Google SEO Office Hours, 14 May 2021

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From YouTube: English Google SEO office-hours from May 14, 2021

Description

This is a recording of the Google SEO office-hours hangout from May 14, 2021. These sessions are open to anything webmaster related like crawling, indexing, mobile sites, internationalization, duplicate content, Sitemaps, Search Console, pagination, duplicate content, multi-lingual/multi-regional sites, etc.

Find out more at https://goo.gle/seo-oh-en

Feel free to join us - we welcome webmasters of all levels!

A

All right welcome everyone to today's google search central seo office hours hangout. My name is john mueller. I'm a search advocate at google here in switzerland and part of what we do are these office hours, where people can jump in and ask their questions around their website and web search.

A

As always, a bunch of things were submitted on on youtube. We can go through some of those, but it looks like people are already raising their hands to get started. So I guess we can get started with you all uh to start us off. um Let's see uh sun kun, I think, is the first one.

A

Oh, we can't hear.

A

A

Oh no, something.

A

Doesn't seem to be working okay,.

A

Okay, um uh otherwise like see, if you can get it working again, I I think I heard you before so uh it must be close, um but we we can go back to you as soon as you're ready, no problem all right, uh mohawk.

B

uh Hey john, how are you hi uh so uh I'd come to your office hours about uh a month and a half back, and you gave a really good advice salient, as always where you asked me to cut down on the number of pages and focus on value and unique content uh and not on scale. So ever since then we cut down drastically a number of pages.

B

Well, we went from like 500 000 to five pages, uh and now those pages are buffered with a lot of useful tools and they have 100 conversion rates from those pages to app downloads, which is phenomenal.

B

But what we've been struggling with is that even with all that engagement and I just posted a link on the chat as well. Those pages always rank at number, seven and number eight pages, and what I'm concerned is that, because no one ever goes to google page, seven or eight. How will google ever get the signal that those pages are more engaging and better at answering user intent than pages that always rank first, and so I don't actually see a clear path to ranking higher on google, even with creating really high engaging pages.

A

Okay, so I I'd have to take a look at your pages to see, if there's something specific, uh that I can help with there, but in in general this is a the kind of process it. It takes quite a lot of time to to see things kind of change in that regard, and that's less a matter of like google seeing signals that people on page six find this a great result, but more a matter of us recognizing that across the web.

A

This is actually something that is relevant and that we should be showing more visibly in search results, and I, I think, concentrating your your pages on fewer or your site on fewer pages makes a lot of sense and helps to make it so that you don't have to collect signals for each of these individual pages. But rather it's like everything is nicely concentrated there, but that's still something that I would assume would would still take quite a bit longer. So I again- I I don't know your website.

A

I don't know exactly what all you're doing there, but my guess is if you're making a change going from several thousand to a handful of pages, then that's something that would take a couple of months, at least for for things to settle down. Maybe I don't know up to a half a year, uh something along that line, and that's just with kind of google waiting to see where things are settling down.

A

But in the meantime, you can still do things to help promote your website to work on things to make things that that are interesting for people to link at make it easy for people to link at them to bring people to your website so that they understand that your website exists, so that they in turn, can also link to your website.

B

All right, thank you and then one more question separately.

B

uh We also noticed that uh you know we're a visa tech company, so we noticed that a lot of people search for embassies and foreign embassies near them, uh but a lot of the pages right now directories are uh stuffed with keywords and actually hold valuable information right at the end. So we created better pages where we answer the user intent directly and our objective is that users get to those pages and leave those pages immediately.

B

So you know they find the phone number or the address, but on the search master forum, uh people perceive those pages as thin, because uh you know they have very little content. There's just like phone number map address and we haven't stuffed them with a lot of content, and is it necessary to stuff pages with content so that they rank higher or all that matters is entering user objective and intent.

A

You you don't need to stuff the pages with content, but I I do think like again, I don't know those particular pages, but I do think with this kind of content you have to watch out for it you just like not just providing commodity information. So if you're talking about things like addresses and phone numbers like that information is available on so many different sites, uh that's maybe even directly available directly in google.

A

My business- I I don't know, but that's something where essentially the the information that you have there is, is the same that everyone else has because it's it's like a fact right, and because of that, you need to find a way to provide significantly more value to users than just the facts that everyone else knows. So that's something where it's like. Maybe you can build out those pages.

A

Maybe there are other parts of your website that you need to build out to make those pages uh less critical for your website, uh but uh you kind of need to watch out for that situation, where the the information that you're providing is essentially exactly the same as everyone else has and then from a google's point of view, it's like well, we can point at any of these sites, and users will be happy, so you kind of have to make something that goes beyond just that.

