The Future of SEO

So HTML and JavaScript, SEOs will need


The Future of SEO

to continue working on that.


The Future of SEO

What about more basic things, like URLs?


The Future of SEO

Are URLs going to go away in favor of entities or IP


The Future of SEO

addresses?


The Future of SEO

I don't know.


The Future of SEO

Like, how do you see that evolving?


The Future of SEO

MARTIN SPLITTENBERG Fortunately, URLs cannot go away.


The Future of SEO

What do you mean?


The Future of SEO

At least not in the foreseeable future,


The Future of SEO

because the URLs, they are the standard way


The Future of SEO

to communicate addresses on the internet.


The Future of SEO

And without that, the internet is just not the internet.


The Future of SEO

The same way domain names cannot go away because of how


The Future of SEO

the internet is built, or IP addresses cannot go away


The Future of SEO

because of how the internet is built,


The Future of SEO

the same way URLs cannot go away.


The Future of SEO

OK.


The Future of SEO

If you think about it, how hard it


The Future of SEO

was to introduce IPv6 to the internet,


The Future of SEO

it took many, many years to introduce it.


The Future of SEO

Not to replace IPv4, but to introduce


The Future of SEO

a new format for IP addressing.


The Future of SEO

Changing URLs, that would be even crazier


The Future of SEO

than changing IPs or IP formats.


The Future of SEO

We did change IP formats when we changed from IP version 4


The Future of SEO

to IP version 6.


The Future of SEO

But IPs will stay around, and so I think will URLs.


The Future of SEO

They might look different, but they'll stay around, I think.


The Future of SEO

So by look different, do you mean instead of path


The Future of SEO

and file names, everything will be parameters,


The Future of SEO

and it'll be like a machine learning hash instead of words?


The Future of SEO

Maybe, or maybe we will decentralize the web somehow,


The Future of SEO

and everything will be identified


The Future of SEO

by the hash of the content.


The Future of SEO

And then you might get it from different sources.


The Future of SEO

Who knows?


The Future of SEO

But I think URLs, in terms of addressing contents


The Future of SEO

on the network, will stick around.


The Future of SEO

OK.


The Future of SEO

So I guess the URL-based mechanisms will also


The Future of SEO

stick around.


The Future of SEO

Like, at least looking forward maybe five or 10 years,


The Future of SEO

it feels like a long time for the web.


The Future of SEO

But at the same time, it's like looking back 10 years,


The Future of SEO

what has changed on the web?


The Future of SEO

Not much.


The Future of SEO

It's like different ads, more cat videos.


The Future of SEO

Which is kind of sad.


The Future of SEO

But the other URL-based mechanisms, I guess,


The Future of SEO

would also be similar.


The Future of SEO

You mentioned the rel canonical.


The Future of SEO

That seems like something that'll stick around,


The Future of SEO

or do you think something will come along and be able


The Future of SEO

to replace the rel canonical?


The Future of SEO

I mean, there's no need to replace it.


The Future of SEO

Usually, these changes are prompted by a need.


The Future of SEO

And unless there is a need for changing


The Future of SEO

rel canonical, something that's extremely widely used,


The Future of SEO

why would we want to try to change it?


The Future of SEO

When we know that something is broken


The Future of SEO

and we need to come up with something else,


The Future of SEO

then we might change it or try to find new solutions


The Future of SEO

for the same problem.


The Future of SEO

But if it's not broken, we generally


The Future of SEO

don't want to touch it.


The Future of SEO

But if we can, I mean, the rel canonical


The Future of SEO

is kind of a mechanism to let search engines know


The Future of SEO

that two pieces of content are the same


The Future of SEO

and you should pick this one.


The Future of SEO

It feels like at some point in the future,


The Future of SEO

we will be able to look at pages and say, oh, it's


The Future of SEO

like pretty much the same.


The Future of SEO

We'll just pick one of these.


The Future of SEO

I mean, technically, we could do that already.


The Future of SEO

Like, we appreciate the help that we get from rel canonical,


The Future of SEO

and we use it quite aggressively, in fact,


The Future of SEO

in canonical selection.


The Future of SEO

But it would work without it.


The Future of SEO

If we remove that criterion from rel canonical selection,


The Future of SEO

then it would work.


The Future of SEO

But then people would have less control


The Future of SEO

over their desired canonical URL.


The Future of SEO

And that's not something that we want.


The Future of SEO

We do want to give people control


The Future of SEO

over what we show in search results, what


The Future of SEO

the canonical version of the URLs are.


The Future of SEO

And rel canonical is just a good match for that.


The Future of SEO

And that's why we also standardized it.


The Future of SEO

There's an internet draft for that,


The Future of SEO

or I think it's an internet draft.


The Future of SEO

OK.


The Future of SEO

So I guess I think that's also a really interesting aspect.


The Future of SEO

Because on the one hand, there is all of the machine learning


The Future of SEO

work that's being done to kind of automatically understand


The Future of SEO

things better.


The Future of SEO

But the control aspect is something


The Future of SEO

that machine learning can't really replace there,


The Future of SEO

because that's my personal preference kind of thing


The Future of SEO

and less understanding of a piece of content.


The Future of SEO

Yeah.


The Future of SEO

What about meta tags in general?


The Future of SEO

I mean, we have talked about hreflang, and we


The Future of SEO

have talked about canonicals.


The Future of SEO

But do you think we will need more meta tags in the future,


The Future of SEO

or will the need for meta tags go away?


The Future of SEO

I hope that we are not introducing more meta tags.


The Future of SEO

And usually, when you see internal threads


The Future of SEO

about this search team wants to introduce a new meta tag,


The Future of SEO

then usually both John and I jump on that thread,


The Future of SEO

and we are pushing back quite aggressively.


The Future of SEO

Because there's very rarely a good reason


The Future of SEO

to introduce a new meta tag.


The Future of SEO

Usually, there is already something


The Future of SEO

that might be used for that.


The Future of SEO

Like, for example, someone wants to let


The Future of SEO

people control whether the content can be translated,


The Future of SEO

and then they want to introduce a new meta tag.


The Future of SEO

It's like, well, is your translate service a robot?


The Future of SEO

Well, technically, yes.


The Future of SEO

Then just use the robots meta tag,


The Future of SEO

and then just introduce a new directive there.


The Future of SEO

Don't introduce a completely new meta tag,


The Future of SEO

because then people just have to pile, or to learn, actually,


The Future of SEO

a new meta tag, which is not necessarily a good thing.


The Future of SEO

I think we don't want more meta tags,


The Future of SEO

and I hope that we are not going more meta tags.


The Future of SEO

But then teams have weird ideas, and unfortunately, John and I


The Future of SEO

are not always there to fight back.


The Future of SEO

I mean, it's also a matter of control that you mentioned.


The Future of SEO

Whereas sometimes site owners have very strong preferences


The Future of SEO

one way or the other, and it's useful to listen to them,


The Future of SEO

because we kind of want to work together.


The Future of SEO

But it's always a bit tricky.


The Future of SEO

So I guess robots.txt falls into the similar category of,


The Future of SEO

on the one hand, it's URL, so it'll probably be the same.


The Future of SEO

And on the other hand, it's about site owners' preferences


The Future of SEO

and controls, so probably that will remain as well.


The Future of SEO

GARY ILLYESOLEVICH I one correction there, it's for URIs.


The Future of SEO

JOHN MUELLER URIE Oh.


The Future of SEO

Oh, what's the difference?


The Future of SEO

I mean, URL is a form of URI.


The Future of SEO

GARY ILLYESOLEVICH Could you give us an example of a URI


The Future of SEO

versus a URL?


The Future of SEO

JOHN MUELLER App indexing deep links, for example,


The Future of SEO

that's a URI and not a URL.


The Future of SEO

GARY ILLYESOLEVICH And you do that in robots.txt too?


The Future of SEO

JOHN MUELLER So one of the things


The Future of SEO

that we tried to do with robots.txt


The Future of SEO

when we started the process of standardizing it


The Future of SEO

was to expand the language to accept URIs versus URLs.


The Future of SEO

Because the original de facto standard


The Future of SEO

that was describing the protocol to be used with URLs,


The Future of SEO

and we had to change some wording.


The Future of SEO

I don't recall exactly how, but we


The Future of SEO

had to change some wording plus the ABNF language


The Future of SEO

to make it work on URIs.


The Future of SEO

Because if we already have a protocol that


The Future of SEO

can do a very good job controlling crawling


The Future of SEO

on the internet, then why would we


The Future of SEO

want to introduce yet another one in case


The Future of SEO

a new form of URI shows up on the internet


The Future of SEO

and invent a new control mechanism for crawling those?


The Future of SEO

And that's why we expanded the language


The Future of SEO

to accept URIs to be used with robots.txt versus just URLs.


The Future of SEO

GARY ILLYESOLEVICH Oh, cool.


The Future of SEO

I totally didn't know about that.


The Future of SEO

That's pretty cool.


The Future of SEO

So basically, if you, as an SEO, work


The Future of SEO

to understand the foundation of robots.txt


The Future of SEO

and how the matching goes there, then if some new form of URI


The Future of SEO

pops up and becomes popular in the future,


The Future of SEO

then they can keep building on that.


The Future of SEO

OK, that's cool.


The Future of SEO

OK, what about things like structured data?


The Future of SEO

You mark up a product.


The Future of SEO

You put a price there.


The Future of SEO

Do search engines really need to have structured data?


The Future of SEO

Can't you just look at a product page


The Future of SEO

and recognize it's a product page?


The Future of SEO

Come on.


The Future of SEO

I just want to say that I have very strong opinions


The Future of SEO

about structured data.


