Google SEO Office Hours, 12 Apr 2023

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From YouTube: English Google SEO office-hours from April 2023

Description

This is an audio-only recording of the Google SEO office-hours from April 2023 - a transcript is available at https://goo.gle/3ZTKsQt

These sessions cover topics submitted around anything search and website-owner related like crawling, indexing, mobile sites, internationalization, duplicate content, Sitemaps, Search Console, pagination, duplicate content, multi-lingual/multi-regional sites, etc. The answers are compiled by the Google Search Relations team.

Need site-specific help? Post your question in the Google Search Central Help Community, and get answers from our Product Experts and other experienced web professionals: http://goo.gle/sc-forum

Do you have a question about Google Search or SEO? It might be a good fit for the office hours. You can submit your question for Google SEO Office Hours here: https://goo.gle/seo-oh

Chapters:
0:00 - Introduction
0:35 - Website.com/eu or a separate website per country?
1:24 - When I search for something included in my sitemap it’s not showing an indexed post, why?
2:22 - Does Google use product-specific third-party review & rating data for Rich Results?
2:53 - I have a site that is flagged in Google. How do I find out why it doesn't appear in SERPS?
3:34 - Does using a URI for a thesaurus term work for SEO?
4:12 - Failed robots.txt file is unreachable when trying to index in Search Console URL inspector tool, why?
4:48 - If I delete several old indexed HTML landing pages, should I redirect 404s to the homepage?
5:31 - How do I delete an old website from Google Search?
6:03 - Bad URLs were discovered on my site. Will it affect the way my site is crawled?
7:03 - Is using 410 for Googlebot and 200 for users OK?
7:46 - How does Google handle 308 status code compared to 301?
8:17 - How to increase indexing speed on Google Search Console?
8:37 - My website is not appearing in Google Search. What should I do?
9:17 - Why is Wifi and Wi-Fi not considered the same by Google?
9:54 - Missing structured data snippets for “ratingValue” & “reviewCount”. Bad for SEO?
10:31 - Can my site be deleted from SERP for one certain keyword?
11:24 - Why did my request in the outdated info tool get denied?
12:21 - Migrated domain to Google Domains: How long will it take to appear in Search?
12:44 - How can you optimize your recipe structured data to make it eligible for Rich Snippets?
14:19 - My site's description shows spam not from my site, why?

Check out past office hours → https://goo.gle/gsc-seo-oh
Subscribe to the Google Search Central YouTube Channel → https://goo.gle/SearchCentral

#SEO #google

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Of Google's SEO office hours in these videos, we aim to answer your questions about SEO and Google search. These questions were submitted using the form linked below over the past month. To answer them. We have folks from Google search quality team joining us today are Lizzy Gary and me John. So without further Ado, let's Dive Right In Nissa asked when expanding our website into the EU can I use website.com EU as the subdirectory with multiple hreflangs or do I need a separate website per country.

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So, yes, you can use that subdirectory, hreflang annotations are per page and you can apply multiple annotations to the same page. In your case, you could either specify the list of countries in English that apply to that page or you could just use the language en and Mark it as a generic English version and then annotate the other English versions appropriately in any case, I'd still back this up with a dynamic Banner that displays for users from the wrong country to help guide them to the best possible experience.

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Hello I'm, usually Gary from the search relations team, someone's asking when I search for something included in my sitemap. It is not showing an indexed post. It says only one page and page two, but there are approximately 200 pages on my website. What should I do first, keep in mind that Google doesn't index every single URL on the internet. It would be great if we could, but it's just not feasible But.

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To answer your question more specifically, I check if the URLs are actually accessible to googlebot, you can do this with search console, urine inspection tool if they are accessible, then remember that the URLs that Google tends to index are those that are of high quality check out our documentation on developers.google.com search. We have quite a few dogs about what we perceive as high quality content.

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Hello, it's Lizzy from search quality, Mike T is asking, does Google use product specific third-party review and rating data for Rich results: hey Mike for products? This is totally okay. The reviews just need to be visible on the page somewhere so make sure people can easily find and read the reviews about that product and make sure it's relevant to that product. Page product reviews should be about an individual product and not a category of items. Our documentation on review Snippets has more info on this, so I recommend checking that out.