B

Understood, that's really helpful. Thank you, john sure.

A

um Let me see who's next max hi john.

C

Hi, um I see a discrepancy between the cool web vitals report and the page experience report the google search console. So, for example, if I look at the core web vitals report, we've got 4 000 urls that have been listed as good. However, if I look in the page experience report, we have zero urls. This is a good now. If I look, um if I look at the buckets, so a url is a good url. It says the url has a good status in the core web vitals report. The url has no mobile issues.

C

According to the mobile usability report, the site has no security issues. uh The url is served over https and there is no ad experience issues now. All of these points um are ticked. It. It passes all these points. So how can there be four thousand good urls in core website tools but zero in page experience? Surely should that number not be the same if it if they all pass.

A

um I don't know offhand why why there might be a difference there? It like there might be something with regards to timing. There might be something with regards to kind of the grouping of these pages.

A

um One thing I would do there is check in page speed, experience directly and see if you also have field data there, so in in the page, speed insights tool you you can test individual pages and it'll show you the the lab scores, but it also shows you, if there's field data for those pages available, and that can give you a little a bit of a sense of. Is there actually information that google would have available to show in the uh page experience report.

C

Yeah, so if I click uh into an individual url in the core web vitals report, the ones that are listed as good- and you get the list of examples and if I click into that and give it more information, um it says I think that there's not enough real world data for this page. Okay, there's a little, I think, there's an icon. It says not enough real world data, but doesn't there have to be real-world data for these pages to appear as passed in co-work fightings.

C

A

I don't know why you would see that different.

C

Yeah I have made a um a forum or post in the google help forum and it has.

D

C

Bit more explanation, but it hasn't really had an official reply, so perhaps I could share that with you and you could look in to a bit more detail if you wanted to. It has a bit more of an explanation. There.

A

Okay, if you can send me the forum link, I I'd be happy to pass that on to to someone from the team. You can take a look.

A

Okay, thank you sure, and one one situation where I could imagine that happening is uh if we used to have like field data for a set of urls on your site and for some reason we don't have that much field data anymore for the site, then we might know the urls, but we don't actually have data for the urls, um but I I don't know how how you would check for that uh offhand. So I am happy to pass that on to someone from the the core web vitals team.

E

John, you, you, don't you don't group urls by type, do you because we've noticed something similar that category pages or they also don't have enough chrome views in order to give perfect data.

E

But we get messages saying these are similar pages. That.

A

Yeah we we do that we do that with the the chrome user experience report, data the the field real world data, essentially um where we try to recognize when, when they're pages that are similar enough, uh that we could group them together right and then that could be some. I I don't know how that would look in practice. It could be something where all of your category pages are in one group we say well, these pages perform.

A

Similarly, so if we find a new url that is also part of this group, we don't have to have data for that new url. We can rely on the data for the group overall.

E

Okay, so I'll throw that in there.

A

Yeah- and I think that sometimes throws things off a little bit in sense of we might have one group essentially for a site, but that could contain thousands of urls. uh So in the report in search console, I think we would report that, as like thousands of urls have this problem.

C

A

And then we just show that one one part of the group essentially but like not seeing any data at all in one report and seeing a lot of data in the other report. That feels kind of weird all right.

A

F

Hi john sir hi, uh sir, I had attended your last officer session and that I had raised a question regarding the about the full content and.

G

F

Sorry, I didn't catch it, sorry about the full content, duplicate content, okay, content above the folder.

A

Above the fold, okay, yes,.

F

So recently, one of our main keyword have been drank and the changes that we did on our page was like. We had some content banner image and we have just removed that content and no changes apart from that. So that might be the reason we have been deranked.

A

I I think, if you make that kind of design change on on your website, where suddenly the content moves up or suddenly the content moves down, you would generally see that as a fairly soft change like a very small change. So if you're saying that your whole website is essentially no longer as visible in search anymore, no no.

F

A

F

Initially, we were at first position now we have moved to second after that change.

A

Yeah, I I don't think you would be able to kind of uh tie it back to to that change. That feels that feels like a fairly.

A

I don't know almost like a subtle, normal change in search that that can always happen, that a site moves from position, one to position two or precision three and then to position two and then position one like these. These kind of changes are fairly common.

F

Thank you, sir sir. One more question sure in local seo does snap details play a very vital role.

A

I have no idea about local seo. Like do you mean google, my business essentially.

F

Yes, yes, like, if I have a keyword like support digital marketing course melbourne and have a location with that. So in that case I have a institute in melbourne, so the nav details like play a very vital role as far as directory submission and other submissions are concerned,.

