Year in review 2022

Where we can get, I guess, more, I don't know,


Year in review 2022

diverse perspectives about how things in the SEO world


Year in review 2022

are going?


Year in review 2022

Or what aspect did you really like about having guests?


Year in review 2022

I mean, there are multiple aspects to it.


Year in review 2022

One is that it's nice to highlight that there


Year in review 2022

are people behind the role.


Year in review 2022

I thought that's a really nice touch.


Year in review 2022

And for example, hearing from Barry Schwartz about his life,


Year in review 2022

that was really, really cool.


Year in review 2022

Jennifer Slag, same thing.


Year in review 2022

And then the diversity aspect, that's


Year in review 2022

also really nice to bring focus on.


Year in review 2022

And then all the technical stuff that we


Year in review 2022

learned from these interview podcasts, that's


Year in review 2022

also really eye-opening, I guess.


Year in review 2022

Yeah.


Year in review 2022

I mean, I would agree with that.


Year in review 2022

I feel like with those episodes particularly,


Year in review 2022

it felt like we were learning more from them,


Year in review 2022

sort of interviewing them about what their career was like


Year in review 2022

and the subject matter that they know about.


Year in review 2022

So it felt more fun because you came away learning something


Year in review 2022

new, I think.


Year in review 2022

Cool.


Year in review 2022

OK.


Year in review 2022

Here I am nodding my head in a podcast, which


Year in review 2022

doesn't seem to work very well.


Year in review 2022

After like 50 episodes, I would have hoped


Year in review 2022

that we'd stop doing that.


Year in review 2022

Oh, well.


Year in review 2022

I also do the hand stuff, so whatever.


Year in review 2022

I mean, like just waving my hands.


Year in review 2022

But that's signature.


Year in review 2022

Yeah.


Year in review 2022

Wow.


Year in review 2022

So having more guests, that means probably we'll


Year in review 2022

reach out to more people outside?


Year in review 2022

Or are you looking for people to volunteer?


Year in review 2022

I mean, this past year, you selected people


Year in review 2022

for a particular reason, I'm guessing, Gary?


Year in review 2022

Like you had sort of had an idea to do like a series of six,


Year in review 2022

I think, throughout the year.


Year in review 2022

I think I just reached out to a bunch of people


Year in review 2022

and then was waiting for replies.


Year in review 2022

I didn't have anything in particular, basically.


Year in review 2022

I generally know who are the SEOs


Year in review 2022

that I kind of want to talk to.


Year in review 2022

Well, not just SEOs, I guess, because Barry, for example,


Year in review 2022

Barry Schwartz is not really an SEO.


Year in review 2022

But all the people that we talk to, I know personally.


Year in review 2022

And they really love chatting with them


Year in review 2022

when we meet each other at conferences


Year in review 2022

or after conferences or whatever.


Year in review 2022

And they just thought that it would be nice to bring them


Year in review 2022

on the podcast.


Year in review 2022

Next year, we can do something else, perhaps.


Year in review 2022

If I remember correctly, the planning


Year in review 2022

is either in your hands or in Martin's hands.


Year in review 2022

So you can knock yourself out with it.


Year in review 2022

I'm curious if we would focus it differently.


Year in review 2022

Like this past year, it was more of a highlight or spotlight


Year in review 2022

on that person specifically, like their career path.


Year in review 2022

It was more of a, how did you get into SEO?


Year in review 2022

And what are you doing that's maybe specific to you


Year in review 2022

in the industry?


Year in review 2022

Would we change that in the next year?


Year in review 2022

Because there are a couple of different approaches


Year in review 2022

that you could take, like highlighting newcomers,


Year in review 2022

for example, someone who's more fresh,


Year in review 2022

or bringing someone who's, I don't know,


Year in review 2022

to talk about a specific topic instead of highlighting


Year in review 2022

their career.


Year in review 2022

Yeah.


Year in review 2022

I mean, sounds good to me.


Year in review 2022

What do you think, John?


Year in review 2022

I think someone has to take it up and set up a plan


Year in review 2022

and go for it.


Year in review 2022

From my point of view, that sounds like a great idea,


Year in review 2022

having a different focus on the people that


Year in review 2022

are coming into the podcast.


Year in review 2022

So pick something and run with it.


Year in review 2022

I think from a general point of view about the podcast


Year in review 2022

within the context of everything that we do externally,


Year in review 2022

like we can go in any direction.


Year in review 2022

How is the podcast doing, by the way?


Year in review 2022

It's doing surprisingly well, and I don't know why.


Year in review 2022

We reached 1 million downloads this year,


Year in review 2022

which is kind of crazy.


Year in review 2022

And all of the downloads.


Year in review 2022

Wait, wait.


Year in review 2022

Yeah, 1 million.


Year in review 2022

Do you want me to say it again?


Year in review 2022

1 million.


Year in review 2022

How?


Year in review 2022

I don't know.


Year in review 2022

And all of the downloads were from this year.


Year in review 2022

So we're at 1.3 million, and 1.1 is from this year alone,


Year in review 2022

even though we've been doing it for like 2 and 1


Year in review 2022

2 years now.


Year in review 2022

Do you think it's a bot?


Year in review 2022

It's also weird because most of the downloads


Year in review 2022

are the transcripts.


Year in review 2022

So is it views on the transcripts themselves?


Year in review 2022

Oh, maybe it's crawlers.


Year in review 2022

Could be.


Year in review 2022

Search engines in your podcast.


Year in review 2022

It's more likely than you think.


Year in review 2022

Oh, I had a piphany.


Year in review 2022

The piphany?


Year in review 2022

The piphany.


Year in review 2022

We could start a podcast and talk about search engines.


Year in review 2022

Like other search engines, not ours?


Year in review 2022

This is a terrible idea.


Year in review 2022

OK.


Year in review 2022

Moving on.


Year in review 2022

What was the most surprising thing


Year in review 2022

that happened this year from your part of you?


Year in review 2022

I mean, for me, it was that 15 megabyte thing.


Year in review 2022

That completely.


Year in review 2022

Don't say it.


Year in review 2022

I'm going to say it again.


Year in review 2022

No.


Year in review 2022


Year in review 2022

No 15 megabytes.


Year in review 2022

15 megabits?


Year in review 2022

Bytes.


Year in review 2022

I don't know.


Year in review 2022

That whole thing just blew my mind


Year in review 2022

because it was like such a subtle change that we made.


Year in review 2022

Not subtle.


Year in review 2022

It was a small thing.


Year in review 2022

One sentence, I think, just saying the limit.


Year in review 2022

And we didn't think that this would be of note, I guess.


Year in review 2022

Also, you said change.


Year in review 2022

I think it's worth noting that it was a change on Dev side.


Year in review 2022

Correct.


Year in review 2022

Basically on our publishing platform


Year in review 2022

and not in how Googlebot works.


Year in review 2022

Like that's how Googlebot worked for the past, I don't even know,


Year in review 2022

15 years or something.


Year in review 2022

I don't think it was eye-opening because I


Year in review 2022

don't think I would have done anything differently.


Year in review 2022

No.


Year in review 2022

It was just really, really surprising


Year in review 2022

that everyone and my grandmother freaked out


Year in review 2022

about that addition to developers.google.com


Year in review 2022

slash search.


Year in review 2022

And I couldn't explain why.


Year in review 2022

I kind of think it's one of those things


Year in review 2022

where it's hard to grasp what is 15 megabytes.


Year in review 2022

And nowadays you think, well, my phone


Year in review 2022

has like gigabytes of storage.


Year in review 2022

So my web page might be 15 megabytes.


Year in review 2022

I don't even know.


Year in review 2022

And maybe that's kind of what's throwing people off.


Year in review 2022

It's like some technical change that they


Year in review 2022

found in documentation that they don't know if it actually


Year in review 2022

affects their website because they never looked at it.


Year in review 2022

Well, for me it was super weird.


Year in review 2022

Do you recall if, because we did a few changes there.


Year in review 2022

We wrote a blog post.


Year in review 2022

But when we initially changed it,


Year in review 2022

did we add that note that said this


Year in review 2022

is just a change in the documentation.


Year in review 2022

It's been functioning this way.


Year in review 2022

I think that might have been a turning point for us


Year in review 2022

to start saying that more, just to head off people who are like,


Year in review 2022

is this new in general?


Year in review 2022

No, this is a technical limit that has always been there.


Year in review 2022

There's no change.


Year in review 2022

Even though this is new to you, it


Year in review 2022

has been functioning this way this whole time.


Year in review 2022

Yeah.


Year in review 2022

I think there were a few things that came out of that fiasco


Year in review 2022

that are positive.


Year in review 2022

One is what you just mentioned, the updates page,


Year in review 2022

where we document more aggressively the things


Year in review 2022

that we, well, document.


Year in review 2022

And the other thing was that we started looking more


Year in review 2022

into what else can we document, more obscure things.


Year in review 2022

Because you had too much fun with this?


Year in review 2022

You want to cause trouble?


Year in review 2022

Well, not necessarily trouble.


Year in review 2022

But one thing that was very obvious,


Year in review 2022

that people were interested in this.


Year in review 2022

It's such a minor thing.


Year in review 2022

And it affects so few pages.


Year in review 2022

Probably you can count on.


Year in review 2022

We did.


Year in review 2022

We did count how many pages this affected.


Year in review 2022

And it was such a small amount.


Year in review 2022

I don't remember the number.


Year in review 2022

Ridiculous.


Year in review 2022

But it was a super small number.


Year in review 2022

But people were still interested.


Year in review 2022

And then why not document more of these things,


Year in review 2022

especially if they are not changing too often?


Year in review 2022

Do you think part of it's a number thing,


Year in review 2022

like a fascination with like, we publish some kind of number


Year in review 2022

that's like a maximum or minimum?


Year in review 2022

And that's just like?


Year in review 2022

I mean, that's Barry.


Year in review 2022

Barry's fascination.


Year in review 2022

Numbers.


Year in review 2022

Otherwise, people are just like, it's a new thing.


Year in review 2022

It's shiny.


Year in review 2022

Look.