The Future of SEO

I expect structured data as, in terms of the data


The Future of SEO

that you present, if you do things right, is superfluous.


The Future of SEO

But I think of structured data as a way


The Future of SEO

to opt in to certain features of search and other products


The Future of SEO

that we offer so that you basically say,


The Future of SEO

I add structured data specifically


The Future of SEO

so that I don't accidentally end up


The Future of SEO

in certain products or services.


The Future of SEO

But I specifically say, this is a website that


The Future of SEO

contains product information.


The Future of SEO

So if there is someone out there who specifically


The Future of SEO

looks for that, they might pick it up and then use it


The Future of SEO

in some sort of user experience or some sort of app or service


The Future of SEO

or whatever.


The Future of SEO

And I like it for that.


The Future of SEO

I like it as a kind of implicit agreement


The Future of SEO

to provide this information in a more structured form.


The Future of SEO

But I don't think many people think about it like that.


The Future of SEO

OK.


The Future of SEO

So it's almost like a control mechanism.


The Future of SEO

Kind of.


The Future of SEO

Where you kind of say, well, I'm OK with Google understanding


The Future of SEO

this is a product page.


The Future of SEO

I mean, Google probably understands


The Future of SEO

what a product page is anyway.


The Future of SEO

I mean, at least looking into the future


The Future of SEO

where machine learning is everywhere.


The Future of SEO

Yeah.


The Future of SEO

I'm pretty sure we can understand,


The Future of SEO

oh, this is a product.


The Future of SEO

And the product's name is this.


The Future of SEO

And the product's price is that.


The Future of SEO

And this is a product image.


The Future of SEO

But it is kind of nice to have this explicit machine readable


The Future of SEO

information where we can say, oh, so they specifically


The Future of SEO

want us to think of it as a product.


The Future of SEO

It's basically a glorified meta tag that says,


The Future of SEO

is product page, and then the value of that meta tag


The Future of SEO

would probably be true or something like that.


The Future of SEO

OK.


The Future of SEO

But that almost sounds like the rest of structured data


The Future of SEO

is going to be optional at some point in the future.


The Future of SEO

I mean, not like next week in the future.


The Future of SEO

But in 10 years or so, who knows what machine learning progress


The Future of SEO

will have happened.


The Future of SEO

And we should be able to look at a page


The Future of SEO

and say, oh, these are like 12 attributes of this page.


The Future of SEO

And if someone searches for an attribute,


The Future of SEO

we should be able to match that.


The Future of SEO

Generally, yes.


The Future of SEO

But I mean, there's many ways of doing things on the web.


The Future of SEO

And even with machine learning, there


The Future of SEO

might be creative ways where a machine does not necessarily


The Future of SEO

pick up the information correctly.


The Future of SEO

So having it spelled out quite literally


The Future of SEO

is probably helpful nonetheless even in the near future.


The Future of SEO

I don't know.


The Future of SEO

Maybe not.


The Future of SEO

I don't know, Gary.


The Future of SEO

What are your really strong opinions?


The Future of SEO

These are more like internally strong opinions


The Future of SEO

because we have a very strong team and leadership that focuses


The Future of SEO

a lot on structured data.


The Future of SEO

And there's massive use of structured data


The Future of SEO

in indexing and also in understanding entities.


The Future of SEO

And my opinion is that, yes, structured data


The Future of SEO

is amazing for these kind of things and to power features.


The Future of SEO

But we certainly can get to a point


The Future of SEO

where we don't need it anymore.


The Future of SEO

And we do have the granular controls


The Future of SEO

that enable people to opt out of different presentations.


The Future of SEO

For example, you could add a span element and mark it


The Future of SEO

with a data node snippet.


The Future of SEO

The part of the text that you don't


The Future of SEO

want to see in a rich result, like, for example,


The Future of SEO

if you don't want your price to show up in a rich result,


The Future of SEO

then you could just opt that out.


The Future of SEO

And you don't even have to wait for the price


The Future of SEO

to end up in a rich result. You could do that proactively


The Future of SEO

as well, as many people do it already with, for example,


The Future of SEO

their news articles where they actually opt out


The Future of SEO

complete paragraphs or even complete news articles


The Future of SEO

from the page or from search results.


The Future of SEO

So I don't see a reason why people couldn't do that


The Future of SEO

with rich snippets, especially because we are getting better


The Future of SEO

understanding these, for example, product pages.


The Future of SEO

Like, we are getting there where we are really


The Future of SEO

good at figuring out that this is a product page,


The Future of SEO

and this is the image of the product, and this is the price.


The Future of SEO

This is the stock, whether they have inventory


The Future of SEO

of that particular item.


The Future of SEO

And I think it's a matter of time we start using that.


The Future of SEO

It's not an if anymore.


The Future of SEO

It's more like a when.


The Future of SEO

And if we jump ahead like 10 years or 15 years


The Future of SEO

where our computers are actually way better than they are now,


The Future of SEO

then that would just enable us to do more of this


The Future of SEO

and also better.


The Future of SEO

And when I say we, I mean search engines in general,


The Future of SEO

not just Google, because we definitely


The Future of SEO

see other search engines do amazing things with language


The Future of SEO

understanding and machine learning in general.


The Future of SEO

So it is coming.


The Future of SEO

The question is when it's going to land.


The Future of SEO

JOHN MUELLER


The Future of SEO

At least for the foreseeable future,


The Future of SEO

it'll still be there as something


The Future of SEO

where if you have strong opinions about what


The Future of SEO

your page should be and what the attributes should be,


The Future of SEO

then you can specify it there.


The Future of SEO

And at some point, it'll be almost like a real canonical,


The Future of SEO

where it's like, well, if you don't care,


The Future of SEO

then you don't have to do it.


The Future of SEO

And we'll try to figure it out.


The Future of SEO

But if you do care, then you can tell us


The Future of SEO

what the real product name is, and we


The Future of SEO

won't have to try to identify it on a page.


The Future of SEO

I mean, it could also work as an override.


The Future of SEO

Maybe that would work.


The Future of SEO

We'll see.


The Future of SEO

Yeah, so I guess SEOs still have to think about structured data.


The Future of SEO

And at the very least, they'll have


The Future of SEO

to think about what they actually put on their pages


The Future of SEO

and to be clear with regards to the actual page's content.


The Future of SEO

So it's almost like good content will continue


The Future of SEO

to be important for SEO.


The Future of SEO

Well, that's a shocker.


The Future of SEO

No shocker.


The Future of SEO

OK.


The Future of SEO

Getting things into search engines,


The Future of SEO

do you think that will change, like the crawling


The Future of SEO

part of the web?


The Future of SEO

That feels so antiquated.


The Future of SEO

It's like, oh, you find one URL, and then you


The Future of SEO

look to see if there are links to other pages,


The Future of SEO

and then you request those pages.


The Future of SEO

Couldn't we, I don't know, just get a dump of all HTML pages


The Future of SEO

on a website, and we'll just process that at once?


The Future of SEO

I am so excited to see how that's going,


The Future of SEO

because currently, there is this push towards a more


The Future of SEO

of a push-based approach.


The Future of SEO

So right now, it's a bit of like a pull thing,


The Future of SEO

where search engines kind of make a decision which URL


The Future of SEO

to crawl when and how often.


The Future of SEO

So they go and pull information from people's websites.


The Future of SEO

I know that other search engines, namely Bing,


The Future of SEO

is experimenting with a push approach, where


The Future of SEO

I, as the website owner, proactively


The Future of SEO

tell the search engine, hey, there


The Future of SEO

is information on this URL.


The Future of SEO

Please come get it.


The Future of SEO

We are experimenting with it as well for certain use cases,


The Future of SEO

I think, like live streams or live blogs


The Future of SEO

or something like that, and job adverts.


The Future of SEO

I think we are using an index push-based approach.


The Future of SEO

But looking in the future, now this


The Future of SEO

is kind of nice and useful, because there's


The Future of SEO

only very few people using it and very few URLs being pushed


The Future of SEO

if you compare it to the size of the internet as a whole


The Future of SEO

or of the web as a whole.


The Future of SEO

And thus, obviously, we can give those priority


The Future of SEO

that are pushing us proactively or pinging us proactively.


The Future of SEO

But if everyone does it in the future,


The Future of SEO

let's paint a picture, three years,


The Future of SEO

our indexing API opens for all websites and all pages,


The Future of SEO

and Bing does it as well.


The Future of SEO

And everyone wants to be in Bing.


The Future of SEO

I think Bing is now open for everyone already,


The Future of SEO

but I'm not sure how many people are actually using it.


The Future of SEO

I don't think they publish this information anywhere.


The Future of SEO

But let's assume everyone pushes all their pages all the time.


The Future of SEO

First things first, there is additional work


The Future of SEO

on the side of the website creators,


The Future of SEO

of the website owners, because they


The Future of SEO

have to feed this information to the API somehow.


The Future of SEO

So there will be specific tooling that does this for you,


The Future of SEO

or you have a script that runs every hour


The Future of SEO

and pushes any potentially updated pages to this API.


The Future of SEO

So there's actually more effort on your side.


The Future of SEO

And then also, if everyone does it all the time,


The Future of SEO

I don't see how anyone, Google, Bing, whoever else,


The Future of SEO

would be able to process this with the same high priority


The Future of SEO

as they do it today.


The Future of SEO

And then we would be back to square one, I feel,


The Future of SEO

where they have to schedule things.


The Future of SEO

And then just pushing it to the API


The Future of SEO

doesn't mean that it gets indexed right away,


The Future of SEO

or indexed at all, because there will be delays.


The Future of SEO

There will be scheduling.


