Those of you in the US, I wish you all happy Thanksgiving


English Google Webmaster Central office-hours from Nov 26, 2019

and I guess a good Black Friday.


I don't know if you wish people that.


Seems like just buying stuff.


But anyway, a great week.


We'll have the next Hangout in English on Friday


and one in German on Thursday.


And next week, we have Webmaster Conference in Tel Aviv,


where I will be.


So if any of you are there, come and say hi.


We also have Webmaster Conferences lined up


in Japan and Korea the next couple of weeks.


So if you're there, that's also cool.


Yeah.


Switzerland on the 11th.


Cool.


All right.


Yeah, that's the one lined up after that.


So many things happening next couple of weeks.


Then I wish you all a great week and see you next time.


Bye, everyone.


Thanks.


Monitoring Rich Results 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 Search Console


to monitor and optimize your performance with Google rich results.


By the end of this video, you will understand what are rich results,


how to monitor your rich results appearance on Google Search,


where to find errors in your structured data,


and how to ask Google to validate fixes you've done to your website.


Google Search Console


But before I go into the nuts and bolts of Search Console,


I would like to say a few words about structured data and rich results,


as an introduction if you haven't heard about it,


or to refresh your memory.


When you search on Google, you can see many kinds of results,


including blue links with text snippets and rich results.


For example, if you search for a venue or a music band,


you may get results that show you nearby events.


Or if you search for falafel recipes,


you may get instructions on how to cook it.


Those are examples of rich results.


If you own a website,


you might want to trigger these types of results for your site,


as they can be more attractive to users.


For that, you'll need to implement structured data markup.


Check our developer documentation to find out more about what, how,


and why to implement structured data.


In a nutshell, here's how your decision-making process should look like.


Review the search gallery examples.


Find the structured data type that matches your content.


Check guidelines and requirements to be eligible to appear on search.


Implement the markup on your pages.


After you do that, you can start using Search Console


to help optimizing your implementation and monitoring your performance.


In addition to the Search Console interface,


which we'll talk about in a minute,


you can also use a public structured data testing tool


called Rich Results Test.


This tool can verify the syntax of your structured data


and, in some cases, provide a sample of what the result might look like


in Google Search.


You can either upload a piece of code


or check a specific URL for Google to crawl.


The tool shows whether your implementation has any errors.


You'll also have an option to preview your page's search appearance


on Google Search results and how it will be seen by Googlebot.


Checking your own code can be very handy during development cycles


to make sure your structured data is valid


even before you move to its production.


Over time, as the pages with structured data are indexed by Google,


Search Console will start showing reports for those structured data types.


After setting up your pages and seeing them get indexed,


your next step is to monitor their performance.


Let's run through an example of how you check your rich result performance


on your site.


First, open Search Console and navigate to the Performance report.


Select Search Appearance in the tabs just below the main chart.


You'll see in a glance the volume of traffic coming to your website


through rich results.


In order to understand your rich results performance over time,


add a feature to the report, including only rich results.


You can do that by clicking the Rich Results row in the table.


This will update your performance charts


to show your rich results traffic by queries, pages, countries, and devices.


You might find patterns in your data that show how important


or how unimportant a specific segment of traffic is.


Perhaps a specific group of queries or pages are not driving rich results,


which could point at opportunities to enhance your structured data implementation.


Additionally, you might notice a drop in rich results performance


if your structured data implementation was affected by a website change.


Once you have a better idea of your overall performance,


you should take a closer look into each specific structured data report


in order to learn about warnings and errors


that Google has encountered in your website.


Errors disqualify your rich results from being shown in Google Search,


but you may still be shown through a standard plain blue link.


Warnings can provide a somewhat reduced experience for users.


When Search Console detects structured data


for one of the supported rich results types on your website,


it will create a report for it summarizing all errors and warnings,


and it will send an email to account owners.


But if an existing issue gets worse, it won't trigger an email.


So it is important for you to check your account periodically.


This is not something you need to do every day,


but I recommend you check it once in a while


to make sure everything is working as intended.


For example, if your website development has defined cycles,


it might be a good idea to log into Search Console


after changes are made to the website to check that nothing broke down.


You'll find the structured data reports


under the enhancements section in the sidebar.


You will see a report only if Search Console has data


for that rich result type on your site,


and Search Console offers a report for that type.


Open a structured data type summary report you have access to.


By default, you'll see the trends for error items in the main chart,


but you can also click Valid with Warnings and Valid


to check their trends at the chart and more details in the table.


The bar chart is great for monitoring trends over time,


but you'll probably want to check the details in the table below the chart,


which provides the specific issues that Google found in your website.


To get more details on a specific issue,


click one of the errors to open a detailed report.


Here, you'll see the date when the error was detected,


the number of errors over time,


and examples of pages where Google detected it.


You can click a specific example page


to check instances of the error in your HTML code.


Now that you know what needs to be fixed,


you have two options.


Make the required code change yourself,


or share the details with a developer


that can perform code changes to your website.


You can do that by grabbing a link using the Share button.


After you or your developer have fixed the error,


click Validate Fix, and Google will validate your changes.


There are quite a few types of errors and warnings,


so if you don't understand what's wrong,


check the developer documentation


on the specific structured data type you implemented.


You can find a list of them in the search gallery.


Before I leave you to work on your property,


I want to mention one last report,


unparsable structured data.


If Google finds structured data that, for some reason,


breaks while parsing the page


before it can even identify the rich result type,


it will show that item as an error


in the unparsable structured data report.


Parsing issues could point you to lost opportunities


for rich results for your site.


You should fix the errors in this report


to get the benefits of structured data.


Once they're fixed, the page structured data


will be added to Google,


or in case there is still an issue,


it will show up in the respective structured data report.


That's it for today.


Hopefully, you'll be more comfortable to monitor


and optimize your rich results from now on.


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


to improve your AMP implementation


and make your site more usable.


Don't forget to subscribe to the Google Webmasters YouTube channel,


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


Does Google ignore hashtags in a URL? #AskGooglebot


Malik asks us about URLs with a number sign or a hash symbol


in them.


Are they ignored?


Well, the short answer is that yes.


Most of the time, the part behind the hash symbol


is ignored by search engines.


Taking a step back, these URLs are


used when you want to link to a specific section of a page.


