English Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout

All. Right welcome everyone today is Google, Webmaster, central office, hours hangouts, my. Name is John Doe I'm a webmaster trends analyst, here at Google in Switzerland and, part, of what we do are these office, hours hangouts where. Webmasters and, publishers can. Jump in and ask questions. Regardless. Of kind of pinnable well. What's what's interesting for them and their sites with, regards to web search, bunch. Of questions were submitted already but. As. Always if any of you who are here in LA I want to take a shot. At the first couple of questions. Okay. So I, have a question if nobody else wants to jump in all. Right go for it, all right so graduations. On officially. Rolling out the mobile. First indexing, process. There, are some people asking if what people. Saw over the weekend regarding, like a March 23rd. Algorithm. Update or something like that if that's with. Any way related, to maybe what was. Being rolled out with the mobile first index or with, the mobile first index you. Probably wouldn't notice any ranking fluctuations, or. No. You wouldn't, notice anything. In. General. Overall it should be fairly smooth. But. I, I, believe they only. Started. Rolling. This out like I, don't. Know this. Today, tomorrow. This week sometime, and not. Not before the blog post went live okay. So you're confirming the, rollout really then because nobody's really seeing any, examples. Of this happened in the search results so you're saying when. You launch. The blog post first and then after that you're pushing it out yeah. I mean we already, had some sites rolled, over to mobile, first indexing, this is just I guess, a next. Bigger batch of sites that, is happening the. Plan is also to descend, the messages the research console, I believe. They're. Behind. There so it might be. Some. Sites over this week and send them a message next week or something like that but in, general you should get a message for. That. Okay. So most. Likely the stuff you saw over the weekend is probably completely unrelated to this and Google's lucky firming anything that happened over the weekend as far as you know as, far. As I know so. That's. Like. A my. Guess is that's, unrelated. To, the. Mobile versus indexing change. Excellent. Thank you I have one more question but if anybody else wants to has a question feel free I. Had. A question about Google for jobs which, I've posted, in the Google. Plus page. I'm. Not sure if it's quite a specific, question I'm, not sure if you. Can answer it oh it's for another team. If. You want to take a minute and and read, the question or should I try and summarize here. So. We've got a fixed location but, it's. What. I'm finding is. When. I put that location in the markup and then preview, it in the. Tool that Google provides. In. Some cases in. Most cases I'm, not seeing that location, appear, in the preview and I'm.

Just Wondering what the reason, is for that because it doesn't give me, feedback. As to why it doesn't. Appear. From. From, what I saw in the question it sounds like you just have a name instead of a street address is, that correct so is that like a specific. Location, that's, called like that or is, is that more like a regional, thing. So. It's the, yeah. It's a specific location. Like, a town or a city. Where. That job is located. And we often don't have any more rich data than that any more specific, data we just have a string. Okay like like London, or Paris or. Okay. So, I believe the, team prefers. To have an exact. Address, for. This markup but. What. I saw. Somewhere. Recently is that they're. Treating this more as a warning now rather. Than, actual. Failure for, us to kind, of implement or, understand, the markup. But what I will do there is definitely post in the webmaster help forum about this if you want to you can send me the link to your question afterwards. And I'll. Point someone from the jobs team directly, there so that they can take a look to see what. What exactly I, we. Could recommend there. Okay. Pretty no I'll definitely do that thank you all, right thanks. All. Right any. Other live, question, before, we head off into the, submitted. Ones. Actually. I have I have a question okay. I, notice, in my webmaster tools the, HTML, improvements that. We, have. Notifications. Of errors for duplicated, not errors but they're duplicate, meta, descriptions. And long meta descriptions, and in all those instances it, happens, to be that they're related to our landing page. For. Tags, that. How, does one avoid. Bag. So. So, how do you mean landing page, the. It so it's uh it's. A long post, about, a specific, individual, that's. Related. To the tag so. You know if it's oh okay. Celebrity, for it so, in. That somehow. Or another is, is it's, resulting, in these notifications. But. It's only those pages it's in the it's not the actual post themselves so. It's more like a category. Page I correct, correct okay yeah. So that's, that's, perfectly, fine I think, that's that's completely normal we. We bring these no, vacations in search console specifically, that HTML. Improvements. Out, so, that if you aren't aware of, like. Putting, unique titles on on your pages then that's something we'd like to point out there but if otherwise your site has unique, titles and these are just a handful of pages that haven't have the same title or, especially if they're category. Pages and, the paginating. Category, page like your on page five of I, don't know garden furniture for example then. You, you'd, still have the title, of garden furniture you wouldn't necessarily. Like. Need to make a different title on every, page of this pagination, set for example so. From. From that point of view that's that's, perfectly, fine to have like that, thank. You. All. Right. Perry, go for it last last. Question I'll stop, asking fingers for today. So. A lot of people were reporting in the past actually, a couple weeks about new. URLs, not being indexed by Google even, using the fetch as Google which has their issues, now I honestly. Thought it was just people. Complaining and there's typical. General indexing. Issues of new Google just choosing not to index that content but. I'm seeing a really large number of complaints not just in the google forms on twitter but from SEO is that do, know their stuff, so. I'm wondering if it's something you guys are looking into or if you found any issues around this I. Have. Been looking into a bunch, of those but for the most part it, really seems like it's, just work working as normal and. Sometimes. We do, index tougher very, quickly sometimes, we don't index stuff very quickly I. I, believe we're crawling a bit more than than usual at the moment so usually, we pick, these things up, I. One. Of the things that, I've kind.

