Google SEO Office Hours, 19 Nov 2021

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From YouTube: English Google SEO office-hours from November 19, 2021

Description

This is a recording of the Google SEO office-hours hangout from November 19, 2021. These sessions are open to anything search & website-owner 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 folks of all levels!

A

All right welcome everyone to today's google search central seo office hours hangout. uh My name is john mueller. I'm a search advocate here at google in switzerland and part of what we do are these office hours sessions where people can join in and ask their questions around their website and web search, and I wonder what we'll be talking about today. So uh we we have a bunch of questions that were submitted already, but I see some of you already have your hands raised. So maybe we'll just start off with you.

A

uh Let's see akash, I think you're. First.

B

Hi john hi hi, uh so my question is uh like past two days a few of my uh web pages have been uh considered. You know they are failing for mobile usability test. Due to you know, text uh text is too small. So could this be possible if you fail for one of the mobile usability errors, or your pages won't be indexed?

B

Is there something related to that.

A

They should definitely still be indexed, even even if they're not completely mobile friendly, we we would still index them. uh The the mobile friendliness criteria is something that we use as a small factor within the mobile search results, uh but we we definitely still index those pages, and sometimes this this kind of issue can come up temporarily, where maybe we can't crawl one of the css files for a brief time, and then we don't see the full layout.

A

uh If you test your pages manually in the testing tool and they look okay, then I will just let it be it'll it'll kind of pop back into normal again.

B

Okay, is it different than uh how mobile usability tool works and a browser when you know they start rendering the page, because uh the problem is just uh that that tool shows. You know uh mobile usability test space due to the small text, but on the mobile or the browser the chrome was, uh I see the you know the page is, you know properly be loaded. There are no such issues.

A

Yes, so in in particular, we we have to follow the robot's text and in the robot's text file it can happen that you block something uh from being crawled, which could be something like the css file, which kind of tells us how the page should look like. So in a browser, we, the the browser, doesn't look at the robot's text, but when we crawl the page, we do look at the robot's text, so that could definitely be be something where it's different. When we look at it than when you look at it.

B

A

Much for, thank you sure, all right. uh I'm mayor seo.

C

Hi hi, how are you? I have uh actually three short questions. uh I work in uh news industry, so we are publishing like uh 20 article each day, so uh I, when I was like optimizing the seo, I told them. We need to fix the title to 65 letter only and they were very like upset about that, because, like news should be like a long title and a good title, so after I struggling with them, I I searched the web and I didn't get like a right. Good answer.

C

Is that a really good uh factor of ranking that the title long should be like something with the limitation.

A

No, we we don't have any recommendation for the length of a title, so I I think kind of picking a number from from your side and saying on mobile, like this much room is available. So as an editorial guideline, we'll say, 65 or whatever you want to choose. I that's that's perfectly fine, but from google from the kind of the search quality, the ranking side. We don't have any guideline that says it should be this long or not even.

C

If, if the whole title doesn't say didn't show up in the search page.

A

That sounds like something different: how do you mean.

C

I mean when I search on google on something and our website is shown. If the title is longer than 65 letter it, it will not show all on in the search page. So is that, like a ranking factor, that's that's my.

A

No, no, the the length doesn't matter if, if we show something shorter or if we show something slightly different, that's just kind of how we display it in the search results. It doesn't mean the ranking changes.

C

Good good point: another thing is the length of the url important because we used to bought all the title in the url and now we removed it. uh Is it.

A

C

No different at all.

A

No difference I I.

C

My team would hate me for, after that.

A

No, no, I mean it's good to ask these questions. uh I think it's it's good practice to have some of the the words in the url, so it's more like a a readable url, but it's not a requirement from an seo point of view. So.

C

If it's only the id to the article, it's good for google, that's.

A

Okay, too yeah I mean it. I think it's better to have some words in there, but it's it's essentially fine like for the most part, that's something that just users see and when they.

C

A

And paste the url they might see. Oh, I know what this article is about. Based on what I see here, whereas if they just see the number then they might pick the wrong one or might not be sure about that. But that's a user question almost not an seo question.

C

The last thing is about in the coverage in the google console. There is something called not indexed and requested, like any gray, something we have like more than one million page on that when I clicked it, it's uh redirect wages. So I I fixed the redirect issues in in the website, but is there any like uh validate the fix, like the coverage error in.

D

C

Step how what time should I wait to I I fixed it like over the month.

A

What did you think.

C

The redirection it was like redirecting with the wrong thing: if you go to the page, it will redirect you to another base.

A

Okay, I mean that's something that just settles down automatically, so it's not even something where I I would say you would need to submit like a validate fix or anything special as we recrawl those pages we'll see the redirect works and goes to a different place, and we can just follow that. So that's that's perfectly fine.