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David is asking I have a site that is flagged in Google. How do I find out why it doesn't appear in serps? Gsc has nothing to report. Site is indexed but pretty much nothing ranking for anything. If a URL or a site was flagged by Google, then you would see it in search console. That's why we have the manual actions report.

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Otherwise, if our automated systems rank your URLs lower than before or doesn't rank them at all, you probably need to check out our documentation about content quality and you can find that documentation at developers.google.com search. The.

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Next question I have is: does using a URI for a thesaurus term work for SEO, so this question is specifically mentioned the nalt thesaurus, which is for the US national agricultural Library, where there are specific, Uris defined for specific items at the moment. This is not something that Google search supports. It is, however, fine to use these annotations if they're valuable to your site outside of Google. Our search developer, documentation lists the structured data which Google supports through rich results.

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Someone's asking about failed robots, txt files, which return with unreachable errors when trying to use search, console, urine, inspection tool, robots, txt, unreachable error is fairly common and it's always down to your site settings to solve it. There's nothing. Google can do about it, check your firewall settings or other network components that steer traffic and have a configurable alloy list check your CDN. Also, if you use one for blocked IPS and if it all fails check with your hosting provider. Also, you don't have to submit your robot CXC file for indexing.

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It wouldn't do pretty much anything at all.

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Pete is asking if I delete several old indexed HTML landing pages should I redirect 404s to the home page Maybe. It really depends on the content on those landing pages. Would it make sense to a user to land on the new home page instead or would it be confusing? Also, 404s are a normal part of the internet, and sometimes a 404 is the best course of action. If there's really not a good replacement for whatever was on the old landing page.

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For example, given the following scenario: there's an old landing page about purchasing aquariums, but the new home page reflects the business's new focus on high-end cat trees. 404 is probably a better approach. There.

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Nick is asking how do I delete an old website from Google search if you are moving to a new domain, please please, please redirect your old site to the new one, instead of just deleting the old site, it's pretty likely that your old site has collected some valuable signals over time, and you really don't want to throw that away. If you already redirected, it may take a few weeks, occasionally a few months to see all your old URLs replaced by the new ones in search.

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Alex asked a poorly coded ad that ran on my website has resulted in 1.2 million bad URLs being discovered by Google in just a few days. Is this a problem for me? Will it affect my site in the way that it's crawled, so the context mentions that the ad used a relative path, so a crawler would have tried to follow all of these links. Overall, our systems try to recognize and handle these kinds of incidents you're, not the first one to create a ton of irrelevant URLs accidentally, that's it.

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It can happen that this temporarily increases the overall crawling resulting in a higher load on the server until things back down again, perhaps after a few weeks depending on the situation. The fact that these URLs do not get indexed won't cause any problems for search, neither for indexing or for other URLs, nor for any quality assessment. Having a lot of unindexed URLs is fine. Wolfgang.

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Is asking, would it be okay, from Google's perspective, to provide status quo, 410 to googlebot and status code, 202 users for SEO, irrelevant URLs, which are massively crawled, or will this be considered cloaking cloaking status code specifically is generally a pretty bad idea and I would strongly advise against it. When you have multiple serving conditions, eventually, something will go wrong and your site may even fall out of search results depending what went actually wrong.

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If you need to remove something from search specifically, you can just add the no index robots, meta tag to the specific pages, it's much easier and so much safer than setting up weird serving conditions.

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Ricardo is asking: how does Google handle 308 status codes compared to 301? Well, we treat these as the same. They are both moved permanently. Googlebot treats 308 as equivalent to 301, and these codes are strong signals that the redirect should be canonical.

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Shailesh is asking indexing on Google's search console is very, very slow. There are many items that are pending for indexing: how to increase the speed for that, how much of your website Google indexes and how fast depends on how much of your site googlebot can access and the quality of the content. On your pages, the higher the quality, the more your site, Google Mighty index, if you want to learn more check out our documentation at developers.google.com search.

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Melissa asked my website is not appearing for Google searches and then Melissa mentions the URL I'm, not sure what I need to do. Help hi Melissa I took a look at the URL that you mentioned, and unfortunately it's one that we haven't ever seen at all this. It makes it really tough for us to discover and to index apart from encouraging others to mention your website. You can also add the website to search console, submit a sitemap file and submit individual Pages, for example the home page for indexing. There directly hope that helps.

