how things were back then.


How to think about ranking in Search and much more! | Search Off the Record podcast

Maybe we should just document it more.


MARTIN SPLITTENBERG And it's all the anecdotes.


I mean, our producer, when we were


trying to find the right place, was super picky.


The bookshelf was too much clutter


in the background, visual clutter.


And then my walls were white and boring.


So we couldn't use these.


And she was quite picky.


It took us quite a while.


But it was good.


I think this, as you say, it makes you


appreciate the effort even more.


Yeah.


Cool.


Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.


I have one very important thing to say.


Well, actually two.


One, John, your hair is back.


Ah.


I'm so disappointed.


It happens.


I don't know.


It's like I took it all out, and then it came back.


I think you should dye it.


Dye it.


What?


Oh, I misheard that sentence because I'm like, wow, Gary,


that's rude.


Dyeing hair rude?


How about you, Martin?


You look like a something PG-13 unicorn.


That fell into a unicorn lake.


Yes.


Precisely what happened.


I told you, my user agent is Pink Fluffy Unicorn.


Do you have a user agent?


I do have a user agent.


That's perfect.


Wow.


Wait, you actually have a user agent?


Like you modified your browser's user agent?


Actually, yes.


Fun story, yes.


I did.


Just to piss off, one person that I know


is checking their analytics for the different browsers that


are accessing their website.


I used to run with a very specific user agent,


and they're like, who the hell is this?


And because I was traveling so much recently


in the last couple of years, he couldn't pinpoint it down


because the requests were coming from all over the place.


Oh, man.


You're such a troll, Martin.


That's amazing.


I love it.


I should do that.


Definitely.


I should just put Gary as user agent.


Just put Internet Explorer 4.5.


Oh my gosh.


That's terrible.


I actually wonder how the web would break for me


if I modified my user agent to just be Gary.


I think you should try it out.


Yes.


No.


I shall try it out.


And if you don't see anything break,


then you should color your hair.


I will not do that.


I promise you that.


Oh.


OK.


All right.


Well, in that case, looking forward


to seeing Gary in my server logs.


All right, well, thanks for listening, everyone.


I hope you found this episode insightful.


And if you did, let us know in the comments,


ideally on Twitter, so that we can


see kind of where we could improve, what we could change,


how things are working for you as well.


And of course, like and subscribe, as always,


like you do with these podcasts or YouTube videos.


I don't know.


Now I'm confused.


But let us know.


Thanks for joining us.


And hope to talk to you, I guess,


in the future at some point.


Bye.


Have a day.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Welcome, everyone, to the next episode of the Search Off


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

the Record podcast.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Our plan is to talk a bit about what's


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

happening in Google Search, how things work behind the scenes,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

and who knows, maybe have some fun along the way.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

My name is John Mueller.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I'm a search advocate on the Search Relations team


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

here at Google in Switzerland.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I'm joined today, again, by Martin and Gary,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

who are also both on the Search Relations team.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Hi, everyone.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Hi.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Bonjour.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Woo-hoo.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So Gary, you've been talking a lot about search indexing.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

What's the next step?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

When are you finally going to be talking about ranking?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Maybe today?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Wait, I was not told I'm going to start this.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

John said that twice.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

He walked through the procedure twice.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Well, I was not paying attention, as usual.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

OK, thought collection.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

What's next?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Well, we pretty much finished with indexing.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

We touched upon a little bit on crawling.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Plus, crawling is not all that interesting.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

What?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Either.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So I think the last thing that we can talk about is serving.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

What is serving?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

It's serving results.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Duh.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So but wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So we have build and index, and now we're serving results.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Does that kind of do ranking as well, or no?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Yes, yes.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And that's why we don't talk all that much about serving,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

because the ranking is actually happening


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

in serving when we receive the queries


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

and returning results from our index.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So it's full of those highly guarded secrets


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

that we don't necessarily like to share.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

That said, there are a bunch of things


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

that I believe that we can share,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

either because if you attended computer science classes,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

then it's highly likely that you covered


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

some of these things in your information retrieval classes.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Like, for example, I know that Pandu,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

who is our chief ranking person, I don't know what's his title,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

he's teaching information retrieval at Stanford.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Well, I don't know if he's still doing it, but he was.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And information retrieval is a thing that you can learn.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And conceptually, it's not that different


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

from what we are doing.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Basically, what's taught in those computer science classes


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

are actually very similar to what's happening


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

in our serving infrastructure.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Now, there are a few terms that we don't like to mention,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

because, well, we don't want to.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

PAUL LEWIS-SOMMERMANN.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Not page rank.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Well, that's a different thing.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

We don't want to mention page rank for different reasons.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

But sure.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

But going back to the higher level serving system,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

what we start with is a query from the user.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And that query is traveling in the serving system two ways.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

One is going down, and one is going up.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

When going down, it passes several systems,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

which I think we can cover, or at least most of them.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

One would be the query parsing and understanding system.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Then it's passed on to kind of like a router system


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

that passes on the parsed query to the different indexes


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

that we have.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So for example, this is important


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

for universal search.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

The query is passed on to the web index.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

It's passed on to the image index, video, news, and so on.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

All the different indexes that we


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

have for different file formats or different kind of content.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Then in case of web, the parsed query


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

travels down to our serving index, actually.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And that's where some of the magic happens,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

some of the magic that we already covered.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

For example, in a previous episode,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

we were talking about posting list.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

We are going to dedicate more time


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

to this in a future episode.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

But based on the posting list, we


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

find the results that might satisfy the user's query.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

We select those documents, and then we


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

start pushing them back up.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Now, the ranking system kicks in and starts ranking the results


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

that we've retrieved from our index.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Here, you can think of topicality, for example,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

essentially relevance.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

That plays a huge factor in ranking, then,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

the quality of the results and the content.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And I don't remember how we say it anymore,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

but probably hundreds of other signals


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

are taken into account for determining


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

an order for the results that we retrieved from our serving


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

index.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And then it goes further up in the stack.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Now, we reach that router again that


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

was sending the queries to the different index tiers.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Here, we wait a little bit for the other index's responses.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And if we get anything in the allotted time,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

then we would try to push the received results


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

among the web results.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

That's essentially what Universal Search is.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And if we manage to do that, good.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

If we didn't, then we just return web results,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

and that's it.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Going further up, there is not much else there.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

We would get some ads responses from the ad server,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

although I have literally no idea at all what it does


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

and how it does it.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I just know that it sometimes serves ads.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And we put the results in a template.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Think of J template or C template


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

that are public templating systems.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And then the user gets the results page in HTML form.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And this is the very high level overview


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

of how serving works.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

In future episodes, I'm planning to go


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

into more detail about certain or specific systems


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

that we have.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Like, for example, I think it would