The Future of SEO

There will be dismissal of spammy or bad URLs.


The Future of SEO

And I wonder how that's going to look


The Future of SEO

like in a couple of years, and if there


The Future of SEO

are some certain solutions to this problem


The Future of SEO

that I'm not seeing.


The Future of SEO

But I can't really imagine one.


The Future of SEO

But I would love to be wrong on this.


The Future of SEO

GARY ILLYESISIOSAKE LOCKHART-MARTINIKE I think one more


The Future of SEO

problem with push is the amount of spam that you will ingest.


The Future of SEO

And we've seen this with the Submit URL feature


The Future of SEO

that we had on Google.com, where I don't remember


The Future of SEO

the exact number, but the vast majority of the submissions


The Future of SEO

was spam, and not like low-quality content


The Future of SEO

or something.


The Future of SEO

It was spam.


The Future of SEO

It was very obvious that it was spam.


The Future of SEO

And then I'm just very skeptical about exposing more push


The Future of SEO

interfaces because of that reason, because of spam.


The Future of SEO

Because it just opens yet another door


The Future of SEO

into search engines for spammers to push spam.


The Future of SEO

And do we really want that, or we want to just find


The Future of SEO

our way to good content?


The Future of SEO

MARTIN SPLITT RODMANNENBERG But is that a filtering problem


The Future of SEO

or an inherent problem that can't be solved?


The Future of SEO

GARY ILLYESISIOSAKE LOCKHART-MARTINIKE That's a good question.


The Future of SEO

It can be tailored or filtered to some extent,


The Future of SEO

but then you end up with false positives,


The Future of SEO

where you filter stuff that you shouldn't have.


The Future of SEO

And then people get grumpy about it.


The Future of SEO

People who are trying to spam also get grumpy about it,


The Future of SEO

and they create lots of noise externally.


The Future of SEO

And then it's your and John's and my job to keep them at bay.


The Future of SEO

So is that nice?


The Future of SEO

No.


The Future of SEO

What I would actually really want to see,


The Future of SEO

and we are kind of working on some solutions,


The Future of SEO

is to be more intelligent about crawling.


The Future of SEO

Because if we are more intelligent about crawling


The Future of SEO

and we are not hitting sites repeatedly for the same URL,


The Future of SEO

for example, or we are more intelligent about discovery,


The Future of SEO

then we are not wasting resources.


The Future of SEO

We are either on the site's side or on our side.


The Future of SEO

And we are just doing a better job


The Future of SEO

at getting content into the index.


The Future of SEO

And I think that's much nicer.


The Future of SEO

And that also leaves the thing that the SEOs or technical SEOs


The Future of SEO

do nowadays there for them to work on.


The Future of SEO

So you're saying links will not go away?


The Future of SEO

Why would you bring up links?


The Future of SEO

Well, it's like crawling.


The Future of SEO

It's like crawling through a website.


The Future of SEO

You need links.


The Future of SEO

But why?


The Future of SEO

Why?


The Future of SEO

Oh, so you're saying links are going away?


The Future of SEO

I'm staying up.


The Future of SEO

No.


The Future of SEO

Why are you twisting my words?


The Future of SEO

Why are you bringing this up, even?


The Future of SEO

I mean, links shouldn't go away.


The Future of SEO

OK.


The Future of SEO

I think we got better at using them.


The Future of SEO

And perhaps we don't need as many links


The Future of SEO

as people believe to do ranking well.


The Future of SEO

But I don't think they are going away.


The Future of SEO

They are the same as HTML.


The Future of SEO

They are basic building blocks.


The Future of SEO

Well, because they are HTML.


The Future of SEO

And they just cannot go away.


The Future of SEO

OK, cool.


The Future of SEO

More things not going away.


The Future of SEO

Sounds like SEOs will have a future at work anyway.


The Future of SEO

What about things like keyword research?


The Future of SEO

What's that?


The Future of SEO

It's like when you research specific topics that people


The Future of SEO

are interested in, and then SEOs,


The Future of SEO

and try to encourage writers to write about these topics


The Future of SEO

because they would drive attention in search.


The Future of SEO

I guess it was they.


The Future of SEO

OK.


The Future of SEO

What about content in general?


The Future of SEO

It's like with all of these text generation algorithms,


The Future of SEO

basically, you just tell a machine


The Future of SEO

what the topic should be, and it'll


The Future of SEO

create a full page for you, right?


The Future of SEO

So writing will go away?


The Future of SEO

I think that could be a topic on its own for a future podcast


The Future of SEO

episode because we can see the pros and the cons of machine


The Future of SEO

generated content.


The Future of SEO

And we are quite strict about what we allow in our index.


The Future of SEO

But on the flip side, you can also


The Future of SEO

see very good and smart machine generated.


The Future of SEO

I don't know if smart is a good word.


The Future of SEO

But very intelligent machine generated content.


The Future of SEO

I recently saw a short article about yeast, for example.


The Future of SEO

And it was generated by GPT-3.


The Future of SEO

Search for it on your favorite search engine


The Future of SEO

if you don't know what it is.


The Future of SEO

And it was very well written.


The Future of SEO

I couldn't tell that it was written by machine.


The Future of SEO

And then there's the thing that if you can't tell that it was


The Future of SEO

written by a machine, then does it


The Future of SEO

matter if it's in search or not?


The Future of SEO

OK.


The Future of SEO

Yeah.


The Future of SEO

So is a good content is OK?


The Future of SEO

But what if the machine makes stuff up?


The Future of SEO

It's like it's a topic about yeast.


The Future of SEO

And it tells you you put gasoline into bread.


The Future of SEO

And then it generates yeast.


The Future of SEO

And it's well written English.


The Future of SEO

But anyone who knows the topic is like, this is wrong.


The Future of SEO

Well, but it also depends how the content was generated


The Future of SEO

or what were the sources for it, right?


The Future of SEO

How it was taught.


The Future of SEO

Yeah, I think this deserves its own podcast episode.


The Future of SEO

Like, we could debate about this a lot.


The Future of SEO

Right now, our stance on machine-generated content


The Future of SEO

is that if it's without human supervision,


The Future of SEO

then we don't want it in search.


The Future of SEO

If someone reviews it before putting it up for the public,


The Future of SEO

then it's fine.


The Future of SEO

Cool.


The Future of SEO

It sounds like one of those areas where SEOs could evolve


The Future of SEO

and try to learn more about fancy machine learning


The Future of SEO

technologies and build out a niche for themselves.


The Future of SEO

What about images, video, audio?


The Future of SEO

That seems like another one of those areas


The Future of SEO

where machine learning could pick up and say,


The Future of SEO

oh, this video is about cats.


The Future of SEO

We will just rank it about for cats.


The Future of SEO

Wait, audio?


The Future of SEO

Why would you ever produce audio?


The Future of SEO

Audio.


The Future of SEO

Yeah, podcasts are overrated.


The Future of SEO

Oh, podcast.


The Future of SEO

Well, oops.


The Future of SEO

I mean, like with images, that's one of those things


The Future of SEO

where the machine learning teams, the research teams


The Future of SEO

always kind of try to show off how well they recognize


The Future of SEO

the objects on an image and what they're doing.


The Future of SEO

Do you see that kind of going into SEO,


The Future of SEO

where suddenly people won't have to do alt attributes for images


The Future of SEO

anymore, and images will just rank perfectly?


The Future of SEO

I gave a presentation a couple of years


The Future of SEO

ago at a conference called CIPIC,


The Future of SEO

and we were showing entities that we could


The Future of SEO

detect from simple images.


The Future of SEO

Simple images being a picture of an apple


The Future of SEO

on a white background, I think the Eiffel Tower,


The Future of SEO

and then a person in a picture.


The Future of SEO

Again, white background.


The Future of SEO

And we could tell the general topic of the image.


The Future of SEO

So we could say that a red apple, or Eiffel Tower,


The Future of SEO

or person.


The Future of SEO

But for example, for the person, we couldn't even


The Future of SEO

tell the gender.


The Future of SEO

And from the picture, if you were


The Future of SEO

looking at the picture as a human,


The Future of SEO

it was very obvious, the perceived gender.


The Future of SEO

But the machine just couldn't actually


The Future of SEO

say anything about the perceived gender


The Future of SEO

of the person in the picture.


The Future of SEO

And I think that's still true.


The Future of SEO

In general, we can tell the basic topics


The Future of SEO

or topic of the picture, or what's in the picture,


The Future of SEO

but we can get quite confused.


The Future of SEO

If you put up a grapefruit and an orange


The Future of SEO

and the perspective is off or confusing,


The Future of SEO

then we might not be able to tell the two apart.


The Future of SEO

So yeah, I think for now, we are going


The Future of SEO

to rely on attributes and surrounding text quite a bit.


The Future of SEO

I can see that eventually we get there


The Future of SEO

where we can detect more concepts and more accurately


The Future of SEO

in images, and then we can use that for ranking purposes.


The Future of SEO

But I don't think that we are there yet.


The Future of SEO

But I definitely think that we are


The Future of SEO

going to get there eventually.


The Future of SEO

Yeah.


The Future of SEO

I think the aspect that I always think about as well


The Future of SEO

is that usually when it comes to images,


The Future of SEO

it's not that people are looking for images,


The Future of SEO

but they're looking for what's represented by the image.


The Future of SEO

Where if you're looking for luggage, then


The Future of SEO

you might use image search to try to find the luggage.


The Future of SEO

But it's not that you're looking for a photo of a nice suitcase.


The Future of SEO

You want actually to buy a physical suitcase,


The Future of SEO

and you just want to see what it looks like.


The Future of SEO

I think we call that visual exploration.