A

I I don't know how how google my business would handle that it. It feels like it would matter, but I, I honestly don't know.

F

Thank you, sir.

A

um Akash, I think hi so hi.

D

Hi uh so let's say we are ranking, for you know hundreds of thousands of keywords right and if, if we like, create some more few pages, so is there something like you know uh that value that we have generated from the thousands and hundreds of pages that we have already built and getting ranked for them hasn't been like passed on to some of those pages, and that can also help you know in order to uh rank again right from scratch.

D

There could be some seo value, which is like uh collective, like through a time of like six months or one year or ten years, and then it's been again then passed on to those pages where we can rank those pages. uh You know much easier rather than working again and hard and hard is something like an seo value being shared across your website or the pages that are getting ranked.

A

um So so, if, if I understand your your question correctly is it's essentially is: is there value in having a long-term presence in search like in being visible for the for the long term, in search.

D

Yes and then those things are like you know, pass on for other some new pages that we have created you know and then getting the rank because few things that I've noticed we have been ranking for hundreds and thousands of keywords.

D

uh We have uh done the best content currently and that the reason we are ranking so uh seems like. There are few pages which I just uh I think you know, got a live 15 10 days uh before and they just started getting lagging. So my assumption would be like there's something like you know, seo value of perception. You know that google has about our domain or website. I don't know if they produce some good content or better content, and that can help. You know for other videos to get right much better.

A

Okay, so I mean if, if you build out a website and it becomes successful- and it does well in search then obviously new pages that you create, which are linked from within your existing website. We, we understand a little bit more about those already. So that's something that in general is is always a good thing, which is also one of the reasons why I recommend, focusing on making one really strong website, rather than a lot of individual small ones, so uh essentially like building out a big and strong website.

A

I think that always kind of makes sense, but like whether there is an inherent value or kind of like domain authority or something like that associated with the domain. I I don't think I'd say that, but it's it's essentially you're building something strong. It has a good reputation. uh People like it search engines like it. So when you add new content, they assume that it's similar to to the old content, which kind of makes sense.

D

Right so I think so that kind of uh my website or my you know thing- has created some values on the internet. You know on this earth, and that is something like the impossible. Even the same thing right.

A

I'm honestly not quite sure what what exactly you're asking, because it sounds like you already have a big website and it's working well. So I'm not like I'm not quite sure what what what you would do differently or what uh what kind of help you're looking for.

A

So no, no, it isn't, but.

D

Thank you so much sure.

A

Okay, um all right uh clint.

G

Hi john, um my question is around or is focused on an e-commerce website, so we're making several changes to layout, ux, etc, so essentially moving with the times from adaptive to responsive design, um and you know focused on mobile parity, etc. One of the pages in particular that'll, be changing. Quite a bit is a key um category page so on the desktop experience. Currently, it's very much informational, whereas on the mobile experience, currently it's more focused on just the sub categories, etc, etc.

G

The mobile accordions and menu items so, given the fact we're already being crawled predominantly with the mobile crawler, um and it's a relatively small change, that's happening on the mobile experience. It's actually going to be better because it's essentially going to be turning into a product listing page. Should we be concerned about ranking changes and impact.

G

Given that scenario or given the fact that it's on mobile we're already being called with the mobile site, it is the thinner content of the two experiences greatly so that, at the end of the day, it's actually going to be better. And we shouldn't really worry with the fact that, yes, we've got a ton of content on the desktop sites and that's going to be moved over to another page.

A

Now I I think I think that sounds like you're on the right path uh in in terms of uh like the migration, from kind of more thinner category pages to more informational category pages. I I think that kind of makes sense. One way you can double check which page google is indexing is to look at the cached version of the url.

A

uh So if you take one of the the category pages and you look at the cache version in google, you should be able to see is: is it the mobile version or the desktop version, especially if you say that there's content differences at the moment and based on that you can kind of judge a little bit better?

A

Is it going to be transition from the desktop version to a better mobile version, or will it be transition from kind of the thinner mobile version to a better mobile version, and that should give you a little bit of a sense of? Is this going to be more of a positive change or more of a negative change.

G

Okay gotcha. Thank you sure.

A

um Bilal, hey john hi.

H

So there's a website. You know um I probably asked in february that is taking actually longer to index and the current situation is. I have 170 pages valid pages and search console, but when I check it through site column it it just says um three for sometime five pages, so that has been happening from three to four months. Now, I'm not sure what the correct way to go from from now on. It's it's actually an e-commerce website, and it has about. I mean less than 500 product pages, so yeah.