C

Okay, thank you very much cool.

A

Baruch over to you.

E

Yes, uh I just uh wanted to know uh the new design for page speed insights. um I wish I could be reverted back because I have to keep on scrolling down see you're laughing, because you knew this was going to happen, um but I mean I, you know. My main concern is uh a lot of sites. um I remember when https came uh when that was introduced um and there's a bunch of other algorithms inside everything that makes the algorithm or what it is today. um So this is not something again.

E

We can't uh just continue to focus in making sure that you know this side is going to be. You know, 98 out of 100 and so on, but in february, when the ranking, I guess with when page speed insight will count. What do we do because at this point in time I mean there's certain sites, I'm having issues with lcp issues and cls and a lot of sites right now are some sites. I guess, are on a very popular cdn platform, I'm not going to name them, but uh they told me like look.

E

You know it's servers within your area that are creating a specific score and you're seeing you know. Sometimes I would see the lcp and cls at a perfect score, which would be almost 99 out of 100 and then it goes back into another score um and which has nothing to do with in the site. So I'm kind of I I mean I'm getting worried because google sometimes crawls the site and then I I get the error um in search consoles.

E

Saying hey, you know, you have cl issues the cls issues, an lcp and then I go and scan it and it's fine and it's like 99 out of 100 and then some pages on the blog are 100 out of 100.. So then I'm like what is going on here and then the new design that just got introduced um and then I'm seeing some areas where it has no data found and I'm like okay, I guess you guys need to crawl it, and then data will come john. This is just I don't know. um I.

A

I think there there's one one big aspect that uh that that plays a role there, which, which is important in that, uh on the one hand, we have these lab testing tools like page speed, insights and lighthouse, and things like that, where essentially you test it, either from your browser with your connection or with some server um web page tests, I think, does similar things. Some of the various other tools do that as well. That's kind of the the lab testing that you can do and that's more something that is useful for incremental improvement.

A

So if you need to fix something, you need to see if it worked or not, you can just test it again. We don't use the lab testing for search instead, what we use is the field data, which is basically what users actually saw and that's the data that you see in in search console.

A

So essentially what what you're probably seeing there is users saw that something was slow uh kind of on on an aggregate level. We'd look at that. It's not it's not on a per url level, um and uh we give you that information, like some users, saw this kind of an issue in search console and then you can essentially use the the individual lab testing tools to see where could this be coming from? Is this something that I can fix? Is it something that was like?

A

I don't know some quirk that happened in the in the network overall, that you can't really kind of help with um that kind of helps you to narrow things down.

E

The the thing is in gt, metrics uh and your. I know um webpagetest.org it's a favorite of yours uh because you in a lot of hangouts. You do have that shown. It's perfect there. So when I rescan it, of course you gotta wait. 25, there's 25 people ahead of you all that stuff, and I just it's not easy to reschedule page speed insights, but um when I do that, it's fine, it's perfectly fine. So what should I do then? Who do? I trust.

A

Well, I mean essentially what what is happening in a case like that is with the lab testing tools. They're saying things are okay from a theoretical point of view, but in practice people see something different. So all of the lab testing tools they make assumptions on what users might see. So, if you're running in a data center somewhere, you can't just act like oh, my I don't know. Gigabit connection through the internet is what every user has, but rather they they slow things down artificially and they try to act like a normal user.

A

But of course they can only go so far and make assumptions and what your actual users see might be different. It might be that your actual users are like using something faster than the assumption or using something slower, and essentially the the search console part of that. The search ranking side is based on what users actually see and not based on some artificial number, that some data centers so.

E

As 5g develops and gets better and better, this of course will change and then it's going to be easier easier for everyone right. So this will be the thing of the past.

A

Well, I mean speed is more than just the network connection.

E

I don't know no, it's just that I've gone and I've done my research out there and if you just go and just stand on a mall, I don't see anyone that has a 3g uh network anymore and.

A

Yeah I mean what what you can also do, what what some sites do is try to instrument the pages themselves. So basically you add javascript to the individual pages on your site or the pages that are being flagged as being slow and you collect the actual data that users saw in analytics, and that gives you a little bit of a faster feedback loop where you can try things out and see. Okay, what happens if I make this image even smaller or what happens? If I remove, I don't know adsense or analytics or whatever.

A

Then you can see fairly quickly. Okay, it was like the number is still 99 for me in the lab test, but users actually saw it faster. So maybe I should go in that direction.

E

Okay, I see all right so yeah, it's it's.

A

Hard it's hard.

E

Arden, it's fun at the same time uh as you're, getting the hang of it and then yeah with yeah. So it's not something. We should worry about.

A

I mean I mean I, I would dig into it to try to figure out what it is, but the the thing to also keep in mind is the core web vitals. The page experience is, is a ranking factor, but it's not the biggest ranking factor so.