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

be interesting to cover the query parsing


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

or how we actually find results in our index


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

for certain queries.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

But I already talked for 12 minutes,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

and perhaps I should stop.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So cool.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

But all of this happens within milliseconds, right?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

That's right.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

It's blazing fast.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So every system has an allotted time for responding.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And if they don't respond in that time,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

then we would not wait for them unless they


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

are critical for the page.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So for example, for web results, we


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

would always wait because without results,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

it's kind of weird.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

But for example, if the ad server


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

doesn't respond fast enough, then we


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

would not wait for that.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

We would just give the user the results without ads.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Or if Map Pack, for example, didn't


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

arrive in the allotted time for the Google Maps


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

server to respond, then we would just not put maps


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

among the web results.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Plus, the second thing is that there's


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

lots of caching going on.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Like if people search for cookies in my area,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

then they are very likely routed to the same data center


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

because of a geographic area.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And it just makes sense to route them to the same data center.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And there, we would very likely, after the first query,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

first cookie query, we would return results from a cache.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So we wouldn't even go down the whole stack


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

and find new results for a certain time, which


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

is order of minutes.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

But still, it helps a lot with giving users speedy results.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So multiple people would get the same cookies?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

That sounds terrible.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Multiple people, no.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

That sounds amazing if I bake the cookies.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Oh, like people in your neighborhood


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

get the same batch of cookies.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Oh, OK.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Yes.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

That makes a lot of sense.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

That's correct.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And Martin might also get some cookies.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Yes, I'm really looking forward to get some cookies.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

No, no, not now.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Not now.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

No, no cookies for me.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

We care about speed, but not that much.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

We do.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So just to kind of recap and make sure I understand


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

everything right.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So first of all, if someone goes to Google


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

and types in cookies near me or cookie recipe


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

from Gary's blog that doesn't exist or something like that.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Thanks.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Then our systems would go off and try


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

to understand this query first.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

It's like, oh, cookies.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

That could be like one cookie or five cookies.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

It's like those are kind of synonyms.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I think Paul Hart did a cool session on this at some event


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

that we recorded, I don't know, was it like two years back now?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

But the recording is on our channel.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So make sure to watch all of the videos on our channel,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

and you'll find that recording about synonyms


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

and how we pick things up.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I thought that was pretty cool.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

It happens right up there, right?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

It's like, cool.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

OK.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So then all of these synonyms or whatever,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

the understood query is passed on to some big mixer.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And there we stir the pot a little bit


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

and hand off this query to all of the different indexes.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And we wait a little bit, but not really a lot.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And the results that come back, we try to rank them


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

and then essentially show them to the user.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Yes, that's the simple version.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So cool.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

That's like a lot of stuff that has to happen


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

within milliseconds.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I wonder how they wrote that PHP code to work so fast.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Well, it's not PHP, so.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Oh, it's ASP, of course.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

It's like for a show.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Oh.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

It's C and C++.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Oh, OK.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Wow.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

That's like complex.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Cool.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

OK.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I see.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

You see?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

You didn't.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Oh, man.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I did.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I wasn't there.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

The heck would you do that for?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I don't know.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I wanted to increment the pun count,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

like C++ increments on C.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So it's like D?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

C++ is essentially D?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I thought D was another programming language.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

There is a programming language, D, I think,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

if I remember correctly.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

It's so confusing.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

These engineers, they should just


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

settle down and get to work rather than inventing


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

new stuff all the time.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

How dare they?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Fascinating.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So Martin, you had a really cool session


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

at the Search Central Live.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Well, actually, you had all of the sessions.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

But you also had a really cool one.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Wait.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Let me frame that differently.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

No, that was perfect.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

That was perfect.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

That was amazing.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

That was great.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Just leave it like that.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

We need to keep that.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

You had the middle session as well,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

where you did a really cool case study with someone


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

from the community.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I thought that was really neat.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Can you tell us a little bit more?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Thanks, John.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So yeah, you have been part of the Search Central Live event


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

that we did recently.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

For those of you who haven't seen it,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

you can check that out on our YouTube channel.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

If you go to youtube.com slash google search central,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

you'll find the video recording from that event.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

There will be more events in the future.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And I wanted to try something out


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

that we haven't done before.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I have seen a talk at another event from Christina Azarenko,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

where she walked people through how


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

she approached a specific kind of SEO debugging


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

or technical SEO troubleshooting.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And I was wondering, oh, so what would be a good case where


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

she had to debug some technical SEO problem that she


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

could share with us?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And then she came up with something


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

that I have seen multiple times in the wild.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Multiple websites had suffered this specific problem.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So I thought, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

It would be super cool if she could


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

share that with the audience.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And I think that's one of the beautiful things


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

with virtual events.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

We're all at home.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

We are comfortable at our own machines, at our own computers.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So it's a little easier to actually do


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

these kind of live debugging situations and setups.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And she said yes.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And so we had a session, I think it's


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

like a little over 20 minutes, where


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

she debugged a problem with lazy loading images on a page.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Now, we didn't want to highlight or shame


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

the website that was affected.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So I built a fake website that actually


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

exposed the same problem.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

That was surprisingly hard, because I built the setup,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

and then it just worked.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And I'm like, oh, dang.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So I had to deliberately break the website.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And then I broke it in the wrong way.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And then Christina's like, but that's not what happened there.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I'm like, I know.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I'm sorry.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And then I had to re-fix that and then


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

break it in the right way.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So you have to break the website, but in the right way.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I think you just know too much about how


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

to make good websites.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Trying to be a blind person, it's really tricky.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Very unfortunately, it gets easier to build good websites.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Yeah, this is terrible, isn't it?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

It's cool.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And it was really cool to see how she guided us


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

through the tools, and how she used the different tools


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

to spot things, and what tools she used.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And we got lots of questions like, what is the tool


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

that you're using there?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And how did you do that?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And how did you find out this from the audience


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

while we were doing it?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So that was also really cool.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And I would love to do more of these in the future.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I haven't worked out how.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I haven't worked out how we can make that happen.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

But I'm pretty sure the community out there probably


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

has lots of case studies that we can look into and share


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

with others to share how people are using the tools,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

how are people approaching the problem,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

and how can you solve the problem effectively.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

That sounds cool.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

That would be something that, do you


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

think we should do more of that?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Yeah.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

It's not that you need the challenge


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

of creating broken websites.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

But I think the idea of showing people


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

how to use existing tools to improve things,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

or to debug things, to diagnose issues,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I think that's super cool.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Because it's one thing to read about it on our blog.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And it's like, oh, you should just use this tool.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And it'll tell you what to do.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And something completely different to be in front


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

of the tool and say, well, what does this mean?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

What do I have to interpret here?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

