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Google’s John Mueller has confirmed that Google Web Stories may roll out in countries if websites in those countries start using it. The topic was discussed in the Google Search Central Live stream on 15th January. John was particularly focussing on web stories, but he also said it is the same for other search features.
A publisher asked Mueller for information on whether the Google Web Stories can be seen in other countries search results. Currently, web Stories in search results are supported in India, USA and Brazil.
Publishers in other countries want their site to be prepared if such features roll out for their countries. However, Mueller encouraged the site owner to implement the changes on their site for web stories even if it is not supported in their country.
He also mentioned that if more domains from a specific country start using the features, Google may look into rolling out support for such features.
Site Owners’ Influence on Google Searches
Google currently supports a few structured data types in the US, whereas the support is still not rolled out for other countries. One of such structured data is Home activities Markup which is supported in the US only.
When many publishers from certain countries start using unsupported markups, Google may notice it and take it as a signal for the feature’s rollout in that country. In simple words, a webmaster can influence Google search features.
Mueller’s Said
“With regards to us turning on individual features in individual countries, sometimes that’s a matter of working out the policies and working out the technical details.
Sometimes it’s also a matter of us being able to look into the data from the country and say: “Oh, lots of people are already implementing this structured data, maybe we should just turn it on.”
So in that regard if you’re tempted to try something like this out I would say go for it even if you’re not seeing all of the advantages yet.”
Mullers said that pertaining to web stories; there isn’t much difference between web stories and web pages with respect to how they are crawled and indexed. Google crawls and indexes them as regular web pages. However, the search results may appear different in countries where support is already present compared to countries where it is not supported yet.
Any publisher from any country can create web stories. It will be crawled as regular pages, but results displayed will not be as Rich as shown in the US.
Below is the snapshot of how web stories look in the US on Google Search and Google Discover.
So, Webmasters and Publishers should start using the markup or features on their website, even if it is not supported yet.