C

A

Have critical things that you need to do if it's a matter of kind of restructuring your website first, then I would kind of do the critical things first and then, as you find time, think about what you can do to improve speed. Okay, perfect! Thank you so much sure uh adrian.

D

Hello just check, everybody can hear me yeah, yes, good, okay, um a couple of things. First, one up, I did write a question in there uh with regards to concern with doorway pages.

D

um This is kind of linked in with google ads. I know this is search and all that kind of stuff, but I came across an article that basically said uh explained a person's experience where they created a bunch of landing pages and stuff. Exactly what I just did. uh They were being flagged as doorway pages and not only were they de-listed their google ads account was actually shut down.

D

um I can't have either of those done. I can't afford that um I'm a small like local service based business, um don't have thousands of pages. I've got like seven keyword, targeted landing pages um in the uh google uh discussion forums.

D

Somebody suggested well just um no index those landing pages um but which I did and but I'm also thinking, is those seven pages. They are targeted for specific keywords. They could be very beneficial for organic search. um I don't know what what's the the like, the risk level of being labeled as oh. This is doorway.

A

So I I think, with seven pages, you don't have any problems, uh that's kind of at that level. Even if someone from the web spam team were to manually look at that, they would see. Oh it's it's seven pages. It's not it's not like thousands of pages. It would be different if you were, for example, a nationally active company and for every city in the country you had a separate page, then that's something where we'd say well. This is this is way way, past kind of acceptable.

A

It's it's something that is really problematic where we need to take some action to preserve the quality of the search results.

A

But when you're talking about, like I don't know a handful of pages like like the seven that you mentioned, I I don't think that would be a problem just purely from from the web spam point of view. Even if someone were to manually look at that they'd be like it's seven pages. It's like it's not going to change the search results completely.

D

Even though the content is really duplicated, would I do any kind of canonical to the home page for those landing pages, or I.

A

Mean I mean I, I don't think it's ideal, so that's that's kind of the the other aspect there. uh It's it's, probably not an ideal situation when you have pages that are very similar like that. But again it's not something from a webspam point of view. They will take action on so they would not. I mean I. I can't promise this because I don't know what your site is.

A

I can't I tell them like don't do anything with this site, but I just purely what I know from them like they would not take action on this. So your your search listing and probably also the ad side. I don't know the details of the ad side, but probably also that part, would be perfectly fine with seven pages. I think overall, it's not optimal, but so I would think about ways that you can make those pages actually useful for those individual kind of niches that you're targeting and really go past.

D

One have one niche, that's the pro, that's the thing well,.

A

I mean: is it going past? I don't know swapping out the city name, for example, in the title, or something like that where, where you have, I don't know, maybe like directions from that city to your your place of business or some additional information that gives people a little bit more context. There.

D

And well they're, not city keywords, it's basically, I'm I'm a photographer. I shoot headshots specifically, so my keywords are like uh headshot toronto, headshot, headshots, toronto, uh professional headshots stuff. Like that right um all the content is pretty much the same. Like I shoot headshots like I don't know how many other different ways I can describe what it is. I do right, okay, um so that's why the content is very identical.

A

Okay, in in that case, I would pick one page and make it canonical, because essentially, what you have there is just variations of the same keywords like when you're saying like photography, toronto, toronto, photography, for example. uh Those are just like variations of the same keyword and for the most part we figured that out and even within the natural text on a page, you can mention both of those. It's not like it's not going to blow the page up. If you mentioned those those seven variations.

D

Yeah I I went down this route because, uh honestly, I've been fighting with google ads. Is there something like this for google ads where we can like really ask people.

A

D

A

I have no idea.

D

A

But, but really from from the search side.

A

My from my point of view you you could combine all of that into one page. The other thing that I I think is also worth maybe looking into, is you can block pages from search and keep them for ads uh kind of like that no index that was mentioned in the forum? Well, if you make the, if you keep those pages- and you say well, I don't want them shown in search.

A

You can choose a canonical or use a no index on those pages, uh but within ads you can still use them as landing pages and something that's.

D

Not just no index then.

A

Yeah I mean that's something that a lot of people do where they say. Well, these are my ads pages, and these are my kind of seo pages and that's that's perfectly fine to do it.

E

Also andrea- and I I suggest maybe you uh checked your ssl certificate for some reason: it's not like I'm getting blocked uh coming to the to the site. There's.

D

That's interesting.

E

D

um I say it's interesting because I just implemented something with um http auth on my wp admin, because I'm getting hammered with hack attempts.

E

D

It's weird: it's working for me.

E

I went to it's uh adrian and then your last name right.

D

No, oh okay, toronto headshot dot com, so that.

C

Sights down.