What's my next step?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And it's a bit of a SEO murder mystery kind of situation.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

You just come to the crime scene and something


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

is broken or hurt or dead.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And then you have to figure out, how did we get here?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Where do we need to branch off and take a different path?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I found that very interesting.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And so I would love to hear from the community.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Maybe just ping us on Twitter.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Do you think we should do more of these kind of debugging


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

stories or nah?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And if you have any specific scenarios,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

that would also be interesting to hear.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I mean, if you ask people, should we do more,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

it's not that they're going to say no.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

It's like, of course people want more, right?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Well, sometimes people at least tell us, yes, we want more,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

but not that.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

We want something different.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

OK.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Yeah.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So maybe you can debug which links are good for my website.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Can you debug why my website's not ranking?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

No.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Gary could.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

It's not serving, Martin.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

You have to use the right terminology.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Why is the website not serving?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

It's not serving nicely.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Not serving cookies.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Not serving cookies properly.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

It has cookie banners that disrupt the page CLS score.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Cookie loading stats?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Cookie loading.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

There we go.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I mean, one of the topics that I always get questions on,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

especially in the German Hangouts


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

when I do them with the folks, is everything


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

around internationalization.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Maybe we can do something on that.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

What do you think?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

The Germans want internationalization.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

That's very good.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Internationalization is a big topic,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

and I think that causes lots of interesting situations.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And I know that it also is a little bit related to serving.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I don't know.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

What is our take on hreflang these days?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

It's like one of those weird topics


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

where when you read the documentation, you're like,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

oh, this all makes sense.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

It's so easy.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

You just put this one link here on this German page.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

You put the other link on the French page.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Or you have a German for Germany and a German


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

for a Switzerland page, which is kind of awkward


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

because they don't really speak German in Switzerland.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

But anyway, you just add these links to your pages,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

and then magically, it all works out.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And I don't know.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

It's one of those things where it's easy to point people


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

at it and say, oh, it's like, just follow these guidelines,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

and everything will work out.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

But it's sometimes really surprisingly complex.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And I'm often surprised when people get things right


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

with regards to hreflang because of all of the complexity.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Wait, what?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

When they get it right?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Yeah.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I mean, it's like if you have a website, kind of connections


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

between different versions of your pages,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

that's almost kind of tricky because who


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

knows which version is the French version of my page?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

You have different URLs, different URL structure,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

different people working on the different pages.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

It's like sometimes, I don't know, it gets really messy.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So I think that's kind of tricky.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And it's also really tricky with regards to our tools.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Like if you just use Search Console to try to figure out,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

is my site's hreflang working properly?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Because of the way Search Console reports


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

on the indexed version of your pages,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

and indexing takes a while to process hreflang,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

it has this weird delay.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And it brings up errors where when you look at the pages,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

you say, well, maybe Google just didn't see the proper hreflang


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

at the time, but it's OK now.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

What do I actually do here?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So maybe we could improve our tooling.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

We could definitely improve our tooling.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I think that's certainly one part.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

But maybe, I don't know, it's always one of those things


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

where showing it to people, they think, oh, it makes sense


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

and is easy to do.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And then they start trying to do it,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

and it gets really complicated.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I keep wondering if there is some way


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

to make it easier and less error prone.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Because as soon as something gets complicated


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

and you don't have really cool, or I don't know,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

straightforward tools to diagnose it,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

then you just have to assume that there


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

are lots of people out there implementing it in a way that


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

is essentially incorrect.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Where you have, I don't know, the typical ES-LA for Latin


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

America, Spanish.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And it makes a lot of sense, because maybe that's


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

the code that you use internally for all of your Spanish pages


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

for Latin America.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

But Google doesn't think that your page is


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Spanish for Laos or whatever.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So it's, I don't know, it gets really complicated


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

with all of those details.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

GARY ILLYES-SCHREIBERnEN I'm particularly fond of that


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

example, because that was in our own help center.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

JOHN MUELLER Oh, no.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

OK.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

MARTIN SPLITT I think the last time I looked,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

we still have similar things where


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I forgot which country code.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

But it's also one of those things


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

where we group a bunch of different countries together


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

and just call it by some number or something like that.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And we still have that in various places on our side,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

too.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And if Google can't get it right,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

then expecting other people to get it right is kind of tricky.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And it's not something where if I


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

know that it's super complicated to get right,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

where I feel really comfortable telling people


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

to spend a lot of time on it.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Because it takes a lot of time.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

It's hard to tell what exactly you will get out of it.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And it's one of those tricky topics.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

GARY ILLYES-SCHREIBERnEN Yeah, I think the biggest problem


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

with it is that, well, that it's complicated.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

But the complexity comes from a different angle


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

than what we would expect.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Because for example, if you have a site where


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

you have multiple languages, and you have just one domain where


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

you have multiple languages, basically just changing


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

with the hl equals language code,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

then implementing it is actually not that hard.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Because it's very likely that you


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

are using the same templating system,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

and then you can just change the URLs in the hflang cluster


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

based on the parameter, for example.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

The complexity comes when you have


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

completely different sites for different regions


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

using completely different templating systems.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And then you have to match up the URLs, perhaps


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

using a spreadsheet or something.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I don't even know.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And then that is more prone to errors.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

But we also know that there are a large number of sites that


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

make perfect use of hflang.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

They implemented it correctly, and they


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

are reaping its benefits.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

There are sites out there that messed up the hflang clusters


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

on their sites.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

But then we also know that there are


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

a large number of sites who didn't,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

and they are benefiting from it.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Now, it's one of those things where if you get everything


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

right, it seems to make sense.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Two of the cases where I see where people make mistakes


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

with regards to hflang is on the one hand,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

they look at the system, and they see,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

oh, I can add all country codes, all language codes here.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So therefore, I will make my website


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

be international in all variations.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And it's kind of tempting to just say, well,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I can create the code to make all of these different language


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

versions.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

But actually, from a practical, from a ranking,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

from a search point of view, it probably


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

doesn't make sense to just duplicate your whole site


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

for all of these versions if you're not


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

doing anything unique on all of those versions.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So finding the right set of country and language versions


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

that make sense for your website,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

that's sometimes super hard.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And there's no absolute answer for that.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And the other thing is that I sometimes


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

see people implementing hflang purely


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

across totally unrelated languages, where maybe you


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

have a German page and a Chinese page,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

and you implement hflang there.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And to me, that feels a little bit like wasted effort.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Because if someone is searching in Chinese,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

we're not going to show them the German page, right?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So it's more something where if there are actual issues that


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

were showing the wrong version, then obviously, hflang


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

helps us to pick the right one.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

But if we're not having trouble understanding


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

these different language versions,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

then maybe you don't even need to use hflang.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Would that be about correct, Gary?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