Of Noticed in looking into a lot of these issues is that a lot of people relied on the, submit, to indexing tool in. Search console where you manually submit URLs, to too late next, and. That's. Something, that kind, of surprised me because I thought the. Normal methods of submitting content into, Google should, just work, so. I imagine like for example you with your site you wouldn't manually, submit, every page that you write and say like hey Google I wrote this new article so I pick it up quickly but, you just kind of like put it in your feed and your feet gets, picked up and gets, pinged automatically, by the CMS so. That's kind. Of what what, we expect. Like. A normal set up to do is that you wouldn't need to rely on any kind of manual work to. Get, your day-to-day work done. Essentially. But. It's. Interesting that that people relied, on this so much so I'm kind of wondering if, if. There are things in the automated, processes, that we need to - so, I have. Been looking into a bunch of these cases to see what kind. Of has been happening there in the past, why. They, might be seeing a difference there to. Figure, out what we can do there to improve, that, yeah. I've been surprised, also how many people are complaining that they, can't submit URLs - through the fetch as Google tool even, like large publishers, and I'm like I'm. Just surprised so it's. Interesting to see that from the community, you, know I. Mean. It's good to see that the tools are being used so that's, on. The. Other hand, so. When, talking with a team we're like no you can't turn this off. All. Right Don, I thought you had a question. Or. You posted it yeah. I mean, I'm. In a reception, area. Friend. So I don't really want to talk very loudly because, I'm really turned around so. And I posted, a thing that's online yeah okay. So. You're saying I'm fine Google, by crawling into, areas which are blocked in URL parameters, and also blocked in robots.txt. We. Should not be crawling anything that's blocked by robots.txt, so, that's kind. Of strictly. Off-limits, for, Googlebot, where. If, we understand. A robots.txt, file and we can kind of parce the directives there we will not go off and crawl that, the. The one kind, of edge case there is if you change your robots.txt, file today, it, might be that we just redraw, the robots.txt, file tomorrow and then we notice the change in directives, but. Otherwise. We we shouldn't be crawling, into those areas but. I've also defined, quite, a lot of rules in URL. Parameters, and they're still going wrong and they're, really player so. Yeah. That's. That's more of a signal for us so, that's something where we we, do occasionally. Double. Check to make sure that we're. Not missing anything that, we're not kind. Of skipping content. That actually we could be indexing. So. That's, something. Where I wouldn't say it's on the same level as a robots.txt, file but if it's robots.txt, we definitely, should not be calling okay I'll double check am, I able to send, you a link, if I find that it is still being crawled, robots.txt.

Yeah. So. I, I. Try to look into these as much as possible is to show you what the robots.txt, because that's something that is really critical for us that if you put. Something in the robots.txt, file and say don't crawl this then we should definitely respect. That okay all, right then that's great okay hold on one sec girl sorry it's. Actually, sorry. It's only certain parameters, I'll have to I have. To think about how to do that be honest. Yeah. Okay because it's. Not lunched yeah I'll, have a think about it okay. Perfect. All. Right so. Now, we have the the simple question, of what signals as the Google's algorithm, look into to calculate, the amount of PageRank passed through a link. For. That I don't really have an. Absolute. Answers, we. We do look for the the rel nofollow to say we are not going to pass any signals, through through a link but, otherwise it's, something, where we. Take into account a lot of things and it's. Not something where I think it wouldn't make sense for. A normal site to try to calculate, like how the patron, flows within a website because there's just so many ways that, links can go into a site and how your, ELLs can be folded together and. Duplicated. And like we're crawling kind of goes off send it dead-ends, and things like that so that, seems. Like something that's not not. Really a good, use of time. The. Use of background. Images. The. Use of background images, instead of regular image tags, doesn't. Have any negative SEO impacts, for web and image search what's the recommended and what are the negative sides of using background images, besides. The fact that you can't have title or alt attributes. So. I believe, this is specific. To using. CSS, to add kind, of a background. Image within, a tag, in. HTML and. From. What I understand. We wouldn't, pick up those images at all so this is something where we take well this is part of your CSS your design and, not actually, an element on the page that. Is, is. Useful, for something, like web search or for image search so. My, understanding is we would, skip those completely. Also. We wouldn't have any information from title tags or attributes, on, those images so, if. So. For. For web search that. Probably, doesn't matter so much because if we index an image or not doesn't change anything for web search but. For image search if we don't index that image then of course that image can't be showing the research so. If you do want to have your images show in an image search I'd recommend, using normal, image tags so. That we can pick up those images normally, so that we can also understand, the context, of that image a little bit better, things. Like like, the alt attributes, for the image the. Captions, on the image text, around the image all of that really. Helps us to understand, the images a little bit better so, if you want, to make. Sure that your images are available for image search I would. Not, using, CSS, background attributes. To embed, them into your pages. Does. Google consider too, many folder directories, thin content, so. The. Example. Given there is w, te WP. - content, slash plugins, flash plugin name, there. Was an issue with one of our sites and apparently approximately. 30 pages are, indexed, folders. What, kind of issue will this cause what's, the best way to get these pages the index. Okay. So I think it's, not a matter of too many folders. Essentially. But kind. Of these. Directory. File, pages. Where it. Essentially, just lists the URLs or the files within a directory. From. Our, point of view we probably, ignore. That for the most part we. Do. Index. These if we run across them, but. I wouldn't, worry that this is something that will say your site is seen as low quality content for because, we. Probably, recognize, fairly quickly that these pages aren't relevant for anything and we can just skip over them when it comes to search so. I kind. Of recommend blocking.