D

Okay, I'm going to look into that other side.

D

um Sorry, john one, other question before we go. This is with regards to search console. um I have created a custom post type in wordpress that um creates the archive page for reviews, testimonials, um I'm not seeing any of that enhancement show up in search console, even though the page has been crawled.

D

um All the all the schema validates on the schema.org tool, um but yeah it's just not showing up.

A

Are they reviews or what did you mark up? Yeah? Okay? So we probably wouldn't show that, as reviews in in the search results, because it's more like a testimonial, so reviews would essentially need to be something which is is based on a specific product on that page and the reviews need to be things that users leave directly on that page.

A

So if you're kind of like archiving reviews from other sources and you're posting them, then we wouldn't pick those up as reviews for the structure, data side.

F

You can keep them on the.

A

Page, we just wouldn't use the review markup for that.

D

Okay, like all the reviews, uh all the content, I'm taking from the reviews is from my it's not called google my business anymore, but it's called reviews there um yeah. So how would I add any kind of schema for you guys to see that.

A

You wouldn't like, if, if people are leaving the review somewhere else and you're making a copy of that, then the original place would be the place where the the structured data would need to be implemented.

D

A

I think it's it's kind of tricky, because we we try to recognize this situation automatically and sometimes we don't recognize it properly and just show it anyway. So perhaps when you're searching around, you see other sites that have that shown where it's just well, it was like. We didn't recognize that this was actually not left directly on the site, but from from a policy point of view, we we try not to show reviews that are left somewhere else that are copied over to a website.

D

Okay, I am getting one review, snippet show up and it's basically the one that's tied to the uh the business object, so I have a section in the business schema that says. Review and yeah just has like an overall review kind of thing, but yeah, not the individual ones. Okay, remember that was my whole plan.

A

Oh wow, okay, I mean you can still keep them in the cert. In your pages, it's just. We won't show them with the special treatment in the search results.

D

Right: okay, cool! Okay! Thank you. All.

A

Right, uh let me run through some of the submitted questions and then we'll get more of the the live questions as well. uh Let's see the first one is about search, console verification. We have the code on every subdomain, but we're also using a tool which requires domain level, verification we're thinking about doing it through dns records. Would that invalidate the current setup and lose the data that we already have?

A

The the simple answer is no. You can do that in search console. You can have it a site verified multiple times. You can have different parts of the site verified individually. It doesn't lose any of the data when you have it verified separately.

A

So that's something where you could have both the kind of host level, as well as the domain level verification running in search console.

A

We notice when our crawl requests from google decreases. Our crawl request from bing increases are the two related.

A

I think that would be a really weird coincidence, but I I'm not aware of any kind of uh collaboration with being that we swap off the crawl requests. So I don't see that being related. What might might happen?

A

Sometimes is on google side when we recognize that a server is overloaded and kind of slow and showing server errors, then we'll tend to crawl less, and it could be the case that when bing crawls a lot we see the server is generally slower, so we'll crawl a little bit less, and when we see that the server has more capacity is a little bit faster, then we'll crawl, more, which might be kind of related to, when being happens, to crawl, less theoretically, that's possible from a practical point of view, I kind of doubt that would be happening uh just because usually websites have so much capacity uh for for users to come.

A

That, like some crawling from being and some crawling from google is not going to slow down, the whole website will amp pages impact. The google requests. We saw research a few days ago on twitter that google crawl volume on non-amp pages increased recently, while the crawl volume of amp pages decreased.

A

So we we take into account all crawling that happens through the normal google bot infrastructure, and that also includes things like updating the amp cache uh on a website. uh So if you have normal pages and you have the amp versions and you're hosting them on the same server, then the overall crawling that we do on that website. That will be essentially what we try to balance out, and that includes the amp and the non-amp pages.

A

So if your server is already running on its at its limit with regards to kind of the normal crawling- and you add amp on top of that, then of course we we have to balance and figure out what we can do there, which part we can crawl at which time but again for most websites.

A

That's not an issue, it's usually more of an issue when you have tens of millions of pages and google barely gets through crawling all of them, then that's something where, if you add another kind of duplicate of everything, then of course it makes it a lot harder. But if you have, I don't know thousands of pages adding another thousands of pages from the amp versions. That's not gonna, throw things off.

A

um We we have a client having almost identical pages per location, and I I thought this was your question. Adrian uh piano course, birmingham and piano course, london. The only difference in those pages is the location. Shall I canonicalize those pages? What would be the best practice kind of like I mentioned before? If you have a handful of pages, it's something where purely from a doorway page point of view. I wouldn't really worry about that.

A

If you have these two pages with two locations, the the general best practice here is really to make sure that you're providing something unique and valuable on those individual pages.