A

um Now so in general, I would not worry about the difference between uh what a site colon query shows and what search console shows uh in in practice. The site, colon query is not meant to be used for diagnostics purposes, so sometimes you do see quite different numbers and for some sites you see much lower numbers for other sites. You see like 100 times, larger numbers and uh essentially the the numbers we show in the site.

A

Query result are optimized for speed and to give kind of a sense of the website, but they're not optimized, to be comprehensive. So that's where the search console numbers would come in.

A

um I I think in in general, if you're talking about a site that is about like 500 pages or so and after a period of several months, it's only like 100 or indexed. uh That seems like something where probably you could do a lot better with minimal extra effort, uh so that could be something where what I would first of all check is just the technical side of things to make sure that technically everything is okay, that the website can be crawled.

A

There's some website crawling tools available. I think they're even free for very small websites, where you can check your site to see if it's crawlable or not, and if it's well crawlable then the the next thing I would consider trying to figure out is what you can do to promote your website a little bit better, and that could be something like like encouraging users to come to visit, maybe by by buying ads, maybe by working together with someone else for a while, just to kind of get the ball rolling.

A

It could also be if you're, an e-commerce site or especially, if you're, a small business local business site. Maybe there are like local chambers of commerce that would be interested in linking to your website to give you like a little bit of extra information so that when our systems look at your website, they say. Oh, this is actually a legitimate small business. We should try to index everything because, especially if you're talking about a smaller website, with like a couple hundred pages, that feels like something where we like.

A

If we have a little bit of a hint, then we'll go off and get all of that. uh If you're talking about an e-commerce site that has 500 000 pages, then obviously like, if, if we get all of those pages or not, it's like that's like that's a totally different story, but with 500 pages it feels like something that that our systems with a little bit of extra incentive to say like we should at least check it out. We should be able to get a significant part of those indexed.

H

All right so another thing uh which was happening to this website. It has a few of hundreds of errors in search console uh that was due to setting no index meta tax or january.

H

Then what I did, I just you know, removed the no index from the product pages and there are a few uh unwanted pages still that we want to know index and we kept it known next to those pages, and now, when I start validation, you know it keeps on failing because few of the pages that is at the top of the report, those are no indexed and the bottom of the pages. The product pages all are.

H

When I checked it through a live test, it just you know, validate and available for google crawl, but still it you know, shows, under the error section very long.

A

Now I I think the the transition from no index to getting content index. That could be a reason why things take a little bit longer, but the the validation tool in search console is not something that I would say would be holding you back. It's more a matter of. We use that tool as a way of like giving you extra information.

A

So uh just because the the validation fails for that and uh like the other urls are okay. I I don't think that would be holding your website's indexing back. It's more search console is a little bit confused because you said you fixed the issue, but you didn't really fix the issue, and then we don't know like what we should show you as an error, because we we want to help you to fix these issues if there are issues.

A

But if you're, saying like some of these are no index on by design, then like search console will be a bit confused for a while, but that that's fine.

H

All right so I'll take the traffic. Basically, this site has a social media presence earlier. It has a good presence and good following out there. Then they launched the website. So we are getting good traffic already on the website, but yeah the website is not. You know as playing a trick since last january, so yeah I'll double check the things yeah, but any advice would be helpful.

A

Yeah, I I do think like, like switching from no index to index that can make things, take a little bit longer and get a little bit confusing, but, like it's been a couple of months now, so it feels like that should be slowly settling down.

A

I, I would still try to see what you can do to kind of actively promote your website a little bit better, especially if you have a strong social media presence. Maybe there are things you can do with your users there to to kind of encourage them to to promote the website for you as well, because I feel like especially a smaller website with a couple hundred pages. It doesn't take a lot for us to say. Oh it's like we.

A

We can spend a little bit more time here to index more of this content uh with really large websites with very competitive websites, that's kind of like a different story, but with small websites, small e-commerce shops. I I think we we should be able to pick that up a little bit better.

A

Just sometimes it just takes a little bit more all right. Thank you. So much sure uh vinyas.

I

Hey john, uh we recently, you know had this situation where we were ranking in first position for a particular keyword, uh but when we started running ads for the same keyword, you know our organic page just didn't appear in not even in 100 results.

I

So right after we stopped running ads, the keyword is keyword is back to number one position. So you know, I know this. uh Google ads shouldn't affect your organic results, but uh I'm curious to know whether or if there is any other particular reason for this to happen.