Those, Directories, in general, mostly, for security, reasons so that people don't like, stumble into, essentially. Your plugin, directories, and figure out which plugins you're using which, files that, they're using what the configuration settings might be all of that, kind. Of blocking, those for those reasons but, I wouldn't, worry so much about it with regards to the quality of the website. It's. Essentially. Just like a simple, HTML page that we're picking out there that's not really, shouldn't. Really cause any problems. I, accidentally. Created a site move to a penalized, domain one, that I have parked, for a year now, my site is no longer on the first page for anything, what. Steps should I take to recover my, Google, traffic. Also. Is it possible because I didn't, use a new domain that caused a manual, action or, manual penalty. So. I guess there are multiple. Approaches, that you can do here on the one hand you can cancel. The site move that's, probably, the first thing that I would do I assume, you, already did that. You, could also redirect back from the other site if that's, something that you. Can set up you. Can also think about what, it would take to clean. Up the manual action for. The other site so. In particular if you are now hosting content on the other domain and maybe the. Any, kind of manual action that you previously have for that domain would. Be irrelevant and you could just do a reconsideration, request and then suddenly, things are back to normal, so, those, are kind, of the approaches. I would take there. Hey. I think it's kind, of tricky with the site move tool because, it does check a lot of things before it actually accepts. A site move so you kind of have to redirect and all of that so. Cleaning. That up is usually a matter, of like. Redirecting, back and, cancel. Them decide move but, it's. Probably something you want to avoid in the future so if you haven't domain. That you know has a manual action on it I I would just get that cleaned up even if you're currently not using that to me. Let. Me see, seems, like, some questions are showing up in the chat here as well. Is. There any term like text, to code ratio, and SEO and. No. We, we don't use anything like. Text. To code when it comes to to, Google search. We. Especially. Pick up the visible, content on the page and we use that some pages have a lot more HTML some. Pages have a lot less HTML, that's, more, a matter of your kind, of design preferences, how you set things up on your side. Having. New landing, pages to. The site by product, type but one main, page is still ranked. In search. New, pages of rank, keywords. And. Fixes. Find out. During pages by product. Type and not the. One, main page so. Usually this is something that just settles down over, time in. The sense that if. You've significantly. Change the structure, of your website then, we need to recrawl, all of that we need to reprocess, all, of those URLs and understand, kind. Of the context. Of those new pages within, the rest of your website and over. Time that's something that will. Generally, work itself, out so if, you have normal linking, in your. Site with like a clean category. Structure Hiroki. On the website and all of that kind. Of just cleans. Itself up so no. Need to do anything special there. Alright, and. Now, we have a question. With a bunch of sub questions so, let's, see on. My marketplace I'd, like, to add the vendor description, on each product page will, this be considered duplicate, content by a government, so. Technically. Yes, that would be duplicate. Content for. The most part if you have other unique, content, on those pages that, wouldn't be a problem though because then. We'd still be able to understand, that your page has some unique value, of its own and what kind, of is is the unique story there the unique twist that means. We should show it to a set of users who are looking for that specifically. And. That, would, generally be fine, if. You do, want to take it a step further and just not, be, the same as all of the others that use the same description then, obviously, having a unique description is certainly. A good idea. On. The same marketplace, I have 67, hundred pages that were created a long time ago to improve SEO through. Massive, amount of descriptive, content, about the different, types of product and so on the. Content turns out to be really poor quality and these pages drive almost, no traffic. I've. Heard such poor, quality content could harm the entire website, in terms of SEO is, this true I. Yes we do sometimes, look at the website overall to figure out how it, kind of fits in with the, rest of the web and where would. Be relevant to show and if, we can tell that a website is primarily. Low-quality, content, that's.

Kind Of like spun content rewritten, content, from other sources, then. That might, be something that we take into account with, regards, to how, we show your website and search okay. Question. Goes on I'd like, to delete all of these pages and recreate, new ones with higher quality content could I implement, 301, redirect, from the old pages to new ones with. A, website. In terms of SEO. Since. They don't drive a lot of traffic so. I. Would. Recommend either deleting. These pages or just updating. Them I think, redirecting. Them to new pages that you create is. Kind. Of an unnecessary. Extra step but if you feel. That you can add significant. Unique and compelling value to these pages then, I would, just update them or if, you think, that these pages have actually, no sense, to to keep for, the long run within your website then, you just delete them. Okay. Still, more to this question I'd like to index all the product pages I mentioned. As. Soon as possible about two thousand pages should. I do both, off at the same time or, wait until the product pages are crawled and indexed to start deleting content, pages. You. Can do this in whatever order you want there's. No, algorithm. On our side that says you have to do everything at the same time otherwise, it doesn't count we. Reprocess. The, website over, time and we try to take that into account as we see it's happening. And. Then. One, last, question last week I attended a Google event in Paris and the speaker mentioned that neither traffic nor bounce rate were taken into account to, rank. The search results, how can it be possible. It's. It's, possible, I don't. Know how, to say how but. It's, it's certainly possible it's not something, that we, take into account when, looking at individual, search results pages. Sometimes, we do, take things like, user. Behavior, into account when we evaluate algorithms. Overall but then we're looking at millions of search results, and we try to compare like, how these algorithms are competing. With each other and which of these algorithms is working best or which of these settings with algorithms is working best but. On a small level that doesn't really make sense at. Least in our experience. John, why about what about shot chart links, John, claims short, clicks that's.