Year in review 2022

People also seem to like when we publish the things


Year in review 2022

that we don't support.


Year in review 2022

Because that's also been something recent


Year in review 2022

that you've been doing to say these things don't work.


Year in review 2022

Not just writing about the things that are supported,


Year in review 2022

but also not supported, which is, I think,


Year in review 2022

something that we were, I don't know.


Year in review 2022

Like if we don't mention it, why would it not?


Year in review 2022

We're just documenting by default,


Year in review 2022

by the fact that it's not there.


Year in review 2022

Why do we have to just go overkill


Year in review 2022

and say it's not supported?


Year in review 2022

Yeah, implicitly not supported.


Year in review 2022

I think that is way trickier than what we support,


Year in review 2022

or documenting what we support.


Year in review 2022

Because obviously, we don't support probably millions


Year in review 2022

of file extensions and content types.


Year in review 2022

Like for example, binary files generally


Year in review 2022

are a no-go for search engines.


Year in review 2022

But documenting those would be fairly impossible, I guess.


Year in review 2022

The other thing is HTML element attributes,


Year in review 2022

like rel attribute and class and name and whatnot.


Year in review 2022

Like we can't possibly document them all, especially


Year in review 2022

with the custom attributes like data dash star.


Year in review 2022

Literally, there are virtually infinite number of attributes


Year in review 2022

that we would need to document.


Year in review 2022

We can't.


Year in review 2022

When do you think it's particularly beneficial


Year in review 2022

to document what we don't support?


Year in review 2022

Because it feels like it might be


Year in review 2022

where we need to have a reference where people keep


Year in review 2022

asking us, or we want to debunk something, like keywords.


Year in review 2022

Yeah, that's exactly it.


Year in review 2022

Thank you for answering your own question.


Year in review 2022

Oh, OK.


Year in review 2022

I'll just have my own podcast.


Year in review 2022

Cool.


Year in review 2022

So what other things kind of surprised you this year?


Year in review 2022

So on the one hand, kind of giving more information,


Year in review 2022

I think that feels unsurprising that people really like that.


Year in review 2022

And also telling them things that don't work.


Year in review 2022

Anything else that kind of stood out from your point of view?


Year in review 2022

I mean, I didn't anticipate that we would be kind of moving over


Year in review 2022

to Masterjohn.


Year in review 2022

Oh.


Year in review 2022

If you had asked us at the beginning of the year,


Year in review 2022

would we be on Twitter or not?


Year in review 2022

I don't know.


Year in review 2022

Did you anticipate that, John?


Year in review 2022

Did that surprise you?


Year in review 2022

I thought it was kind of surprising.


Year in review 2022

Yeah, I mean, at least at the moment,


Year in review 2022

we don't have the official account on Masterjohn,


Year in review 2022

but a bunch of us are more active there now


Year in review 2022

with all of the changes around Twitter.


Year in review 2022

So I don't know how that will evolve by the time


Year in review 2022

this podcast actually comes out, but we'll see.


Year in review 2022

I think it's cool to kind of put yourself


Year in review 2022

into a different mindset when it comes


Year in review 2022

to some of these social media things,


Year in review 2022

because there are different philosophies around it.


Year in review 2022

And it makes you kind of recognize the things


Year in review 2022

that you almost kind of took for granted with the old setup.


Year in review 2022

And lots of things are different on Masterjohn.


Year in review 2022

I don't know, some of them are probably good.


Year in review 2022

Some of them might not be as good as what we had before.


Year in review 2022

I don't know.


Year in review 2022

We'll see how it pans out.


Year in review 2022

Is Masterjohn one of those Web 3 things?


Year in review 2022

Web 3 things?


Year in review 2022

Like, I mean, I don't think it uses blockchains or anything


Year in review 2022

weird like that.


Year in review 2022

I think what's interesting about it is


Year in review 2022

it's built on open standards.


Year in review 2022

So anyone can build something around that


Year in review 2022

or create bots or weird things.


Year in review 2022

So that's kind of cool compared to Twitter


Year in review 2022

where it's a lot more locked down.


Year in review 2022

So it's almost like going back to the time of RSS feeds


Year in review 2022

and things like that.


Year in review 2022

We could just launch a Google Reader sort of thing.


Year in review 2022

OK.


Year in review 2022

Million dollar idea.


Year in review 2022

Go for it, Gary.


Year in review 2022

Maybe not.


Year in review 2022

Cool.


Year in review 2022

So last year, I saw we did a podcast.


Year in review 2022

We were like, oh, well, this is going to happen in 2022.


Year in review 2022

I took a look at the transcript.


Year in review 2022

And there are a bunch of things in there.


Year in review 2022

What do you think?


Year in review 2022

Did we kind of do what we wanted to do


Year in review 2022

or what we had almost like the idea that might happen?


Year in review 2022

Yeah.


Year in review 2022

Do you remember, Gary?


Year in review 2022

Well, so one thing that we failed at


Year in review 2022

is that JavaScript is still alive and happy.


Year in review 2022

Oh, did you say that you wanted to kill it


Year in review 2022

like at the beginning of the year?


Year in review 2022

I would never say that.


Year in review 2022

But would you insinuate?


Year in review 2022

That allegation is ludicrous.


Year in review 2022

How can you say that even?


Year in review 2022

Well, maybe I was hoping that something happens to JavaScript.


Year in review 2022

I don't know, like a bus hits it or something.


Year in review 2022

It didn't happen.


Year in review 2022

So that's sad.


Year in review 2022

Events, events, in-person events are back.


Year in review 2022

What?


Year in review 2022

Yes.


Year in review 2022

I went to one.


Year in review 2022

So you're back to hugging people again?


Year in review 2022

What do you mean, again?


Year in review 2022

Oh, they're hugging you?


Year in review 2022

No, people are not hugging me.


Year in review 2022

I have a resting grumpy face, so I repel people.


Year in review 2022

It's nice.


Year in review 2022

So you're going to events, and then you're all alone?


Year in review 2022

Or how does this play out?


Year in review 2022

Yeah, sure.


Year in review 2022

Only at events, I'm all alone.


Year in review 2022

No, but really, going back to events,


Year in review 2022

that was such a fantastic change.


Year in review 2022

And I really like it.


Year in review 2022

I went to one conference so far, I think.


Year in review 2022

And we had hallway discussions, and we had coffee discussions,


Year in review 2022

and I got lots of ideas, exactly what I was missing.


Year in review 2022

I'm not saying it's good ideas, but it's ideas.


Year in review 2022

For example, I'm going back to parachuting.


Year in review 2022

That was one of the ideas.


Year in review 2022

Oh, no.


Year in review 2022

That sounds like a weird discussion.


Year in review 2022

It's like, Gary, you should jump out of planes more.


Year in review 2022

Have you considered?


Year in review 2022

Also.


Year in review 2022

I mean, that's not a new thing.


Year in review 2022

I just stopped a little, a few years.


Year in review 2022

But I really feel that these conferences,


Year in review 2022

the in-person conferences, somehow


Year in review 2022

stimulate brain in such a way that you


Year in review 2022

get more ideas to develop.


Year in review 2022

And that is really, really welcome,


Year in review 2022

because for two years, I was working on docs,


Year in review 2022

and it was very nice.


Year in review 2022

Oh, wait, Lizzie is here.


Year in review 2022

What are you saying?


Year in review 2022

It was fantastic.


Year in review 2022

Best experience of my life.


Year in review 2022

OK.


Year in review 2022

So you're happy to meet people again, chat with them


Year in review 2022

in person.


Year in review 2022

Cool.


Year in review 2022

I think we should have more of these events as well.


Year in review 2022

And I definitely go to more.


Year in review 2022

I always find that you get different kinds of feedback


Year in review 2022

when you talk with people in person versus when you


Year in review 2022

do emails or even video calls.


Year in review 2022

Yeah.


Year in review 2022

And people feel more comfortable sharing it one on one


Year in review 2022

than in front of a group.


Year in review 2022

If they can speak to you in the hallway,


Year in review 2022

it's a much different vibe than in front of,


Year in review 2022

like, ask you a question or something, Q&A after a session.


Year in review 2022

It's sort of you generalize it so that it's OK for everyone


Year in review 2022

else who's listening.


Year in review 2022

But if you want to get a specific thing or tell you


Year in review 2022

something specific feedback, there's


Year in review 2022

a little bit more openness, I think.


Year in review 2022

And speaking of docs, we published docs.


Year in review 2022

We did.


Year in review 2022

We had a huge project that landed in October, I think.


Year in review 2022

We got rid of webmasters completely.


Year in review 2022

That was the last icing on the cake.


Year in review 2022

Wait, can you rephrase that?


Year in review 2022

Because it sounded ominous.


Year in review 2022

We got rid of webmasters.


Year in review 2022

We had one document still left over


Year in review 2022

from our rebrand that still had the word webmasters in it.


Year in review 2022

And that is now gone.


Year in review 2022

Wait, that's still not a good rephrasing, I think.


Year in review 2022

No.


Year in review 2022

It's probably worse.


Year in review 2022

You want to take a shot?


Year in review 2022

No?


Year in review 2022

I like how you're trying.


Year in review 2022

I'm like drowning over here.


Year in review 2022

You're just going to keep letting me flounder.


Year in review 2022

Yeah.


Year in review 2022

Legal will have a call with you.


Year in review 2022

Right.


Year in review 2022

So Webmaster Guidelines has been around for how long?


Year in review 2022

20 years.


Year in review 2022

A long time.


Year in review 2022

And it's had the same name for 20 years


Year in review 2022

and most of the same points.


Year in review 2022

Like, the core of the document has


Year in review 2022

been the same for this whole time.


Year in review 2022

But we've also grown as a site.


Year in review 2022

So we've not wanted to touch that document.


Year in review 2022

We published other best practices


Year in review 2022

and just kind of grown beyond that.


Year in review 2022

I think my problem with all the Webmaster Guidelines


Year in review 2022

was that we kept adding stuff to it that was not necessarily


Year in review 2022

the thing that people should focus on when they


Year in review 2022

start a site, for example.