A

I don't know why why that would happen like that, but it would not be related to the ads. uh So that's that's something where these systems are completely separate. On our side, uh the the ranking within the ads, the ranking within search, are completely separate systems and there's essentially no no real connection there, um and I I get this question sometimes like like in this way. If I run ads, then my website disappears from search, but I also get the same question and the other way it's like.

A

If, if people run ads, then suddenly their website ranks higher in search because they're paying for something and from our point of view, it's like we, we work really hard to differentiate, ads and search uh so much so that, even when, when like large advertisers go to their their ad manager or account manager- and they have like this small search question like we- we push back on that. We don't give any answers at all uh when when it comes to questions from clients or partners, so that's something where I would.

A

I would definitely not expect any kind of uh ranking change, especially something as as visible as that, because that I I think that would also be something that lots of other sites would see and would be kind of a bit. I don't know super obvious, uh so the the ranking change that you see you saw there seems like something that would be totally unrelated to to the ads.

A

Well, okay, john. Thank you. So much sure. um Let me go through some of the submitted questions and then I'll get back to more of the live questions as well.

A

um Let me just see refresh the page here: uh will no indexing a page that already had external links, remove the ranking benefit that the website was getting from those links, uh assuming that the linking pages are indexed um pretty much yes.

A

So from our point of view, links uh are tracked between two canonical urls, uh in other words one url links to another url, and we kind of have that connection there. We have some understanding of kind of what what is happening between those two urls and if one of those urls becomes non-canonical, if it becomes non-indexed, if it drops from our systems, then essentially that link disappears, and that could be if one of these pages turns into a 404 if it gets a no index.

A

All of these things are reasons for us to to kind of say. Well, this page no longer exists. Therefore, the links that used to go to this page are no longer relevant and from a kind of like taking a step back uh it. It kind of makes sense, because someone is recommending something very specific on a website and that something very specific doesn't exist anymore. Then they're not not recommending anything anymore because it's it doesn't exist anymore.

A

On the other hand, if they're recommending the the whole website overall and pointing at the home page, then obviously that's something that remains valid. As long as your homepage continues to exist, um does the faq still work?

A

I assume this means the the faq structured data and from what I know that continues to exist and continues to work. um What what usually tends to happen with some of these structured data types or rich results types is that over time we try to fine-tune how often we show them uh just to make sure that we're not overloading the search results with all of these. I don't know bling and extra functionality that just confuses people in the end.

A

So what what often happens is when we start a new type of rich result. People will kind of reluctantly try it out and then, if it works well, then everyone tries it out and then suddenly, the search results page is totally overloaded with this type of structured data, and then our systems and our engineers work to kind of fine-tune that a little bit so that we continue to use that structured data.

A

We just don't show it for all sites, all the time which kind of makes sense similar to how we tune the snippets that we show for websites and tune the rankings and tune the search results overall.

A

uh So that's something where, from at least as far as I know, I I don't think we've turned off any of the faq rich results types and then the second question here is the h1 is already on my post title: can I still use it inside the post? So I I assume it's like a text in the h1 and in the title, not not the h1 tag itself, because I don't think you can put an h1 tag in your title.

A

um From from my point of view, sure you can. You can definitely do that. uh So the the title of the page and the headings on a page. They give us a little bit more context about what this page is about, and you can use that functionality to to give us context and users expect a bit of context as well, and sometimes it's the same text on on both of those places. In particular, the title of a page is not extremely visible on mobile.

A

So it's something where, if you want to give some context for the page overall, then don't just show it in the title of the page, but also show it visibly on the page itself and using a heading like an h1 or an h2 or whatever that's something that you can definitely use for that.

A

uh So just because, like a bunch of keywords are in the title doesn't mean you can't use those keywords elsewhere on the page uh can signed exchanges significantly improve core web vitals in particular lcp. Even if lcp is more than six seconds, so I know a little bit about signed exchanges, but I don't know all of the details.

A

From from what I know signed. Exchanges are a way that we can kind of prefetch content from your website and serve that to users ahead of time so that they essentially have a part of your pages already loaded in the browser's memory when they go and click on your search result and by by doing that. Essentially it it significantly can improve the speed of your pages, because it doesn't require that much back and forth with this with the server itself.

A

When someone actually clicks on a search result and it starts kind of displaying in in their browser, so, for example, if the the html content is already pre-loaded that helps us a bit if the css and javascript files are pre-loaded that can significantly speed things up.

A

If you have things like bigger images on the page and they can be pre-loaded, that also helps us a little bit there, and this is something that I think is super hard to measure, because you tend to measure a single url, not the transition of going to a search results, page searching kind of in the background, it pre-fetches everything and then clicking on a result and then seeing the pre-fetched result.