What? Why me?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I mean, conceptually, yes.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

It doesn't make sense.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

One of the ranking components that we implemented back then


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

when we were actively working on hflang


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

was a swapping mechanism.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So for example, if you search for,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I don't have examples anymore.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I forgot about them.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

You search for something in Chinese,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

then if the German page would come up,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

then we would swap out the results.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So I think that there is still a benefit.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Like if you have matching content, just


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

different languages, even if the script is different,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

it makes sense to annotate with hflang.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

It might not make sense for all kind of content,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

but for certain content, it might make sense.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

OK, so my Chinese is very rusty, but in Japanese, probably,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I can give you an example.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

They have a character set for imported words.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So that would be a katakana.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And there, we could understand the underlying word,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

like for example, banana.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

They don't have a word that they could express with kana,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

with kanji.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So they use the katakana characters


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

to express the word banana.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And then we would be able to understand that this


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

is the concept banana, the fruit,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

and then we could serve the English page.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

But then the English page doesn't make sense


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

to serve for a Japanese user.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So if there is a matching Japanese version,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

then we would swap them out.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So in that context, it makes sense to have hflang.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

But if someone is searching for something like, I don't know,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

knife making, then it probably wouldn't make sense


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

to retrieve a German page and then swap out


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

with the Japanese version.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Yeah.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

But I guess brands would also fall into that.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

If you have an international brand name that you


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

use in all kinds of countries, then that


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

might also be something where your home page or your category


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

page or the product page, if it's a really popular product,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

could also benefit from that link


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

between the different language versions, right?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Right.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

What about if I have the same product and pretty much


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

the same product description and the same product


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

name in between a German and a Swiss German site or product


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

page?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Would it still make sense?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Because the price is different, right?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

They're using different currencies.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Switzerland has Swiss francs.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Germany has euros.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So even though the content is pretty much the same,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

would it still make sense to have an hreflang version


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

for Switzerland versus Germany?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Yeah.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Yes.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I mean, that's one of the questions I get in the office


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

hours all the time.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And for that, it's something that definitely makes sense.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I think it's tricky because we have, at the same time,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

systems that try to understand when content is duplicated.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And we try to put them into one cluster of pages.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And then sometimes, the German and the Swiss page


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

will get into the same cluster.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

But with hreflang, we can show the proper URL, at least.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So that's, I think, pretty useful.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I'm aggressively nodding here.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I think that's generally not a problem.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

It's just that also because of this,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I mean, it makes sense that these are put together


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

in the same dump cluster or duplication cluster


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

because it's the same content, essentially.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

But then the reporting, it can be


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

tricky if the report is only reporting canonicals.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Because then it's like, oh, what happened to the Swiss page?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

That has disappeared because it's now


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

a duplicate of the German page.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

But that doesn't mean that we are not showing the Swiss page


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

to people in Switzerland.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Yeah.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I think Search Console is super complicated in that regard.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And it's something where people come with these questions.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And because Search Console reports on the canonical,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

you basically have no idea what is actually happening.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I mean, you have a bit of an idea.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

You can kind of guess and try to interpret it from there.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

But it's super tricky with regards


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

to reporting in Search Console for those kind


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

of international sites where we do kind of this duplication


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

thing where we recognize it's the same content.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So I don't envy people that have to do reporting on that.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

But at the same time, it's one of those topics in Search


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Console where we gain a lot by simplifying and focusing


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

on the canonical.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

But for these kind of international sites,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

it makes it so much harder.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Yeah.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Fascinatingly enough, that's roughly


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

what I wanted to say, too.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I remember when Search Console was


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

contemplating on switching to reporting on canonicals.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And one of the biggest issues that we brought up


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

was with hreflang, because hreflang relies


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

a lot on alternate names or alternate URLs.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And because of that, hreflang reporting


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

would essentially break.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And we've seen that happen.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And people were not very happy about it.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

But as John said, greater good.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I guess it also brings up the question of,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

what else could we use instead of hreflang


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

if we wanted to switch to something else?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And I came up with a fantastic system.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And for some reason, that didn't get implemented.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

It kind of relied on regular expressions and content hashes.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And I thought that would be so much simpler than these link


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

tags that you put into HTML.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

But I don't know, Gary, why are you face palming?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I'm not face palming.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

My head hurts.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Gary, we can make that sound more reasonable.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

It just started.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

We can make that proposal sound more reasonable


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

by proposing an alternative variation that


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

uses blockchain.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

No.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Yeah.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I mean, it's one of those things where Gary has also


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

asked externally and internally.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So how could we simplify all of this hreflang thing


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

so that you still have the value but it's easier to implement,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

it's easier to get reporting on?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I don't have the magic answer, apart


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

from that really cool proposal with regular expressions


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

and content hashes.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

But if anyone out there has cool ideas or interesting ideas,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

make sure to send them our way.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Yeah, absolutely.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

We would be super happy to take it internally.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Because if we can simplify it, then that would be fantastic.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

One thing that I think we should caution for


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

is that the solution should work for all kinds


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

of implementations.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Like, for example, the thing that we touched upon


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

was the same site.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

It's just you are changing a parameter


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

to swap the template or the language in the template.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

It has to work on that, but also on completely different sites


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

as well.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And the suggestions that we've got usually


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

fail this criterion.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

And we just can't do that.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

For example, we can't have a system that works only


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

for certain kinds of sites.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Because that would mean that the internet


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

has to change for following that implementation, which


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

just doesn't make much sense.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Well, it could happen.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

It was like, we, I don't know, we changed something


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

and say that we should do it.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

But yeah, it's, I don't know, super tricky.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Let's say that I'm not in favor of that.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

OK, so you're saying search is hard.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Well, it's super simple for me.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I don't understand what you're talking about.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Yeah, John, it's just a text field.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

You type in a query and hit Return,


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

and then you get results.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

How is that hard?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

I don't understand.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Yeah.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

OK, fine, fine.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

So many topics.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

You can even use voice search if you


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

don't want to type anything.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Voice search?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Yeah, we should do one of these about voice search


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

and reporting in Search Console.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

What do you think?


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

That's a quick episode.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

That's going to be a really quick episode.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Treat it just like a different way of entering the query.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Moving on.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

OK, cool.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Fine.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Maybe we should take a break here.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Maybe.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Maybe, maybe.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

OK.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Thank you for joining us here, folks.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

It's been great having you here and listening in


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

on these podcast episodes.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

We've been having fun, at least.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

We hope you found them both entertaining


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

and a little bit insightful as well.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Regardless, let us know how you're liking these.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

If there's anything that we should


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

be including to make them more useful or more


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

interesting for you, make sure to let us know.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

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


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

and update all of your links to point to the new Google Search


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Central site.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

All right.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Thanks, everyone, and bye.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Ciao.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!