Year in review 2022

Like, yes, it's nice to have, for example, a speedy site.


Year in review 2022

And it's nice to be on HTTPS.


Year in review 2022

But it's not an absolute must.


Year in review 2022

But then not spreading spam, that's


Year in review 2022

kind of like an absolute must.


Year in review 2022

And having your site reachable by Googlebot,


Year in review 2022

that's an absolute must.


Year in review 2022

And weeding these things out, basically,


Year in review 2022

just having those, I think, 10 points at the end,


Year in review 2022

the best practices.


Year in review 2022

Key best practices.


Year in review 2022

Yeah.


Year in review 2022

That was also a good exercise for us.


Year in review 2022

Like when we were sitting in a meeting room,


Year in review 2022

and then we were trying to rank those different points that we


Year in review 2022

have onesie on our site, that was a good exercise for us,


Year in review 2022

I think.


Year in review 2022

Yeah, we looked at all the points


Year in review 2022

to sort of evaluate what is actually important


Year in review 2022

and what are the main things that you need to do.


Year in review 2022

Because we sort of started publishing additional documents


Year in review 2022

and then not mentioning them things


Year in review 2022

that should be mentioned potentially in the Webmaster


Year in review 2022

Guidelines.


Year in review 2022

So we sort of ranked them like priority zero is like,


Year in review 2022

you must do.


Year in review 2022

The next one is like really important,


Year in review 2022

impactful for most sites.


Year in review 2022

And then too nice to have if you can do it,


Year in review 2022

if you can get around to it.


Year in review 2022

And that sort of set the direction for what we would


Year in review 2022

put in our new guidelines, I guess.


Year in review 2022

But even the Word guidelines, we had a problem with.


Year in review 2022

Because as you were mentioning, there are requirements


Year in review 2022

and policies that are like, you need to do this.


Year in review 2022

Or if you violate this, then this is a different kind


Year in review 2022

of criteria, I think, than the key best practices


Year in review 2022

and how we were referring to the Webmaster Guidelines before.


Year in review 2022

If you violate this, then you can't


Year in review 2022

appear in this other thing was maybe too intense for the stuff


Year in review 2022

that's in there, that was in there.


Year in review 2022

So have a speedy site.


Year in review 2022

How do you violate that?


Year in review 2022

Yeah, I'm so glad that we were able to make


Year in review 2022

some changes there.


Year in review 2022

It felt like over time, that document had just


Year in review 2022

grown and grown.


Year in review 2022

And everyone was afraid to touch it,


Year in review 2022

because it's such an established piece of content.


Year in review 2022

And now, I feel something that's a little bit more alive


Year in review 2022

and dynamic and where we could make changes if we recognized,


Year in review 2022

well, actually, this is a big new topic with regards to spam.


Year in review 2022

Or maybe there are different requirements or different key


Year in review 2022

best practices.


Year in review 2022

It feels a lot more approachable now.


Year in review 2022

That's super cool.


Year in review 2022

Yeah, that's one thing that I like about it the most,


Year in review 2022

that it's more modular.


Year in review 2022

So we can separate things.


Year in review 2022

And we can say that don't violate our spam policies,


Year in review 2022

for example, versus don't violate our Webmaster


Year in review 2022

Guidelines, which was, as Lizzie said, was kind of stupid.


Year in review 2022

Because it was like, come on, how do you violate a speedy


Year in review 2022

sites thing?


Year in review 2022

Or not making it accessible to Googlebot.


Year in review 2022

That's not a thing that you violate.


Year in review 2022

It's just a thing that you either do.


Year in review 2022

We can access the page, or we can't.


Year in review 2022

What do you mean violate?


Year in review 2022

Right.


Year in review 2022

And then going back to ranking the different things


Year in review 2022

that we have on OneZ, that was also interesting


Year in review 2022

that when we started ranking it, what are the absolute musts?


Year in review 2022

And then we came up with three, only three things


Year in review 2022

that are absolute must from technical perspective.


Year in review 2022

And that was kind of surprising.


Year in review 2022

I never actually thought about it before,


Year in review 2022

how many things you have to actually absolutely do


Year in review 2022

to your site to appear in or have a chance


Year in review 2022

to appear in search engines.


Year in review 2022

And then it ends up being three, like just three things.


Year in review 2022

And they are basically things that by default any site does.


Year in review 2022

Yeah.


Year in review 2022

I think that makes it more approachable as well.


Year in review 2022

It's not like, oh, here's this document


Year in review 2022

that we hand you that has 30 bullet points in it.


Year in review 2022

It's just three things that are pretty normal.


Year in review 2022

Good change.


Year in review 2022

Would not do it again.


Year in review 2022

We should do an episode talking about what


Year in review 2022

we're going to do for next year, but not today.


Year in review 2022

Anyway.


Year in review 2022

Why?


Year in review 2022

Wait, why?


Year in review 2022

Because it's time for the outro.


Year in review 2022

Oh.


Year in review 2022

OK, fine.


Year in review 2022

Thank you both for joining us here and all of the listeners


Year in review 2022

as well.


Year in review 2022

That's it for this episode.


Year in review 2022

In the next episode of Search Off the Record,


Year in review 2022

we'll be starting the year by checking out


Year in review 2022

the Search Console Help Center with our other tech writer,


Year in review 2022

Josh Cohen.


Year in review 2022

We've been having fun with these podcast episodes.


Year in review 2022

I hope you, the listener, have been


Year in review 2022

finding them both entertaining and insightful as well.


Year in review 2022

Feel free to drop me a note on Twitter


Year in review 2022

or chat with us at one of the next events that we go to,


Year in review 2022

if you have any thoughts.


Year in review 2022

And of course, don't forget to like and subscribe.


Year in review 2022

Thank you and goodbye.


Year in review 2022

Bye.


Year in review 2022


Search Central docs and SEO

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Search Off the Record, a podcast coming to you from


Search Central docs and SEO

the Google Search Relations team discussing all things search and having a little fun


Search Central docs and SEO

on the way.


Search Central docs and SEO

My name is John, and I'm joined today by Lizzie from the Search Relations team.


Search Central docs and SEO

Hi, Lizzie.


Search Central docs and SEO

Hey, John.


Search Central docs and SEO

So in today's episode, I thought we would talk about something slightly different, maybe


Search Central docs and SEO

SEO.


Search Central docs and SEO

What do you think?


Search Central docs and SEO

Slightly different.


Search Central docs and SEO

That implies that we've been talking about non-SEO things this entire time for the last


Search Central docs and SEO

how many episodes?


Search Central docs and SEO

We're almost at 50 episodes.


Search Central docs and SEO

What have we been talking about before this?


Search Central docs and SEO

Well, so Lizzie, you run the search developers website, which is kind of our place where


Search Central docs and SEO

we document everything around SEO, our best practices, the whole guidelines, all of the


Search Central docs and SEO

information about structured data, how you should set all of that up.


Search Central docs and SEO

And for that, we probably also have to do some SEO, right?


Search Central docs and SEO

You know, have to is a good framing there, because I don't think we have to do SEO.


Search Central docs and SEO

But it's not something that we were thinking about, I think, at the beginning.


Search Central docs and SEO

When I first joined the team, I did not know about SEO.


Search Central docs and SEO

I don't know if that's a bad thing to be revealing to you.


Search Central docs and SEO

But it's interesting, because from a tech writing perspective, the main goal is to be


Search Central docs and SEO

documenting what we're talking about.


Search Central docs and SEO

And it's not necessarily that we need to optimize for search engines.


Search Central docs and SEO

And that's probably not the main thing.


Search Central docs and SEO

But once you're learning about this, you sort of want to start testing the waters and apply


Search Central docs and SEO

some things.


Search Central docs and SEO

So it's definitely been something that I've been trying on our site.


Search Central docs and SEO

Cool.


Search Central docs and SEO

So I thought we would go through a bunch of things which people talk about when it comes


Search Central docs and SEO

to SEO and kind of get your take on how you've been kind of like practically implementing


Search Central docs and SEO

that or thinking about that or not thinking about that.


Search Central docs and SEO

I think our site is probably a bit unique, because it's kind of the Google documentation


Search Central docs and SEO

people go there anyway.


Search Central docs and SEO

And I guess there must be something in Google's algorithms that say, like, Google documentation


Search Central docs and SEO

should always rank first, right?


Search Central docs and SEO

No.


Search Central docs and SEO

No, I wish that that was true.


Search Central docs and SEO

But it's not.


Search Central docs and SEO

I wish that we could just push a button and be like, number one.


Search Central docs and SEO

But no, it's not true.


Search Central docs and SEO

There is no spot reserved for us.


Search Central docs and SEO

And there's definitely work that we have to do.


Search Central docs and SEO

And it makes us feel safe that people would still need to come to our site.


Search Central docs and SEO

And they could decide not to.


Search Central docs and SEO

Like if there wasn't anything useful there, they could decide not to come to us.


Search Central docs and SEO

They could go to other sites.


Search Central docs and SEO

So I think it's still something that we should think about.


Search Central docs and SEO

But I think that this idea is interesting.


Search Central docs and SEO

And I'm a little bit nervous.


Search Central docs and SEO

But let's get into it.


Search Central docs and SEO

OK.


Search Central docs and SEO

So it's so weird.


Search Central docs and SEO

We have to do SEO like every other website.


Search Central docs and SEO

I know.


Search Central docs and SEO

SEO about SEO content is also very weird and meta.


Search Central docs and SEO

And now we're doing an SEO audit about the SEO audit.


Search Central docs and SEO

Oh, yeah.


Search Central docs and SEO

Potentially.


Search Central docs and SEO

I don't know.


Search Central docs and SEO

What was that?


Search Central docs and SEO

Maybe five or 10 years ago, we did an SEO audit of our documentation.


Search Central docs and SEO

That was also interesting.


Search Central docs and SEO

Maybe we should do that again, like an official SEO audit.


Search Central docs and SEO

But anyway.


Search Central docs and SEO

I think so.


Search Central docs and SEO

Yes.


Search Central docs and SEO

Anyway, let's get started.