A

That's super hard to measure with tools like page speed, insights, but with signed exchanges. That's something I I think we're headed more and more in that direction.

A

uh It is also something that I think we we had in similar ways uh without kind of the the privacy preserving nature of signed exchanges, in that we would prefetch content through the search results page from a server, and the server itself would see that as a normal request, and it would skew analytics and confuse people, and then I don't know with cookies what what all was happening there and one of the things that that I recall from there is that the one of the hard parts was trying to find the balance between when we should do this and how much content.

A

We should prefetch like this, because you could imagine a situation where everyone has signed exchanges and then, when the search results page loads, we could prefetch. I don't know 10 20 results that are shown on a page and all of the css and javascript and images, and that probably doesn't make sense. uh On the other hand, maybe just prefetching the first result, maybe that's a little bit too limited in the long run. Maybe we have to find some balance in between there.

A

So I assume that's something that will still kind of be worked out and over time, as we see more and more sites implement this, um then we will be able to figure out like what the right balance is there and maybe even have some tools that give you a little bit of insight into what is actually happening there with regards to core web idols, because we use the the real world data for core web vitals when we use that in search.

A

This is something that would be taken into account there. So if you're using signed exchanges- and it significantly improves the speed for a significant number of users of your website, then that could be reflected in the the chrome user experience report. Data.

A

Can you please confirm that page speed, insight, score, isn't the ranking factor, but it's a vital tool for diagnosing possible speed issues that, when fixed, might lead to better user experience on a website. um It seems kind of like a trick question, because I mean there are multiple things that come come together here.

A

On the one hand, we don't use core web vitals as a ranking factor, yet uh that I think is coming in in june or later this year at least um so that's kind of though the one aspect there then the the core web vitals are only a part of what we show in page speed, insights and, in particular the page speed insight score kind of that zero to 100.

A

That is not something that maps specifically to particular core web vitals.

A

So that's kind of something slightly different and also the the score that you see in page speed, insights, that's based on lab tests, so essentially a live test that you're doing of a page which gives you some insight into how this page is performing. But it doesn't give you insight into what users are actually seeing and the what users are actually seeing part is the field data, and that is what we would use uh for ranking when core web vitals becomes kind of a live, ranking factor so kind of the I don't know.

A

I don't know if there's a short answer for this, uh but one version is essentially is within page speed. Insights. You do see some data that we would in the future use for ranking uh with regards to speed and usability, but you also see a lot of other data in page speed, insights and that other data is more for you as a site owner to figure out like where are the problems and to give you some some mechanisms that you can iterate on your website to speed things up.

A

um How do you do seo for question and answers for educational websites for every question, separate a separate page or blog or club, or topic wise questions and answers? Because there are many websites which are providing solutions for questions, then there will be a greater chance of duplicate content. So how do you deal with that and also which html tag is recommended for every question?

A

So lots of questions here it feels like questions about questions and answer sites is, is almost very a bit meta uh but anyway, um I I think the the balance between should you have one question an answer on a page or should you have a lot of questions on a page or should you kind of group everything by topic? That is something that you need to figure out for your own site and for some sites. If you have a lot of content, maybe having one page for each question and answer makes sense for other sites.

A

If there are kind of like shorter questions and answers and maybe grouping them together makes sense and that's something that, from google's point of view, we don't have a strong preference that we say you should do it like this or you should do it like that. You really need to figure out what works well for your site. What works?

A

Well for your users with regards to structured data, I think you can do it both ways, so not 100 sure like how how this maps, but I think you have the the faq markup and the what is it- the the q, a markup that you can use if you want to use structured data, I double checked the documentation, because I might be confusing it with something else just now, but in in this structured data documentation, you see the different types of structured data that we have there.

A

The thing to keep in mind is that, just because there is a type of structured data, for something does not mean that that is the optimal setup of a website. So if, if, for example, there were only structured data for multiple questions on a page that doesn't mean that you should always put multiple questions on a page.

A

So that's that's something to kind of keep in mind. uh The the other part that you have. There is uh what, if other people have the same answer or the same question on their website kind of with regards to duplicate content, and I I think that's similar to kind of the. I don't know the person who asked earlier today about uh the the embassy locations where you have an address and a phone number.

A

That is something where, if you have a question and answer pair, which is essentially commodity information where essentially it's it's just a fact, it's like I don't know, did barack obama exist and the answer is yes like that's something where, like obviously like. If people are asking for this and you're giving them the answer. Yes, then that's that's an answer and other people might have that too, but you need to find a way to kind of differentiate yourself from everyone else.