The part before the hash symbol is the address of the page


and the part after the hash symbol


is the reference to that specific location.


When it comes to crawling and indexing,


it's all the same page, so only the beginning of the URL


is used.


There is one exception, which is when


JavaScript on the page does something special with those


URL fragments.


Since this gets into JavaScript websites,


I've linked to our SEO documentation


on that for more details.


Well, I hope this helps, Malik.


If you have more questions, feel free to send us a note


with the hashtag AskGooglebot.


We won't ignore it.


I promise.


Is shared hosting ok? #AskGooglebot

Today, Nancy is asking whether shared hosting is okay for a small business website.


Is shared hosting ok? #AskGooglebot

Shared hosting is when multiple websites are hosted on the same server or on the same IP


Is shared hosting ok? #AskGooglebot

address.


Is shared hosting ok? #AskGooglebot

The alternative is dedicated hosting when a server or an IP address is dedicated to


Is shared hosting ok? #AskGooglebot

a single website.


Is shared hosting ok? #AskGooglebot

This is an extremely common setup and it's critical for the web since there's a limited


Is shared hosting ok? #AskGooglebot

number of IP addresses available.


Is shared hosting ok? #AskGooglebot

Also worth noting is that it's often impossible to tell from the outside how a website is


Is shared hosting ok? #AskGooglebot

actually hosted.


Is shared hosting ok? #AskGooglebot

Is it a single server, a cluster of servers, a single data center, or even multiple data


Is shared hosting ok? #AskGooglebot

centers?


Is shared hosting ok? #AskGooglebot

Using shared hosting is perfectly fine and does not negatively affect your site in Google


Is shared hosting ok? #AskGooglebot

Search.


Is shared hosting ok? #AskGooglebot

There is, however, one thing to watch out for.


Is shared hosting ok? #AskGooglebot

Sometimes when too many websites are hosted on a system with limited capacity, it can


Is shared hosting ok? #AskGooglebot

happen that the server is overloaded.


Is shared hosting ok? #AskGooglebot

This can result in the server and its websites becoming very slow.


Is shared hosting ok? #AskGooglebot

The same thing can happen with a dedicated hosting though.


Is shared hosting ok? #AskGooglebot

Having a website hosted on a slow server makes your users unhappy and can make it harder


Is shared hosting ok? #AskGooglebot

to crawl.


Is shared hosting ok? #AskGooglebot

Just to be clear, a dedicated server is not always fast and a shared server is not automatically


Is shared hosting ok? #AskGooglebot

slow.


Is shared hosting ok? #AskGooglebot

Another concern we sometimes hear is that there might be other bad websites hosted on


Is shared hosting ok? #AskGooglebot

the same server.


Is shared hosting ok? #AskGooglebot

SEOs sometimes call this a server in a bad neighborhood.


Is shared hosting ok? #AskGooglebot

This is not something I'd be worried about.


Is shared hosting ok? #AskGooglebot

In practice, most commonly used hosting providers watch out for this on their own.


Is shared hosting ok? #AskGooglebot

There's generally a wide range of websites hosted on shared hosting, including some fantastic


Is shared hosting ok? #AskGooglebot

ones and some bad ones too.


Is shared hosting ok? #AskGooglebot

For Google, this is fine and not problematic.


Is shared hosting ok? #AskGooglebot

We'll treat each website based on its own merits, not based on its virtual neighbors.


Is shared hosting ok? #AskGooglebot

So in short, for Google, using shared hosting is perfectly acceptable.


Is shared hosting ok? #AskGooglebot

There is no need to move to dedicated hosting or a dedicated IP address for SEO reasons.


Is shared hosting ok? #AskGooglebot

And that's it for this time.


Is shared hosting ok? #AskGooglebot

I hope you found this useful and insightful.


Is shared hosting ok? #AskGooglebot

Stay tuned for another episode of Ask Google Bot.


Is shared hosting ok? #AskGooglebot


What's new in Search | Session

Hi, everyone, and welcome to our session on What's New in Google Search.


What's new in Search | Session

My name is John Euler.


What's new in Search | Session

I work on the Search Relations team here at Google.


What's new in Search | Session

A part of my role is to connect those at Google who work on Google Search with the folks out


What's new in Search | Session

there making websites.


What's new in Search | Session

And that includes everyone who works on websites, be they developers, site owners, analysts,


What's new in Search | Session

creators, perhaps even including you.


What's new in Search | Session

Our team's goal is to give everyone the information they need to allow the websites they work


What's new in Search | Session

on to be successful in Google Search.


What's new in Search | Session

We'll be talking about SEO, but wait, SEO isn't a bad thing.


What's new in Search | Session

This session is specifically for developers, so we'll be focusing on the technical aspects.


What's new in Search | Session

We'll go into recent updates that you can implement, as well as updates to the debugging


What's new in Search | Session

and monitoring tools for Google Search.


What's new in Search | Session

Before we dig into the details, let's chat briefly about SEO.


What's new in Search | Session

Search engine optimization, or SEO in short, is not some voodoo magic that you have to


What's new in Search | Session

be worried about.


What's new in Search | Session

While SEO has a lot of non-technical aspects to it, which are also important, we'll be


What's new in Search | Session

focusing purely on the technical side here.


What's new in Search | Session

Now, I can only speak for Google, but most of the basics will apply to all search engines.


What's new in Search | Session

And you'd run across similar challenges whenever you want to fetch and parse web pages, which


What's new in Search | Session

is basically what search engines do.


What's new in Search | Session

A large part of technical SEO is about making it possible for search engines to fetch your


What's new in Search | Session

HTML pages and to understand the content that's hosted there.


What's new in Search | Session

For that, they need to know about your URLs first.


What's new in Search | Session

Once the URLs are known, they can be fetched, which we call crawling.


What's new in Search | Session

Crawling is similar to how you might use wget or curl to request the page.


What's new in Search | Session

After the page has been crawled and ideally rendered like a browser to process any JavaScript,


What's new in Search | Session

the results are then parsed.


What's new in Search | Session

We call this indexing.


What's new in Search | Session

Storing headings and other text from the DOM is kind of straightforward, as is storing


What's new in Search | Session

them as tokens for an index of URLs.


What's new in Search | Session

Going past that, however, is hard.


What's new in Search | Session

How do search engines interpret that content?


