 Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Google Search News series. I hope life is treating you reasonably well wherever you are. I'm your host today, John Mueller, here from home again in reasonably sunny Switzerland. With this show, we want to give you a regular summary of what's been happening around Google Search, specifically for webmasters, publishers, and SEOs. If you find these useful, which I hope you do, and if you'd like to stay up to date, make sure to subscribe to the channel. It's been a bit since our last update. It turns out that times like these can be pretty challenging. So regardless of where you are, and of how the situation is in your region, I hope that you, your family, friends, and co-workers are all doing well. And now, without further ado, let's move on to the recent Google Search News. Today, we'll take a look at web stories, an upcoming ranking factor, structured data updates, and more. Keep playing the video. Let's check it out. Let's start with web stories, an exciting and somewhat new approach to content on the web. The web stories format is a neat way to create high-quality, bite-sized, informational content directly on your own website. It's easy for users to view them and to move on to your website. Like other parts of your website, they're under your control. You can monetize them, and they can show up in search. The format is built on AMP, so they're normal HTML pages too. While web stories themselves aren't new, they're now actively showing in more and more places like Google Search, Google Images, and Discover. If you use WordPress, you'll be happy to hear there's a plugin in development which makes it easier to create these directly in your own CMS. The plugin has just been launched as an early beta test. It's still a bit rough. But it's a fantastic way to give stories an early spin. I've added the links in the description if you're curious to find out more. I find it fascinating to see this new take on public web content, and I'm sure we'll have more updates on this topic in the future. Last episode, we talked about the core web vitals, a set of foundational metrics for website developers to help build and improve online user experience. Now, we've announced that they will be a part of the page experience benchmark, a future Google Search ranking factor. The page experience benchmark uses the core web vitals, in other words, metrics for speed, interactivity, and stability. It also uses other search signals such as mobile friendliness, HTTPS security, and the intrusive interstitial guidelines to provide a holistic picture. We've now updated various popular developer tools, like Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights, to show these metrics, making it easier to spot and improve web pages. The thresholds we use for the page experience benchmark are based on high-quality user experience and verified to be achievable with data from the Chrome User Experience Report. It's not yet decided when we'll start using these elements as a ranking factor, but we'll let you know at least six months before we start using them in search. If you want to check your site's performance already, an overview graph is waiting for you in Google Search Console, so check that out. For structured data, we recently announced some new reports and testable elements, as well as that we're deprecating one of the two testing tools. Google currently maintains two testing tools for structured data. One is a general tool that shows information about all structured data. We call it the Structured Data Testing Tool. The other is specifically to diagnose issues about what we show in the search results, which is called the Rich Results Test. In the past, these differences have led to confusion, as there are many ways to implement structured data without it being shown in search. As people usually come to our testing tools to improve in Google Search, we decided to focus on the Rich Results Test. So we're planning to deprecate the General Structured Data Testing Tool. Since structured data has been used on the web for many years now, there are also general third-party testing tools available, which can help folks who want a more general test. And as always, we continue to listen to feedback from our users and use that feedback as input for our future plans. So if there's something you'd like to see added to the Rich Results Test, please let us know. In more structured data news, we're now showing special announcements, licenseable images, and AMP article markup in the Rich Results Test. And in Search Console, we've added reports for recipe and guided recipe markup, too. We talked about mobile-first indexing last time. An update there is that we recently announced a change in the timeline, extending it to the end of March 2021. This will give websites a bit more time should they need to adjust parts of their pages for mobile-first indexing. Together with that, we published a number of best practices to watch out for. The link to that is in the description below. In our search documentation, we've expanded the guides for JavaScript sites, adding information about links, the history API, URL fragments, and 404 pages. If you make JavaScript-based sites, it's worth checking that out. But wait, there's more. While we've been working from home for some time, we're still publishing a number of videos that we recorded from before social distancing became common. For example, there are some cool episodes of SEO myth-busting with fantastic guests being published, such as recent ones about crawl budget and page speed. Additionally, we've continued to expand our Search Off the Record podcast, where we talk a bit more about what happens behind the scenes at Google. And since we're no longer going to physical events, feel free to come and visit us virtually, either in our regular SEO office hours or at a number of virtual events run by third parties. No mask is required for virtual events. There's always more happening around Search than we can cover here. If you'd like to stay up to date, subscribe to this channel, check our blog, and follow us on Twitter. And that's all for now, folks. I hope things are well for you and your family, regardless of where you are. Thank you for joining us here, and I look forward to seeing you all again in one of the future episodes of Google Search News. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to add them right here or to reach out to us on Twitter. And now, on to the weather. I know, I know, what good is a weather report if you can't go outside? Well, hopefully that's not the case where you are, and it's nice to be able to escape outside from time to time. At any rate, I hope the information in this video and the other insights that we publish help you to make fantastic websites which shine regardless of the current SEO weather. See you next time.