Essentially, The same thing so, that's something that we, would, probably, take into account when it comes to evaluating, algorithms. Overall, but. On a, smaller level that's, really. Tricky. And I don't think it provides a lot of value there it's, more. Satisfaction. With the results overall, yeah. Dennis mobile-first indexing, me Google will give a full way to hidden, content even if it's never accessible, to users or is, there a difference between not, visible in the initial view and not. Accessible, at all how. Does Google handle a page with 5,000, words of hidden and only. Showing. Like, a call to action to the user. It. Reminds me of kind. Of like spam and white text on white background comes, to old-school, SEO. Tactics, that used to work. So. From. From my point of view this is something that we have, covered, fairly, well from. With regards, to understanding, which. Which part of the page is relevant to the user and with, regards, to understanding where kind, of keyword stuffing starts. So. From, that point of view I'm not necessarily, that worried. About, the situation, I sure. There will be some people that will try to stuff, as much keywords. Onto. A page as possible, but for. The most part we figure, that out fairly well and even. On desktop, it's not the case that we would send like a manual action to a website that does is keyword stuffing we have other, just, try to ignore it and focus on the rest of the page, so. From. That point of view not. Not, necessarily worried, I don't. Think it's a great practice to just hide content, on a page and assume that search engines will treat, it as being valuable and users will never be interested in it because. If we show, it to users in, the search results, and they, go to your site and I was like there's nothing here that I want and a, future they're probably going to avoid your site because they feel they, were misled by, kind. Of being sent there but actually they can't find any information to what they were looking for. Doo-doo-doo-doo, let's see I'm trying, to integrate Google, for jobs okay this is the one I think we touched on in the beginning. Struggling. To find someone at Google to, provide an example of a website which successfully, manipulates. Google's algorithms, by simply, making paragraphs. Of content, as it. Is from different well-established sites. We've. Submitted. A DMCA for a sample of 10 pages and, Google removed those. And. I. Think it. Goes on that, we. Don't want to submit like, hundreds of DMCA, requests. So. Essentially. This is something where you probably need, to go through the web spam form if you think, that this website is manipulating, things with. Regards to search results or if it's, copying, your content and, this DMCA, process, is. Kind of third the right one to do them for that and. In at least in most cases. So. I'm not, really sure what, what else we could do there so. You're. Welcome to send me examples, of something you, see like this and I can take a look at that with the team but in general we wouldn't, remove a website just because there's some copied content on, this website that's. Something, where you'd. Have to, go through the normal process with, the DMCA. Where. That would be done on a per page basis, and, if. There are issues with other pages that are kind of ok on this website then those would remain in the searches. But. Again, you're welcome to send me some examples, so. That I can take a look at that with the team here to see if, maybe, there's something that I'm missing. We. Have, a new, brand, new website with, much, better content, than the competition much, better backlinks.

And Much many more backlinks, totally. Optimized, for technicals, and speed structure, but still we're not ranking, for important keywords, is. A really sandbox. Or what what could be happening here so, I I. Guess first off I'm really, kind of worried the way you phrase this question in the sense that you're saying this is a brand new website and it has much better links, and many more links than all of your competitors that. Sounds. I don't. Know kind, of kind. Of problematic, like. How how, would this happen with a new website. So. That's, just. Kind of an an aside, there in. General, when, it comes to new web sites it is tricky for us to figure out how we should be showing these in search and. In. Some, cases we don't have a lot of signals and we have to kind, of guess, at where. We think this, website, would be relevant in the search results and over. Time that will settle down and that could be that we start out fairly conservative, and it settles down at a higher state it, could also be that we start, fairly high, and it settles down a little bit lower in the search results over time, so. This, process is, is completely normal it's not something, that I would call sandbox. Or that were artificially, holding back new sites or anything like that it's. Really, just a matter of not us not really knowing in the beginning where exactly, we should be showing the site and search and, it. Takes, a bit of fact for the algorithms, to figure all of this out. But. Again, kind, of going back to your initial question I. Really. Kind, of be worried that maybe. You're doing some, things here, with your new website that you shouldn't, be doing. So. I really. Kind of rethink, what, what, you have set up there. With regards your a new, website if that's, really something, that's performing. Extremely well in an organic way or if you've been doing things that in the long term will cause more trouble than actually. Helping your website. So. That might be something worth getting, some tips from from some other people who've worked in similar areas before. Okay. So, two, questions I want to know if Google have in their plans to, send no, result pages, again. With, some keywords or if that was only a test I don't. Know what what. The plans are so, I. Think. In general we, we. At Google move fairly quickly sometimes, and. Sometimes. We try new things out sometimes, they don't work out sometimes, we try them out in a different way and they work out a little bit better this, is something. That I think every, website should be doing they should constantly. Be rethinking, what, what it is of providing, listening, to feedback and. Adjusting. What what they're doing based on feedback constantly, testing, something new and seeing if that works better so I. Would. Be surprised, if we kind. Of took this test and said oh we will never do anything like this again in the future ever but. Rather we'll try to learn from it and see where the problems were where, things could have been improved and. How. It. Makes sense to perhaps, find ways to improve. The user experience for, users in general in. A way that works well for all participants on, the way. Second. Question what types, of pages do you recommend to use em for, mobile. Websites. Amp. Has, a lot. More functionality than when, it was initially launched so while. In the beginning it made sense to focus more on content, type pages for amp, nowadays. You can do a lot of really fancy stuff for them so I, wouldn't, necessarily, try. To limit. Like where you use amp but maybe think about what. What kind of content, you have on your website what. Kind of functionality, you have on your website where, think AMP might be able to help you with that and. That's. Something that I think kind, of differs from website, to website and also differs. A bit based on your, experience, your resources, what kind of a team you have that can implement things. For. Example it probably, doesn't make sense to just drop all work on your website and only implement, and. Probably. You want to find some kind of a split and so you figure out like this is a team, generally, working on on, the website overall moving, things forward and maybe, some people that are trying, new things out and seeing how they work and how, that, evolves over time.