A

Who just has this fact as an answer and that's something that you can do with additional content for individual questions? Maybe that's something that you can do with the way that you structure information on your website, that's something that you could do with the the functionality, the usability of your website overall.

A

But that is something that you should keep in mind where, if you're focusing on information that is essentially on lots of places on the web, then you need to make sure that you're not just doing the same thing as everyone else, because if you aren't just doing the same thing as everyone else, then our systems will say. Oh, like we already have this answer once. Why should we show the same answer again in the search results page? It doesn't really make much sense.

A

So that's that's something always to keep in mind there, depending on the type of site. That might also play a role. For example, if you have math problems where it's like, what is two plus two, then you could just give the answer there, but I don't think that would be very useful for people. So I would not see that as something where, like I will take all the numbers in the world and make kind of an addition table and make individual pages. For that.

A

I don't see that being as super useful for search and then the last part about html tags. um I don't think we have a kind of a preferred html tags for questions and answers.

E

So is questions and answers just content, or is it special.

A

It's just content, essentially yeah you're simplifying it. That's me perfect. Well,.

E

You stick with the same people saying well, shall I I'm creating this content? Should it be a blog or this or not? You know why it's content, so whatever.

A

Exactly yeah yeah.

E

Join in next week for the simplifications to answers.

A

John speaks for 10 minutes and then rob is like it's just content.

A

Oh man, okay, let me see if I can find an answer, a question that I can answer quickly. uh We see two versions of our site appearing in search console, one is http and the other one is https. What is causing this, and should we fix it? So this one is easy. um It's essentially happening because someone submitted both of those versions in search console, and if you didn't do it, then maybe someone else did for you and in practice this doesn't cause any problems.

A

Probably all of your data will be concentrated on one of those two versions, and essentially the value that you get out of having both of them listed in search console is if, for one of those versions, something goes wrong. You'll get information in search, console one way to kind of like get the same amount of information without having them listed twice, is to use a domain verification which would automatically include http and https.

A

The slight downside of a domain verification is that I think not all of the older search console tools are available for domain verification, so having them verified individually, still kind of makes sense too.

A

That was shorter. Okay and, let's see I have a question about button text and hyperlink.

A

I have a blog where I have a list of some artists and buttons for each of them as view profile, and I also have read more anchors for every post- is it possible that this would be considered duplicate, content or spamming internal linking what's the best practice, so I I think, first of all, depending on the way that you implement this on your website.

A

If it's a button element, then we would not necessarily see that as a link anyway, and that is something that could work for users, but we essentially need to process whatever javascript is associated with that button element to see what is actually happening there and googlebot doesn't click on elements on a page by default.

A

So we would not see what you're doing afterwards like if someone clicks on a button javascript is called and then it redirects to a different page. That's not something that we would necessarily see so from from that point of view, if the only navigation within your site were with buttons. That would be a problem, however, since you also have these read more links, which are essentially, it sounds like normal html links going through the same page. Essentially, we would see that and say.

A

Oh, this is a normal link and then we can crawl that and follow that normally. So that would be completely normal internal navigation if you had both of these elements as links. So if the the kind of the button to view profile and the read more link were both normal html links, then that would also not be a problem. It's not not an issue if you have multiple links to the same page from one of your pages so in in practice.

A

What would happen here is we will try to combine those two links and just essentially treat them as one link and follow those kind of normally within your website.

A

The one thing I would recommend here, though, is that you use a a good anchor text instead of read more so it's it's very tempting to kind of have these read more links on a page and pointing to a more detailed page, but our systems do you take into account the anchor text of a link and they use that to get some context of the page that you're linking to. So if the the anchor text is just read more, then that doesn't tell us anything it's like we. We find the link.

A

We can follow the link. We can crawl that that's perfectly fine, but, for example, if the the link were read more about xyz, then we would automatically know when we find that link. Oh, this other page isn't going to be about xyz, so we can kind of categorize that a little bit ahead of time already.

A

So that's something like if you're looking for optimizations and it's really currently a read more link. That would be something that I would recommend doing. I I also noticed this on on my site, when I kind of like tried to clean things up a little bit in lighthouse within chrome. If you, I think it's the accessibility report or the seo report, not 100 sure, uh if you run that report on your site- and you have links that just contain read more then that will be flagged as something that you should improve.

A

So that might be something to try out there as well.

A

Will the new core web idle signal be a live ongoing signal, for example, if my pages are rated as poor, when the update rolls out, but a few months later, I managed to improve them um kind of will that be taken into account or will we have to wait until gary pushes a button?