Au revoir.


How serving works, hreflang, and more!


Structured Data: SEO Mythbusting (Bonus Material)

There is one term that I'm going to mention to you just based on, this is the reason why I had to submit the URL to be re-indexed, and that's microformats.


Oh, alright.


So can we talk about, are they still a thing? I haven't really had to do a lot of SEO optimization for a while.


And I know microformats were such a huge thing because, let's say you've got a product page and it has reviews on it and you want to show the little stars and all of that kind of rich content.


And every time I made a tweak and we deployed, I would have to then submit to get recrolled and see if the results got more rich.


And that was definitely a very slow feedback cycle.


So what is the state, is microformats still a thing, and are there better resources out there right now for us to be able to pull that rich content out?


I'm going to be very happy. We have much better things.


So they're still a thing, they're now called structured data, and we are using JSON-LD, so JSON for linked data.


Yeah, this is all new terms to me.


Right, you probably used literally the microdata attributes in HTML.


Yes, exactly, we were using them. And they were very hit and miss.


Yes. It was very easy to just mess up one tiny thing and the validator didn't catch it and then the stars would disappear.


And we have moved on from there.


So there's now schema.org is an open source organization where people can submit or discuss or change or do stuff with semantic data that they want to put on the web and Google is participating.


There's much more semantic data out there that we are supporting in search results, but a bunch of it is supported in search results.


So for instance, if you have an event that you want to have showing up with the location and if you can get tickets and who's the performer and all that kind of stuff.


If you have a recipe where you might have an image or the instructions on how to make it or the time it takes to make it and reviews how nice this recipe might be.


Articles, books, TV series, all sorts of things.


We have documentation on that specifically as well.


If you go to developers.google.com search, you find all the supported types and they show up nicely in the search results.


So you get a little preview picture and then you get the stars and all that kind of stuff.


This would have been amazing.


It's fantastic.


And it's JSON.


Which is so much easier.


It's a script tag with JSON in it.


It's so much easier.


It's just not little meta attribute things.


Yes.


So you have your JSON blob and we have what's called the structured data testing tool that is a little dated by now, but it supports generally basically everything that we know of.


Shows up as either valid or invalid.


And then we have the rich results test because the structured data test, while being very generic, is also not very specific to what you want to achieve.


You want to probably achieve the nice little stars showing up in the search results.


This is what we call rich results.


And there's the rich results test for it.


And that even gives you a preview of how that might look like in the search results.


There's no guarantee that it does look like that in the search results because people have been using it to expand stuff like.


Yeah.


I have a bazillion reviews.


And they're like, yeah, you just have some JavaScript generating fake reviews.


That's not really.


Well, how do you actually use the tool?


Because I remember you used to have to dump your entire HTML file in there.


You don't.


And then if you did it too many times, you got timed out.


Right.


That doesn't happen anymore.


Oh, OK.


That's very exciting.


So you have two options.


You can dump a URL in it, which is nice.


And you can even use ngrok or something if you have a local.


Oh, local.


Yes.


This is very fancy.


Or you can even also still do like you dump your HTML in there.


We execute the JavaScript.


So if you're using JavaScript within that code dump, that's fine.


Oh, wonderful.


And you can basically live debug as you type.


You press a button, and it goes like, nope.


And you're like, oh, damn it.


And you get the feedback here.


It's like, missing performer for your event.


I'm like, OK, sorry, sorry.


And you write it in, and then it reruns it.


And you're like, OK, cool.


This is what I want.


And then it can take it back to you.


That is awesome.


And yeah, we have that tool.


We have Search Console that gives you


a live view of what happens on your page, also for Microdata.


Sorry, for structured data.


Yeah, Microdata is not that much of a thing.


But the structured data is still going strong.


Oh, it sounds like it's coming a long way.


That's very exciting.


If I'm ever working for a large retailer ever again, then


I feel like I have this.


If you have a blog at the article markup,


you might get that.


Oh, OK.


I'm going to look at the schema for that.


That would be like author and stuff.


And other sources might pool the data as well.


It's an open source format.


So theoretically, voice assistants


could use it as well.


So just imagine if you have a recipe blog,


and then you stand in the kitchen and go like,


hey, assistant thing, whatever it is, whatever company


you're choosing, there's a variety of options these days.


And then the thing goes like, yeah, Martin's apple pie.


First step, take some apples and peel them.


And you're like, oh, OK, fair enough.


That can come from the structured data as well.


So that's pretty cool.


That is really cool.


I didn't even think of those use cases.


I just always thought about special results.


Google Webmasters Thank You: 300,000 Subscribers!!

We live and breathe everything around websites and web search.


We'll be answering your Webmaster and SEO questions.


There are so many misconceptions and myths about SEO.


Welcome everyone.


Bonjour à tous.


Namaste Webmasters.


Hefti ke kalman.


Buenas tardes.


Minasan konnichiwa.


Sitemaps in Search Console - Google Search Console Training

Hi, I'm Daniel Weisberg, Search Advocate at Google.


And today, I'll talk about how to use the Search Console Sitemaps report.


By the end of this video, you should be able to understand what a sitemap is,


decide whether you need one or not,


and learn how to submit a sitemap and track its status using Search Console.


Google Sitemaps


A sitemap is a signal about which URLs you would like Google to crawl on your site.


It may provide information on URLs that were recently created or modified,


and give us some extra information about them.


Google supports four main ways for you to provide additional information.


You can extend a URL with images included in it,


you can also extend a URL with videos included in it,


you can include information about alternate languages


or country versions with href lang annotations,


and finally, for new sites,


you can use a special variation of sitemaps


to give us information about the most recent updates.


Note that this information won't necessarily be highlighted on Search Console,


but you can still provide information about the most recent updates.


But you can still provide it in your sitemap.


But if I don't have a sitemap, will Google find all my pages?


I'm glad you asked, John.


Usually, if you have a relatively small website


and your pages are properly linked, Googlebot can discover your content,


so you don't need to worry about a sitemap.


However, if your site meets one of the following criteria,


a sitemap might help Google decide what and when to crawl your website.


If your site is really large,


a sitemap will help Google prioritize the URLs to crawl.


If your pages are isolated or not well linked to each other,


a sitemap might help Google find those pages.


If your site is new or it has a lot of quickly changing content,


such as a news website,


a sitemap will help Google discover your content.


Please remember that using a sitemap doesn't guarantee


that all your pages will be crawled and indexed,


but in most cases, your site will benefit from having a sitemap,


and there is no disadvantage for having one.


In addition, sitemaps don't replace normal crawling,


and not including URLs in a sitemap


won't result in those URLs no longer being crawled.


Hmm, interesting.


I might need a sitemap, but how can I create one?


Another great question, John.