What's new in Search | Session

Well, search engines use various machine-readable elements.


What's new in Search | Session

These elements can tell us which pages to store in our index and which pages to skip.


What's new in Search | Session

But there's even more, such as information that the current page is not a family saga,


What's new in Search | Session

but rather a pie recipe, and that the baking time is going to be 45 minutes.


What's new in Search | Session

We call these kinds of elements structured data, and we'll see more of them in a bit.


What's new in Search | Session

With the processing, we also look for links to new pages, links both to within your website


What's new in Search | Session

and going out to other websites.


What's new in Search | Session

In order to understand the links, they should be well-formed HTML elements and point at


What's new in Search | Session

reasonable and fetchable URLs.


What's new in Search | Session

So in short, we have the crawling of the pages, then comes the processing or indexing.


What's new in Search | Session

To complete the circle, we look for new URLs linked on those pages for future crawls.


What's new in Search | Session

But also, we take all of this data and use it to generate the search results.


What's new in Search | Session

Those are the aspects I wanted to call out about technical SEO.


What's new in Search | Session

There's much more to it, of course.


What's new in Search | Session

If you're working on a website that's meant to be highly visible and where it's important


What's new in Search | Session

that users can find it in search engines, I strongly recommend you work with an SEO


What's new in Search | Session

expert to discuss the project early on.


What's new in Search | Session

Sometimes there are challenges which you can work together to avoid.


What's new in Search | Session

For example, how to best deal with login pages.


What's new in Search | Session

Catching these early makes it easier to move forward quickly rather than having to redo


What's new in Search | Session

things later on.


What's new in Search | Session

So without any further interaction delay, let's move on.


What's new in Search | Session

One of the recent changes in Google's fetching of web pages is the shift to enable HTTP2


What's new in Search | Session

crawling.


What's new in Search | Session

HTTP2 is the next major version of HTTP, the protocol primarily used for transferring data


What's new in Search | Session

on the internet.


What's new in Search | Session

We made this change to make crawling more efficient.


What's new in Search | Session

With HTTP2, we can open a single TCP connection and efficiently request multiple files in


What's new in Search | Session

parallel.


What's new in Search | Session

This means Googlebot, our crawler, won't need to spend as much time crawling your server


What's new in Search | Session

as before.


What's new in Search | Session

In SEO terms, this falls into the so-called crawl budget.


What's new in Search | Session

Crawl budget is a mix of how many URLs Google wants to crawl from your website, the crawl


What's new in Search | Session

demand, and how many URLs our systems think your server can handle without problem, the


What's new in Search | Session

crawl capacity.


What's new in Search | Session

With HTTP2 crawling, this gets a little bit more complicated because a single connection


What's new in Search | Session

can include multiple URLs.


What's new in Search | Session

Overall, we find that HTTP2 crawling gives our systems the ability to request more URLs


What's new in Search | Session

with a similar load on your servers.


What's new in Search | Session

The decision to crawl with HTTP2 is based on whether the server supports it and whether


What's new in Search | Session

our systems determine there's a possible efficiency gain.


What's new in Search | Session

You don't have to do anything special apart from enabling HTTPS and HTTP2 support on your


What's new in Search | Session

web server.


What's new in Search | Session

Now, since starting this experiment, we're excited to be able to share that we're now


What's new in Search | Session

crawling more than half of all URLs with HTTP2.


What's new in Search | Session

Using stream multiplexing and header compression, the number of connections and the bandwidth


What's new in Search | Session

have both gone down significantly.


What's new in Search | Session

These improvements help both our crawling as well as your website serving infrastructure.


What's new in Search | Session

Woohoo!


What's new in Search | Session

Moving on to structured data.


What's new in Search | Session

When it comes to machine-readable information on a page, Google primarily relies on structured


What's new in Search | Session

data embedded in the HTML pages.


What's new in Search | Session

Over the past year, JSON-LD has become the most popular way websites provide structured


What's new in Search | Session

data.


What's new in Search | Session

All of Google's modern search-specific metadata can be provided through JSON-LD and the schema.org


What's new in Search | Session

vocabulary.


What's new in Search | Session

Schema.org is a globally accepted standard and open vocabulary for expressing information.


What's new in Search | Session

It was started 10 years ago and is now an important part of the open web infrastructure.


What's new in Search | Session

It provides a stable foundation on which websites can be built for the long run and yet is constantly


What's new in Search | Session

being expanded as new technologies and features are needed.


What's new in Search | Session

A shared vocabulary makes it easier for developers to get the maximum benefit for their implementations


What's new in Search | Session

and enables others to use the data in appropriate ways.


What's new in Search | Session

For example, Google recently open sourced Schema-Rama.


What's new in Search | Session

Schema provides data parsing and validation tools which make it easier for you to consume


What's new in Search | Session

schema.org data as well as to integrate automated testing into your production pipelines.


What's new in Search | Session

If you're curious about what you can do with structured data within Google search, I'd


What's new in Search | Session

recommend checking out the search gallery in our developer documentation.


What's new in Search | Session

Consider the type of website you're building and then look for specific elements that would


What's new in Search | Session

work well with it.


What's new in Search | Session

There's recipe structured data, as I mentioned before, but also newer options such as for


What's new in Search | Session

online and offline events, options for home activities, and even practice problems for


What's new in Search | Session

those who are building a website for students.


What's new in Search | Session

Giving extra information like this won't increase your website's ranking in search, but allows


What's new in Search | Session

your pages to present it more visibly in the search results when users are looking for


What's new in Search | Session

them.


What's new in Search | Session

We also use structured data for videos.


What's new in Search | Session

One of the areas where we've been making changes over the past year is how we recognize and


What's new in Search | Session

show videos in search.


What's new in Search | Session

In particular, there are a few kinds of supported structured data which can be quite interesting


What's new in Search | Session

if embedding videos is important to your website.


What's new in Search | Session

Taking a step back, videos and their landing pages are prominently shown in search and


What's new in Search | Session

discover and are popular with users.


What's new in Search | Session

You can host videos either on your own website or with many popular video hosting platforms.


What's new in Search | Session

Both approaches work similarly and are supported by Google search.


What's new in Search | Session

In addition to helping users find videos, search now allows users to directly skip two


What's new in Search | Session

important moments in a video, making it quicker and easier for users to access your content.