So. With. That said I don't, really have an answer of where you should be implementing, HAMP but I do know there are lots of places you can make really fast websites, or really, fast pages using. Amp technologies, that, you. Probably profit, from in the long run. Are. There negative consequences, to adding a lot of links to other sites within, one article my site would like to offer as much transparency as possible, as to how we arrived, at our conclusions, with fact-checking other outlets, but. We also don't want to hurt her own PageRank in the process, that's. Perfectly. Fine you can link to lots, of sites on your website, that's. Something, that definitely, works for us to also, understand, better, the context. Of your website within. Kind of the bigger web itself, the. One thing I try. To watch, out for is if there are any links, that could, be perceived as being kind, of paid or, kind, of being, placed there with, regards, to maybe, some exchanges, that are happening in the back and that's. Something where you probably want, to use the rel nofollow microformat. On those links but. Otherwise if these are organic, links, normal, links within the articles, on your website I, would. Just go for I think that makes perfect sense to link, to other sites. The. Only, follow up I have on that is that. My, understanding is, that in the fact and community that would like us to do sort, of like footnotes, on the bottom of where. Sources, came from. In. That instance, I would sort of almost, have to do. That link again, in the footnotes. Do. You have any suggestions, of how. You know the if I were to say that this came from let's say People magazine and then on the bottom say this quote was, from People magazine. More. Transparently, it's, at a prompt because now I have duplicate. Up the same sort of link that's. Perfectly fine that's, perfectly, definitely not a problem okay. Thank you okay. Let's, see no question the chat, if. We have a site that was hit by the March, 7th to March 9th, quality, updates that, is a legitimate, site that is generating, world-class content, and. Getting high quality links to, the content but the contents, get scraped and now the content. After the update is ranking, for other. Scraper. Websites first. Before our I. Guess. I tried to figure out what what, is going wrong here what. What, could be happening there I. I. Guess, what. I would recommend doing there first of all is posting, in the webmaster help forum to try to get general. Advice from other people. To. See. If there is something specific that they could be pointing out, something. Maybe that you've, overlooked, that you can either change. On your side or, react to to. The way other sites are acting, on your website, to. Try to handle, that a little bit better. In. General I think the the update you're referring to is, one. Of our core, algorithm updates. Where. Essentially, we're just trying to improve the relevance of the search results, it's not the case that we're saying your website is bad it's just our. Algorithms, essentially saying and maybe it's not so relevant for the queries that we used to show your website for. Obviously. As a webmaster you probably, have strong opinions about that and. That's. I, think perfectly. Understandable, I would, in a case like this, maybe go to the webmaster help forums and show. Us some of the queries where you. You felt your, site would be relevant for and so, that other people can take a look at that as well to, better, understand, how your site, is kind. Of interacting, in the bigger picture of the web and. The. Folks in the webmaster help forum can also escalate, issues to us if they see things, where they say well this, looks really weird this, shouldn't.

Be Happening like this they, can escalate, that to Googlers and Googlers. Will be able to take a look at that, as well and, figure. Out if there's anything on our site that we need to change there or if, there's anything maybe, technical, or kind, of from a quality, point of view that we could point out to you that, you could improve on your website in general. So. That's kind, of one what I would recommend doing there as a first step. Can you please empathize, more on technical SEO what, are the factors of technical. SEO, well. I think that's like a giant, open-ended. Question it's, like what what. Is SEO essentially. So. I. Don't. Know where I would start so I guess what. What I would see as technical. SEO is, everything, that's involved, up to maybe, like indexing, when. It comes to search so crawling. A web site understanding. How we, find, URLs on a website how. We can extract the content from the pages extract. Maybe metadata, from the pages and store, all of that or in our index and kind. Of what happens afterwards is mostly, I guess a matter of ranking. Which takes. Into account lots, of different signals from lots of other places, but. From a technical point of view I, feel, for the most part it's those first couple of steps in the pipelines. But. I. Am doing and ask. Me anything on reddit. I think that's tomorrow. A, bit, later in the day tomorrow so maybe. Jump in there and ask. There, because, that's specifically, around technical, SEO there, so check, out what kind of questions come maybe ask your questions there too and. Maybe. That'll help to kind of give, you a little bit more insight into what people, generally see as technical, SEO, I think, another. Tricky aspect here is of course that everyone has different view of what SEO should be and how far it kind of goes. So. Finding. That one, perfect answer that tells you exactly what, it is is unlikely to happen. I've. Worked on one domain for, eight month after, the domain expired I accidentally, bought the, wrong domain, instead of my previous one and all my work was gone. So what. What, can I do to, kind of restore, my. Rankings. There I. Don't. Think you can do anything really, magical. To make, that come back, you'd.