A

um So my my understanding is this would be live based on the current data, because that's kind of the the way that we can, I don't know, run this kind of a pipeline in the sense that when we get new data for core web idols from kind of the field data for individual urls, then we can automatically take that into account in our systems. I don't think it would make sense for us to kind of like keep a cached version of all of those signals and uh only use the old data for that.

A

uh So the the thing to keep in mind, though, is that the the core web vitals data that we use the from the chrome user experience report is, I think, 28 days old. uh So it's not that if you improve your site today tomorrow, you will see a ranking change, but rather, if you improve your site today, then in 28 days we would have information about how your users have been seeing. Those pages since then and we'd be able to take that into account at that point.

A

uh With regards to like kind of like moving between the different values of the core web vitals, I think we'll have to see how how strong that effect is. But in general we tend to differentiate between pages that are in the bad bucket and uh kind of then from there.

A

The there's a needs improvement bucket, which is kind of like that yellow zone and then the good bucket and uh essentially from every time as soon as you pass from bad into needs improvement, then things start to improve in search, and uh I I think at least at the moment: it's not that planned for there to be further iterations within the good bucket, so kind of like between needs, improvement and good, like things will slowly get a little bit better and then, once your pages are completely and good, it's not going to be the case that, like tweaking milliseconds, will change anything with regards to ranking, obviously for users that might be a different story.

A

Maybe you can see things like conversion rate changes. If you improve things by a couple milliseconds, but that's more something for you to care about than something for search to specifically care about.

A

um Okay wow, we still have more questions um and some raised hands, so maybe we can get a few raised hands and then we we can hang around a little bit longer and see what else pops up. um Let's see, I think shashi. I think you're on top of the list.

I

Hello, john hi. Actually I have a e-commerce website uh where the number of url is more than lacks, but what I seen that I submitted the sitemap on jain and still not showing the coverage report.

I

So what are the things that causes this issue? All the site maps contain approx more than 5000 urls.

A

And nothing is being indexed or what? What are you seeing.

I

No url is indexed, but the coverage report is not showing the daily crawl rate is approx. 600 700. But when I'm going to uh check the sitemap coverage report, it's so zero, no yeah.

A

Yeah, I I wouldn't necessarily worry about that like if, if we're able to index your pages normally- and you see them in the index coverage report overall, uh then kind of the tie to the individual sitemap files is something that can vary over time. So I wouldn't necessarily worry about that.

I

But actually it also affect the performance of website on search engine, actually, my view of sitemap showing report on jam and my website working good on search engine after they stopped showing the coverage report. My website also start affecting on search engine.

A

uh Like the the sideband processing, there wouldn't be tied to anything with regards to ranking of your website, so I I see the the sitemaps issue. I see that every now and then and usually that's more a matter of well search console is just not showing you that information, but it wouldn't be affecting your site's ranking in search.

A

If you are seeing changes in ranking, then that would be kind of separate from that.

I

What the action I should have to take to fix this.

A

uh If, if you're seeing ranking changes, I I mean I would focus on the ranking changes, not the sitemaps uh part uh to be honest, but if you're seeing ranking changes, then kind of like everything, that's uh around ranking changes or improving your website. Overall, those are kind of the things that you should be focusing on and uh in in many cases, uh kind of normal ranking changes can be completely normal and it's not a sign that you're doing something wrong.

A

It's just that our systems kind of have re re-evaluated, the the relevance relevance of your website overall, and that means you need to kind of, like almost like, take a step back and think about what you can do to significantly improve the quality and relevance of your.

I

Website the changing titles and meta descriptions do any kind of effect.

A

I I think you can use some of that to tweak things a little bit, but if you're talking about ranking changes so strong that you're you're seeing them overall, then I think just tweaking titles and meta tags are not going to give you kind of what you're looking for like tweaking titles and meta tags makes it easier for us to recognize what is actually on a page, but it's not going to change the the overall visibility of the website significantly.

A

So that's like I, I think tweaking these things working on them always kind of makes sense, because it drives you to think about more like what. What is the focus of my web page? What is the focus of my website overall, but it won't necessarily fix an issue where your website has dropped invisibility significantly.

I

Okay- and I noticed that my website css- are still run on http 1.1, so is it affect any kind in seo.

A

I

Thank you. Thank you.

A

um Okay, let me pause the recording here. um I I still have a bit more time, so, if any of you all want to hang around longer, that's fine too, but for those of you watching the recording. Thank you for watching. I hope you found this useful and found some questions and answers along the way which were insightful and relevant for what you're looking at and maybe I'll see you all in one of the future hangouts all right and with that we'll.

A