The Future of SEO

It was actually the basis of that presentation


The Future of SEO

that I was referencing.


The Future of SEO

And the vast majority of our users


The Future of SEO

are actually doing that, visually exploring the web,


The Future of SEO

versus going and finding an image for me, more or whatever.


The Future of SEO

OK.


The Future of SEO

So working with images and videos


The Future of SEO

will also continue to be something for SEOs.


The Future of SEO

What about voice search?


The Future of SEO

Will SEOs have to optimize for voice search?


The Future of SEO

Oh, god.


The Future of SEO

The future that never will be.


The Future of SEO

I think no, because if we learn anything.


The Future of SEO

I remember a bunch of years ago, people were like, oh,


The Future of SEO

we'll stop using keyboards and just do voice.


The Future of SEO

And I think that has been a recurring theme from the 90s.


The Future of SEO

But I think in the future, it won't change,


The Future of SEO

and we will naturally or magically become


The Future of SEO

the number one thing that we need to worry about,


The Future of SEO

simply because it changes the input modality,


The Future of SEO

and it changes probably how queries are phrased.


The Future of SEO

But it doesn't change the fundamental use


The Future of SEO

of natural language to retrieve information from the internet.


The Future of SEO

So I think you don't have to worry too much about it,


The Future of SEO

to be honest.


The Future of SEO

But that's maybe just me.


The Future of SEO

Maybe the future will be completely different,


The Future of SEO

and we'll, I don't know.


The Future of SEO

I don't think so.


The Future of SEO

I think we are going to experiment with just


The Future of SEO

projecting our thoughts into search engines,


The Future of SEO

and then that's how we are going to find things.


The Future of SEO

But I wonder if our, I don't know.


The Future of SEO

So apparently, there's like two different kinds of people.


The Future of SEO

There's one kind which has like an inner monologue,


The Future of SEO

and the other one doesn't.


The Future of SEO

I'm of the kind of inner monologues,


The Future of SEO

so my thoughts are fully formed sentences.


The Future of SEO

So I would still use normal natural language in my thoughts.


The Future of SEO

But maybe the other kind doesn't.


The Future of SEO

I don't know.


The Future of SEO

JOHN MUELLER-GRANT, PhD, PhD Then you


The Future of SEO

have like three voices in your head, two of your own,


The Future of SEO

and then one, Google.


The Future of SEO

And then you have like Bing and the other search engines, too.


The Future of SEO

It's like you have, like you wake up in the morning,


The Future of SEO

it's like, what should I have for breakfast?


The Future of SEO

And you're like this, this, this.


The Future of SEO

And maybe it's like this video calls or general conference


The Future of SEO

call situation, like can you hear me now?


The Future of SEO

Am I loud enough?


The Future of SEO

Martin, you are muted.


The Future of SEO

Oh my gosh.


The Future of SEO

OK, cool.


The Future of SEO

Yeah, OK.


The Future of SEO

So I guess we started and we thought,


The Future of SEO

well, what is the future of SEO?


The Future of SEO

I mean, externally people always bring that up.


The Future of SEO

It's like SEO dead and will it die soon?


The Future of SEO

It sounds like, at least based on your expert opinions here,


The Future of SEO

SEO is not going to go away.


The Future of SEO

Things like URLs are going to remain in place.


The Future of SEO

HTML is going to continue to be the basis,


The Future of SEO

and SEOs will continue to need to know HTML.


The Future of SEO

And JavaScript, perhaps, probably.


The Future of SEO

Understanding more about web apps.


The Future of SEO

No, no, web apps is like that new opportunity.


The Future of SEO

That sounds good.


The Future of SEO

Structured data seems like, well,


The Future of SEO

if you plan to retire in the next 10, 20 years,


The Future of SEO

probably you'll continue to do it.


The Future of SEO

But maybe at some point less.


The Future of SEO

Crawling and all of that probably


The Future of SEO

stays the same or similar.


The Future of SEO

And machine-generated content seems


The Future of SEO

like one of those research opportunities for people


The Future of SEO

to plan ahead on what might happen, I don't know,


The Future of SEO

maybe 5, 10 years in the future.


The Future of SEO

Is that about right?


The Future of SEO

Sounds about right to me, yeah.


The Future of SEO

But maybe we're all wrong.


The Future of SEO

Who knows?


The Future of SEO

That's the beauty about the future.


The Future of SEO

We can't really predict things.


The Future of SEO

But yeah, I think that encapsulates


The Future of SEO

what we think will happen.


The Future of SEO

Let's see how right or wrong we are in the future.


The Future of SEO

OK.


The Future of SEO

Well, it sounds like we'll continue


The Future of SEO

to have search engines because people will continue


The Future of SEO

to ask, is SEO dead?


The Future of SEO

And for that, you need a search engine.


The Future of SEO

So at least for that topic, we'll continue to need SEOs.


The Future of SEO

True.


The Future of SEO

Very meta.


The Future of SEO

Cool.


The Future of SEO

All right.


The Future of SEO

And with that, I think we've kind of made


The Future of SEO

it to the end of our episode, which is pretty cool.


The Future of SEO

Thank you, too, for joining in here.


The Future of SEO

Thank you, all of the listeners who are watching or hearing,


The Future of SEO

I guess.


The Future of SEO

Thanks for joining us here.


The Future of SEO

We've been having fun with these podcast episodes.


The Future of SEO

And I hope you all find them insightful and interesting,


The Future of SEO

too.


The Future of SEO

And regardless, let us know if there's anything


The Future of SEO

that you think we should be talking about more


The Future of SEO

in the future.


The Future of SEO

Feel free to drop me a note on Twitter


The Future of SEO

or chat with us at any of the virtual events


The Future of SEO

that we sometimes go to, which is not a lot at the moment.


The Future of SEO

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


The Future of SEO

and update all of your links to point to this podcast episodes


The Future of SEO

because Gary says links will not be going away.


The Future of SEO

So thank you and goodbye.


The Future of SEO


English Google SEO office-hours from February 26, 2021

OK.


Maybe.


All right.


Welcome, everyone, to today's Google Search Central SEO


Office Hours Hangout.


My name is John Mueller.


I'm a search advocate on the Search Relations team


here at Google in Switzerland.


And part of what we do are these Office Hour Hangouts


where people can join in and ask their questions


around websites and web search.


A bunch of questions were submitted already,


and we have a bunch of people here live.


So maybe we'll just start off with some live questions


from one of you all.


Hey, John.


So John, my question is regarding Office schema.


The price markup.


So my doubt is if I mark a price and if that price is valid only


for three days, and if my page is not crawled,


and I end up showing a wrong price on a CRP.


So how do I approach that?


Now, I don't think you can really fix that in the sense


that you can force Google to recrawl your pages immediately


when you make price changes.


But you can use the usual best practices


to make it possible for Google to recognize that.


So in particular, the sitemap file.


Let us know that the page has changed,


that we can pick it up.


If it's an important page for you,


then make sure that you link it from important paces


of your site as well.


So if it's something that is going on sale


and you think it's an important sale,


then make sure it's linked from your home page,


for example, so that we can understand your perception


of the importance.


But there's no kind of work around to making it


so that Google automatically picks up all of the changes


within your website.


SPEAKER 2


Yes.


Thanks, John.


So there is another question of mine.


So how important is the font size?


So probably one part of my page is in 14px,


and the next part of my page is in around 12px.


So is it going to affect my ranking?


I don't think so.


Usually, it shouldn't.


The one thing I would watch out for is mobile friendliness.


So if your page can be viewed properly on a mobile device,


mobile friendliness is still a factor


that we look into for ranking.


But otherwise, it doesn't really matter.


It's more something between you and your users


so that you present something that they can read,


they can understand, that's easy for them to kind of process.


SPEAKER 2 Thanks, John.


Thanks.


Sure.


All right.


Pranit.


Yeah, hi, John.


Good morning.


This is the first time joining your call.


So I have a couple of questions.


The first one being that we're trying


to get an answer for this from Google blogs


and getting some conflicting information.


We have our pages where we have some FAQs or content that


is long enough for mobile views where the user needs to scroll.


And we are using read more, read less kind of buttons


that expand and collapse the view.


How much of the content that the user is seeing?


My question is, if we are our page load the data at one time,


so the read more is not loading anything extra,


our read less is not taking anything away from it.


The page, if you look at the doc on the network side,


you have all the questions, all the answers.


Is that going to affect what Google sees?


And how does it affect what Google reads on the page?


That's usually completely fine.


So that's not something where I would worry about it


from an indexing point of view.


Because if it's on your page when we load the page,


we can index it even if it's not visible immediately.


One place you might want to watch out for,


since you mentioned FAQ, with structured data on your pages


specifically for rich results, we


want to make sure that that information is visible.


So especially with FAQ markup where


you have questions and answers, at least the questions


that you mark up should be visible.


It's fine if the answers are kind of collapsed,


but at least the questions should be visible.


Sure.


We do use the FAQ markup in the structured data,


and everything is there as well.


And we do provide the questions.


We're just not sure if we need to show the answers.


It goes for a bad user experience


if they keep scrolling to get to the next one.


So that's what we're trying to solve.


But at the same time, make sure that Google


is reading our pages.


Second question I have is around sitemaps.


We don't have that much of crawl for it, I think.


And many of our pages are crawled


by Google that are not listed out of the sitemap.


But when it comes to the sitemap,


it only crawls about 10% of the pages


that we put on the sitemap.


I know that the priority is not something


that Google uses anymore.


Is there any other way that we can say,


Google, if you're trying to crawling only 10% of our pages,


these are our most important pages?