Have To get, the other domain as well and redirect, to your new domain essentially. Because. Otherwise what. Happens is it, looks like to us like there was a great, content here and it, disappeared and suddenly the same copy of the content appeared somewhere else and sometimes. We can draw a connection there and say well maybe, this. Belongs, together and we should treat them as one thing, but, it could also be that some random other person just copied your content, and put that on and, then. Wouldn't. Be the right thing to just say well is probably the same thing we'll just rank it in the same way as it was before. So. I, think. In a case like that either you, kind of have to bite the bullet and say get well. Kind. Of redo those last eight months which is not not, an eternity, so definitely. Something, that's that's reasonably, possible, or. Figure out a way to get that old domain name back so that you can redirect properly, to your, new domain name. I. Noticed. In search results, that sites who showed up on page 1 for domain name and, if you post no longer display the posts, on page 1 it's, like, the change booted, the posts off I only see the home pages of a lot of sites, is. That normal. I am. Not, aware of anything in, that regard which which are been happening, so. Sounds. Like maybe these are just normal search changes, or maybe these other changes, specific, to two individual sites if. You feel the quality of the search results, has gotten. Worse because of a change like this I will definitely go ahead and submit feedback on the bottom of the search results page there's. A feedback link and you. Can tell. Us kind. Of what when you were searching for and why you're unhappy. With what happened there the search results and if. You're seeing this across, the board for a lot of cases and. Not. Just individual, sites but a lot. Of situations where you're thinking that this is really like broken.

And Google should be doing much better in the search results, then, you're welcome to kind of send me that as a pack, so. That I can take a look at that with. A team here for individual. Queries it probably makes more sense to just do that with a feedback link. But if you're seeing something bigger that you can't really pack into individual, feedback. Submissions. Then, you're welcome to send me that directly. The, easiest way to do that is on Google Plus which. Is sometimes, a bit quirky you with regards, to how to add. Me to your thread privately, but. Probably. The the best way to get that to me. Mobile. First indexing okay, a mobile, version of a website with less. Internal, links so if you're tough menu items is expected, to have ranking problems due to less leave value passed through interlinking. So. If you have different, mobile content. Or, different content on mobile, than you have on your desktop in. Particular, that. Would be you, don't have a responsive, web design setup. Then. When. We switch to mobile first indexing, for that site we will use the mobile version for crawling indexing and, kind of passing the signals but internally, within the site so. In, an extreme case where, you have no links, at all on the mobile page and, you, have normal. Linking structure on the desktop page then, we wouldn't be able to crawl that page anymore, or that site anymore, because we wouldn't be able to find all of the pages anymore when we do that with a mobile device. I would. Expect, in a case like that to, see some changes in search if you have significantly. Different internal, links on mobile, than on desktop. Whereas. If you have a responsive, web design even, if not all links, are immediately, visible that's. Something, that you don't have to worry about it all that essentially, just works. We, do take into account how a site. Is linking, when, we switch to mobile first indexing though so. If we see that a site has a, terrible, internal, linking structure on mobile and a reasonable, one on desktop, then probably we wouldn't be switching that so insight over to mobile first indexing, just yet. Do. You think that SEO is a long-term career, I don't. Know, all, of these SEO s are just so young they just like briefly started, work on this at. Least they all look so young so, I. Don't, know we'll have to wait and see if this lasts more than a couple of years I guess, what. Do you all think, SEO. Is like long term thing. It's. Dead. SEO. Is dead oh my gosh no. That's terrible don't, tell me. Yeah. I I think there's lots of stuff that can be done with, regards to SEO and kind, of understanding. How the how, the web works and. How. How. Things work online, there. Are a lot of technical things that need to be done even if I. Don't know how search engines work completely. Artificial. Intelligence, power and we're able to guess all of your URLs you'd still have to put that content on there somehow and explain. To search engines why your content is the best version of that so. I totally. Don't see that going away it will, evolve of course it, has evolved, quite a bit over time, when. I think back at the beginnings, it's like everything was just a black box and nowadays like. There's so many technical things you can just check off and you kind, of know this is actually something that searches is care about so it. Definitely. Changes over time so if, you want a. A job, that will. Be the same for. The long run then maybe SEO is the right thing for you but, if you're happy with challenges, and figuring, new things out all the time then I don't. Know cool. Area to be activated.

Doesn't, Matter where, the internal, link is placed for SEO purposes for, example our internal, link space in the sidebar as, powerful, as in content, links or will internal, links carry more value if they're placed higher in the content, in. General the location, of the link doesn't matter so much for us we. Do try to figure out what the context, of that link is to better understand, how we should connect, those those, pages, for. Example if we notice, that a link is in the comments, on a blog somewhere of, them we'll probably assume, this belongs to some blog comment, and maybe we'll, treat that slightly differently than if it's something that's within, the top body of your article, but. For the most part when. We crawl, through a website we try. To just, treat it as a natural link when we come across links, and follow them normally. Let's. Say lighthouse. Audit, extension, for chrome sure to be taking. Note of the progressive, web app results, for my web site or is this only for downloadable. Apps, so. Progressive web app is essentially. A way of making a website that, has. That. Fulfills certain attributes, such. As being. Able to run, offline. Letting. You add it to the home screen on mobile and, I. Think, that it uses a serviceworker, I'm, actually sure now that, I think about it, but. It's essentially a normal website and you can use those audits, to test. For, your normal website as well some. Of those audit, results will probably, be irrelevant to you so if you don't have any offline functionality then. You, probably don't care if the audit says you don't have any offline functionality. But. Sometimes. There is useful, information that comes out of these audits where. You might, see some speed aspect, that's highlighted that you forgot about or, maybe, some other aspect, that that. You missed we. Recently added some SEO, audits, to the lighthouse setup as well I believe. They they're. Going, to show up in chrome or already showed up in some. Chrome versions, as. Well so for. Example if you're developing.