What's new in Search | Session

To enable these features, we plan to support two types of markup.


What's new in Search | Session

First, there's clip markup.


What's new in Search | Session

With this structured data markup, a web page can provide information on segments or clips


What's new in Search | Session

within a video.


What's new in Search | Session

These segments can then be shown directly in the search results, making it easier for


What's new in Search | Session

users to go right to a part of a video.


What's new in Search | Session

It doesn't take much to do this.


What's new in Search | Session

You just need to provide a textual tag, a starting time, and a URL that goes directly


What's new in Search | Session

to that timestamp.


What's new in Search | Session

Then Google search will be able to show those videos appropriately.


What's new in Search | Session

But what if you can't easily list the segment information for all of your hosted videos?


What's new in Search | Session

For example, perhaps many people are using your website to host videos on their own.


What's new in Search | Session

Well, for these cases, you can soon use seek markup.


What's new in Search | Session

With this markup, Google can use machine learning to analyze your video content and automatically


What's new in Search | Session

determine relevant segments for you.


What's new in Search | Session

All you have to do is tell us how to link to an arbitrary timestamp within the video


What's new in Search | Session

hosted on your pages, and we'll do the rest.


What's new in Search | Session

It's magical.


What's new in Search | Session

To enable this feature, you seek structured data on those pages so that we know how to


What's new in Search | Session

link to parts appropriately.


What's new in Search | Session

There's more about this feature and its current status in our search developer documentation.


What's new in Search | Session

At the time of recording, it's still on a pilot, but we hope to make it generally available


What's new in Search | Session

in the near future.


What's new in Search | Session

All right, over to our tooling.


What's new in Search | Session

The primary set of tools we recommend for debugging and monitoring websites for search


What's new in Search | Session

is aptly called Search Console.


What's new in Search | Session

If you haven't used Search Console before to get started, you need to verify ownership


What's new in Search | Session

of the website you're working on.


What's new in Search | Session

If someone else is already working on search for your website, then it's likely just a


What's new in Search | Session

matter of having them add you to the site.


What's new in Search | Session

For more information on this setup, I'd recommend the Search Console training video series.


What's new in Search | Session

Within Search Console, there are some neat new features that might make your lives a


What's new in Search | Session

little bit easier.


What's new in Search | Session

First, there's Crawl Stats.


What's new in Search | Session

We touched upon crawling earlier.


What's new in Search | Session

The new Crawl Stats report in Search Console gives you information on that.


What's new in Search | Session

For example, how many requests were made, what your server's responses were, and any


What's new in Search | Session

availability issues along the way.


What's new in Search | Session

As a developer, you're probably used to having to analyze server log files to get this kind


What's new in Search | Session

of information.


What's new in Search | Session

Having it directly in Search Console makes it a bit easier for you to recognize changes


What's new in Search | Session

and to dig into issues.


What's new in Search | Session

Then there's a Page Experience report.


What's new in Search | Session

You've probably heard folks talk about the Page Experience ranking factor.


What's new in Search | Session

Search Console now has a report just for that.


What's new in Search | Session

It gives you a summary of the good URLs on your site, as well as information on the other


What's new in Search | Session

parts of the Page Experience ranking factor.


What's new in Search | Session

We define good URLs as those which reach the good thresholds of each of the core web vitals.


What's new in Search | Session

As I mentioned, we also give information about the other parts of the ranking factor, too,


What's new in Search | Session

such as HTTPS, mobile usability, and the safe browsing status.


What's new in Search | Session

This report is a great way to get started on Page Experience and to spot broader issues


What's new in Search | Session

which a developer might be able to fix on a website.


What's new in Search | Session

We have more information on this report, as well as detailed information about the Page


What's new in Search | Session

Experience update in other videos linked from here.


What's new in Search | Session

To be honest, it can be quite a complicated topic, and there are many specifics where


What's new in Search | Session

developers can help out, so it's worthwhile to get a good understanding of the details.


What's new in Search | Session

Alright, let's take a quick look back.


What's new in Search | Session

We talked briefly about SEO and roughly how crawling and indexing works.


What's new in Search | Session

These aren't magical black boxes, and you can help to make those processes work better.


What's new in Search | Session

Then we touched upon crawling with HTTP, too, and how it can help with the load on your


What's new in Search | Session

site's servers, both for users and Google bots crawling.


What's new in Search | Session

Next, we took a look at structured data, which is where many of the new features of Search


What's new in Search | Session

come from, in particular markup which you can use for embedded videos.


What's new in Search | Session

And last but not least, there's Search Console, the ever-evolving tool for debugging and monitoring


What's new in Search | Session

a website for Search.


What's new in Search | Session

Make sure you're set up and have access to those reports.


What's new in Search | Session

There's definitely a lot more that has changed in and around Search, but I thought this collection


What's new in Search | Session

would be particularly useful to you all.


What's new in Search | Session

In any case, I hope this session gave an insight into how things have been evolving in Google


What's new in Search | Session

Search.


What's new in Search | Session

We're definitely not done yet.


What's new in Search | Session

The world online is constantly changing, as is the work that you all have been creating


What's new in Search | Session

for the web.


What's new in Search | Session

We're keen on making sure that Google Search remains relevant for users, site owners, and


What's new in Search | Session

developers.


What's new in Search | Session

If you'd like to stay in the loop for future updates, the Search Central site and its YouTube


What's new in Search | Session

channels are great starting points.


What's new in Search | Session


Why should developers learn SEO?

Don't developers want people to use what they build?


Why should developers learn SEO?

How do you prove your worth as an SEO?


Why should developers learn SEO?

How would you measure your work's impact?


Why should developers learn SEO?

Why don't SEOs listen to developers?


Why should developers learn SEO?

Hello and welcome to another episode of SEOs and Developers.


Why should developers learn SEO?

With me today is Monika Lent, who is a developer turned entrepreneur building her own software


Why should developers learn SEO?

as a service product, and she's a seasoned blogger too.


Why should developers learn SEO?

All right, and I'm here with Martin, who is a developer advocate at Google Search and


Why should developers learn SEO?

a passionate underwater photographer.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Monika, I'm super, super happy to have you here as my guest today.


Why should developers learn SEO?