A

So if you have something that you're offering in one city and you're, offering it in another city as well, then give some information about why you have these pages separately and make it so that when people are searching for it, they really find something that matches that not just like oh piano courses in the uk and uh like a handful of city pages there.

A

So that's that's kind of one approach there. The other approach is uh like I mentioned before canonicalizing and just picking one of those pages to to show. I think if you have something distinct, that you want to provide and having multiple pages is perfectly fine.

A

If it's something where you're just offering variations of the same thing, then sometimes folding them together is a better strategy. uh The advantage of folding them together is that you make a little bit of a stronger page rather than two pages that are kind of like okayish.

A

From from a strength point of view, and the the general idea here is that google has some information about your website and if you kind of dilute that across a whole bunch of pages, then each of those pages individually will be a little bit less value than if you concentrate everything on fewer pages. So if you think you can make a really strong page just piano courses, then that might be a good approach, especially if there's a competitive market there.

A

If, on the other hand, you think that these individual locations are distinct enough, that you want to have individual pages such as, maybe you have really physical addresses in these locations or different opening hours or different kinds of teachers in these locations, then that definitely makes sense to keep separate because you're providing something unique that people can find value on there. So that's kind of the approach I would take there.

A

It's not that there's one answer that works for all websites here for some it makes sense to hold together for some it makes sense to keep separate depending on the website. Sometimes you even combine that. So, if you have an e-commerce site, you might say well, this model of shoe is all the same model of shoe, but you have maybe one unique size that really kind of stands out or a unique color variation that really stands out.

A

Maybe you'll split that off into a separate page, so those are kind of the thoughts behind that uh in general does disavowing a 301 redirected domain have the same impact as disavowing. All the backlinks of the redirected domain. We have a 301 redirected domain, pointing to our home page that has 18 000 spammy backlinks. Can we just disavow the domain redirected to us, or do we need to disavow all the 18 000 backlinks?

A

We know that in most cases, google might already discount these links, but we want to be safe, so in in a case like this, I I think it's kind of tricky, because we do try to figure out what the kind of the destination and the origin of individual links are, and we try to take that into account. uh So purely from a kind of an uh theoretical point of view, you would probably want to disavow as many of those individual links as you can.

A

I think you can probably also get pretty far by just disavowing that kind of redirect to your home page and kind of handling it at that level. If this is the only spammy link that you can find for your website, probably I wouldn't even worry about it too much. I, I think disavowing that redirect kind of takes care of a lot of that issue.

A

So probably that's already enough.

A

uh Indexing seems to have changed a lot for me over the past year or two happens all on my across all of my web properties, whereas things were quickly indexed before when submitting them in search console nowadays, search console submissions seem to have no effect.

A

Rather, it appears on its own in the index after several days or even weeks, sometimes bouncing in and out of the index. This happens on well-established sites with 50 000 organic monthly visitors. Why is this? um I don't know like it's it's hard to say uh kind of in in a broad way to kind of like this is why things are not being indexed so quickly on your website, but in in general.

A

The request indexing tool in search console is something that passes it on to the right systems, but it doesn't guarantee that things will automatically be indexed. I think in the early days it was something that was a lot kind of a stronger signal for indexing system to actually go off and index that, but one of the problems that that happens with these kind of things is, of course, people take advantage of that and use that tool to submit all kinds of random stuff as well.

A

So over time our systems have kind of grown a little bit uh safer, almost in that they're trying to handle the the abuse that they get, and that does lead to things sometimes being a bit slower, where it's not so much that it's slower, because it's doing more. But it's slower because well we're trying to be on the cautious side here, and that can mean that things like search console submissions take a little bit longer to be processed.

A

It can mean that we, we sometimes need to have a confirmation from crawling and kind of a natural understanding of a website uh before we start indexing things there and, from our point of view, that's kind of expected uh one of the things that I think has also changed quite a bit across the web. Over the last I don't know last couple of years, probably longer is that more and more websites tend to be technically okay, in the sense that we can easily crawl them.

A

We can crawl them normally, so we can, on the one hand, shift to more natural crawling. On the other hand, that means a lot of stuff that we get.

A

We can crawl and whereas in the past, when something would not get indexed, you might say well, like maybe there's something set up incorrectly on the website, and you try to find that problem from a technical point of view and nowadays most submissions that we get are technically okay, so we can go off and index them, which means, because there's still a limited capacity for crawling and also for indexing. We kind of need to be a little bit more selective there.

A

So I imagine overall, that's kind of what what you'd be seeing there. If we're not picking things up as quickly as you, I don't know we might have in the past, um I have a domain that hasn't been used for four years. The blog I had was doing great uh in its niche, but because I didn't want to sell it, I deleted all the content and left the domain parked. I want to revive the content on it, but I want to take a slightly different approach.