Search Central docs and SEO

I bet you're going into Search Console every day to check what's happening, right?


Search Central docs and SEO

Every day.


Search Central docs and SEO

Am I supposed to be logging in every day?


Search Central docs and SEO

I definitely don't.


Search Central docs and SEO

I don't know if that's the right or the wrong answer.


Search Central docs and SEO

But I do know.


Search Central docs and SEO

So Josh Cohen, the technical writer on the Search Console team, he has a document about


Search Central docs and SEO

how often you should be checking Search Console, depending on your usage patterns.


Search Central docs and SEO

And he does say that you don't need to be doing it every day.


Search Central docs and SEO

OK.


Search Central docs and SEO

I log in sometimes to kind of see like periodically.


Search Central docs and SEO

I think that every day is a little bit too much.


Search Central docs and SEO

Sometimes it's I'll log in to investigate a certain thing if I'm curious if something


Search Central docs and SEO

has moved.


Search Central docs and SEO

Maybe I implemented something a while ago and I want to see for a particular page.


Search Central docs and SEO

Or I'm just curious about if a recent update affected our content.


Search Central docs and SEO

I might look and see what's been happening over the course of the last few months.


Search Central docs and SEO

But I think every day is a little bit too often.


Search Central docs and SEO

A little bit too much?


Search Central docs and SEO

So what do you look at in Search Console?


Search Central docs and SEO

Is it just the performance or do you check the links?


Search Central docs and SEO

I definitely look at the general performance to see like are we... is there anything weird?


Search Central docs and SEO

Sometimes it could be like a big spike from some weird thing.


Search Central docs and SEO

I think recently something that confused me was a spike for our page about best practices


Search Central docs and SEO

for website testing.


Search Central docs and SEO

So we have a document that's about like if you're running an A-B test or something like


Search Central docs and SEO

that, how to... if there's any best practices that you should consider when doing that for


Search Central docs and SEO

your website so that you don't mess up whatever is happening in search.


Search Central docs and SEO

And we got a huge spike of traffic coming to that page for some reason.


Search Central docs and SEO

The search query was Google SEO... or no, Google search test.


Search Central docs and SEO

And I wasn't sure if this was the right... like what are these people looking for and


Search Central docs and SEO

why is there a sudden upsurge in this search query?


Search Central docs and SEO

Just like baffled me.


Search Central docs and SEO

And this is maybe something that happens kind of frequently because we tend to show up for


Search Central docs and SEO

odd things sometimes for some of our pages, like for our video structure data page we


Search Central docs and SEO

are like showing up for the query video or like watch videos, which is like what are


Search Central docs and SEO

they looking for?


Search Central docs and SEO

I'm not sure.


Search Central docs and SEO

Probably not the developer documentation, but...


Search Central docs and SEO

Probably not.


Search Central docs and SEO

Like structured data, like come right here to add video structured data to your page.


Search Central docs and SEO

But maybe we can convince them.


Search Central docs and SEO

It's like so you're looking for an entertaining video, but how about you make a website instead?


Search Central docs and SEO

Yes, we'd trap them.


Search Central docs and SEO

What about other SEO tools?


Search Central docs and SEO

Do you use anything else?


Search Central docs and SEO

I recently got Screaming Frog.


Search Central docs and SEO

So for the last couple of years, I've been bothering you about this, which I don't know


Search Central docs and SEO

if you've been like annoyed by that or not, but every time I had a question for, oh, can


Search Central docs and SEO

you generate a list of URLs that have this thing or like I'm looking for everything that


Search Central docs and SEO

was missing a title on this page, this kind of thing, I would just bother you because


Search Central docs and SEO

I knew you already had it set up and I was maybe lazy, I guess.


Search Central docs and SEO

But I finally went and got the license and set up the tool and I can't believe I did


Search Central docs and SEO

do it sooner, to be honest.


Search Central docs and SEO

Because now I have a whole pile of stuff that I can sort of search through.


Search Central docs and SEO

So I went there because I needed to generate a list of all of our titles and descriptions


Search Central docs and SEO

for all of our Japanese pages.


Search Central docs and SEO

And I needed to export that in a big table.


Search Central docs and SEO

And I thought, well, this is probably the only way that I can go and get that information.


Search Central docs and SEO

But yeah, there was some interesting things in there.


Search Central docs and SEO

They have like a whole section about broken links and stuff.


Search Central docs and SEO

So I found other things that I wasn't doing properly.


Search Central docs and SEO

Oh, no.


Search Central docs and SEO

You're saying we had broken links or we still have broken links?


Search Central docs and SEO

Like what kind of links?


Search Central docs and SEO

I guess like we could have them.


Search Central docs and SEO

I haven't checked today.


Search Central docs and SEO

This was maybe two weeks ago.


Search Central docs and SEO

So I guess I could have introduced a problem in the last two weeks.


Search Central docs and SEO

But yeah, there were like, I don't know, like 30 broken, like not that many because we had


Search Central docs and SEO

gone through a change to fix most of the issues there.


Search Central docs and SEO

But they found some things that I didn't anticipate.


Search Central docs and SEO

So back when we moved our blog over from Blogger, migrated it, I think it's been almost two


Search Central docs and SEO

years now since we did our whole merging and rebranding and everything.


Search Central docs and SEO

We migrated all of the localized blogs too.


Search Central docs and SEO

And we had to match the URLs.


Search Central docs and SEO

Sometimes the URLs were translated and then we had to go find like the parent English


Search Central docs and SEO

version so that they would all be synced up to have the same URL so that when you toggle


Search Central docs and SEO

between languages that it works properly.


Search Central docs and SEO

So that was a whole rabbit hole to find where is the match for this page.


Search Central docs and SEO

And if there wasn't a match, like what do you do?


Search Central docs and SEO

But the broken link checker thing found a list of URLs that I had either had a typo


Search Central docs and SEO

when I was making that map or it found this weird bug that we had where we were missing


Search Central docs and SEO

like it found the broken links, every link, it was a URL that ended with the letter M


Search Central docs and SEO

and the M was missing.


Search Central docs and SEO

So in our script that brought, I don't know why this happened, but it was a pattern that


Search Central docs and SEO

I noticed that all the broken links, the typo that I was fixing was that the M or the E


Search Central docs and SEO

was not there.


Search Central docs and SEO

And then when I added the M that's what fixed the broken link.


Search Central docs and SEO

So bizarre typo thing that I had caught all in English, but the link checker found like


Search Central docs and SEO

all of the localized URL problems, which I just wasn't able to spot the typo with my


Search Central docs and SEO

eyes necessarily.


Search Central docs and SEO

So this found things that we were linking to from the table of contents to a blog post


Search Central docs and SEO

and then the blog post was a 404 because the M was missing.


Search Central docs and SEO

Wow.


Search Central docs and SEO

OK.


Search Central docs and SEO

So weird.


Search Central docs and SEO

I guess like these migrations are always tricky because especially in our case we had so many


Search Central docs and SEO

different kinds of sites that we essentially merged into one place.


Search Central docs and SEO

And then all of the bloggers stuff, which is very different and on blogger everyone


Search Central docs and SEO

did it individually.


Search Central docs and SEO

So sometimes we would have like a blog post where we posted it on German and in Spanish


Search Central docs and SEO

and then there's no English source.


Search Central docs and SEO

So then we would have to figure out how.


Search Central docs and SEO

So we need to merge these and which URL will now be the URL that they share and sort of


Search Central docs and SEO

link up to.


Search Central docs and SEO

So that's definitely an odd thing to sort of go back and find what was the source and


Search Central docs and SEO

what was the intention like 10 years ago.


Search Central docs and SEO

Why did we post this blog post only in these two languages and there's no English source


Search Central docs and SEO

for this thing.


Search Central docs and SEO

So URLs in general, do you have any pattern that you stick to forever or do they change?


Search Central docs and SEO

How do you deal with that?


Search Central docs and SEO

So over the course of the past few weeks we've changed our structure again.


Search Central docs and SEO

And I think this might be like the third iteration of just management, I guess from an internal


Search Central docs and SEO

perspective how we are grouping things because I don't think it matters a lot.


Search Central docs and SEO

Maybe you could correct me if that is true but I don't think it matters so much externally


Search Central docs and SEO

but internally managing OK this content is here in these directories makes more sense


Search Central docs and SEO

to group them in a certain pattern.


Search Central docs and SEO

And so we were following the structure I think at the beginning when we didn't have so many


Search Central docs and SEO

pages on our site.


Search Central docs and SEO

We were just grouping them underneath like a guides directory.


Search Central docs and SEO

Just like everything went into guides.


Search Central docs and SEO

And then we had more content so we needed to figure out a way to sort of group them


Search Central docs and SEO

so we didn't have like hundreds of pages in one directory.


Search Central docs and SEO

And so we went into our iteration where we had basics, beginners, and advanced for a


Search Central docs and SEO

while.


Search Central docs and SEO

And then we decided that we wanted to move away from that kind of structure because what


Search Central docs and SEO

even is a basic versus a beginner?


Search Central docs and SEO

It's more topic based now.


Search Central docs and SEO

So we went through and changed all of the URLs like two weeks ago.


Search Central docs and SEO

So I'm going to have to be dealing with that to match up the translated versions of those


Search Central docs and SEO

pages now need to sync back up to the new structure.


Search Central docs and SEO

Wow.


Search Central docs and SEO

OK.


Search Central docs and SEO

So this is kind of like one of those things that external SEOs struggle with as well.


Search Central docs and SEO

Creating categories and URL structure.


Search Central docs and SEO

So OK.


Search Central docs and SEO

Cool.


Search Central docs and SEO

I feel like I don't know if like if we were working with an SEO would they be mad at me


Search Central docs and SEO

for doing this?


Search Central docs and SEO

I mean I'm kind of like if I'm wearing multiple hats I'm sort of mad at me for doing this


Search Central docs and SEO

because now I have to deal with potentially broken links and moving stuff around.


Search Central docs and SEO

But the other hat that I wear for managing this content is happy with the new structure.