To give a sense of importance within your website,


you'd need to do that more with regards to internal linking.


So less with just purely the sitemap and more


kind of making it easy for Google


to recognize when we crawl your site which of the pages


you care about the most.


Usually that's like where you would start with your home page


depending on the website.


But in many cases, we start with the home page and things


that are linked from the home page


we would see as being more important than things


which are just like, I don't know, five or six steps


distance from the home page.


SPEAKER 2


All right.


Rob.


Yes.


Yes, I'm here.


Is there still any kind of API access


for Search Console which would give us


more information on where the 404s are breaking?


Because I understand it used to include that, the referring


page.


But our developer said he looked into it,


and it was closed.


The access was closed nine months ago or something.


Is that true?


So we can't actually access the referring data anymore.


I don't think you can see that.


Yeah.


So that's something.


I think it's visible in the index coverage report,


but that's not connected to the API at the moment.


I don't think the referring URL is in there.


I don't know if it's in the default downloads,


but we don't have an API for that.


So that's kind of the tricky part.


I guess what I would do in cases like that


is try to crawl your website with a local crawler


and see what comes back as 404s and where they come from.


OK.


Second question is that the new site


we launched a year or two ago to replace the other one


that you broke.


There are some URLs still reporting in Webmaster Tools


that are at least seven or eight years old


and haven't been live for that long


and have been 410ed previously a long time ago.


Is there anything else we can do about that,


or is that perfectly normal?


These can't have any external links pointing to them.


There's no way you could be finding them externally.


So is that still normal?


Does Google have a memory of what it used to be


and just keep trying?


Yeah.


I don't know.


Seven, eight years sounds like a really long time,


but especially if it's something that we saw in the past,


then we'll try to recrawl it every now and then.


We'll tell you that, oh, this URL didn't work.


And if you're like, well, it's not supposed to work,


that's perfectly fine.


So if we, because the site wasn't live for five or six


years, we just parked it.


So if we just 410 again for six months and see what happens,


it should finally get the point.


I don't think you could guarantee that we would try


those URLs, because it's one of those things where we have them


in our system, and we know that at some point


they were kind of useful.


So we're just kind of like, when we have time,


we'll just retry them.


It doesn't cause any problems.


It's just we retry them, and we show you a report


and tell you, oh, we tried this, and it didn't work.


And you're probably like, well.


Because I was just worried about the sheer number or percentage


of 404s, because I was chatting to Mihai as well.


And then Mihai had me worried that 30% of the URLs


are 404ing.


And that might start to look like it's only 70% of our site


is actually fundamentally useful.


No, that's perfectly fine.


That's completely natural, especially for a site


that has a lot of churn.


So if it's like a classified site


where you have classified listings that


are valid for a month, then you expect


those listings to drop out.


And then we, over the years, we just collect a ton of those


URLs and try them again.


And if they return 404 or 410, it's like, whatever.


Perfectly fine.


ROBB YOUNG, JACQ, SANDERS, AND PUGS


So if on a natural kind of ongoing basis, 30% of your URLs


go out of date, that would look normal.


But if you had a site where everything's new and fresh,


but suddenly 30% of them were broken,


that might look unusual.


I don't think that would even look unusual to us.


It's not that we would see that as a quality signal


or anything.


The only time where I think 404s would


start to look like something problematic for us


is when the home page starts returning 404s.


Then that might be a situation where we go,


oh, I don't know if the site is actually still up.


But if parts of the site are 404, whatever,


that's a technical thing.


It doesn't matter.


And usually what happens is we remember those URLs,


but we keep them in more of a low priority queue.


And whenever we have time left, when we think, oh, we could so


crawl, I don't know, 1,000 URLs from the site,


we'll go and say, oh, well, how about we check these old ones


just to make sure that we're not missing anything.


OK, and there's no remove from index button anymore,


is there, in the sense?


No.


I mean, there's no button-like remove from Google's memory.


Because I think they're probably not indexed anyway.


It's more like, oh, we just think we'd try.


All right.


OK, thanks.


Sure.


Derek.


Hi, John.


My question is regarding the country targeting


feature in Search Console.


So let's say I have a website, xyz.com,


whereby the content on the home page


is actually designed for users in the US.


However, I also have a subfolder, xyz.com slash UK,


that's actually meant for users in the UK.


So in this case, can I actually use the country targeting


feature in such a way that the home page is actually


targeting users in the US?


And then the subfolder slash UK is actually


targeting users in the UK.


And the main reason for asking this


is because I'm not sure if country targeting at home page


level is going to be treated as a site-wide signal,


causing country targeting at folder level to be ignored.


You can definitely do that.


So we'll look at the most specific part and use that.


So if you have, like, the rest of your site is for the US,


and you have a subdirectory for the UK or some other country,


that's perfectly fine to set up like that.


The important part is that it's a generic top-level domain.


And then you can apply country targeting.


If it's a country code top-level domain,


then you wouldn't be able to do that.


AUDIENCE 1 OK.


Thank you so much.


JOHN MUELLER Sure.


AUDIENCE 2 John, would you also add


hreflang on those sub as a secondary signal,


or does it not matter if you geotarget it in Search Console?


JOHN MUELLER Yeah, I mean, if they're equivalent pages,


then using hreflang definitely makes sense,


especially if it's the same language, different country


content.


OK.


All right, Stefan.


AUDIENCE 3 That pesky mute button.


Question about breadcrumb structured data.


The context is we have a product detail page that does not


include the product description in the URL.


And so we were hoping to improve the user experience


and click-through rate with breadcrumbs.


So we've marked up, and we've added the structured data.


We've checked it in the Rich Result Test tool.


We've confirmed that at least a sample of URLs


have been picked up by Google through the breadcrumb report


in GSE, but still haven't seen any change in the display


URL for SERPs.


So I'm curious whether there are additional steps


or requirements that we would need to fulfill.


JOHN MUELLER Not necessarily.


So I think in Search Console there's


a report for breadcrumb structured data.


AUDIENCE 3 There is.


JOHN MUELLER Do you see your URLs listed there?


AUDIENCE 3 So there's kind of two observations there.


Just before this call, I went and picked one sample,


which was in that report, retested it, and so forth.


And so it is there.


I did see actually a very large drop-off


in the number of valid pages.


It was hovering, and I think it's dropped nearly,


let's call it 70% in the last month, which seems odd,


because I don't see an uptick in errors or valid with warnings.


OK.


Anyways, that's a separate topic, I think.


So when it comes to structured data and rich results


in general, we try to look at it on several different levels.


And I don't know if that applies so much to breadcrumbs,


but just to be complete, the first things


are from a technical point of view,


is it valid markup?


It sounds like that's the case.


You can test that with the testing tool.


The second one is, does it comply


with our policies, which probably for breadcrumbs


is less of an issue, because I don't know,


breadcrumbs are breadcrumbs.


It's hard to do them in a bad way, I guess.


And the last one is more of a general, usually site-wide,


signal that is about the quality of the site overall.


Like, can we trust this website to provide something reasonable


with structured data that we can show in the rich results?


And usually, what happens when everything


from a technical point of view is set up correctly


and we've had enough time to process it for indexing


and it's still not shown, then that's usually


a sign that our quality algorithms


around the rich results in general


are not 100% happy with your website.


So I don't know if that's the case here.


One way to roughly estimate if that's the case


is to do a site query for your website


and to see if the rich results are shown there.


If the rich results are shown there


but they're not shown for normal queries,


then that's pretty strong signal that from a quality


point of view, we're not completely happy with your site,


or at least the structured data algorithm there.


If in the site query you also don't


see those rich results types, then that's


more of a sign that for whatever reason,


we haven't gotten around to processing them completely.


So that's something you might want to double check there.


What I would otherwise do is if you


continue to see this over a longer period of time,


like you give it a couple of weeks


and it still doesn't show up, I would definitely


post in the help forum and get input from other people


there with specific queries that you're using


and specific URLs that you're looking at.


SPEAKER 2 OK, that sounds good.


One quick follow up to that is presentation.


Like, are the links in the presentation layer important?


So is there some rough requirement


that you have to have a link, caret, link, caret,


and so forth?


No, not necessarily.


Oh, yeah, maybe one thing else that's kind of


usually important for rich results


is we have to be able to see it on the page itself.


So if these breadcrumbs are not visible at all on the page,


that might be something where our algorithms are not


sure if they're actually relevant for that page.


They are present and visible.


I ask you one additional question related to SSR.


Real quick, we're rebuilding our approach to SSR.


Your step brother system, Bing, has some pretty onerous


requirements in terms of size of document, which we're


trying to fit our solution to.


One of the biggest drags or biggest sort of page bloat


is related to our hydration code.


So question is, for SSR, do you see,


would you suggest including hydration, particularly


for user experiences that have carousels?


So obviously, you're going to use a viewport.


You'll look at and try to expand that.


So would you suggest keeping hydration for at least


Googlebot's consumption in SSR?


My guess is it doesn't matter so much,


as long as the server-side rendered content is essentially


what the user would see, that update from there


to the full version is less something


that we would care about from our side.


So I think the important part is that we have normal link


elements on the page, and we can follow those links,


and we have the full content on the page.


But the JavaScript framework behind all of that


is something that is usually something


that's more useful for users than for Googlebot.


Sweet, thanks.


Sure.


Let me run through some of the submitted questions,


and I'll get back to all of you who are raising hands.


I'll try to extend a little bit longer as well


so we have a bit more time to get to all of these questions.


And probably won't make it through all


of the submitted ones either, but we'll


see how far we can go.


Let's say I want to improve the content on a page.


I add as much relevant content as I can for the users.