Ideally, the system running your website


will make sitemap files for you automatically.


For example, you can find a WordPress plugin


or Drupal extension if you use those content management systems.


Check the documentation from your provider,


as every platform is slightly different.


We recommend finding a way to automatically generate sitemaps,


rather than creating them manually.


Usually, this will involve running code on your server,


so if you're not a developer, you might need help from one.


There are limits to the number of URLs


and the maximum size of a sitemap file.


If you need more space, you can make multiple sitemap files.


You can also submit all of these sitemap files together


in the form of an index sitemap file.


Doing that makes it a bit easier to track them all together in one place.


To learn more about sitemaps formats and guidelines,


check our Help Center.


Before I go into Search Console,


please note that the sitemaps report shows only sitemaps


that you submitted using Search Console.


It does not show any sitemaps discovered through a robots.txt reference


or other discovery methods.


However, even if we already discovered a sitemap through other means,


you can still submit it using this report


in order to track errors and warnings.


So let's look at the report.


Open Search Console and find the sitemaps report.


If you have already submitted one or more sitemaps,


you'll find the following information about each sitemap that you submitted.


The sitemap URL, the type or format of sitemap,


such as XML, text, RSS, or Atom,


the last submission date using this report,


the date it was last read by Google,


the crawl status, such as success, has errors, couldn't fetch, and others,


the number of URLs discovered in the sitemap.


You will note an icon next to each successful sitemap.


Clicking it will lead you to the index-covered status report


for the specific sitemap.


I'll talk about this report in the next episode.


But sitemaps can also be partially read, even if they have errors.


If your sitemap status is success, good job.


If you have any errors in the status column,


click the specific row to see more details.


You'll find a complete list of errors


and what to do in each case in the Search Console Help Center.


If you want to submit a new sitemap,


simply open the sitemaps report and submit the URL.


You will need owner permission for a property in order to submit it.


If you submitted a sitemap but it's not relevant anymore,


you can delete it from Search Console.


But know that deleting a sitemap removes it from this report


but doesn't make Google forget the sitemap or any URLs listed on it.


In order for Google to forget a sitemap,


just remove it from your site and return a 404.


After some attempts, Google will give up


and completely stop refreshing the sitemap.


But this has nothing to do with the URLs in the sitemap.


If you truly need Google to stop visiting the URLs listed in a sitemap,


you will need to return a 404


or use a robots.txt rule for the URLs that you want to block.


This is what you would do in order for Google to stop crawling this page.


If your goal is to remove the URL from the Google index altogether,


you should either use the no index directive


or require HTTP authentication for users to see your page.


I hope this video helped you understand when you should use a sitemap


and how Search Console can help you.


In the next episode, I'll talk about how to use Search Console


to check which of your pages have been indexed


and any problems found during that process.


And by the way, check out the Ask Google Webmaster series


where John Miller, our guest star today,


actually answers lots of questions submitted by the Webmaster community.


And don't forget to subscribe to the Google Webmasters YouTube channel


where we'll be publishing lots of Search Console videos.


So stay tuned.


SEO for governments and authority entities - Google Search Console Training (from home)

Hi, I'm Daniel Weisberg, Search Advocate at Google.


And in this video, I'll discuss a few best practices


for governments and authority entities


to make information more visible on Google Search.


Many times, the advice is similar to the advice we give to other websites,


but I'll try to focus on what's most relevant to you.


I'll discuss three topics.


Optimizing your site appearance on Google Search,


making sure Google can find and index your pages,


and analyzing queries that you're ranking for and queries that you're not.


Let's start with some search engine optimization basics


you should implement on your site.


These are best practices to optimize your content appearance


and find ability on Google Search.


Create unique, accurate page titles.


A title tag in your page HTML tells both users and search engines


what the topic of a particular page is.


When your page appears in a search result,


the content of the title tag may appear prominently


in the search result snippet,


so it should be both short and informative.


If the title is too short, too long, or otherwise deemed less relevant,


Google may show only a portion of it or one that's automatically generated.


Google may also show different titles depending on user queries or devices.


Use the description meta tag.


A description meta tag in your HTML page gives Google a summary


of what the page is about.


While the title should be only a few words or a short phrase,


the description may be as long as a paragraph.


Description meta tags are important


because Google might use them as snippets for your pages,


so make sure to write a description


that will both inform and interest the users.


Use heading tags to emphasize important text.


Use meaningful headings throughout your content


to indicate important topics


and create a hierarchical structure for your pages.


This will make it easier for users and search engines


to navigate through your content, especially if your pages are very long.


Improve site navigation with internal links.


Government websites usually provide guidance on multiple subjects


to a broad audience.


This can make it hard for users and search engines


to understand where to find content and what is most important.


To help with that, first, make it easy for users


to distinguish between regular text and links.


You don't want users to miss the links.


And second, use descriptive text in the links.


This will help users and Google understand what the linked pages are about.


In addition, your site's information hierarchy


will help make it clear what is most important


and how to navigate between sections.


You should start by making sure the site navigation menu


has all the important sections


and also by providing breadcrumbs on the top of your page.


Add structured data to your pages.


Structured data is code that you can add to your pages


to describe your content to search engines.


Google uses this information to display your content in useful ways,


such as rich results.


There are several types of structured data


governments can potentially use.


Here are three ideas.


Frequently asked questions or FAQs for pages providing information


on areas where users might have recurring questions.


How to for pages where you have step-by-step guidance


on how to do something like getting a certificate, a visa, or a permit.


And breadcrumbs to help describe how your website is organized.


For more best practices, check the SEO starter guide


linked in the description.


It's long, but it can be a valuable resource.


After optimizing your content,


make sure that Google can find and index your pages.


These can be easily uncovered using the index coverage report.


Log into Search Console and find the report in the sidebar.


When you open it, the default view shows a summary of indexing errors


on your website.


Click to show valid with warnings, valid, and excluded pages too.


Here's what each status means.


Errors prevent pages from being indexed.


Pages with errors won't appear in Google,


which can mean a loss of traffic to your website.


Valid with warnings are pages that may or may not be shown on Google,


depending on the issue, but we think there is a problem


that you should look into.


Valid pages have been indexed and can be shown on Google Search.


Excluded pages were not indexed and won't appear in Google,


but either we think that is your invention


or we think it's the right thing to do.


Clicking a row in the table will lead you to a more detailed report


showing examples of pages that are affected


and provide more information on the issue.


Here, you can also grab a link using the share button


to share the details with a developer that can perform call changes


to your website.


After you or your developer have fixed the error,


click validate fix and Google will validate your changes.


You can watch the index coverage episode in this series


to understand more about the issues affecting your site


and learn how to validate the fix you have implemented.


