Google announced today that it is bringing free listings to the Shopping tab in the United States before the end of April and will expand globally by the end of the year. Previously, merchants were required to pay for ad placement and product listings, which led to major online retailers dominating the Shopping tab. “Beginning…
Last week at the AMP Contributor Summit 2019 in New York City, the AMP project announced that it will be joining the OpenJS Foundation incubation program. OpenJS was formed by a recent merger between the JS Foundation and the Node.js Foundation. AMP will join webpack, jQuery, Mocha, Node.js, ESLint, Grunt, and other open source projects…
Google recently announced a new Breadcrumbs report available in the Search Console to inform site owners about markup issues. In 2015, Google introduced support for schema.org structured data, including the breadcrumbs URL structure, in order better present URLs in search results. The Search Console’s new report uses this data to help site owners fix any…
This week Google announced changes to the 15-year old nofollow attribute that was previously recommended for identifying links related to advertising, sponsors, or content for which users are not intending to pass along ranking credit. The nofollow attribute is no longer a catchall for these types of instances, as Google has introduced two new rel…
The most recent release of Chrome (76) added a new “loading” attribute that supports native lazy loading in the browser. An implementation for WordPress core is still under discussion. In the meantime, plugins that enable this for WordPress sites are starting to pop up, and Google has just released one of its own. Native Lazyload…
Website owners have been excluding web crawlers using the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) on robots.txt files for 25 years. More than 500 million websites use robots.txt files to talk to bots, according to Google’s data. Up until now, there has never been an official Internet standard, no documented specification for writing the rules correctly according…
Google released version 1.2 of its official AMP plugin for WordPress ahead of WordCamp Europe in Berlin. This release introduces a new AMP Stories editor that is powered by Gutenberg. AMP Stories are separate from the capabilities that enable AMP for the rest of the website, and they can be used together or independently. The…
Google’s rich results testing tool has been updated to include a selector for desktop or mobile so website owners can check their results on both platforms. This tool shows if pages are properly structured for display in Google’s carousels, images, breadcrumbs, events, books, and other types of rich snippets. A glossary is available with images…
Google is enabling mobile-first indexing (crawling sites with a mobile user-agent) by default for new domains as of July 1, 2019. These are sites Google defines as “previously unknown to Google Search.” Mobile searches are the primary way that users engage with the search engine for the past few years, which caused Google to begin…
Google is rolling out an update to mobile search results that includes website branding. The new design displays a website’s name and icon at the top of the listing so users can easily scan results. If the result is an ad, it will be indicated in bold next to the website’s address. Below is a…
Google is launching a new program called Season of Docs with the goal of fostering collaboration between technical writers and open source projects. The initiative is very similar to Google Summer of Code, except it is focused on documentation and technical writing contributions instead. Prospective participants can apply during the month of April 2019. Google…
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I discuss a thought-provoking post published by Morten Rand-Hendriksen that takes a deep look at equity in open source software. Morten suggests that the mantra of decisions are made by those who show up be changed to decisions are made by those who can afford to show up.…
WordPress.com has announced plans to create a new, open source publishing platform that caters to small and medium-sized news organizations. The Google News Initiative has contributed $1.2 million towards the development of “Newspack” on top of WordPress.com’s infrastructure. Automattic and Google have joined with other contributing partners from the broader world of journalism for a…
Google has launched a new educational site at opensource.dev that offers a succinct and approachable introduction to open source software and licensing. WordPress is cited as one of the more well-known examples in the opening paragraphs: It’s in your phone, your car, your TV, and your wifi-connected light bulbs. Open source components enable engineers to…
Alberto Medina and Weston Ruter gave a presentation on Progressive Content Management Systems yesterday at Chrome Dev Summit 2018 in San Francisco. Medina is a developer advocate at Google and Ruter recently transitioned into a new role as a Developer Programs Engineer after eight years at XWP. Medina began the session with a quick overview…