Learn how to remove potentially illegal or unauthorized content on Google. Google talks about how to go over the process and tools for requesting content to be removed from Search and other Google products for legal reasons, like copyright infringement or infringement of your country’s laws.

Legal Helpcenter → https://g.co/legal

Google Transparency report → https://g.co/legal/transparency

Rachel Anderson and Jamie Indigo talks about how to test your performance using Lighthouse, what metrics comprise Lighthouse’s Performance score, and what those metrics mean.

One common cause of layout shift is surprisingly difficult to resolve though: flashes of unstyled text (FOUT). In this post Simon Hearne will explore the surprisingly complex world of text rendering on the web and some techniques to remove FOUT while not incurring a CLS penalty.

In the mobile Google Maps app, we are seeing a new Google Review Summary technique that shows review snippets summaries based on the most common Places Topics. The new display in the Google Maps mobile app for both Android and iPhone now shows Review Summaries based on the Place Topics. Topics with the highest frequency seem to drive the review snippet choice and link out to the corpus of reviews containing the phrase. The change is not yet visible on the desktop version of Google Maps.

Another interesting change is the new 3rd party review summary cards that are now being shown on the mobile browser brand search results. Google is including these summary cards for 3rd party sites above the Google Review Summaries.

Google has reached an agreement with an association of French publishers over how it will be pay for reuse of snippets of their content. This is a result of application of a ‘neighbouring right’ for news which was transposed into national law following a pan-EU copyright reform agreed back in 2019.

The tech giant had sought to evade paying French publishers for reuse of snippets of content in its news aggregation and search products by no longer displaying them in the country.

But in April last year the French competition watchdog (FCA) quashed its attempt to avoid payments, using an urgent procedure known as interim measures — deeming Google’s unilateral withdrawal of snippets to be unfair and damaging to the press sector, and likely to constitute an abuse of a dominant market position.

Google has not confirmed how much money will be distributed to publishers in France solely under the agreed framework over content reuse which is directly linked to the neighbouring right.

This article looks at some of the changes made on SmashingMag — running on JAMStack with React — to optimize the web performance and improve the Core Web Vitals metrics.

Google has threatened to remove its search engine from Australia if a code forcing the company to negotiate payments to news media companies goes ahead, saying the proposal sets a “dangerous precedent”.

Last week it was revealed Google was testing removing news sites, including Guardian Australia, from search results for about 1% of its Australian users as the company continued to push against a code that would force it to negotiate with news outlets to pay for linking to news articles in search results.

But on Friday Google said it was prepared to go much further, and pull the entire search function from Australia.

Update 22/01/2021:

Our PM responded “..we don’t respond to threats”

Google responds “It’s not a threat. It’s a reality“

SEOTesting.com has launched a new feature where you can look up Google Search Console URLs and queries data by week and month.