Search Central docs and SEO

Another aspect to you might ask like why did you do this?


Search Central docs and SEO

I guess it's for managing translation.


Search Central docs and SEO

So if we have so many pages in a directory it slows down the translation flow.


Search Central docs and SEO

The way that our requests are managed is it waits for all of them to be finished.


Search Central docs and SEO

So if we were like oh waiting for 100 pages to be finished it would take like months and


Search Central docs and SEO

months versus if it's only for 10 pages the turnaround is faster.


Search Central docs and SEO

So there are other reasons for I guess grouping things in a directory structure than just


Search Central docs and SEO

for SEO purposes I guess.


Search Central docs and SEO

OK.


Search Central docs and SEO

So I guess like the translation is something which is more the internal Google process


Search Central docs and SEO

kind of thing.


Search Central docs and SEO

That's true.


Search Central docs and SEO

Where it's like everyone has a different process.


Search Central docs and SEO

Do you set up redirects or do you just hope it works out?


Search Central docs and SEO

Oh no for sure redirects and I should test the redirects.


Search Central docs and SEO

So we have a staging environment to make sure that the redirects work.


Search Central docs and SEO

And yes like redirecting things is good.


Search Central docs and SEO

There have been a couple of cases where we just left the pages a 404 if there was no


Search Central docs and SEO

appropriate page.


Search Central docs and SEO

Like it really didn't make sense to redirect to anything.


Search Central docs and SEO

I mean we could redirect everything to the home page but sometimes that's a more confusing


Search Central docs and SEO

experience than like legitimately there is nothing no replacement for this type of page.


Search Central docs and SEO

But yes there are a few cases where we intentionally left as a 404.


Search Central docs and SEO

And which kind of redirect do you use?


Search Central docs and SEO

301 or 302?


Search Central docs and SEO

I don't know.


Search Central docs and SEO

This feels like a trap.


Search Central docs and SEO

I think it's the one that's permanent.


Search Central docs and SEO

It's a permanent move.


Search Central docs and SEO

It's not a temporary move.


Search Central docs and SEO

Which one's the permanent one?


Search Central docs and SEO


Search Central docs and SEO

Yeah OK.


Search Central docs and SEO

There we go.


Search Central docs and SEO

Perfect.


Search Central docs and SEO

I know the answers.


Search Central docs and SEO

It's OK.


Search Central docs and SEO

Fantastic.


Search Central docs and SEO

Cool.


Search Central docs and SEO

And do you all use robots.txt?


Search Central docs and SEO

Is that something that you use at all to kind of manage the site or is it basically you


Search Central docs and SEO

never touch it?


Search Central docs and SEO

I've never touched it but I have thought about whether or not we should be touching it.


Search Central docs and SEO

I think it would be interesting if we had pages that we wanted to be roboted like from


Search Central docs and SEO

a whole directory perspective.


Search Central docs and SEO

I don't know if we have any content that we would want to block.


Search Central docs and SEO

But I do know that from our domain level from developers.google.com, they have a robots.txt


Search Central docs and SEO

file.


Search Central docs and SEO

And I think that they've roboted the login page and things like that.


Search Central docs and SEO

But that's not it's for the entire site.


Search Central docs and SEO

So not anything that we would need to block.


Search Central docs and SEO

But I think from our site's perspective, there's nothing that we would want to hide.


Search Central docs and SEO

OK.


Search Central docs and SEO

What about sitemaps?


Search Central docs and SEO

Kind of like to highlight the URLs.


Search Central docs and SEO

Yes.


Search Central docs and SEO

So for sitemaps, we did do a sitemap submission when we migrated all of the blog posts.


Search Central docs and SEO

So we wanted to prompt Google to come look at our stuff when we moved all the URLs.


Search Central docs and SEO

But DevSite, which is our platform that we're sitting on for developers.google.com, does


Search Central docs and SEO

a sitemap generation for us.


Search Central docs and SEO

But we've recently been getting errors for having too big of a sitemap.


Search Central docs and SEO

Like over the 50 limit.


Search Central docs and SEO

So we have an ongoing bug where we've requested that they segment out the sitemap so that


Search Central docs and SEO

we don't have that error anymore.


Search Central docs and SEO

And they replied that they didn't think it was a problem.


Search Central docs and SEO

And so they've lowered the priority.


Search Central docs and SEO

I know.


Search Central docs and SEO

And it's weird because they are referencing our documentation.


Search Central docs and SEO

Like I plus one the bug.


Search Central docs and SEO

Like yes, please fix it.


Search Central docs and SEO

I would like to not see this error.


Search Central docs and SEO

And they were like, we've read the documentation on this from Google.


Search Central docs and SEO

And we think that it's not an issue.


Search Central docs and SEO

Oh no.


Search Central docs and SEO

So I was a little bit like, oh, should I make an edit to make it sound more important because


Search Central docs and SEO

I want this bug fixed.


Search Central docs and SEO

But it's how they interpret it.


Search Central docs and SEO

And I can't be like, you should fix it because of reasons.


Search Central docs and SEO

Like they're reading it just like anyone else would.


Search Central docs and SEO

So we're still waiting.


Search Central docs and SEO

So they haven't said that they will never fix it.


Search Central docs and SEO

But it's like a low priority until someone says otherwise, I guess.


Search Central docs and SEO

Like why this matters.


Search Central docs and SEO

So their reasoning was that it seems to work fine anyway.


Search Central docs and SEO

Like without a sitemap.


Search Central docs and SEO

Oh, it's basically.


Search Central docs and SEO

It's like working well.


Search Central docs and SEO

Like we don't need a sitemap.


Search Central docs and SEO

It doesn't even need a sitemap.


Search Central docs and SEO

Apparently.


Search Central docs and SEO

Oh no.


Search Central docs and SEO

How sad.


Search Central docs and SEO

OK.


Search Central docs and SEO

So I have to like prove or something that it's not working as well as it could if we


Search Central docs and SEO

had a sitemap.


Search Central docs and SEO

We should just make our own sitemap.


Search Central docs and SEO

I would just upload it.


Search Central docs and SEO

I think we could.


Search Central docs and SEO

We would just go rogue.


Search Central docs and SEO

Yeah.


Search Central docs and SEO

Like if they could do it automatically for us, it would be better if we just leveraged


Search Central docs and SEO

whatever they're doing versus me like manually managing something.


Search Central docs and SEO

Wow.


Search Central docs and SEO

That's so awkward.


Search Central docs and SEO

I know.


Search Central docs and SEO

And I can't say anything.


Search Central docs and SEO

I hope nobody finds out.


Search Central docs and SEO

Oh man.


Search Central docs and SEO

And what about translations?


Search Central docs and SEO

Like the hreflang links?


Search Central docs and SEO

Do we have that in a sitemap or do we have that in the pages themselves?


Search Central docs and SEO

It's in the page itself.


Search Central docs and SEO

So it's something that DevSight is also generating automatically in the head, I think, for us.


Search Central docs and SEO

But recently, maybe two months ago, I don't know, you also raised a bug about like how


Search Central docs and SEO

come we are not having like proper links in that language switcher thing that's at the


Search Central docs and SEO

top right hand side of the web page where you can toggle between like English and another


Search Central docs and SEO

language that those buttons, I guess, or like from the dropdown thing should be a proper


Search Central docs and SEO

link and before it was not.


Search Central docs and SEO

And I think your hunch was that that should help with the discovery of the other language


Search Central docs and SEO

versions of our pages.


Search Central docs and SEO

And they finally did fix it.


Search Central docs and SEO

Oh, cool.


Search Central docs and SEO

But I don't know how to measure if that helped at all.


Search Central docs and SEO

So that's another thing that I'm thinking about.


Search Central docs and SEO

Like, oh, it's good that we fixed it.


Search Central docs and SEO

But like, what does it mean?


Search Central docs and SEO

Will that improve anything?


Search Central docs and SEO

Like that particular fix.


Search Central docs and SEO

OK.


Search Central docs and SEO

Yeah.


Search Central docs and SEO

Like measuring things is super complicated.


Search Central docs and SEO

Yes.


Search Central docs and SEO

Because it all just feels like it merges into just this general pot that you're looking


Search Central docs and SEO

at.


Search Central docs and SEO

Like, oh, like overall CTR has improved.


Search Central docs and SEO

Like you're doing all of these incremental fixes, I guess, or enhancements.


Search Central docs and SEO

But how can you tie it to one particular thing that you did that is like, oh, the sitemap


Search Central docs and SEO

thing?


Search Central docs and SEO

Like, I don't know, like this thing, I know for sure that this thing improved the whole


Search Central docs and SEO

metric that we saw move.


Search Central docs and SEO

I don't know.


Search Central docs and SEO

I don't know either.


Search Central docs and SEO

And when you're talking about like click through rate from search results, I assume you're


Search Central docs and SEO

also looking at things like titles and descriptions?


Search Central docs and SEO

Or do you think about those at all?


Search Central docs and SEO

Oh, yes.


Search Central docs and SEO

Definitely I'm thinking about those.


Search Central docs and SEO

I didn't start thinking about them until we started working with other SEOs during our


Search Central docs and SEO

rebrand.


Search Central docs and SEO

We worked with the SEO external agency to see like what did they have to say about our


Search Central docs and SEO

site and anything that we could be doing to make improvements.


Search Central docs and SEO

And they said the titles and descriptions.


Search Central docs and SEO

And so we worked with them to add them all.


Search Central docs and SEO

We did not have any titles or descriptions.


Search Central docs and SEO

And that helped, to be honest.


Search Central docs and SEO

But I still see the titles being rewritten sometimes.


Search Central docs and SEO

I don't know if that's like a controversial take.


Search Central docs and SEO

But sometimes...


Search Central docs and SEO

Okay.


Search Central docs and SEO

It even happens to us.


Search Central docs and SEO

Yes.


Search Central docs and SEO

So sometimes they will like drop the Google Search Central part and put in Google Developers.


Search Central docs and SEO

And I'm like, no.


Search Central docs and SEO

I want it to be like Google Search Central.


Search Central docs and SEO

But we sit underneath the Google Developers branding, I guess.


