Tuesday, May 10, 2022

We organized the first Search Central Virtual Unconference Japan on April 5, 2022 to facilitate a discussion and networking platform for the SEO, Search and publisher community, in Japanese. This is part of the global Search Central Virtual Unconference event series.
The event was lively, with more than 100 participants of different backgrounds and professions managing websites of different types and sizes. We were happy to see many ideas exchanged, experience shared, and feedback provided.
There were 9 discussion sessions orchestrated by about 15 facilitators! And here are some of the things we learned from these sessions (ordered by event schedule):
- Traffic drop case studies: It’s cool to see participants sharing their insights about traffic fluctuation experience. Many factors can cause this, and participants shared their tips to manage it. Noticeable themes revolve around creating an environment for open and constant communication between internal stakeholders, focusing on users and the business main objectives beyond just SEO, and balancing between deeply understanding technical details versus analyzing things from a larger view or from other perspectives.
- Page experience and Core Web Vitals feedback: There were many feedback submissions and product requests, such as a PageSpeed Insights API and Search Console URL grouping. We passed them on to the relevant teams. We also heard many interesting insights, such as image optimization difficulties and other tools people use to measure page experience on top of Search Console.
- Webspam and Search quality feedback: We passed on regional query feedback to the Search Quality team. We learned that among others, hack pages are still a prominent issue that participants come across. There is also an opportunity for us to align expectations on what is considered as webspam.
- AdSense Policy feedback: We collected feedback and insights for the AdSense policy team, such as increasing awareness about Confirmed Click and invalid traffic.
- Search Experience Optimization: The term "Search experience optimization" could mean different things for different people. There were many tips and techniques shared, such as analyzing users’ intent, focusing on users that match business’ objectives, using data to back