Does this mean that when I add relevant text to the page,


Google automatically assumes that the page is better?


Does it work out like that?


Is more text better in the eyes of Google?


I'm trying to convince those in charge that it's not


quite as simple as that.


It's definitely not quite as simple as that.


From our point of view, the number of words on a page


is not a quality factor, not a ranking factor.


So just blindly adding more and more text to a page


doesn't make it better.


It's a bit like if you want to present something


to a client who's walking in, you


can give them a one or two page brochure,


or you can give them a giant book of information.


And in some cases, people will want a book


with a lot of information.


And in other cases, people want something short and sweet.


And that's similar to search.


If you have the information that you need for indexing,


for making it so that users and Googlebot


understands what this page is about,


what you're trying to achieve with it in a short version,


then fine.


Keep a short version.


You don't need to make it longer.


Just blindly adding text to a page doesn't make it better.


Imagine there are no index pages with the parameter


on a website, and then there are the same pages indexed


without parameters, which users can find only in the Google


search results, not on the website.


Could that cause problems in the long run?


That shouldn't cause problems in the long run in the sense


that we index what we find.


We show it to users in the search results,


and they tend to go there.


And we have something that we can show them there.


So that's essentially fine.


I think it's something where it's more


a matter of making it hard for you


to understand what your users are doing on your own website.


So in particular, if you're using analytics


or any other kind of user tracking metric system,


then if you have multiple sets of URLs that show essentially


the same content, then it's a lot harder for you


to figure out which of these pages


are actually useful in which ways to users.


So having fewer pages that show this content in general


is a good idea.


For search, it wouldn't be problematic


if you have multiple versions and you just show one set


to users through the search results and one set when


they click around on your site.


In many cases, you'll also have another set


of pages that are your paid ads landing pages, which are also


completely separate from the normal search pages that


are visible from crawling and indexing.


So that's something where it's pretty common


to have this kind of setup.


But of course, it just makes it harder for you to track things.


It's not an issue with regards to SEO


or with regards to Google.


Let's say the Core Web Vitals values of my website


are quite good compared to my competitors.


However, my traffic is much lower than my competitors.


How important is site traffic together with Core Web


Vitals in the search results?


In short, can a website with good Core Web Vitals


beat the competitor website with millions of visitors


in the search results?


So for Core Web Vitals, the traffic to your site


is not important as long as you kind of reach that threshold


that we have data for your website.


If we don't know anything about your website,


then obviously we don't know that maybe it's


a really fast website.


And the data that we use in search


is from the Chrome User Experience Report, which


is aggregated from users that are kind of opted


into this kind of metric system.


And that's essentially what we require.


And then that's kind of the baseline.


Like, we have data for your website.


We know that users are seeing a fast website.


It doesn't matter if millions of users are seeing that or just,


I don't know, thousands of users are seeing it.


So just kind of the pure number of visitors to your site


is not a factor when it comes to Core Web Vitals,


and generally not a factor for ranking either.


The other thing that I do need to mention here


is that Core Web Vitals, the page experience,


is at the moment not an active ranking signal.


So we announced that for May.


That's kind of one aspect.


And the other thing is that relevance is still


by far much more important.


So just because your website is faster with regards


to the Core Web Vitals than some competitors


doesn't necessarily mean that come May,


you will jump to position number one in the search results.


So we still require that relevance


is something that should be kind of available on the site.


It should make sense for us to show this site in the search


results because, as you can imagine,


a really fast website might be one that's completely empty,


but that's not very useful for users.


So it's useful to keep that in mind when


it comes to Core Web Vitals.


It is something that users notice.


It is something that we will start using for ranking.


But it's not going to change everything completely.


So it's not going to destroy your site


and remove it from the index if you have it wrong.


It's not going to catapult you from page 10


to number one position if you get it right.


I'm seeing some really strange issues


with paged index without content report in Search Console.


Pages that clearly have content are showing up in the report


and dropping in and out of the index.


For example, the home page of a big site.


Have seen a few other people talking about the same issue.


Have you seen anything on your end?


So I had to double check what this report or this category


of issue actually was, which kind of points


at me not actually seeing a lot of reports about this.


So that's kind of one aspect here.


That means to me that if you're seeing issues


in this regard with your website,


then I would go to the Webmaster Help Forum


and list your explicit URLs and the issues that you're seeing,


maybe some screenshots so that folks there can take a look.


And the folks there can also escalate that to Googlers


to kind of review in a little bit more detail what


actually is happening there.


The cases where I have seen this happen


from before we started showing it in Search Console


are usually cases where there's some kind of issue


on either the CDN that you're using or the server itself.


So one example that I've seen in the past


is the CDN is somehow set up that some requests go


to some node that doesn't have the full content.


And essentially, the node returns a 200 status code,


but a completely empty response.


And for us, we can kind of tell that this is probably not


what you want to have indexed, or at least there's nothing here


for us to index.


And then that's something that we would


bring into a report like this.


So if you're seeing this regularly,


my guess is something around the CDN.


Sorry, John.


Great.


Cool.


That's a small question.


It's really bizarre.


Yeah, I can see it happening for a couple of days,


and then the URL will show up as normal.


Everything looks fine in the Live Inspector tool.


I checked the CDN.


I checked our bot blocking platform that we use.


Everything looks normal.


So I'm really banging my head against the wall.


I did upload it to the Webmaster Help forum,


and I haven't heard back from anybody yet.


But I did see.


I saw a couple of people on Twitter and Reddit


talking about the same thing.


So I'm wondering if it might be a similar bug that we


saw back in October.


Yeah.


If you can link to the forum thread here in the chat,


I can copy that out afterwards and take a look.


That'd be great.


The ones I've seen are sometimes really annoying to figure out,


especially if it's a sporadic CDN thing where you,


when you test it, you don't really see it.


But when Google IPs test it, then sometimes we see it,


sometimes we don't.


And I can't always pinpoint exactly what


is happening there.


But usually when I look at the logs, I can see, oh,


it's like this file size is 10 kilobytes, 10 kilobytes,


and then 0, and then 10 kilobytes again.


Then usually that helps to pinpoint some of the times


when it happens.


But it's really tricky to, I don't know, figure out,


especially afterwards, when you see it in the report.


By then it's already kind of passed.


Yeah.


OK.


Yeah, I'll post a link to the thread here.


Thank you.


Cool.


I've got a question about hreflang and the wrong version


being picked up.


I work for an international news website.


And among our editions, we have three Spanish versions


on different subdomains.


These target Spanish speakers, Spanish speakers


in Latin America, and Spanish speakers in the US,


respectively.


All have hreflang set up across potentially duplicate pages.


While the es.domain.com has hreflang for es and eses,


so two versions.


The other one, Latin American, gets picked up


and ranked for Spain.


I'm seeing it particularly in news carousels with articles,


but it also happens with featured snippets.


Is there something else I can do to ensure


the correct version is ranked in the correct country?


So I think the absolute short answer is no, you cannot


guarantee that we will always show the right version


in the right country.


So that's kind of, I think, awkward truth.


But I think it's something that you


have to assume will be the case, that there are situations


where we don't get it right.


And if you can recognize that a user is


coming to the wrong version of your site,


then I would show a banner and try to catch that on your site


as well.


This is also useful for all of those cases


where people find other ways to get to your website,


be it through social media or just following


old links across the web, kind of making it to your site,


and then they end up on the wrong version.


With a banner on your site, you don't cause any issue


for indexing, and users can find the right version.


In general, for this kind of setup that you have there,


if you have a general Spanish and a Spanish for Spain version


in your hreflang setup for Latin America,


you would need to add tags for all of the countries


that you're targeting on that page.


So if you're targeting, I don't know, five or six countries


in Latin America for Spanish, you


need to add those versions in the hreflang set there too.


And it's fine to have them all land on the same page,


but they all need to be there.


Because without the hreflang connection there,


we will assume that this is just a separate page in Spanish


that we can also show.


And then we don't know that this is actually


part of that cluster of pages that you have,


where you have one version for Spain,


one version for all of the Spanish-speaking countries


that are not mentioned.


But rather, with all of those country links in there as well,


we can understand that, oh, this one


is actually the right one to show for individual countries.


It doesn't guarantee that we'll always get it right.


And in particular, with indexing,


kind of like the timing of indexing can throw things off.


With news content, sometimes we index one version


a little bit faster than the other versions.


If we don't have it indexed yet or processed properly


for hreflang, it can happen that we show the wrong version there


as well.


So that's kind of the aspect to keep in mind there.


One approach could be to say that you swap the hreflang


around a little bit as well, that you say maybe


for Latin America, you have a lot of countries


for Latin America and Spanish, that you treat that one


as a default Spanish version.


And you have the Spanish for Spain version instead.


Then you just have one country version and then kind


of the default version for Spanish.


And then you'd have fewer sets of hreflang links to maintain.


But it kind of depends on the way


that you have your website set up.


I believe that when I run a test with Lighthouse in Chrome,


for a page, this test will use my connection.


Therefore, the location of the test is my exact location.


But when I use PageSpeed Insights,


a test will run on a server close to me, in this case,


somewhere in Brazil.


And I write, this information would


be nice to have in the tests.


So I don't actually know where PageSpeed Insights comes from,


or I mean where the server accesses your site from.


But in general, all of these lab tests


are predictions of what users might see.


It's not meant in a way to mirror exactly what users see,


but rather to kind of roughly predict what a user might see.


And for that, the location is usually less critical.


So the bandwidth or the time to connect


from some other part of the world to your server,


again, is something that usually plays a much smaller role


with regards to the Core Web Vitals than other factors,


like how you have your site laid out,


how you provide images on a page, how large the files are,


all of those things.