A, Web, app for the first time and you want to kind of make sure you have the basics of SEO covered. That. Might be a good way to get started. Neat, thing about lighthouse, is also that you can run it from the command line so, you could theoretically run. This on a regular. Basis and just check, your important, pages to, double-check, that things are kind of set up properly with. Regards to the other site you choose so, that, might be a neat option for for, the more advanced, people, as well. Let's. See. A. Question, about cache, that uses a different URL than, the actual, page and what way can that affect rankings. So. I'm not quite, sure which, cache, you need there, in. Many, cases, if you have something like a rel canonical on a page and the whole page with that rel canonical, is cached then, we'll just when. We crawl that cache page we'll follow the ro canonical, and we'll generally, use. The canonical version instead. So. That, if, you, set it up like that I generally. Think that wouldn't, be a problem. What's, the meaning of not set in Google Analytics. So. I, believe, this refers to the. Data from search console when it's transferred to Google Analytics and. There's. Some queries. Where we don't provide the query itself. Just. Mostly, for privacy reasons for example if a query is very rarely used and we might be kind, of cautious about. Providing, that to to. Search console directly and from. There also to analytics, so that's, kind, of where that comes from in, the search console Help Center for the, search, analytics feature, there's, a little bit more about, kind. Of the queries, that we filter out there. If. We take an example site that operates primarily in English but has a smaller Russian site -. So. It. Sounds like you're just linking, between some of the Russian pages and some of the English pages, do. You have to do anything special to make, that work. So. In. General what, I'd, recommend doing there is trying to figure out if you can set up the atria fling links, between those versions those, helped us to understand, that these pages are actually equivalent but in different languages, however. For, normal. Kind, of content, queries, we. Can usually figure out which language, the user is searching in from. The query that they use, and we, can tell how your Russian pages or English, pages are relevant to that specific. Query so, for the most part that probably, would just work, what. Would probably be trickier, is when it comes to brand queries so if someone is searching for your company name probably. Your company name is the same name in Russian as it is in English then, from that query we wouldn't know which, which over your pages would actually be the most relevant because we don't know are, they looking for the English homepage, or the Russian homepage and, in.

A Case like that maybe. Lucia would show both maybe, we would just show one of the two pages and. That. Might not be exactly what you want so. If. You see, that this is happening with some queries probably, more with like brand queries than anything else then. Maybe, it makes sense to just set up href Lang links for, those individual, pages if you, can't do that across, the whole website. So. That's kind, of what what, I would aim for there. All. Right Wow these questions keep coming and coming let's, see how far we can go. I'm seeing a huge traffic coming from amp URL so clean when I check the URL and Google index for mobile the article is not appearing, and when I check with the site the not am version say Thanks. And it's. Not sharing, anywhere just, the, published articles is there anything I'm missing here. I. Don't. Know like. Getting, late links, and traffic from amp pages seems, like something that wouldn't. Necessarily be totally, out of the question so it. Feels, like that. Might be completely, normal. What, I'd recommend doing here though if you're really confused, not sure what, is happening is may be posting the webmaster help forum to. See if other people can give, you some, more tips on what you could be looking at or, can. Kind of show you how this, is or is not something, that you, need, to worry about more on. Yesterday. It. Was observed that the URL error graphs, in, across. All monitored accounts, there are two data points for. One day is just an error or glitch or. Symptom of mobile-first indexing, or something else so. In general mobile first indexing, you, wouldn't, see anything like this we would just switch, from. One. Version of the content together across, your website so. That wouldn't, be reflected, in the of these error reports, like that I, suspect. It's just some weird data. Glitch I I, don't know what. What the plan is there from the search console side if if we're just going to fold those together or, maybe they are folded together already, I. Haven't seen any more reports of that recently but I'll, check, with the team actually on that. Let's. See if you, have any advice for I can get most, respectable, information, on how to correctly write, about a business, who definitely works in different areas. There's. Going to be lots of misunderstanding. Here but this business, definitely, works in different cities for, example commercial, tour installations. So. In, general. I would write your, content as naturally, as possible and, if. There are individual. Locations, where you're activating, then writing about that I think it's fine if. You're doing, this at a large scale and, including like hundreds of locations, and probably, it makes more sense to use fewer, individual, locations, and talk about regions instead. Because. Otherwise. You just have like this mass of pages, that are essentially just all the same thing. So. I, try, to find kind, of a reasonable ground, with. Regards, to what, you would, provide - maybe, someone visiting your store in person, with. Regards to the content there. All. Right Wow. I think, we actually made it through oh my god more questions and a chat is. There any kind of suppression for long pages of mobile devices I, don't. Think so not, not, that I'm aware of like. Some pages are just really long and we, have to figure out how to deal with them, sometimes. For example a PDF, can be like hundreds, of pages long and we still have to figure out how to index. That content somehow. Let's. See what's the difference between knowledge graph and Google my business to, list in terms of search and search, query. Those. Are kind, of different. Things so. From. From, that regard it's. Like. Very, different things sometimes, we do, show information from Google my business in, the knowledge graph sidebar as well but. Essentially those there's, a different. Kind. Of topics, to it to look at. All. Right I, think. We made it to the end, is. There, anything specific, on, your mind that I missed out that I need to cover before we, head, off into the next. Batch of hangouts, next week or. Otherwise. On Twitter, John, John, as, you, know I'm not talking along. The pages, on well by oh yeah, so. That, was something I was just reading my book. Recently, and, they. Are normalized, though aren't they long, pages and shop pages are all normalized, so, that both. Haven't, - doesn't, must, sort of follow but because you're gonna have a huge, page you're, gonna run out one for shop page because, of normalization, yeah.

