can see the big picture then explore more pic.twitter.com/BxSsoTZsrp
— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) February 6, 2023
5/ Developers can soon try our Generative Language API, initially powered by LaMDA with a range of models to follow. Over time, our goal is to create a set of tools and APIs that will make it easy for others to build more innovative applications with AI.
— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) February 6, 2023
Here is some of the SEO community reaction:
Yeah you would think that making statements like “some say this” and “others say that” would be substantiated with, IDK, a link to the source. Just an idea. https://t.co/P5xvGvAv1V
— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) February 6, 2023
Bard sounds like 🤮
— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) February 6, 2023
Bard: What you get when you let AI name itself. https://t.co/todOZBbnCE
— Greg Finn (@gregfinn) February 6, 2023
Oh, bizarre. When the ChatGPT buzz began, I remarked that we’ll never get the Irish bards again with robots doing the thinking for us. How glib is Google naming this after humans who spent 7 years training to recite hundreds of poems + stories? And how weird for me to see it.
— Miriam Ellis (@Miriam_Ellis_) February 6, 2023
Attribution is a must – I hope this is not where Google is heading – this is not the way https://t.co/PRH2LSKjR7
— Mordy Oberstein 🇺🇦 (@MordyOberstein) February 6, 2023
ESPECIALLY if the AI model charges for its services.
No, you can’t have my written work to use as you see fit for your paid service.
Or even to train your models. It’s my work? My written words?
The tech moves so fast this stuff takes time to catch up, but it’s important.
— Julie F Bacchini (@NeptuneMoon) February 6, 2023
It’s a little concerning to see that the screenshots Google shared do not show websites as sources used for the AI generated answer.
This is likely because the answer is generated from “the breath of the world’s knowledge.”
Drawing from the knowledge graph perhaps? pic.twitter.com/OVwuWScnDt
— Dr. Marie Haynes🐼 (@Marie_Haynes) February 6, 2023
Content creators that monetise via page views might be the biggest losers
— @[email protected] (@davidiwanow) February 6, 2023
Feel sorry for the dude who wrote the great in-depth article on what’s the easiest to learn, the guitar or the piano!
— Matthew Marley👨🏻💻 (@matthewmarley) February 6, 2023
Why would anyone want to publish blogs after that?
What’s the point of publishing original articles ?
Google will crawl my article, learn from it , serve the solution to its customers as its own. https://t.co/wSwTld3qRJ— Fardun (@FardunRahman) February 6, 2023
In a world of AI search engine wars, the brand, unique perspective and insights & quality fact checking with references are becoming key to survive. Structured data & information have now become a commodity https://t.co/IpcRQFy56e
— Dennis Goedegebuure (@TheNextCorner) February 6, 2023
Google Bard – a rival to ChatGPT
The end of SEO websites maybe. https://t.co/ZWowpV5DUg
— Liaqat Hussain 🇵🇰 (@Edwardian842) February 6, 2023
And from now on, whenever I hear “Google Bard,” I’ll think of the OG. #LegendOfVoxMachina #Criticalrole https://t.co/PuYfJaHaAE pic.twitter.com/SCr1YWsUZO
— Ian Lurie 🇺🇦 @[email protected] (@IanLurie) February 6, 2023
Going to be a busy few months… #GoogleBard https://t.co/aEKFLlmMeF
— Will O’Hara 👨🏽💻 (@willohara) February 6, 2023
I think Bard is just an iteration of Lambda and at last year’s Google product expert summit the product manager of Google brain did a presentation of lambda and it was awesome. It was like Google maps times 10
— Molly Youngblood (@mygeigermeister) February 6, 2023
Brain buzzing with all the search news and announcements this week! SEOs cannot sleep. What a time to be alive! The future is bright 🚀
— Fabrice Canel (@facan) February 7, 2023
It’s too early to say, and your feedback can help to shape the next steps. What would you find useful and appropriate?
— johnmu is a ranking factor and so are you 🐀 (@JohnMu) February 7, 2023
Make sure to send feedback. With bigger changes like this, it’ll probably take a few iterations before things settle down.
— johnmu is a ranking factor and so are you 🐀 (@JohnMu) February 7, 2023
Also, make sure to check out the roundup at Techmeme.
Forum discussion at Twitter, WebmasterWorld.
SEARCHENGINES
Most SEOs Think Yahoo Won’t Be Able To Compete In Search

As you know, Yahoo is planning a come back to search with a new way of thinking about Yahoo Search. What that means, we don’t know yet, but we do know Yahoo is thinking hard about how they can compete. Greg Sterling ran a Twitter poll asking if Yahoo has a shot at it, and most say, nope – Yahoo Search is dead on arrival.
The poll on Twitter asked, “Yahoo is planning to “relaunch” search. Is there a chance to revive it?” It received a nice number of responses, 631 responses. The results were not too optimistic.
- 43.7% said nope, dead on arrival
- 26.6% said depends on the UI/UX
- 29.6% said yes, now is the time
Here is that poll:
Yahoo is planning to “relaunch” search. Is there a chance to revive it?
— Greg Sterling 🇺🇦 (@gsterling) January 30, 2023
Personally, I think Yahoo has a good shot at it, better than most other companies. But time will tell and I am very much looking forward to seeing what Yahoo Search comes out with.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
SEARCHENGINES
Google Clarifies JSON-LD, Microdata & RDFa Are All Supported For Structured Data

Google has clarified in its search developer documents that JSON-LD, Microdata and RDFa are all fully supported forms for structured data and Google Search. Google wrote, “all three supported formats are equally fine for Google, as long as they are valid and implemented properly per the feature’s documentation.”
The old paragraph in the documentation read:
Google Search supports structured data in the following formats, unless documented otherwise:
The new paragraph in the documentation now reads:
Google Search supports structured data in the following formats, unless documented otherwise. In general, we recommend using a format that’s easiest for you to implement and maintain (in most cases, that’s JSON-LD); all 3 formats are equally fine for Google, as long as the markup is valid and properly implemented per the feature’s documentation.
This was updated because Google’s Ryan Levering spotted the embedded tweet below, that shows there is confusion on which Google may or may not prefer. Ryan said, “We might need to tweak the wording for Google’s main structured data page.”
He said that Google “primarily recommend JSON-LD because sites screw up Microdata a lot more than they do JSON-LD because it’s embedded. We don’t have some secret plans to remove support for Microdata. Particularly for schema that is either very annotation/text heavy or very simple (so you don’t need to do meta tag gymnastics), Microdata can make more sense.”
Interesting that they are using ProfilePage markup for individual author pages. And wow, somehow it’s not in JSON-LD lol, but in microdata. ok ok 🤔 https://t.co/XKWZbzzMbL pic.twitter.com/Q0MQzG6W99
— 🐝 Olesia Korobka 💙💛🐝 (@Giridja) February 1, 2023
So Lizzi Sassman updated the docs to reflect this.
Forum discussion at Mastodon.
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