We met at a developer conference, I think in Austria the first time, when I remember


Why should developers learn SEO?

correctly, back in the days when conferences weren't an actual thing.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And I remember we talked about so many different stuff like technical topics, but also we talked


Why should developers learn SEO?

a little bit about SEO because you started building your own product.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And as a developer turning into product management and building a product, that must have been


Why should developers learn SEO?

a super interesting challenge.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And I'm guessing one of the challenges has also to pick up SEO and digital marketing


Why should developers learn SEO?

skills, hasn't it?


Why should developers learn SEO?

Yeah, totally.


Why should developers learn SEO?

I mean, when I started building the product, like a lot of developers, I started with the


Why should developers learn SEO?

code and figuring out where to get customers was, I wouldn't say a secondary thought, but


Why should developers learn SEO?

it was not something I realized was going to be as hard as it actually was.


Why should developers learn SEO?

So SEO definitely played into getting customers and building the kind of pipeline that we


Why should developers learn SEO?

have today, but it took so much longer than I was expecting.


Why should developers learn SEO?

I got to say, I'm not super surprised, but I have been exactly that way until relatively


Why should developers learn SEO?

recently.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Coming from a developer background, you're like, oh, you're just going to get all your


Why should developers learn SEO?

technical ducks lined up in a row and you'll be fine, right?


Why should developers learn SEO?

But yeah, it turns out to be trickier than that.


Why should developers learn SEO?

So this makes you the perfect interview candidate for the series where I try to bridge the gap


Why should developers learn SEO?

between the SEO world and the developer world.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And you know, there is this weird chasm that we somehow need to build a bridge over.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And I would love to hear your perspective on these things.


Why should developers learn SEO?

What has been the biggest cliff that you fell off when it came to SEO?


Why should developers learn SEO?

What has been a thing that you needed to learn and explore to get there?


Why should developers learn SEO?

What did you find hard coming from a developer's perspective into the SEO world?


Why should developers learn SEO?

Yeah, I think one of the most challenging things, especially for developers who are


Why should developers learn SEO?

just getting started with SEO, is there is a lot of theory, misinformation.


Why should developers learn SEO?

It's really hard to separate the stuff that's proven and the facts from one-off observations


Why should developers learn SEO?

and anecdotes.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And as a developer, when you're used to working in code and concrete facts, things that either


Why should developers learn SEO?

work or don't, coming into the world of SEO, it feels like you don't have those kind of


Why should developers learn SEO?

more scientific tools or more fact-based tools that you can use to know for certain, if I


Why should developers learn SEO?

do A, B, and C, you know, this page is definitely going to rake.


Why should developers learn SEO?

So you're in this kind of, you know, nebulous space.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And I think coming from the developer perspective, it's almost disarming or it feels unnatural


Why should developers learn SEO?

because you're just not used to having so many variables at play, which you can't control


Why should developers learn SEO?

and can't even directly observe.


Why should developers learn SEO?

That's true.


Why should developers learn SEO?

That is true.


Why should developers learn SEO?

But then again, sometimes in development, you do have this like uncertainty too, especially


Why should developers learn SEO?

when you are charting uncharted territory.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And I know what you mean because I, as a developer, used to be very comfortable in this world


Why should developers learn SEO?

of API documentation that you just happen to follow and then the right things happen.


Why should developers learn SEO?

But I don't know what APIs you have implemented or integrated in your developer life, but


Why should developers learn SEO?

oftentimes you have the same problem as developers because the API documentation says one thing


Why should developers learn SEO?

and then you try that and it doesn't work.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And it turns out you actually need to do something slightly different to actually make the API


Why should developers learn SEO?

work the way that you expected it to work.


Why should developers learn SEO?

So it's similar to SEO, I think, because oftentimes, as you say, there's like a lot of lore, a


Why should developers learn SEO?

lot of anecdotal evidence out there, and it's missing bits and pieces.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And it's also mixed with misinformation, downright misinformation, unfortunately.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Yeah.


Why should developers learn SEO?

I see that that's a tricky one.


Why should developers learn SEO?

How did you navigate that uncertainty?


Why should developers learn SEO?

I think ultimately I had to rely on my own experience at observation, which unfortunately


Why should developers learn SEO?

is the very slow path.


Why should developers learn SEO?

So if you're not just taking courses or listening to what other people say and you're kind of


Why should developers learn SEO?

putting it into practice and you have to find out what's true for the topic that you're


Why should developers learn SEO?

covering, what's the space like, what's the competition like, all of those things are


Why should developers learn SEO?

quite different in different spaces.


Why should developers learn SEO?

So at the end of the day, even though when I talk to some people, they may say, oh, I


Why should developers learn SEO?

don't really believe that that made a difference, but it's hard to take that at face value when


Why should developers learn SEO?

you say, look, I made just this one change and saw that impact.


Why should developers learn SEO?

So at the end of the day, it was a lot of trial and error and doing it for a very long


Why should developers learn SEO?

time.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And luckily before starting to build my product, as you mentioned before, I ran a blog.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And so that was kind of like baby steps, I would say towards kind of understanding how


Why should developers learn SEO?

to get search traffic.


Why should developers learn SEO?

But it changed quite a bit going from writing content for informational blog posts versus


Why should developers learn SEO?

trying to get people to become customers.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And yeah, there are just so many facets to kind of figure out along the way.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Yeah.


Why should developers learn SEO?

So it is not easy and it's a hard thing.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And I do hope that you did find and will find companions in the digital marketing space


Why should developers learn SEO?

who are experienced enough to actually be able to kind of like kickstart this kind of


Why should developers learn SEO?

journey or accelerate this kind of journey thanks to their experience.


Why should developers learn SEO?

But I see that this is tricky because as you say, it's different for every niche.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And finding an expert who is holistic enough and practical enough in the niche that you're


Why should developers learn SEO?

in is not necessarily easy, right?


Why should developers learn SEO?

That's a bit of a tricky thing.


Why should developers learn SEO?

So did any resources pop up on your journey where you're like, oh, that was definitely


Why should developers learn SEO?

helpful?


Why should developers learn SEO?

I ended up learning a lot from being in different SEO communities.


Why should developers learn SEO?

So lots and lots of Facebook groups and what I found most valuable about that is that instead


Why should developers learn SEO?

of things like courses or blog posts where it's really like one person saying, this is


Why should developers learn SEO?

the facts on the ground, this is my observations, you always had room for other people to contradict


Why should developers learn SEO?

the advice or to offer different perspectives.