I Mean. We need to figure out how how to deal with like long pages that have a lot of different content on ER than short. Pages are very focused, and I, don't. Think you can always say that like, a long page it has a section, end for the same content is on a short page it would be like. Exactly the same or different there like how how, that should be read there's, a. Normalization. Suppression. Isn't them probably. Yeah to. Figure, out like where, where it makes sense to, to, include more where, it makes sense to include less I I, think that's totally. Normal you've. Been reading a lot of these cool technical books that's fantastic. Why, SEO should be doing that yeah. Yeah. John a. Couple. Questions one. Something. I've encountered, in the past over the years is our sites, that are primarily. Image based or. One. Particular case, it. Was an html5 site, and there's a lot of interactive. Kind of. Elements. On the page and the question always came about was do we need to supplement this. With, content. Your written content. How. Are those dealt with probably. Yeah, so. If, there, is very little content, on a page then it's really hard for us to understand what this page is about and. In. Extreme case that that I sometimes see is photography. Kind. Of portfolio websites. Where. Essentially. Each, photo is on an individual, page and, the, textual content is like the camera settings and. That's. Something that for us is really hard to understand, like what should we be ranking this page for is it relevant in web search somehow, is available, in just an image search and for, image search like what should we be showing it for we. Don't have a lot of information there so having. Some amount of textual information on a page I think is really, critical. Okay. And the the second, question, I, I'm, not sure my questions, are going. Through on the. The. Other. A section. That, that, robust, thing wrecked correct, I. Don't. Know I, have. A tool to kind of pull them out for me but I don't see any of, your questions left, so. Maybe. They're so they're somewhere, well, I asked, last time too and they were kind of skipped so I'm thinking there might be some okay. I'll. Double-check okay. Thank you cool. All. Right oh my, gosh a really. Long question. Let. Me see if I can I can summarize it. I. Work, for a company health, and wellness that. Has like. Professional, writers and, a lot of UGC. I. Guess. Kind, of an indirection I was like how would, Google, understand, the quality, of the content based. On the sub directories, or different parts of a website where you might have experts. Writing about things and, you might have user-generated, content, on.

Similar, Topics. I. I. Think. That's. In, general very tricky, situation. Because for. The most part we do try to understand. Things on a per-page basis, but we, don't understand a full context, on a per-page. Basis, and sometimes we will look at the bigger picture and, that. Often. Means that we look at the website overall to try to figure out how is, the. Is the quality, of this website overall so, if you're mixing a lot of let. Us say the extreme case low quality user-generated, content, with really, high quality expert. Content on your website then sometimes, our algorithms might not understand, where, this barrier is between, those two sections and that we should be treating these differently, and then. It might, might. Be tricky for us to to kind of show the high quality expert content in the right place. So, that's something, where, it. Might. Make sense to think, about like what you can to make it clear which, parts are user-generated content, which parts are really. Kind of your expert. Editorial. Content that you're providing that could. Be something. Like maybe a sub-domain, it. Could be maybe, in an extreme case even putting it on a different domain. Or. Finding, other ways to, kind of at. Least give, us more information about the content that you're providing and other. Approaches. That we've also seen from people. Who run forums, for example is that they try to figure out which parts of the UGC content, are actually high quality UGC which parts are lower lower, quality, UGC. So. That, could, be something where if you have some. Kind of tracking mechanism, on your site that you can track to see which. Parts of the UGC are good and which parts are bad or, you could say well I'll just put the lower, quality UGC on no Index to start. Off with for perhaps and as. I get, information that this is actually really useful then, I take that no index away, so. This is something that I believe we do in our product, forums as well where if, someone just comes in and posts a bunch of stuff in the beginning then we'll put that on no index and if, people kind, of interact what that was like oh this is actually a good question and, really, insightful thing here then, we, take that noindex, away and have, it index as normal content so. That might be something kind. Of to look, into as well but. It, really, kind, of depends on on, the website and, what kind of UGC, you're talking about if these are random people from the internet giving medical advice then. Probably, it's not a good idea to mix that in with like. A. Credited, doctor is also giving medical advice, but. If if, these are really high quality UGC. Things. That are being provided there maybe. That's that's. Perfectly fine to keep those more, related, together. Alright. We've. Kind of run out of time I have, the next batch of hangouts. Set up I think for next week. And. So. If there's anything left on your mind that you want to add feel free to jump in there, also. How I'm as, I mentioned the reddit. Thread, should, be going, up tomorrow so if you have any technical SEO questions, feel free to jump in there I'm sure that will be interesting, and as. Always in the meantime feel, free to ping us on Twitter or post, in the webmaster help forum lots. Of people there who can, help out with a lot of the more. General questions around web search and escalate, the. Quirky things that people run into as well. All. Right thanks. A lot again and hope. To see you all in the future again bye. Everyone bunch.

2018-04-01 17:11

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