A

My question is: does google need to learn about my blog again as if it was new, or do I have a better chance to be an authority in my niche faster than usual because of this old domain?

A

So if the content was gone for a couple of years, probably we need to figure out what what this site is kind of, essentially starting over fresh. So from from that point of view, I wouldn't expect much in terms of kind of bonus because you had content there in the past. uh I would really assume you you're going to have to build that up again, like any other site like if you have a business and you close down for four years and you open up again, then it's going to be rare.

A

That customers will remember you and say: oh yeah, I will go to this business and it looks completely different. They offer different things, but it used to exist. I I think that situation is going to be rare in in kind of in real life. I guess if you will as well, uh so I would assume that you're essentially starting over here.

A

uh This is also one of the reasons why it usually doesn't make sense to go off and buy expired domains in the hope that you'll get some kind of a bonus out of using those expired domains.

A

um I'm managing a website with over 5000 urls. We do our best to comply to search, ranking and seo factors, but we find on average we get around 100 urls per month that get d index. What can we apply to our pages to prevent this from happening?

A

So it's it's kind of hard to say with just that information, because for for the most part, we don't just remove things uh from our index. uh We kind of pick up new things as well, so, if you're adding new content at the same time and some things get dropped on along the way from our index, usually that's that's kind of normal and expected because, essentially for pretty much no website, we index everything on the website.

A

It's something where on average, I I don't know what the numbers are, but what what I've seen is somewhere between 30 and maybe 60 of a website tends to get indexed.

A

So, if you're, adding hundreds of pages a month and some of those pages get dropped or some of the older pages or less relevant pages get dropped over time. That seems kind of expected to to minimize that. I I think it's something where essentially you need to show to google or to your users. I guess what the value of your website is overall, so that google says well.

A

I need to make sure I keep as much as possible from this website in my index and that's usually less of a technical thing and more of something where kind of the value that you provide is such that it's it's critical for google to keep this in our index and even in cases like that, when we think a website is fantastic, we still won't index everything it's kind of, just purely from a technical point of view, it's almost impossible partially because a website tends to have a lot of.

A

I call it technically duplicated content where you have things like tracking parameters or maybe pagination that goes into infinite spaces or filtering parameters or search form or things like that, where, theoretically, we can find an infinite number of urls on the website and if it's possible to find an infinite number of urls and we can only index a finite number, then we'll never be able to get everything indexed.

A

um Let's see for job posting schema markup. What are the most important parts for getting indexed and ranking highly we've seen spikes in index jobs that drop off after a week or two, with no understanding as to why um I I don't have much insight into the job, search or google for google for jobs. I think it's called uh side of things, but essentially this also falls into similar categories of indexing, like what can you do to make sure that your content is better indexed and uh especially the the things that I mentioned so far?

A

I think those are really what relevant. uh If you have kind of more a a stronger website structure, you can also guide things a little bit in that. If we can index, let's say 100 out of 200 pages on a website using the website structure, you can guide us a little bit to focus on which part you want us to focus on and the the way usually that is done is with internal.

A

Linking, for example, you take the important pages of your website and you make sure that you're linking to the other parts that you care about, so that could be like on the home page. You have a section that says important pages or popular products or new products or new jobs or whatever it is that you want to have highlighted in the search results and from the home page. You link to that part of your website directly and then we'll kind of go and look at that and say well.

A

The home page is probably the most important page for most websites, and it's telling us that these pages are really important. So we'll focus more on those pages and, for example, if you have a jobs website and you have new jobs that you want to have index as quickly as possible, make sure that from the home page you're linking to those new jobs, many sites do that automatically kind of intuitively.

A

But you can also do this kind of in a very uh determinant way and clearly kind of tell us exactly what it is that you'd like to have shown in search, and it doesn't have to be the newest ones. It can be things like uh the the pages where you make the most money out of or the pages where the competition is the strongest or anything.

A

Essentially, like just tell us what you think is important on your website uh through internal linking and we'll try to follow that and highlight that a little bit more in search.

A

uh We migrated our site about seven months ago to a new domain. Should I remove the old sitemap from the old site? uh Probably yes! uh So usually when you migrate a website, you end up redirecting everything to the new website, and sometimes you keep a siphon file of the old urls in kind of in search console with the goal that google goes off and crawls those old urls a little bit faster and finds the redirect and that's perfectly fine to do in a temporary way.

A

But I think after, like a month or two, it's probably worthwhile to take that sitemap out, because what also happens with the sitemap file is you're telling us which urls you care about and if you're pointing at the old urls, then you're almost saying well, I want my old urls, findable and search, and that can lead to a little bit of a conflict in our systems that, in that we say well you're pointing at the old urls.