Search Central docs and SEO

The same thing with the favicon.


Search Central docs and SEO

I would love to set our own favicon logo to show up.


Search Central docs and SEO

But we can't.


Search Central docs and SEO

Oh, yeah.


Search Central docs and SEO

Because it's only set at the Google Developer level.


Search Central docs and SEO

So for our whole site, we sort of sit underneath them.


Search Central docs and SEO

Which is kind of sad.


Search Central docs and SEO

Yeah.


Search Central docs and SEO

Well, I'd like to see Googlebot next to our pages, titles, and descriptions.


Search Central docs and SEO

So we need our own domain name.


Search Central docs and SEO

That seems like a big move.


Search Central docs and SEO

Okay.


Search Central docs and SEO

So they will let us leave.


Search Central docs and SEO

I think they like us too much.


Search Central docs and SEO

And what else did the external SEO agency bring in?


Search Central docs and SEO

Was it mostly titles and descriptions?


Search Central docs and SEO

I think that a big portion...


Search Central docs and SEO

Not a big portion, but a chunk of it was focused on...


Search Central docs and SEO

This was like, I think, two years ago when we were doing our rebrand.


Search Central docs and SEO

So a chunk of it was speed and Core Web Vitals.


Search Central docs and SEO

I think it was a hot topic.


Search Central docs and SEO

I think it's still sort of a topic, but they wanted us to fix those kinds of things, which


Search Central docs and SEO

are sort of out of my hands.


Search Central docs and SEO

Like I can fix the size of the image, but not necessarily how the image loads on the


Search Central docs and SEO

page.


Search Central docs and SEO

So we did open up bugs to the development team to see if they could roll out those fixes.


Search Central docs and SEO

But again, it was something that they were like, well, this is low priority for us.


Search Central docs and SEO

From a developer perspective.


Search Central docs and SEO

But I think this is a common story where SEOs open a ticket, the developers are like, and?


Search Central docs and SEO

What else do you want?


Search Central docs and SEO

Like what do you want me to do?


Search Central docs and SEO

Or prove it.


Search Central docs and SEO

Why would this be something that I should work on over this other feature request or


Search Central docs and SEO

something?


Search Central docs and SEO

So they did not do anything.


Search Central docs and SEO

So I think we might still be scoring poorly with our speed and loading.


Search Central docs and SEO

I mean, I see it sometimes even just visually.


Search Central docs and SEO

We load our homepage and it's like paint, paint, paint.


Search Central docs and SEO

Slowly behind the background and then the front, which is, I wish it was better.


Search Central docs and SEO

Did the SEO folks check the links to our site and kind of disavow any of the shady links?


Search Central docs and SEO

No, this never came up actually.


Search Central docs and SEO

What?


Search Central docs and SEO

No, like they did not.


Search Central docs and SEO

I mean, would this be like, oh, they would give me a list of sites to go talk to or something


Search Central docs and SEO

like, Hey, stop linking to us or?


Search Central docs and SEO

Kind of, it's like the shady links to the site.


Search Central docs and SEO

It's like maybe like a previous SEO went off and bought a whole bunch of links for the


Search Central docs and SEO

developer documentation.


Search Central docs and SEO

I don't know.


Search Central docs and SEO

John, what are you saying?


Search Central docs and SEO

You mean nobody ever checked?


Search Central docs and SEO

No, nobody ever checked.


Search Central docs and SEO

Should I be checking?


Search Central docs and SEO

Checking the links report in Search Console.


Search Central docs and SEO

How would I know if this is a shady link or not?


Search Central docs and SEO

This sounds like such a naive question.


Search Central docs and SEO

Am I like revealing myself to be?


Search Central docs and SEO

I think that's always the problem is like you look at it and you're like, oh, this looks


Search Central docs and SEO

like a spammy site, but is it bad or not?


Search Central docs and SEO

Yeah.


Search Central docs and SEO

I mean, like how much of it is it a problem?


Search Central docs and SEO

Because I would assume that like people are linking to us for like, oh, like they have


Search Central docs and SEO

to mention the webmaster guidelines or something like, is it really up to us to say like, Hey,


Search Central docs and SEO

stop linking to us in this way or something?


Search Central docs and SEO

I mean, from a practical point of view, usually it's more of an issue if we or someone on


Search Central docs and SEO

our side went off and actually bought a whole bunch of links in the past.


Search Central docs and SEO

Who would do that?


Search Central docs and SEO

I mean, it kind of implies that people on our side were looking at the links to the


Search Central docs and SEO

site and it sounds like nobody's even looking at the links to our site.


Search Central docs and SEO

So it's unlikely.


Search Central docs and SEO

No.


Search Central docs and SEO

I mean, I look at it sometimes, but not from like a shady perspective, more like I'll be


Search Central docs and SEO

like, oh, this, I'm getting a lot of like negative, like hate mail from this page.


Search Central docs and SEO

Like people are really upset and writing in like really mean comments to our feedback


Search Central docs and SEO

tool.


Search Central docs and SEO

And then I'll look to see like, where are these people coming from?


Search Central docs and SEO

Why are they so upset on this one page?


Search Central docs and SEO

And usually it's like, oh, they're coming from like some help page or something inside


Search Central docs and SEO

search console itself.


Search Central docs and SEO

And like they were set up for failure.


Search Central docs and SEO

Like now the page has been redirected so many times.


Search Central docs and SEO

Like the button was like submit URL or something.


Search Central docs and SEO

And so of course, like as a user, you'd be like, oh, okay.


Search Central docs and SEO

If I click this button, I will be able to like submit the URL, like something will happen.


Search Central docs and SEO

And instead the button takes you to my page.


Search Central docs and SEO

That's like a documentation page.


Search Central docs and SEO

And they're like, what the heck?


Search Central docs and SEO

Like rightfully so, you know?


Search Central docs and SEO

Yeah.


Search Central docs and SEO

And so I will look at that I guess to see like, where are they coming from?


Search Central docs and SEO

To see like, what could make these people so upset?


Search Central docs and SEO

But it's never from like somebody bought links to make them upset, I guess.


Search Central docs and SEO

No SEO thing.


Search Central docs and SEO

What about links on our side?


Search Central docs and SEO

Do we have things like nofollow links in our documentation?


Search Central docs and SEO

We do.


Search Central docs and SEO

So we have some nofollow links in our case studies.


Search Central docs and SEO

So we've put something there, I think more for like the fairness angle.


Search Central docs and SEO

Okay.


Search Central docs and SEO

That like we're publishing this case study, but we're not doing it as like an exchange


Search Central docs and SEO

or anything.


Search Central docs and SEO

Cool.


Search Central docs and SEO

So we do think about links.


Search Central docs and SEO

And sometimes people put like weird stuff, like, I don't know, rel author or something.


Search Central docs and SEO

Oh, I remember a bunch of them.


Search Central docs and SEO

So I've seen some interesting things inside the links in old, old blog posts.


Search Central docs and SEO

Seems like there was a trend for a while to put fun things in the links.


Search Central docs and SEO

Fun things.


Search Central docs and SEO

Did you take all the fun out?


Search Central docs and SEO

No, I left them there for historical accuracy.


Search Central docs and SEO

Like it was a thing for a while.


Search Central docs and SEO

Links to my Google Plus profile.


Search Central docs and SEO

Sure.


Search Central docs and SEO

Fantastic.


Search Central docs and SEO

That's it.


Search Central docs and SEO

That's an interesting point, though, like the 404.


Search Central docs and SEO

So people will write in to say like, hey, this post from 2005 has broken links.


Search Central docs and SEO

How dare you?


Search Central docs and SEO

It's like, this is from 2005.


Search Central docs and SEO

Like the tool doesn't exist anymore.


Search Central docs and SEO

Like what?


Search Central docs and SEO

Why are you even here?


Search Central docs and SEO

Like how, what is even happening?


Search Central docs and SEO

And so we'll put like, I mean, our current solution to that is to put a banner at the


Search Central docs and SEO

top that's like, hey, did you see when this was published?


Search Central docs and SEO

Like we wrote this a while ago.


Search Central docs and SEO

Some of the stuff might be broken.


Search Central docs and SEO

Like some of the images might not look like what you would expect like webmaster tools


Search Central docs and SEO

to look like today.


Search Central docs and SEO

That kind of thing.


Search Central docs and SEO

And I don't know what to do in that setting.


Search Central docs and SEO

Like would you keep it for historical accuracy?


Search Central docs and SEO

Like this is what they were looking to at the time in case you wanted to go back and


Search Central docs and SEO

see what that actual link looks like in the wayback machine or something like that.


Search Central docs and SEO

Or would you update that to be something that's like, well, this is sort of how you would


Search Central docs and SEO

do that nowadays.


Search Central docs and SEO

And it's maybe changed a little bit.


Search Central docs and SEO

So that's sort of a quandary, I think.


Search Central docs and SEO

Yeah.


Search Central docs and SEO

On my blog, I have it set up to automatically link to the wayback machine.


Search Central docs and SEO

Oh.


Search Central docs and SEO

The blog posts are like older than, I don't know, five years or something.


Search Central docs and SEO

Like it changes all the links automatically to the wayback machine.


Search Central docs and SEO

That's a pretty good idea.


Search Central docs and SEO

Just because it's like, I can't like, it existed at some point.


Search Central docs and SEO

Like maybe you'll find some traces of it somewhere.


Search Central docs and SEO

But I just can't double check all the links all the time.


Search Central docs and SEO

So how can you tell that you're doing SEO right?


Search Central docs and SEO

I mean, I don't want to say this because I feel like this is the bad answer.


Search Central docs and SEO

But it depends.


Search Central docs and SEO

It depends.


Search Central docs and SEO

On which thing.


Search Central docs and SEO

Like if it's the links or if it's the structured data, like what thing that you implemented,


Search Central docs and SEO

there's going to be a different thing that you would look at to see if it had any effect.


Search Central docs and SEO

And so I guess for structured data, if I went and added FAQ structured data to some pages,


Search Central docs and SEO

like I would expect to see in a search console report that now like Google can tell that


Search Central docs and SEO

there's structured data on those pages.