To help search engines discover all your content,


it's very useful to tell them which pages, images, and videos


to crawl on your website.


This is done by submitting a sitemap.


If you have a sitemap, you can submit it to Google


and track its status using the sitemaps report on Search Console.


If you submit a sitemap using this report,


you can see whether we were able to read it, when we read it, and more.


To learn more about sitemaps and how to track their status


using Search Console, check the links in the description.


Now that you've checked that your pages are being crawled, indexed,


and served optimally, it's time to analyze


how well your pages are performing using the performance report.


Here, you'll find the chart summarizing impressions, clicks,


average click-through rate, and average position of your site


in search results.


Below the chart, you'll see a list of queries that users click


to reach your website.


You can change tabs to view the information broken down by pages,


countries, and search appearance.


Here are four things to look for when analyzing your performance data.


If the number of impressions is significantly higher than clicks,


or, in other words, if the click-through rate or CTR


is very low for a query or a page,


you might need to create better titles and descriptions


to make your snippets more attractive in search results.


If search queries that you expect to see don't appear,


your site might not have enough useful content


relevant to those queries.


If important pages on your site are not in the pages list,


there might be an issue with them.


In that case, you should use Inspect URL to find out why.


Check how many queries show your site when the user does


or does not include your site's name.


These might show interesting areas where people are searching


for content directly related to your site.


Those are just a few examples of what information you can learn


from the default reports.


Check out my previous video on the performance report


for a more comprehensive overview on how to use the report


to analyze your organic search performance.


Before I end this video, I want to discuss one last tool


that might be helpful for you.


Google Trends provides access to a largely unfiltered sample


of actual search requests made to Google.


It's anonymized, categorized, and aggregated.


This allows us to display interesting topics


from around the globe or down to city level.


The data can be useful for governments in many ways.


Here are two ideas.


Check soft queries in your region


and compare it to the queries you're getting traffic from,


the ones we just discussed from the performance report.


If there are queries missing from your traffic,


check if you have content on that subject


and make sure it's being trolled and indexed.


Check related queries for important topics you're interested in.


This might surface surprising queries


and help you prepare your site for them,


for example, by adding content related to it.


Try out by visiting trends.google.com.


Pretty fun. And inside.


Hopefully, this video helped you optimize your site for search


and monitor its performance if you're a government website.


To recap, optimize your site appearance on Google Search


with SEO best practices.


Make sure Google can find and index your pages.


Analyze queries that you're ranking for and queries that you're not.


Don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel


to watch our upcoming Search Console videos.


English Google SEO office-hours from October 16, 2020

Hi, everyone, and welcome to today's Google SEO Office Hours


Hangout.


My name is John Mueller.


I'm a search advocate at Google in Switzerland.


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


where people can join in and ask their question


around their website and web search.


A bunch of stuff was submitted already on YouTube.


We can go through some of that.


But if any of you want to get started


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


Hey, John.


Hi.


So we have a competitor who, on his website,


has a great number of product reviews.


And after a mutual agreement, we'd


like to use some of his product reviews on our website


alongside with our reviews for the benefit of our visitors


who would be interested in them.


And they would help them to decide on the product.


So we exchange with, like, natural credit for the reviews


by providing a default backlink from each of our product


details pages, which will use product reviews


from his website.


And in the end, we would end up with around 2,000 backlinks


linking to his site from our site


that has around 12,000 pages.


So both our and his websites are well established


and belong to the top 10 in the niche.


And would Google see this as something that's OK?


Or could this harm ours or his rankings?


In order to avoid duplicate content and Google


seeing the reviews on our website


because we don't really want Google to see them


because they're there only for our users,


we are thinking about lazy loading them.


Would this be OK?


So I guess starting with the last part,


lazy loading is fine.


It's fine also to have parts of your pages


where you say these should be excluded from the snippet.


So using the data no snippet, for example.


If you're using reviews that are not sourced yourself,


then you shouldn't use them in structured data.


That's kind of the other thing.


I think the trickier part is really


with regards to the link there.


And it sounds like you're kind of exchanging things of value


there.


And from my point of view, that kind of


falls into the bucket of link exchange.


And that could be something where the web spam


team would say this would be problematic.


My general recommendation there would


be if this is on a larger scale, then I would definitely


work to make these links no follow so that users can click


through if they want.


And there's some value in that at least,


but that you're sure that it doesn't come across


as we're buying the reviews from them in exchange for backlinks.


OK.


So basically, if we are going to give him credit,


it should be no follow credit and maybe one link


on the general web page saying that we


are using reviews from his website that


could be a do follow link.


Yeah, I think that would be fine.


Yeah.


Yeah, great.


Thank you very much.


Sure.


Hi, John.


Hi.


So I have actually a few questions.


Most of the questions are actually


a tough question for the main question.


So my first question is the main question.


If we move a domain to another domain entirely,


does it mean that the ranking the old website has,


the new website will get all the ranking?


It should transfer all of the signals, yeah.


Yeah, if everything is otherwise fine, then all of that


should transfer normally.


And we've worked for a really long time


to make these domain moves as smooth as possible.


And I think for the most part, they work really well.


As sometimes we do run into weird edge cases,


but it should essentially transfer everything.


It's trickier if you have one domain that already


has existing content and you move something there


because then you're kind of merging two websites.


But if you're really just moving from one domain


to another one to one and it's just changing the domain name,


essentially, then that's something


we should be able to pick up very easily.


So here's my next question.


We have a client who provides a big swimming pool


and also builds a spa.


Now, what they did before they had one site for swimming


pool and another website for spa.


Now, they want to merge the spa site with the swimming pool


site.


So all the things they had for the spa site,


they want to relate to the swimming pool site


because they create a category for swimming, spa,


and all the products is over there.


Now, if we do this, the spa site,


it has some organic ranking.


Those ranking will move to those product category,


new product category, and creating a swimming pool site.


Yeah.


So that sounds like you're merging sites, right?


In general, we do try to figure out


what the right approach is with merging sites,


but it's harder than when you're moving from one domain


to another because you don't really know what


the final outcome should be.


So essentially, what happens is on a page by page basis,


we try to move things over.


And then on a whole, across the whole website,


we obviously have to kind of recalculate and rethink


things, how the internal linking is, which of these pages


are relevant, and how kind of they're


connected with the rest of the web as well.


So that's something where I would expect some


of these pages on a page by page basis


if you're just moving them to essentially just transfer over.


And for a lot of the rest, it will probably


take a bit of time to settle down.


And I imagine you will see a positive effect of merging


these two sites together, but it's something where it's


hard to say what the final outcome will be because it's


not like all of the traffic from site A


plus all of the traffic from site B,


but some kind of mixture in the end.


And the last question, this is how it


happens opposite of the interesting.


So one point, they build guardianship,


and they build a playground for the kids.