So the location specifically for PageSpeed Insights


is less of an issue there.


When it comes to search, what we use


is the field data, which is based


on what users actually see.


And for that, we use, obviously, what users see,


so their location, their connections, their devices.


And that's usually something that


mirrors a lot closer what your normal audience would see.


So you don't really have to worry about where those lab


tests are coming from as well.


When our post ranks for long tail keywords with less traffic


volume, it's said it should also start to get


ranked for shorter keywords.


How can I make that happen?


So yeah, I think everyone wants this as kind of a quick way


to rank for more higher volume queries.


And I think the short answer is there is no magic solution.


There is no meta tag where you can


say I want to rank for both long tail and short tail queries.


But rather, we have to understand


that your page over time is actually


a relevant, useful result for people who


are searching for these things.


So that's something where all of the usual SEO advice applies.


There is no simple trick to say I


want to go from long tail traffic to short tail traffic.


There's no setting that you can do that.


My pages, including the home page,


now have a date in the search results, just like blog posts.


Why is that?


And how can those dates be removed?


The website itself is built on WordPress.


So essentially, the short answer is we found a date,


and we started to associate it with your pages.


And we think it's sometimes useful to show it


to people in the search results.


And that's essentially why we're showing that as a part


of the snippet of the page.


There is no simple approach to not showing any date at all.


So there's no meta tag that you can use to say,


don't show any date in the snippet.


The one thing you can do is, of course,


remove mentions of a date on your pages.


And then if we don't have a mention of a date on a page,


then that makes it less likely that we show a date.


But if these are blog posts, and the blog posts


have data associated with them, then obviously, you'll


have those dates somewhere.


In general, this is less of an issue,


because if this date is based on the blog post


that you have on your page, then that's kind of a relevant date.


And it kind of makes sense there.


If we're showing a wrong date for your pages,


for individual pages, there is a Help Center article


that we have that goes into how we pick a date.


And in particular, that covers the structured data


that you can use on your pages to specify a date in a machine


readable way.


And with that structured data, if we can confirm it


on the page and see that actually this date is also


on the page and in the structured data,


then it'll be much more likely that we actually


use that specific date for your pages.


The date itself is not a ranking factor,


so it's not that you need to push something in there


or that you need to kind of make it


look like the date has changed.


It's essentially just a part of the snippet


that helps inform the users of when this page has changed.


And sometimes they like to see that our page has


been stable for longer.


Sometimes they like to see that our page has


been freshly updated.


It really kind of depends there.


Why does Google add to my website title


the name of my brand before the defined title?


So I have my title set like this, Red Shoes dash My Domain


Name.


But Google rewrites the title to My Domain Name and then


Red Shoes.


With and without JavaScript, the source code looks good.


But Google still rewrites the title.


There's also no quick fix for this.


Essentially, we sometimes rewrite titles


to try to make them a little bit easier to understand for users.


And sometimes that results in this weird swapping of the page


title and the site title because we try


to recognize those separately.


And that can sometimes happen.


In general, that's not something that causes any problems.


However, if you're running a Chrome app


or something like that, then I would go to the Webmaster Help


Forums and present your case there.


Show some screenshots of some queries and the pages


that you have on your site and see if there's something


that others have that might be useful to you.


And then I would go to the Webmaster Help Forums


and show some screenshots of some queries and the pages


if there's something that others have that might give you


some tips on what you can do to improve.


In general, when we rewrite titles completely,


I think this is less your question.


But when we rewrite titles completely,


it's because our system thinks that the title that's specified


is really kind of an awkward or weird one that doesn't reflect


well what the page is about.


And that might not make it so interesting for users


to actually click on and look at the page.


So in particular, things like just a collection of keywords


or a lot of stuff text when you just put keyword stuffing


into the title or you just try to include


as much as possible in the title that's not really


relevant to the page, then that's


something where algorithms might say,


oh, this title is really weird.


We need to figure out how we can make this better so that users


actually want to go there.


So that's something where sometimes the folks in the forum


can point you at that.


With regards to the length of the title,


that's totally up to you.


Sometimes a longer title is useful for our system.


Sometimes a shorter title is useful for our systems.


It kind of depends on what you want to show to people


in the search results.


Oh, and maybe one other thing with regards


to posting in the forum, specifically queries


where you're seeing weird things happen,


if you can find queries that are as general as possible,


that makes it a lot easier for us to treat them appropriately.


So in particular, if you're searching for this really long


convoluted phrase where anyone who looks at that query


can say, well, you're probably the only person in the world who


would search like that, then that's


something where our algorithms or our engineers


might look at that and say, well, we don't really


have time to fix this one query because there are maybe


five queries like this which happen every month.


And we can spend a lot of time trying


to figure out a solution to this,


but it's not really an effective use of our time.


Whereas if you can come to us with a query that


is really more or less generic where you can look at it


and see, well, there are probably thousands or millions


of people searching like this every day,


then our engineers are much more likely to take that and say,


OK, we really need to figure out a solution here.


Lots of people are seeing these terrible search results.


We need to find a way to make that work a little bit better.


And we'll take that and try to improve our algorithms


over time.


So we wouldn't go in there and say,


we'll manually tweak the title that we show here,


but rather we'll improve the algorithms


that we use to create titles in general


and use this one situation as a kind of a test case.


Recently, in my Core Web Vitals feature in Search Console,


there are big fluctuations before the 17th of February,


which green URLs go down to zero in favor of yellow URLs.


And then one month later, the situation reverses.


Why does that behavior in Search Console report


if I didn't do anything in the performance?


It's hard to say without having a little bit more information,


like which site you're talking about in particular.


And it feels like something where also maybe folks


in the forum might be able to jump in and provide


some help there.


But I think what sometimes happens with these reports


is that if a metric is right on the edge between green


and yellow, then if for a certain period of time


the measurements tend to be right below the edge,


then everything will swap over to yellow.


And it'll look like, oh, green is completely gone.


Yellow is completely here.


And when those metrics go up a little bit more back


into the green, then it'll kind of swap back.


And those small changes, they can always


happen when you make measurements.


And to me, this kind of fluctuation back and forth


points more to the metrics.


Back and forth points more towards,


well, the measurement is kind of on the edge.


And the best way to improve this is


to try to provide a bigger nudge in the right direction


so that it's less just between those two versions,


but rather clearly on the green side.


So that might be an approach that you could take there


is try to figure out, why is it almost yellow and not


purely green, and see if there's something


that you can push to make it so that it's


really kind of strong green.


The tricky part, of course, is you


don't see any more fine-grained information between that.


You just see bad, middle, and then good.


So it's harder to tell, am I barely in the green


or am I completely in the green?


Especially with the field data, with the Chrome user experience


report data, you see a little bit more the exact numbers


that users saw on aggregate.


And with the lab tests, of course,


you have a lot more fine-grained information


on what exactly might be causing this


or what the numbers actually look


like when you do kind of this artificial prediction of what


users would see.


So many questions.


Maybe I'll just switch over to more questions from you


all here, and I also have a bit more time


afterwards so we can hang around a little bit longer


after the recording should even more questions pop up.


I'm just going down the order as I


see the folks have raised their hands in the Hangout, which


is a really useful feature now, now that I think about it.


Amos.


AMOS JOSEPH SINGH NGUYEN-SALASIYA, JR. Yeah, hi, John.


I have a question about the Find Results On feature


that we've been seeing mostly in the European markets.


So I couldn't find any documentation


on how to optimize for Find Results On.


Is there anything available?


I'm not aware of anything specific there.


My understanding is that's something


that is mostly algorithmic in that we


try to recognize which sites show there,


and we kind of show that automatically.


But I don't think there is any structured data or anything


specific that you can do to kind of force that or encourage


that.


Yes, because I can see it's kind of mostly for listing sites.


So it's a bit inconsistent.


And some sites in our group are appearing and some aren't.


So it's hard to understand whether we


need to do anything or not.


In addition, in Google Search Console,


there's no way to also filter for clicks coming through that.


Is that something that's going to come?


I'm not aware of anything coming there with regards


to Search Console.


My feeling is it's also something


which is rare enough that probably a Search Console


team wouldn't make a special report or kind


of an attribute for that.


And just the final question, is it


going to be launched in other markets?


So it's only in Europe, you can see, at the moment?


I have no idea.


No idea.


It might also be that it's something


that's more experimental, where we're just trying things out


and seeing how that works out.


But it's really hard to say.


Yeah.


Thanks.


Not a lot of good answers there.


Oh, well.


OK.


Bilal, I think.


If I got your name right.


Yeah, John.


So I have a situation where I can see 84 valid pages


in the Search Console.


When I check it through site column,


it just pops up four URLs.


And this situation has been pervading


from last four weeks.


So I'm just trying to understand what could go wrong.


So continuously checking all the parameters


and basic things, like crawl stats, robots, sitemap, et


cetera.


Is that something you can hope for, advice?


Yeah.


It feels like something which might be a matter more


for the forum to look at there.


But the general situation, what can always happen,


is that we have multiple data centers.


And what you see in the search results


might not be completely reflected


on what you see in Search Console.


Because Search Console tries to pick the overall view


of your website.


And it might be that in a lot of data centers,


these pages are not indexed at the moment.


So Search Console might say, oh, but I see them indexed.


But you, when you try them out, you don't actually see them.


So that's something that sometimes just settles down


over time.


That might be something that is happening there.


Of course, if you're seeing very few pages indexed


for your website, it might also just


be a sign that our systems are not


really sure what they should be indexing from the website.


And usually, especially with regards to smaller websites,


it's something where we try to index as much as possible.