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Anonymous is asking: why is Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi with a dash not considered Same by Google? This is a great question. Also fun question Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi with a dash are treated ballpark, the Same by Google, however, since people are using the tool interchangeably with surface slightly different results for the two, but always trying to closer match the user's spelling from Pure understanding perspective. However, Google does equate Wi-Fi to Wi-Fi with a dash just checked.

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Ren asks pages are missing: unstructured data, Snippets for rating value and value and property review count. This is only for pages with zero reviews. Is it hurting our SEO herein? It's not a problem. If the review count is zero, and this is actually normal for new product pages that don't have reviews just yet and therefore this property is often empty and set to zero. Initially, this just means that there's also nothing for Google to show in the rich result. If there's no rating, we just won't be able to show any Star information at all.

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Camille is asking: is there a way that my site was deleted from serp for one certain keyword? We were first and now we are absent completely, but the page is in the index. It's really uncommon that you'd completely lose rankings for just one keyword. Usually you just get outranked by someone else in search results instead, if you did indeed disappear for this one particular keyword first I would check if that's the case globally, ask some remote friends to search for that keyword and report back.

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If they do see your site, then it's just a glitch in The Matrix. If they don't, then next I would go over my past actions to see if I did anything that might have caused it have I changed my internal link, structure or page layout or acquired more links or if I use the disavow tool and so on. Each of these may have some effect on ranking, so going through them is probably going to help.

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The next question then I have here is the webmaster has made changes to an initial article. I submitted a request through the outdated info tool, but it got denied hi there. So I took a look at the page that you mentioned in the context Link in our tools, and it looks like you use the cache update tool, which also removes the snippet. That's shown. This tool is specifically meant for cases where the page continues to exist, but something specific was removed from that page. Sometimes, that's a name or a phone number.

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The tool will only accept requests where we can determine that the text was removed and where the text was still indexed. In this case, the text is no longer indexed, so there's nothing for the tool to do so. It rejected the requests. Essentially, that means you're all set.

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Anonymous is asking how long until recently migrated domain to Google domains appears on Google search. Well, it largely depends on the site itself how long it takes to show up in Google search. It can be anywhere between a few minutes and many months, and it's usually faster for higher quality sites.

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Cohen is asking: how can you optimize your recipe, structured data in order to make it eligible for Rich Snippets? Does it matter if all optional attributes are null or empty? Also, this recipe does not have a name and image for every step. Is this okay, hey Cohen, to make your site eligible for recipe? Rich results, you need to add the required properties. These are the ones that are listed in a separate table in the recipe.

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Structured data, documentation, image and name of the recipe overall are required, so you should focus on filling those two out and making sure they're not empty if the optional properties are empty, that can be okay, as these are nice to have. It just means that we might not be able to show additional enhancements for that rich result. For example, if you don't specify the cook time, then Google might not be able to show that part in the rich result. Same goes for the reviews of the recipe which is often empty until someone reviews that recipe.

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This is fine, just nothing to show until there's a review for that recipe. It's also okay, not to have the name and image for every step. First of all, this is only recommended if you're trying to optimize for recipes on the Google Assistant, which is known as guided recipes in our docs and if it makes sense to name your steps. Sometimes this doesn't make sense if the steps are already pretty short. For example, you don't really need to use the name to shorten a step.

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That's like preheat the oven to 350 to just preheat, but this could make sense if your recipe has lots of subsections and complex things.

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Anonymous is asking my site's description shows spam, not from my side. Well, unfortunately, this is usually a sign that your site was hacked. I would head to our friends over web.dev and search for their hacked topics. It's not easy, but it's certainly possible to clean up your site and secure it better.

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And that was it for this episode. I hope you found the questions and answers useful. If there's anything you submitted, which didn't get covered here, I'd recommend posting in the search Central help Community. There are lots of passionate experts active there who can help you to narrow things down and, of course, if there's more on your mind, please submit those questions with the form link below your questions. Here are useful to us and to those who catch up on these recordings. So please keep them coming.

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If you have General feedback about these episodes, let us know in the comments or ping us on social media and there's more coming out on our YouTube channel. So if you subscribe, you'll be the first to find out in the meantime, may your site's traffic go up and your crawl errors go down. Thank you and see you soon. Bye.

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