Why should developers learn SEO?

So no matter what you're learning about or what question you have, I mean, in SEO, you


Why should developers learn SEO?

will always get, you can get directly contradictory advice from two different people who swear


Why should developers learn SEO?

that it's true.


Why should developers learn SEO?

But at the very least, you're exposed to all of those different options and you can kind


Why should developers learn SEO?

of reason through it yourself.


Why should developers learn SEO?

So I think that's something that has been really helpful is like being in these SEO


Why should developers learn SEO?

communities as opposed to only consuming kind of unidirectional course material.


Why should developers learn SEO?

But it is a much less organized way to learn as opposed to doing a straight up course or


Why should developers learn SEO?

something like that.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Yeah.


Why should developers learn SEO?

But I think that's very important.


Why should developers learn SEO?

That's a very, very important point because it is such a wide field and you can look at


Why should developers learn SEO?

it from so many different perspectives and focus on so many different aspects.


Why should developers learn SEO?

You might not necessarily get like singular truth or singular advice in the right direction.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And if you're being honest here, the same is true for development courses or tutorials.


Why should developers learn SEO?

If you read a tutorial on whatever framework is the framework of choice today in the frontend


Why should developers learn SEO?

world, they'll be like, oh, yeah, you can use this other framework, but you know, it


Why should developers learn SEO?

sucks and it's going to be terrible and it's going to like ruin everything and you're going


Why should developers learn SEO?

to have spaghetti code and look at our beautiful code here.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And then that kind of keeps rolling and changing all the time as well.


Why should developers learn SEO?

So I think seeking out experience from as many perspectives as possible is a good idea.


Why should developers learn SEO?

That's not a bad idea.


Why should developers learn SEO?

How did you then evaluate what worked and what didn't?


Why should developers learn SEO?

I mean, you said like you experimented and you made a change and you watched the impact.


Why should developers learn SEO?

How did you do that?


Why should developers learn SEO?

What kind of tools did you use?


Why should developers learn SEO?

Where did you find out if your changes had a positive effect or had no effect at all


Why should developers learn SEO?

or a negative one?


Why should developers learn SEO?

Yeah, I mean, to be honest, I wouldn't necessarily say I have a super scientific process.


Why should developers learn SEO?

There are definitely people who are running like in-depth SEO experiments, single variable


Why should developers learn SEO?

testing and so forth.


Why should developers learn SEO?

But pretty much what I did is I know that when you publish something or create something,


Why should developers learn SEO?

it takes time to rank.


Why should developers learn SEO?

So at that point, you just have to kind of keep going and trust somehow that if you create


Why should developers learn SEO?

something that is really good, one day the algorithm will be good enough to reward that.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Doesn't always happen off the bat, but that's like something I at least I strive for or


Why should developers learn SEO?

hope for that if I know what I create is better than anything else out there, eventually it


Why should developers learn SEO?

will be rewarded as such.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And sometimes that takes a long time.


Why should developers learn SEO?

But I mean, as I learned, what I really did is I would go back through the entire kind


Why should developers learn SEO?

of corpus of content that I had written or published and regularly refresh it with the


Why should developers learn SEO?

new lessons that I had learned.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Whether that's making my title tags better, hopefully Google would use my new title tags,


Why should developers learn SEO?

or maybe it's changing the structure, making the article more complete or even the opposite,


Why should developers learn SEO?

making out sections that were maybe not fitting the search intent so well and could be split


Why should developers learn SEO?

out into their own articles and just kind of doing this iteratively.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And I could see that content that had previously never ranked at all would eventually start


Why should developers learn SEO?

to rank once it kind of fit into those patterns that I had learned.


Why should developers learn SEO?

So anytime I had a piece of content that did really well, especially really quickly, I


Why should developers learn SEO?

would just say, okay, what's different about this compared to all the other stuff that


Why should developers learn SEO?

I have and try to take those lessons and apply it to old content because it's so much more


Why should developers learn SEO?

efficient than just only publishing stuff that's new.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And yeah, it's not so scientific, but observations using, for example, Google Search Console,


Why should developers learn SEO?

I am in there every single day and being able to see, okay, something is starting to pick


Why should developers learn SEO?

up impressions, something is starting to pick up clicks, or what are the terms that this


Why should developers learn SEO?

is getting impressions for, but I'm not really mentioning in the content.


Why should developers learn SEO?

What does that mean?


Why should developers learn SEO?

Do I need to include it or does it mean that I'm showing up for stuff that's kind of irrelevant


Why should developers learn SEO?

and maybe I need to hone in the messaging so that I get shown for the terms I really


Why should developers learn SEO?

want people to find me with?


Why should developers learn SEO?

So all of those were kind of things that I use to take a library or backlog of content


Why should developers learn SEO?

and iteratively upgrade it as I learned SEO, slowly but surely in practice.


Why should developers learn SEO?

It sounds like a really, really interesting journey that you have been on coming from


Why should developers learn SEO?

a developer's background, looking more into the SEO bits and pieces.


Why should developers learn SEO?

If you think back at the developers who are still working as part of a larger team and


Why should developers learn SEO?

working in-house in a product company or in an agency, would you say that you as a developer


Why should developers learn SEO?

benefited from this journey despite maybe not having your own product to build with?


Why should developers learn SEO?

If you were part of a larger team of developers, would you benefit from this knowledge that


Why should developers learn SEO?

you gathered now?


Why should developers learn SEO?

I think so.


Why should developers learn SEO?

I mean, the thing about SEO, which I feel a lot of developers maybe get distanced from,


Why should developers learn SEO?

is just the business impact of your work because you can really see how certain kinds of rankings


Why should developers learn SEO?

or showing up for certain terms means that you're having a really direct impact on the


Why should developers learn SEO?

bottom line of the business.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Ultimately, the type of content that brings in customers, it has a specific search intent,


Why should developers learn SEO?

it communicates specific information that draws in the target customer, you present


Why should developers learn SEO?

a solution and so forth.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Understanding how the product that you're spending so much time laboring over actually


Why should developers learn SEO?

gets discovered by people, I think is really rewarding because especially with my background


Why should developers learn SEO?

as a front-end developer, as my technical focus, the thing that drives me and people


Why should developers learn SEO?

who work in similar fields to me is getting something I've created in the hands of users.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And SEO is one of the key ways that people can actually discover the thing that I'm creating.