So if you're just seeing four pages out of, say, I don't


know, 20 pages indexed, then that, to me,


suggests either a critical technical issue


or a critical quality issue, where our systems are really


like they're trying to get these things indexed.


But either for technical reasons,


which you would see in Search Console,


or for quality reasons, we're not


able to actually index them.


Quality issues, you probably wouldn't see in Search Console.


You'd kind of have to deduce them


based on things technically being indexable.


But our system is saying, well, actually, we


don't want to have this indexed.


Right, so another question related to e-commerce website.


Things like are continuously uncertain.


And I'm just trying to understand if there's something,


what should I do in that case?


Because I've checked the basic things are correct as well.


But yesterday, there was two pages that were indexed.


I checked through site colon.


And today, it was just one page.


So not sure what is going on.


Yeah, it feels very similar to the previous case.


And yeah, I think if you're really sure that they're not


technical issues involved, then I


would try to figure out if there's something


from a quality site that you can do to significantly make steps


forward there.


The other thing, of course, is in particular


with new websites, we need to have some understanding


of the context of the website within the rest of the web.


And if we just know that this website exists,


that's not necessarily a sign that we'll go off


and actually index it as much as possible.


But rather, we need to have a confirmation


that this is actually something really useful and worthwhile


to show.


So that's something that you could also


work on, especially with a new website.


So similar to a new business, when you open up a new business


you don't just open up a new business,


but rather you go to places where people are,


you do advertising, you do other things


to make it known to people so that they start coming to you.


And then over time, you grow your client base


and people who are regular and keep coming back,


who recommend your business to other people.


So that's the same kind of thing that you


would need to do with an e-commerce site


or any other site that you open up.


You kind of need to build up that first critical mass first


and then really have something fantastic so


that when they go away, they say, well,


I need to recommend this to my friends.


And that's not or usually less a technical factor,


so less something where you just need


to get some technical meta tags right


and submitting things in the right way.


But you really need to have your best foot forward.


SPEAKER 2 Alright, so with this website,


the last cached page is off December 11.


So luckily the home page gets available today,


but if I check the cached for you,


it is still off December 11.


So I'm just trying to figure it out.


We'll obviously discuss later.


I can send you the link.


But yeah, thanks for the insight.


Now, I would definitely go to the help forum for something


like that because that's something that folks there


can take a look at various things


and give you a little bit of advice.


Sometimes it's also, I don't know,


the hard to take advice of like, oh, your website really looks


out of date or something like that, where you sometimes


need a little bit of a nudge to go past from like, oh, this


is my baby.


Everything is perfect.


And to understand like, oh, actually I


need to improve some things.


But that's always useful, I think, to hear sometimes.


SPEAKER 1 Right, thanks.


All right, Robin.


Yes, can you hear me?


Yes.


Oh, great.


I wasn't sure my mic was active.


So I would like to follow up a little bit on the page type


that answer that you gave before.


You indicated that the length is not really a matter


because, I mean, the conventional wisdom


has been for many years that you want


to have a title tag that is as room within the Google


presentation so it doesn't end with a dot, dot, dot.


Because we are also building some new coding


for our product detail pages.


And so we're setting it up as a product designation and then


the product category because the product designation itself


doesn't say a lot of the product.


But if you combine the two, you will get a good sense


of what the product is and more specifically what it's named.


And in some cases, our products are bundled together,


which means that there are several product descriptions


in a row, so to speak, which will extend the title


to a lot more than 72 characters or something like that.


So it will be broader than the allowed pixel width


in the SERP.


But if I understand you correct, as long as we also


have the same content on the page well represented


as in the title tag, this is not really a problem.


Now, I mean, it's definitely not a problem in the sense


that your pages will rank worse in a case like this.


For the title tag, it's less a matter


of what we also find within the text body of a page


because the title can be different in regards.


It doesn't have to be the same as the heading,


for example, on a page.


I guess the aspect here is that we do use a title tag


in our rankings as well.


So having the relevant information in the title


makes sense.


At the same time, the title is also something


that we show to users.


And sometimes you might choose to have a title that is very,


I don't know, where you found that it's very useful for users


or where you found that users respond to it very well.


And that's something where if you have a specific title


that you want to use, then fine, use that.


If you have a longer title that is automatically generated


based on the product that is shown,


then sometimes that title is just a bit longer.


And the dot, dot, dot at the end does not


mean that we don't use the rest for ranking.


It's just we can't show everything there.


The other part, I think, is sometimes we


show shorter titles in search, and sometimes we


show longer titles.


I think sometimes we even show two-line, three-line titles.


Not 100% sure if that's always the case,


but it's definitely not the case that you need


to target exactly 72 characters, and then


that's the perfect title.


It's kind of this mix of you need


to provide information for us so that we


can rank your pages properly.


You ideally provide that in a way that


is encouraging for the user, that they understand


what the page is about, and that it's interesting for them


to click on it because that's kind of the way


that you get traffic from search.


And at the same time, if you have a very large website,


you need to do that in some way that you


can automate for the pages that you can't manually


create titles for.


So if it's an e-commerce site, you


can't realistically create a title for every million


products that you might have.


So you kind of have this mix of some things


you create manually to really find target, a specific title.


Other things you just leave automated


in a way that works optimal, but at the same time saves you


time.


Yeah, yeah.


That is what I thought.


But yeah, thank you very much.


Cool.


OK, let me take a break here and pause the recording.


I'll stick around a little bit longer.


If any of you have more questions and comments,


we can definitely do that.


And yeah, cool.


OK, let me pause.


And thank you all for joining.


Thanks for watching so far.


Thanks for all of the questions that were submitted.


Always cool to see what all is happening.


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

People often find that their sales will go up.


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

They'll get more engagement from audiences they didn't know they had,


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

just because they can now access the content.


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

Hello and welcome to another episode of SEO Mythbusting.


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

With me today is Eddaros Cannon, and you're working for Samsung, is that right?


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

That's correct.


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

What do you do at Samsung?


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

So, for Samsung, I'm a developer advocate for the web browser Samsung Internet.


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

Samsung Internet is a web browser for Android phones.


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

You can get it from the Play Store, but not a lot of people have heard about it,


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

so there's lots of what I do is trying to raise awareness.


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

But more importantly than that, what I'm trying to do is advocate for the web as a platform


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

to try and encourage developers to build for it


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

and to make sure it lasts long into the future as a great and healthy platform


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

for people to build stuff with.


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

I'd love to have you here because I want to talk to you about the SEO


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

versus performance and usability on the web.


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

And I think we need to get some stuff out of the way, right?


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

So, would you say what is the most important bits and pieces


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

that you would like people to focus on more when building web stuff?


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

So, I have a huge passion for ensuring that the web remains great for everyone around the world,


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

not just on people using the latest handsets and on desktop computers,


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

because most people aren't.


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

People are using devices from years ago and low-end sub $100 devices,


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

where, frankly, today the modern web is just not even reaching them.


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

There's a fantastic talk from Alex Russell,


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

who goes into the reality of people with phones that are less than $100.


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

I love that.


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

Yeah, that's a fantastic one.


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

You'd have the naive thought that as time goes on, phones are getting steadily better


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

and that a bottom-of-the-line phone nowadays is just as good as the top-of-the-line phone four years ago,


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

when they're not. It's just getting wider and wider and wider.


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

The chasm is opening rather than anything else.


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

What was really awesome, I heard recently Google was doing performance metrics


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

into their ratings for search results.


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

And so, was this front-end web performance, like render speed, making sure it's not janky,


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

or is this just making sure it pays loads really quickly?


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

So, it is a tricky one, because we have so many metrics, right?


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

We have time to first byte, we have time to interactive,


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

we have time to first meaningful paint, and then you have the frame rates and stuff.


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

Now, Googlebot, which is the tool that basically fetches the data


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

and renders your website for search indexing,


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

we don't really interact that much with the page,


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

so we can't really figure out if your scroll is smooth or something like that,


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

but we do get the rendering bits, so we can tell you when the page becomes responsive to input,


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

when the content is ready for the user to consume,


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

so we're looking at a blend of these kind of modes of performance.


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

Does that make sense?


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

It does make sense.


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

So, do you have any other qualms with how SEO influences the daily work of a web developer?


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

So, a friend of mine recently rebuilt her site using React.


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

She was very excited about it and seemed to get quite good client-side performance


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

once it had all loaded.


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

Unfortunately, when she sent it out to her company's team, which does SEO analysis,


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

they came back with an answer of,


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

we love your site, it's really good, but you basically don't appear in the rankings,


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

even though she could show them that, look, right there, it's on Google.


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

Is Google engaging with people who do SEO analysis to ensure that they're running up-to-date metrics,


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

the similar ones to Google, to ensure that even a heavily client-side rendered page,


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

they can feel confident that it is being measured well.


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

So, we can't really fix what people are doing in terms of what tools they're using or something,


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

but what we do want is we want to open this black box of SEO for everyone.


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

So, we're having this conversation with web developers,


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

we're having this conversation with SEOs and toolmakers,


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

and we provide a bunch of metrics and tools as well.


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

So, we have Search Console that gives you a bunch of insights on how you're doing in search


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

so that you're not relying on someone else basically sticking the finger in the wind


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

and reading the stars and stuff.


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

And we also want to make sure that people are understanding that blanket statements like,


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

JavaScript is going to kill your SEO or you cannot use React or Angular,


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

that's not necessarily the best way of doing it.


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

It's a really comfortable answer probably, but it's not the right answer sometimes.


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

All right. So, at Chrome Dev Summit, I saw your great talk on SEO in the web.


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

Thank you.


Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

And one thing you mentioned was the rendering by Googlebot