Search Central docs and SEO

And then hopefully that page is like showing as a rich result.


Search Central docs and SEO

Like that would be the ideal thing to be looking for.


Search Central docs and SEO

So if there's that filter thing to see like how is my page appearing for in search and


Search Central docs and SEO

if FAQ is a search appearance that we're showing up for, then like that would be a success,


Search Central docs and SEO

I think.


Search Central docs and SEO

But sometimes that doesn't happen.


Search Central docs and SEO

OK.


Search Central docs and SEO

So you look at, I guess, like overall traffic to see that it's more or less stable or are


Search Central docs and SEO

you trying to get more or?


Search Central docs and SEO

I think like it would be nice to get more, but we're generally doing so many things at


Search Central docs and SEO

the same time that I think that the net neutral is like what I'm aiming for because we've


Search Central docs and SEO

got cleanup efforts where we're like deleting old pages, merging things, cleaning up things


Search Central docs and SEO

on our site.


Search Central docs and SEO

So I would imagine like traffic could drop from that perspective if we were getting traffic


Search Central docs and SEO

to like five different pages.


Search Central docs and SEO

And now we're like, actually, this is the one page that people should be looking for.


Search Central docs and SEO

We might see a drop for that, but then we will publish some blog posts about like an


Search Central docs and SEO

update or something that is very interesting to people.


Search Central docs and SEO

And then we get a huge spike from that.


Search Central docs and SEO

So it ends up sort of balancing out to be a little bit above net neutral.


Search Central docs and SEO

But net neutral is what I would be happy with.


Search Central docs and SEO

That we're not like dropping.


Search Central docs and SEO

That sounds great.


Search Central docs and SEO

Yeah.


Search Central docs and SEO

I mean SEO is kind of about being there when people need you and you can't really force


Search Central docs and SEO

people to need you.


Search Central docs and SEO

And correct.


Search Central docs and SEO

Like if it's in like holiday period or something like December, January and there's a lull,


Search Central docs and SEO

like that makes sense.


Search Central docs and SEO

Like people are taking holiday breaks.


Search Central docs and SEO

I am not like shocked when I see that kind of thing happening.


Search Central docs and SEO

Cool.


Search Central docs and SEO

Well, thanks a lot, Lizzie.


Search Central docs and SEO

It's been really insightful to kind of hear your take on SEO for SEO docs.


Search Central docs and SEO

It's always kind of fun to hear from the practical side of things because it's very easy for


Search Central docs and SEO

us to focus on theory.


Search Central docs and SEO

And then it's like you can do a lot of things theoretically, but how does that actually


Search Central docs and SEO

work?


Search Central docs and SEO

But like actually in context, how do we actually apply these things might be different.


Search Central docs and SEO

Like even on our side and kind of knowing that there is no magic button to always rank


Search Central docs and SEO

number one as Google.


Search Central docs and SEO

Correct.


Search Central docs and SEO

That's kind of useful.


Search Central docs and SEO

All right.


Search Central docs and SEO

Well, that's it for this episode.


Search Central docs and SEO

In the next episode, we have a special treat for you.


Search Central docs and SEO

We'll have an episode from Brighton SEO where we meet Miriam and do things a little bit


Search Central docs and SEO

different, namely a live recording.


Search Central docs and SEO

We've been having fun with these podcast episodes.


Search Central docs and SEO

I hope you, the listener, have been finding them both entertaining and insightful as well.


Search Central docs and SEO

Feel free to drop me a note on Twitter or chat with us at one of the next events that


Search Central docs and SEO

we go to if you have any thoughts.


Search Central docs and SEO

And of course, don't forget to like and subscribe.


Search Central docs and SEO

Thank you and goodbye.


Search Central docs and SEO


English Google Webmaster Central office-hours from May 1, 2020

All right, welcome, everyone, to today's Webmaster Central


Office Hours Hangout.


My name is John Mueller.


I'm a webmaster trends analyst here at Google in Switzerland.


Well, at home, at least.


And part of what we do are these Office Hour Hangouts,


where folks can join in and ask questions around their website,


around search, Google, SEO, whatever.


And we'll try to find answers.


As always, a bunch of stuff was submitted already on YouTube.


But if any of you want to get started


with the first question, you're welcome to jump in now.


Hi, John.


Hi.


Hi, I have a quick question about the hreflang


on this Shopify web shops.


So we have both visitors from UK and from US


and from Australia and other from New Zealand


and other English language speaking countries.


So how do we deal with duplicate content


since our private descriptions and our collection pages


do have the same content?


But how do we deal with duplicate content


and the hreflang on these pages?


Good question.


So in general, you don't really need


to worry about the duplicate content part.


That's something that we can usually figure out on our own.


I think the bigger question is really


whether or not you need to have country-specific versions


of those pages indexed or not.


And for the most part, I would tend


towards having fewer pages indexed rather than more pages.


So if there's any way that you can


limit the number of country-specific pages


that you actually make available for indexing,


that tends to make everything a lot easier.


Because we can crawl faster.


We can index things better.


We can rank them a little bit better.


Just everything is a lot easier if there are fewer versions.


If you do need to make country-specific pages,


then using the hreflang annotations is a good idea.


With hreflang, you can do that on a per-page basis.


So you don't necessarily need to do it across all types of pages


or across all pages within the website in general.


I see some websites do it for their home pages,


for example, because that's something


that's kind of unique per country,


but maybe the products are actually


the same across different countries.


So that's something where you can try


to find that balance yourself.


And really, the main thing that I would try to focus on


is just using fewer versions rather than just going out


and like, I can automate this.


I'll put it on 50 country versions and then


five language versions per country.


It's easy to do programmatically,


but then you create all of these URLs


and it just makes things so much harder.


SPEAKER 2


The hreflang helps us to recognize which URL to show,


but we would still recognize that it's duplicate content


in cases like this.


And what would happen is, for indexing,


we would try to fold it together.


Pick one version for indexing, and then


when showing it to the user, we'll


try to swap out the URL against the appropriate local version.


So it's not something that's critical,


that you'll get a manual action or something will


go wrong with your website.


It's just kind of, it makes it a little bit trickier.


SPEAKER 3


Cool.


Thanks a lot, John.


That's everything.


Sure.


All right, someone else had a question as well, I think.


Hi, John.


Hi.


I wrote it in the comments, but I could ask it.


The URLs use pluses in our product description


landing pages.


Is this best practice, or should we be using dashes,


or does it make much difference to the crawler


and for crawlerability?


Yeah, it doesn't make any difference for crawlerability.


It doesn't make any difference for crawling.


Usually, people tend to use dashes more,


because it makes everything a little bit easier with regards


to when you're crawling it yourself


or when you're looking at it yourself,


because a lot of tools, they swap out


the plus against the space.


And then if you have spaces in URLs,


and sometimes things are a bit trickier to track,


like if you have them in an Excel sheet or some other text


file with spaces in the URL, sometimes


it makes things a little bit harder.


That's why people tend to go towards dashes or underscores,


but pluses work just as well.


It's purely from a technical point of view,


that should work.


OK, that's good to know.


I've got another question about local search.


Sure.


So before pre-lockdown, we were using


the Google blog, the post section.


In regards to that, because we've got over 400 stores,


could we post the same blog post on all 400 stores,


or should it be unique to each store, each location?


Does it matter?


I assume you mean the Google My Business posts.


Yeah.


I don't know offhand.


My understanding is you can do whatever you want there,


because it's really only visible for those local locations.


But I would probably double check with maybe some folks


in the Google My Business help forum, just to make sure.


Because as far as I understand, there's


an API now for posts as well.


So that sounds like they're OK with posting things


a little bit more frequently.


But no.


But thank you.


Sure.


John?


Hi.


Hi, Howard.


I have a question.


I notice sometimes that companies do their categories,


let's say company name dot com backslash product,


and then they'll do the same thing backslash pricing.


And then for some odd reason, on that same site,


they'll do blog dot company name dot com.


Is there a preferred structure?


Should it have been backslash blog for a particular place?


That's essentially up to the site.


Sometimes people use it on a subdomain just purely


for technical reasons.


If they have a different infrastructure for the blog,


then maybe they'll put it on a different subdomain


so they can host it separately.


But just purely from an SEO point of view,


you can do that however you want.


I tend to favor having everything on the same host


name just to make it easier for tracking.


So if you have a blog, maybe put it in a subdirectory instead


of a subdomain.


But essentially, you can do it any way you want.


OK, one other quick question.


I notice on Google Documents that the linking internally


sort of takes you, doesn't take you to a separate tab.


Usually in the midst of a white paper or something,


if you click on the link, it will take you


to what it's referencing.


Is there a reason for that?


I mean, I've always thought a separate tab just


makes it easier to come back.


But I have noticed that on Google Documents


and didn't know if that was a best practice or just,


that's your style.


I really don't know.


I never noticed that.


At least from an SEO point of view,


it doesn't change anything if you open it in a new tab


or within the same tab.


So that probably is OK.


My guess is it just depends on whoever


was writing that content.


I know for some areas, the tech writers


have very clear guidelines on how to structure things just


to make things as consistent as possible.


But it might be that maybe in white papers or in blog posts,


people are a little bit more flexible


and just try things out in different ways.


Thank you.


Sure.


Hey, John, quick other question.


I'm using the change.


I know this is not a support forum.


But I'm using the change of the address tool in Search Console.


And I've had a website being moved since October 19.


I see this on multiple of my sites.


And I saw that last week you mentioned something


about having redirects up for at least six months.


So what should we do about the address tool that's


taking longer than usual or expected?


So you set up the change of address.


And you also have the redirect in place?


Everything is still in place.


Been in place since October, yeah.


Yeah.


And what are you seeing?


Or what is it?


It just says, still says, this website is being moved.


Oh, OK.


Yeah, I think that setting just remains in place


for a certain period of time.


So it's essentially just the UI in Search Console that says,


by the way, if you want to do something with this website,


keep in mind that you actually wanted


to have it moved somewhere else.