Now, the playground for the kids,


they want to create a separate domain for the playground


section.


And all the products they have on the website,


they want to redirect those products to the new domain.


Now, the question is, the older site,


the ranking they have for the playground related keywords,


will the new website or new domain have those ranking?


Maybe.


I think splitting sites up is almost harder


than merging them.


But it's a similar situation where


you can't do it purely on a page by page basis because of all


of the things like internal linking


will be very different if you take things out of one website.


I think sometimes it makes sense to separate things out.


For the most part, I generally recommend


concentrating things more rather than separating them out.


But sometimes there are really good reasons


to split things out across separate domains.


Thank you.


John, can I ask a question regarding site move?


Sure.


Could it be the case if you're moving to a domain that


previously had those associated selling illegal drugs


or pornography, could it affect the transfer of the page rank


and seek out server?


Or it has some sort of algorithmic demotion


that's affecting the new site?


Yeah, that can happen.


So for example, if the domain that you're moving to


was an adult content domain, then that's


something where it can happen that our safe search


algorithms kind of stick to that classification


and say, well, this is adult content.


And it can take quite a bit of time for that


to kind of settle down and get dropped.


With regards to, I don't know, other kinds of spam,


it really depends a bit.


I mean, other kinds of spam.


It's not necessarily spam if it's just adult content.


But with regards to other kinds of,


I'd say, problematic or tricky content,


it is something where for a large part


we try to replace it with the new version.


But sometimes there are effects that are also outside


of the website as well, such as maybe there


are lots of external links pointing to the site


with problematic anchors.


That might be something where, on the one hand,


we might be ignoring these already.


Or it could be even that they're causing problems


for the website.


So if you're moving to a site that has a longer history,


then that is something to kind of consider,


that it might be harder to get it into a neutral state again.


AUDIENCE 1 Yeah, I mean, I've seen one case


that we moved to a spamming domain.


Initially, the traffic dropped by, I don't know, 75%


at the time.


But after broad core updates, around six months later,


we actually recovered most of the traffic.


I don't know what.


That's very weird, I think.


But I think that can happen.


Yeah, in general, with our algorithms,


we try to make it so that they adapt over time


to things like that.


And if we move things over and we


have kind of these residual signals for the new domain


that you're moving to, then that should settle down over time.


And sometimes that takes a couple of months.


Sometimes that takes a year or so.


And depending on what the domain was doing beforehand,


it's easier or it's harder.


AUDIENCE 2 John, that's very related to my question.


So when we migrated our domain, we checked for any links


before we even decided to do the migration.


We checked for any links to the new domain.


We checked for our content history.


There were only two links.


No content up for 10 years, at least according


to the Wayback Machine.


What other things should we have looked for?


What's within our control to check for a new domain


so that we don't run this risk?


Because that seems to be the indication we're getting,


is that that's what's going on with us.


So we don't want to run into this in the future.


And also, still don't really know what to do right now.


Yeah.


I don't know.


So I saw your question this morning.


One of the things on our side is we're still


looking into some of the other signals


that we're kind of missing there.


And at the moment, I'm mostly trying


to push the team into just getting it resolved


as quickly as possible, where I think that first step was good.


But it does turn out that there are other things that


are kind of stuck there as well.


But I don't know what exactly else


you should be watching out for.


So I think the obvious ones are really


the things that you looked at, like the links to the site,


the previous content.


Sometimes it's a bit tricky in that really spammy domains


try to hide their history in the Wayback Machine.


But I don't think that's the case with the site


that you move to.


So I don't really know what you could


have done differently there.


No.


It's a bit frustrating.


I wish we could get this resolved a little bit faster.


OK, thank you.


Sure.


Hi, John.


I wanted to ask about the sea results on Carousel in Europe


and the eligibility criteria for that.


Could you explain how to get featured there?


Because our domains are market leaders


in some of the countries in Europe.


And we feel that we should be eligible for that.


But there is no documentation whatsoever.


Which Carousel did you mean?


The sea results on.


Sea-related results.


For example, if you're looking for a mechanic,


you would feature like Gumtree or OLLix.


OK.


I don't know.


Let me just drop my email address here.


If you want to maybe send me an email with what exactly you're


seeing and what your site is, I can try to find someone


and pass that on.


All right.


That's awesome.


Thank you.


In general, a lot of these kind of, I don't know, extra lengths,


I don't even know what they're called,


where we link to other sites for more information


is something that happens algorithmically.


But I don't know how things are handled in that particular case


on your side.


OK, I'll send an email.


Sure.


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


We have written these questions on top.


I think we kind of looked into that already.


Let's take a look at the next one.


We have a large site.


And a section on the site, we have a forum.


This forum is an old CMS, and it's


difficult to optimize for speed.


We're looking to make sure that we have good Core Web


Vital score before 2021.


If we're unable to improve the speed of this forum,


will this only affect the keywords


that rank on the forum pages, or could it


affect the ranks of the pages that aren't on the forum


and that are faster?


Basically, is speed looked at on a page-by-page basis,


or could slow speed on some pages of your site


affect how Google sees your site as a whole?


Good question.


So in general, with our algorithms,


we try to be as fine-grained as possible.


So if we can get granular information for your site


and recognize the individual parts of your website properly,


then we will try to do that.


However, it depends a little bit on your site


and how much data we have for your site,


especially when it comes to speed, where it's based,


or it will be based, because it's not live yet.


It'll be based on the Core Web Vitals and the Chrome User


Experience Report data, which is just


a very small sample of the people that


visit your site aggregated.


And that's something that doesn't have data


for every URL of a website.


So depending on how much data is available there


and how easily it is for us to figure out


which parts of your site are separate,


then that's something that we can do easier


or that is a little bit harder.


We have similar things, I guess similar mechanisms


across various other signals that we use in search.


One of them, for example, is with adult content,


where if you have a part of your website with adult content


and a part of your website that has normal content


or other content on it, then the easier we


can recognize that these are separate parts


and separate them out individually,


then more likely it is that we can just treat that one


part slightly differently.


And you can do that with things like making sure


you have a clean subdirectory structure on your site


or using subdomains if that makes sense for your website.


And the easier, in your case, it would be, for example,


to split out the forum from our side, where we can tell,


oh, slash forum is everything forum, and it's kind of slow,


and everything else that's not in slash forum is really fast.


If we can recognize that fairly easily, that's a lot easier.


Then we can really say, everything here in slash forum


is kind of slow.


Everything here is kind of OK.


On the other hand, if we have to do this on a per URL basis,


where the URL structure is really,


like, we can't tell based on the URL


if this is a part of the forum or part


of the rest of your site, then we can't really group that


into parts of your website.


And then we'll kind of be forced to take an aggregate score