Why should developers learn SEO?

I think, yeah, a lot of times engineering teams end up being kind of distanced from


Why should developers learn SEO?

marketing because it seemed like we're building the product, you find the people.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And at the end of the day, it doesn't quite work that way unless there is this kind of


Why should developers learn SEO?

seamless journey from discovery to activation and so forth.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And yeah, I mean, I think SEO is a very valuable skill for developers to learn and I am trying


Why should developers learn SEO?

to get as many people interested in it and picking up the basics at the very least because


Why should developers learn SEO?

it's just such a valuable skill when it comes to getting people to actually use the stuff


Why should developers learn SEO?

that you're building.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Absolutely.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And I never quite understood that because in the end, I'm building my product.


Why should developers learn SEO?

The code I write is for people to do something, to accomplish something that I couldn't accomplish


Why should developers learn SEO?

without or couldn't accomplish as nicely without my code being out there.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And if no one finds it, and I wonder, people to this day still think, oh, I just build


Why should developers learn SEO?

it and they'll come.


Why should developers learn SEO?

But that's not true.


Why should developers learn SEO?

If you just put a website online and do nothing else, no one will come.


Why should developers learn SEO?

No one will find it.


Why should developers learn SEO?

You have to make sure that you can actually be found.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And how do people discover new content online?


Why should developers learn SEO?

Intuitively, that's through a search engine, right?


Why should developers learn SEO?

You just search for something.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Yeah.


Why should developers learn SEO?

It's true.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And at the same time, a lot of people, they may rely on these kind of one-off channels.


Why should developers learn SEO?

So well, let's say I launch on product time or I launch on Hacker News or something like


Why should developers learn SEO?

that, and you can get an incredible wave of traffic, lots of people talking about you.


Why should developers learn SEO?

But at the same time, that's not as important as having the same number of people visiting


Why should developers learn SEO?

your site every month or having some kind of consistent flow.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Yeah, it's funny because as a front-end developer, and I'm sure you've seen this as well, you


Why should developers learn SEO?

learn so much about how websites work.


Why should developers learn SEO?

But the kinds of technical aspects of a website that you learn when you are doing SEO is actually


Why should developers learn SEO?

quite a bit different than what you learn when you're making a typical website, going


Why should developers learn SEO?

through a web development course or boot camp or learning to build front-end apps.


Why should developers learn SEO?

It's like a completely different side of web development.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And so you can talk to someone who is 10 years in the web development field, and they might


Why should developers learn SEO?

still say, I don't really know what a canonical URL is for.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And that doesn't mean that they are bad at their job.


Why should developers learn SEO?

It's just there is this entire parallel aspect to web development that you don't necessarily


Why should developers learn SEO?

learn when you're learning to build apps or a typical website.


Why should developers learn SEO?

It just happens to not be part of the learning path.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Most tutorials are like, OK, we put in a title because you kind of need to put in a title,


Why should developers learn SEO?

but we don't touch it.


Why should developers learn SEO?

It's just like demo app, here we go.


Why should developers learn SEO?

That's our title.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Hello world is our title.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Done.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Meta description, nah, ignore that.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Meta viewport, maybe because mobile is actually a thing these days.


Why should developers learn SEO?

So fine, we'll put in the meta viewport.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Canonical URL, we don't need that.


Why should developers learn SEO?

None of this actually matters.


Why should developers learn SEO?

None of this is like the tooling is all there.


Why should developers learn SEO?

It's just you need to know that you need to use it because it's not part of the learning


Why should developers learn SEO?

path.


Why should developers learn SEO?

So that's it keeps blowing my mind.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Yeah, totally.


Why should developers learn SEO?

I don't know.


Why should developers learn SEO?

What do you think is the solution to that?


Why should developers learn SEO?

I'm trying to do a little bit of developer education there.


Why should developers learn SEO?

So we did create a JavaScript SEO video series on our YouTube channel, the same channel that


Why should developers learn SEO?

you're probably watching this on.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And I explained the basics there because there are a lot of people who are using frameworks


Why should developers learn SEO?

like Angular or Vue.js or React, and they've never even thought about it.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And then they encounter these weird moments where an SEO pops in and goes like, are we


Why should developers learn SEO?

using JavaScript?


Why should developers learn SEO?

And then the developers go like, duh, yeah, of course we are using JavaScript.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And they're like, oh my God, if we're using JavaScript, we can never be found in Google


Why should developers learn SEO?

Search.


Why should developers learn SEO?

This is a huge problem.


Why should developers learn SEO?

We need to switch away from JavaScript.


Why should developers learn SEO?

How can we do that?


Why should developers learn SEO?

And then they're like, I guess server-side rendering maybe.


Why should developers learn SEO?

But that's a lot of work.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And they're like, oh, what we have to do.


Why should developers learn SEO?

This is very important, which is not exactly true.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And there's an education challenge on both sides because on one hand, what this SEO has


Why should developers learn SEO?

said has been absolutely true, let's say, like 5 to 10 years ago.


Why should developers learn SEO?

But it's no longer true in today's world.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And the developer not even being prepared for something like this and not knowing where


Why should developers learn SEO?

this is coming from or where this is a problem or how to solve this problem or how to even


Why should developers learn SEO?

just come back with an informed decision-making is not necessarily a thing that happens in


Why should developers learn SEO?

a lot of teams.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And so I'm trying to do that with documentation and education.


Why should developers learn SEO?

I'm trying to go where developers are, to developer conferences, talk about SEO.


Why should developers learn SEO?

But oftentimes, as you say, developers are like, ah, SEO is like this hand-wavy black


Why should developers learn SEO?

magic thing that I absolutely don't care about.


Why should developers learn SEO?

I care about technical things and technical decisions and technical interesting stories.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And it's tricky.


Why should developers learn SEO?

But I hope that videos like this maybe help to shed a different light on SEO and shed


Why should developers learn SEO?

a different light on development as well.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Yeah, definitely.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And I think there's also this aspect where a lot of times developers may not realize


Why should developers learn SEO?

that a lot of SEO or getting it right also has to do with technical setup.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And when I talk to developers about SEO, this is actually the part that they find most interesting.


Why should developers learn SEO?

They love the tools.