All right, thanks.


OK, let me run through some of the submitted questions.


We probably have more room for your questions


as well along the way.


And if there's something that comes up in between that


kind of fits through one of the questions,


feel free to jump in.


Let's see.


The first one, does the link value deprecate with age?


Like the older link is less value at forwards.


In other words, I don't know.


Maybe it should be the opposite, right?


It's like the older the link is, maybe the stronger it should be.


But just purely from an SEO point of view, on the one hand,


it feels like you're probably focusing too much on links.


So that's kind of the one thing.


On the other hand, it's not so much


that we keep track of age of the links,


but rather that sites evolve over time.


So for example, if you get a link from a newspaper website


and that's in an article that's currently


linked on the front page because it's a really important


article, then obviously that's going


to be a really important link for us


because we notice that that link is there.


It's linked fairly closely to the home page.


It's something that's really relevant at the moment.


However, that news website is going to evolve.


And over time, that article that might


have been on the front page is suddenly on page two


or is in an archive somewhere or is in a section for articles


from the year 2020, which might be like 50 years ago


at some point.


So it's not as relevant anymore there.


So it's not so much that the link itself is aging,


but rather that the website where that link was has evolved.


And over time, that place where that link was


is no longer as relevant as it used to be.


So that's something that, especially when


it comes to news websites where things


are changing fairly quickly, that's


something that's definitely always involved.


If we have 10 subpages with a list of product categories


and all of them have canonical instruction directed


to the first of them, how does this


affect from a ranking point of view the products


from subpages 2 to 10 of the list?


This is something that comes up from time to time.


It's like you have a paginated set,


and you just want the first page indexed.


So you set the canonical to the first page of that set.


And generally, what would happen here


is that we would see that canonical.


And if we process that canonical and think,


oh, this is a good selection, then we


will only index the first page there.


So essentially, everything that is on these pages


where you're saying this page itself is not canonical,


we would drop that from the index.


We would not index that.


Assuming, again, we process that canonical and say,


oh, you're right.


This is a good selection.


Canonicalization is a bit tricky in that it's not just


the rel canonical on a page that we use.


We do want to make sure that the content of the page


is equivalent.


We take into account other factors as well.


So it's not a clear one-to-one relationship there.


But essentially, if you have things on pages


and they're only mentioned on those specific pages,


and at the same time you're telling us


that we should be indexing a different page,


then it's very likely that those things


on the non-canonical page will essentially


be dropped from our search results


because you're telling us that we shouldn't be indexing them.


Let's see.


Is there any difference between link value


from static and main content?


I mean, links from navigations or product pages,


do they have the same value?


Again, it feels a little bit like you're


focusing too much on links rather than trying


to make a website that works well for users.


The tricky part with a lot of these things


is obviously that we try to make our algorithms so that they


respond to things similar to how users would respond.


So if you're trying to essentially game


the algorithms the way that they're set up now,


that's something that if users change their behavior


and users decide, oh, this kind of content


is no longer as interesting to me


or no longer as useful for me, then that's


something where you're essentially


stuck with that old version.


So with this specific situation, usually what happens here


is we do focus on the primary content on the page,


and that's something that makes sense from a user point of view.


If you have one page, then usually you


focus on what is actually unique about this page,


and you kind of ignore the rest.


I mean, you still use it, but you primarily


focus on the primary content.


So my general recommendation here,


if you're doing internal linking,


is essentially just to focus on making your website work well


for users.


We have a number of stores, and our store addresses


are also displayed on certain category pages, which


offer those services specific to those stores.


Next to the text of those addresses,


we also have an internal link called


branch details going to specific branch information page.


How well does Google understand the association


between the two with such a generic text anchor?


From an SEO point of view, should we


make the anchor more specific and have


the city name of the branch, something


which distinguishes it from other branches on other pages,


like byproduct A from RB branch, or does that sound like too


much?


So this is something where we try


to pull in essentially the information that we have


about your website, the different pages that we know,


the kinds of content that we have on your site.


So if you have one page that's about one specific topic,


and from there you link to other pages within your website,


which are about kind of a subtopic of that,


then it's not so much the case that you


need to provide all of the context through the anchor


text, but rather we understand a little bit of that


through the linking as well.


So in a case like this, or in a general case


where you have category pages and then you have subcategories


or maybe products that you're linking


to from those higher level pages,


there is not really a need to provide full context


of that category page on every link that you have there.


So if you have maybe a shoe store, obviously,


like everyone, I guess, if you have a shoe store


and you have a category for running shoes,


and as a subcategory maybe you have, I don't know,


different colored running shoes.


So maybe you'd have blue running shoes or yellow running shoes.


It's not so much the case that you


need to provide the full context of all of those details


with every link that you have on the page


to the individual products.


So you wouldn't need to, when you're


linking to a specific product, say, well,


this is a running shoe and it's in yellow


and it's this brand or this type of running shoe.


But instead, it's usually enough just


to provide kind of the more detailed context there.


And that makes sense for users as well,


because when users are looking at the page,


they focus on the parts that are kind of unique,


that stand out with regards to the link


It wouldn't really make it so useful for them


if you have a list of, let's say, individual running shoes.


And for each of the shoes, you mention


all of the attributes of the categories


that are higher there as well.


So usually instead, it just makes sense.


It's like, well, you've drilled down, like the breadcrumb


trail lets you know what the categories are,


and you just want the more specific information there.


So from that point of view, I try


to just focus the anchor text on what makes sense, what's


kind of unique within the existing


context of those pages.


I want to move some of my best articles from one domain


to a new one, and I don't want to redirect or move


the whole domain to avoid sending bad signals


to the good ones as well.


I want to start a completely fresh site


from an algorithm point.


What's the best way to do it?


Should I delete the content of my old domain first


and then add it as a new domain?


Or what's the best way to avoid cross-domain duplicate content


issues?


Would no indexing the old articles


help if the content stayed live on the old domain as well?


What about links that go to those articles


that I want to move?


Any way to safely redirect them without harming the new site?


Yeah, I think this is a tricky situation where you kind of


need to make up your mind what you want,


because on the one hand, you're saying


you want to redirect to a different domain,


and you want to keep all of the good things.


On the other hand, you're saying you don't actually


want to be associated with that old domain.


You want to start fresh, right?


So it's something where you almost


need to make up your mind there, and depending


on how that works out, that's something


where you can kind of go one direction


or go the other direction.


I think it's generally fine to take individual pieces


of content and to redirect them to other websites.


It's important to keep in mind that what you're doing


is kind of splitting the website up into individual pieces,


which means from an algorithm point of view,


it tends to be a little bit harder for us


to understand exactly how we should process that.


So essentially, we need to figure out


which of these signals we can kind of forward,


which of these signals we have to recalculate,


looking at the new website, looking at the old website.


And from a practical point of view,


that tends to mean that things just take


a lot longer to be processed.


So if you're moving one to one from one domain to another,


that's something that's easy for us to process.


If you're splitting things up or if you're


merging things together, that's always


going to be a lot harder.


So that's just purely from splitting things up.


With regards to kind of not being


associated with the old website and still having something


on the new website, usually my recommendation here is to,


like, if you want to start completely fresh,


make sure you're starting completely fresh.


So avoid reusing the existing content.


Avoid reusing kind of the existing URL structure.


Avoid redirecting or linking to the new website.


Because if you really want to start fresh,


if you realize, for example, you did a lot of things wrong


and it's going to take so much time to actually clean up


all of these things that happened over the years,


then starting completely fresh makes it such that it's like,


we can really start fresh with a new website.


Whereas as soon as you do redirects or set up links


or set up canonicals or reuse the same content


on another website, then suddenly it's


a situation where our algorithms look at that new website


and say, well, this is actually a part of the old website.


We will help the webmaster because clearly they forgot


to set up a site move here.


We will help the webmaster by linking these two together


and by treating them as one website.


And that sounds like that's the kind of thing


that you want to avoid.


So if you really want to separate things out,


do that completely and do that as cleanly as possible.


John, quick follow-up question to that, if someone picked up


my old website and restored my content,


would Google know that it's a new owner?


And that's something where, especially if you've


built up something over time, I would


try to keep those domains as long as possible.


You don't need to put any content on them.


But by keeping the domain, you're


kind of preventing that situation


that someone takes over the domain


and they reuse your old content or they post something


completely different.


And then suddenly your brand or your old brand name


is associated with this content that you have no control over.


Are there any period of time where


you have to put down a website and let it go blank


before Google knows it's a new owner?


Not necessarily.


The tricky part is that sometimes people mess up


and the website goes down or they forget to renew.


And then after a while, they realize


and they renew their domain name and they put the content back


up.


So it's something where sometimes our algorithms


are trying to be helpful.


And that kind of might be too helpful in a case like this.


SPEAKER 2


I definitely wouldn't use expired domains


as a clear strategy because you just


don't know what you're getting into with regards


to kind of the positive or the negative sides.


All right, thanks.


Sure, OK.


I noticed that there were a few people who had some questions


around Google Discover.


I don't really have any clear answers on that at the moment,


but I'll definitely pass that on to the team.


So I think some of these were about an Android


website in Italy that's not being shown in Google Discover.


And another one was also, I think,


a tech site that was from Sweden that was not being


shown in Google Discover.


I think the tricky part is Discover is a very organic


search feature in that there is no clear kind of things


that you need to do to be shown in Discover.


And it's very possible that our algorithms decide,


like, we should highlight this website more in Discover


or maybe we should highlight this website a little bit less


in Discover.


And that's very hard to kind of take as something


where Google is doing it correctly


or Google is doing it incorrectly


because there are obviously no queries involved.


It's not the case that someone is searching for a website


and then not seeing it, but rather we


try to bubble up information that we think is useful


to users through Discover.


But some of these questions here have a lot of details.


So I'll definitely copy and paste that over


to the Discover team to see if there is something


that on our site we need to improve


or if there is something that maybe we can improve


in our documentation to make it a little bit easier


to understand what you might be seeing in cases like this.


We have a small budget to freshen things up


in our e-commerce website, so having to choose