A

But at the same time, you're redirecting to the new ones, which one do you really want to have index, and uh at that point you essentially want to remove that conflict as much as possible, and you can do that by just dropping that sitemap file and like giving us all the signals that you can that point at your new pages, so that, like once, we've seen that redirect, we can just focus purely on the new pages that you have on your on your website or the new domain or whatever move that you've made.

A

uh Google snippets and knowledge graphs seem to be getting better all the time, and often users don't have to visit a website to get the answers. They need. What does the future hold for web publishers, big and small in terms of getting seo traffic?

A

I I don't see the the need for websites ever really going away, because that information is really in detail on your website and sometimes people just want something really quick. Maybe they want the phone number or the address of your business and then they go off and go visit that business directly, but essentially for anything more than just a snippet of information. You want to kind of find out the the full context and get some more information there. So I don't really see that going away.

A

It's also definitely not our goal. To kind of like be that one place where everyone goes and just gets the answers directly because we know like we have to work together with the ecosystem, together with anyone, who's making websites to make sure that uh the the things that we're providing in search they provide value for for website owners as well, because it's easy for website owners to say. Well, I don't want to take part of this search.

A

I'd rather just be findable in facebook or in social media or somewhere else, and uh we we want to make sure that there is there's kind of an equal deal there. In that we can show your content. We can send users your way, but, like you, also get something out of that in the sense that well you're. Getting all of this traffic as well, and that is something that all of the teams at google that work on search they care deeply about.

A

uh So it's certainly not the case that we're like trying to figure everything out and then just like only show them on our side.

A

um But I I understand that this is something that that folks also worry about, because they see these fancy features in search and it's hard sometimes to understand what what the bigger picture there is or what what the net effect is across websites- and I, I think also if you run across situations where you're like well, I I really don't like the way that google is showing this, because it's really something that I'd prefer people to look at on. My website then give us that kind of information give me contact me on twitter.

A

Send me some screenshots of things where you're saying well. This is really not the way that I want to have my content shown and I'm happy to take that to the product teams, and we can figure out ways that to improve that.

A

Occasionally, when crawling a website, I run across a spider trap. Infinitely expanding urls and I've been wondering how googlebot handles such situations. Does it somehow ignore those urls and focus on the rest of the normal urls on the site, or does googlebot get stuck in some way and miss crawling urls as a result?

A

Yeah that's complicated question and it is something that uh sometimes causes problems uh for the most part. I think we we end up figuring this out, uh because what what happens is this kind of the spider trap area, which is is something for example? Maybe you have an infinite calendar where you can scroll into march 3000 or something like that, and essentially you can just keep on clicking to the next day and the next day and it'll always have a calendar page for you.

A

uh That's kind of an infinite space kind of thing for the most part, because we crawl incrementally we'll start off and go off and find, I don't know, maybe 10 or 20 of these pages and then we'll say well, there's not much content here, but maybe, if we'll look a little bit deeper and we go off and crawl, maybe 100 of those pages, and we start seeing well.

A

All of this content essentially looks the same and they're all kind of linked from this long chain, where you have to click next next, next, next, next to actually get to that page. At some point, our systems are going to say well, there's not much value in crawling even deeper here, because, like we, we found a lot of the rest of the website. That has really strong signals telling us this is actually important and we found this really weird long chain here uh then overall we'll say well. These are probably not that important.

A

We don't have to crawl them that often, if at all, if we want to keep them, and rather we'd focus on the rest of the site, and I think that relative understanding of urls across a website that's something that we we don't really show in search console because it's more like part of our internal systems, it's already complicated, just to show all the urls and uh kind of highlight that we've been crawling things.

A

But you see some of that when you look at your server log files. So if you set up a website- and you add this kind of infinite calendar- you'll see that googlebot goes off and crawls a little bit and a little bit more and at some point it says. Well, I I think I know where this is headed and I'll.

A

Just like avoid crawling much deeper there and you'll also see that over time, some urls get crawled very frequently, maybe once a day or even more often and other urls get crawled less frequently and that's kind of very, very roughly an indicator of like what we think is important on our website. It's not a perfect uh kind of correlation with our sense of importance, because there there's also an aspect there of we want to make sure that we pick up changes.

A

So, on the one hand, we understand the importance of individual pages, but on the other hand, we also think about how often these pages change and a page that might not be super important, might still change very frequently and we might still want to get those updates all the time.

A

But for the most part, if you look at your server logs, you should be able to see some of that kind of balancing happening and if you take an existing website and add a calendar, you'll see it kind of like bubbling up for a bit and then settling down again fairly quickly.

A

Okay, so many questions and running out of time. uh Let me see if I can get some questions from here. I think I think what I'll do is just take the the hands that are raised at the moment and then look at the chat it looks like people are asking questions there too. uh I also have a bit more time afterwards, if any of you want to stick around after the recording.

A

uh Let's see, praveen.

G

Hi jun, how are you hi hi? So uh my question is related to an e-commerce site. So there's a friend of mine whose client owns an e-commerce store, and this question basically comes from that client. So this e-commerce business is based in one of the metro cities uh in india, but they deliver products throughout the country and so the products they sell online are you know, like furniture or home decoration stuff, something like that so uh and they have these product and product category pages on their site so which is doing fine for them.

G

But the thing is um the client said that a few of their competition sites, what they are doing is they are creating pages like product plus location, based pages, something like product by product x in city, a by product x, in city b, something like that and these competitors. They don't have any physical presence in in those cities for which they are creating these pages.

G

So the client wants to know that whether they can also create such pages for traffic, like whether it's it's ethical or you know it's logical- to create the pages where you don't have any physical presence.

A

I I think you quickly end up in the area of doorway pages that we've talked about before, where, especially, if you're talking about a country like india and saying like I want to add all cities there, it's easy from a code point of view to create all of these pages.

A

But then you end up in a situation where you really have thousands of pages that are essentially the same just with different city interviews, and that would be considered doorway pages on our site or from from the webspam point of view, the the website team might take action on that. The the algorithmic side of search will probably also look at that and say well. These pages are all very similar uh in just targeting variations, and then they might take action on the site as well. uh So that's something I would generally not recommend doing.

G

uh This is what we advised to the client, but he said look at the competition. They are ranking and they're getting traffic. So oh.

A

Yeah, I mean I mean that's always kind of a tricky situation, but it it is something where the the webmaster guidelines are pretty clear on that and essentially by going off and creating all of these pages you're, creating this big giant mass of low quality content across your website and while that might not have an immediate effect on the website overall, in the long run, we'll see well like there's some products here and there's this giant mass of low quality content as well and overall, the website then ends up being something well, it's not not as good as it could be.

A

So that's, I think, one aspect to to kind of keep in mind that it's like maybe you'll, have some positive effect in the short run, but in the long run, that's really not something. I'd recommend you.

G

Right right, I think this is what we recommended to the client and just wanted to confirm with you like. Okay condition was correct or not good got the right. One: okay, cool.

A

F

Hi john hi hi, we have a new site that is uh basically public policing in only in english language right, so we want to create a the same article in different languages like in russian in canadian. So how can we do that? I I have done my research and I have found that I have to create a separate publisher for that. But my question is regarding that: should I need to can define a canonical version and alternate version there, or what should I do.

A

Yeah, so I think in general, if you have multilingual content, then using something like the atria flang annotation is really useful, because it helps us to figure out which version of your content should be shown to which user.

A

So that's that's, usually the the approach to take and with regards to the canonical with the canonical you tell us which url to focus on so the canonical should be the individual language versions. It shouldn't be one language as a canonical for all languages, but rather each language has its own. Canonical version like this is the french version and the french canonical. This is the hindi version and the hindi canonical, so it shouldn't be linking across the languages.

F

Okay, but my site is approved on google news and ranking well there and I have amp pages crawled there right so should I use their uh alternate version like we have alternate version in hindi, language or in russian language. So what what you recall on this.

A

Yeah, so with amp pages and normal web pages and different language versions, it gets very complicated so uh in in the amp documentation they they have a a page on. I don't know what it's called, probably like multilingual content uh that has a diagram with regards to the hreflang annotations that you should have there. I I would check that out uh with regards to the google news side of that. I don't know how news would handle that.

A

Specifically, I don't know, for example, if they would require separating that out into a subdomain, so that it's clearly like a separate news site or what what their recommendations are there, but for amp. I would definitely check out that graphic in the documentation.

A

F

So in the next lesson we can uh discuss more about this.

A

Yeah, I I mean I, I think it's complicated with amp pages and normal pages and internationalization. uh So it's like when you look at the graph you you will probably say. Oh, this makes a lot of sense, but if you have a lot of different pages and a lot of different language versions, it's a lot of work to get that all of those details right.

F

Yeah, uh can you can you tell me where I can find that diagram or what should I say, um let me see if I can.

A

A

I think I have it um I'll, just put it in the chopped.

F

Okay, thank you. Thank you.

A

Okay, cool, um I see we still have some hands raised. I I will definitely get to you, but let me pause the recording first and then we we can continue with the rest of the questions. Also, the questions in the chat looks like things are happening there. um So, if you're watching this on youtube, the recording it's like. Thank you for watching to the end all of you here. Thank you for joining and submitting so many questions.

A

um It's always good to kind of meet and see new faces as well.

A

If you're watching the recording- and you want to ask your own questions- we put these in the community section on our youtube channel, usually about I don't know monday tuesday, and we also add the link there if you want to join us live so with that, let me pause the recording.