Why should developers learn SEO?

They love the analytics.


Why should developers learn SEO?

They love basically how can you get a perfect score or how can you make sure it's all dialed


Why should developers learn SEO?

in correctly.


Why should developers learn SEO?

So there are aspects that really appeal to developers about SEO.


Why should developers learn SEO?

The trouble is most of them don't realize that that's even out there.


Why should developers learn SEO?

But at the same time, they can have a really big impact by fixing a lot of these problems


Why should developers learn SEO?

that kind of tend to pile up over the years, especially when nobody's been paying attention


Why should developers learn SEO?

to it.


Why should developers learn SEO?

It's like the entropy of a website.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Like if you don't look at it, it's like CSS.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Like CSS will naturally decay.


Why should developers learn SEO?

There is no like...


Why should developers learn SEO?

That's my opinion.


Why should developers learn SEO?

It's true.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Yeah.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And so when developers like the SEO quote unquote, or at least the technical aspects


Why should developers learn SEO?

of SEO, they often also tend to do that because unless somebody took the time to explain to


Why should developers learn SEO?

the developers, this is why we're doing that, it will be forgotten.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And they'll be like, oh, I didn't know that was important.


Why should developers learn SEO?

We upgraded our framework and didn't include that plugin that was generating the site map.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Or we changed our styling system and we decided to update all the headings so that they looked


Why should developers learn SEO?

right.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And they are no longer ordered as you used to expect them.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And these are examples of things that have happened to me when working in a tech company


Why should developers learn SEO?

with an in-house SEO.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And yeah, it just repeats itself that if you don't explain the why, developers don't want


Why should developers learn SEO?

to do anything unless you can tell them why.


Why should developers learn SEO?

That is in our nature.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Because it's not enough.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And it's wild because both SEO and development are such broad fields.


Why should developers learn SEO?

You might have someone who focuses explicitly on backend development.


Why should developers learn SEO?

They might not touch the front end side of things.


Why should developers learn SEO?

That's perfectly fine.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And it's the same way with SEO.


Why should developers learn SEO?

People are like, oh, there's this SEO that talks about content and content strategy and


Why should developers learn SEO?

oh, I'm not interested.


Why should developers learn SEO?

So I'm not interested in SEO.


Why should developers learn SEO?

But that's ignoring that there's also the technical SEO people who are as nerdy, as


Why should developers learn SEO?

geeky as us developers are.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And they are like, oh, I'm really excited.


Why should developers learn SEO?

I want to try to figure out how we can pre-render our shadow DOM in a puppeteer instance, which


Why should developers learn SEO?

is something where developers are perking up their ears and going like, that sounds


Why should developers learn SEO?

like an interesting thing.


Why should developers learn SEO?

How do you do this?


Why should developers learn SEO?

Can't you just serialize the DOM?


Why should developers learn SEO?

And they're like, no, because the shadow DOM is hidden behind the shadow DOM border.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And that's an SEO concern for some search engines, not necessarily Google search, but


Why should developers learn SEO?

other search engines might struggle with.


Why should developers learn SEO?

So you might need to find a technical solution to overcome this challenge.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And there are so many technical aspects.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And as you say, if no one cares about them specifically, and your SEO might accidentally


Why should developers learn SEO?

not care about them or don't know about them because they might not be in this specific


Why should developers learn SEO?

niche of SEO where they are looking at the technical things, they might just use a tool


Why should developers learn SEO?

that gives them a report, and depending on how good the tool is, you might get a complete


Why should developers learn SEO?

or non-complete report.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And the incomplete report might actually give misleading information too, because it might


Why should developers learn SEO?

just be the wrong tool for the job.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And the problem there is that developers then tend to just downright dismiss everything


Why should developers learn SEO?

that comes from the SEO department or from the SEO side of things, instead of going like,


Why should developers learn SEO?

oh, this is great, let's sit down and talk about our requirements from the technical


Why should developers learn SEO?

side so that you can figure out what the requirements are or how we can fulfill the SEO requirements


Why should developers learn SEO?

with this technical setup that we have.


Why should developers learn SEO?

There are very, very few people out there that actually do this.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And I would wish that developers would also look into this and pick it up.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And I spoke with Bartosz, I spoke with Mike on previous episodes of this series.


Why should developers learn SEO?

They are one of, or part of this group of people, and it's amazing to see how they work.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And it's unfortunate that from the developer side, there doesn't seem to be much picking


Why should developers learn SEO?

up on the SEO tasks.


Why should developers learn SEO?

As you say, SEO naturally decays if you don't pay attention.


Why should developers learn SEO?

So yeah.


Why should developers learn SEO?

I don't know how to make this more visible to developers or how to motivate developers


Why should developers learn SEO?

more to look into these things.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Any ideas?


Why should developers learn SEO?

It's tough, I think.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Because especially depending on the size of the company that you're at, it's really hard


Why should developers learn SEO?

to see sometimes how your individual efforts move the needle.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And that's not what motivates developers.


Why should developers learn SEO?

So I think on the one hand, if there was a way that you could actually show reports to


Why should developers learn SEO?

people and say, all right, so we spent this time working on the technical SEO of our site,


Why should developers learn SEO?

and there is a tangible increase in the organic traffic, that's something that you can feel


Why should developers learn SEO?

pretty good about.


Why should developers learn SEO?

But on the other hand, a lot of times those improvements might be slow to show up.


Why should developers learn SEO?

It's also really hard to attribute changes in rankings, in traffic, to one specific change


Why should developers learn SEO?

on your website.


Why should developers learn SEO?

It's really difficult.


Why should developers learn SEO?

I mean, unless you have a lot of patience and you're just going to change only one thing


Why should developers learn SEO?

for potentially weeks or months or however long it takes, it's not really practical in


Why should developers learn SEO?

some ways to just say, okay, we're going to make this one improvement and not touch the


Why should developers learn SEO?

entire site.


Why should developers learn SEO?

So it's always a bit of a mix.


Why should developers learn SEO?

But I think getting developers to the point where they can see the impact and just actually


Why should developers learn SEO?

explaining to them why it matters.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Another thing that I think we've talked about before in some of our conversations is accessibility.


Why should developers learn SEO?

So a lot of times it's not so easy to convince a developer, let's say, oh, we want to do


Why should developers learn SEO?

this for SEO reasons only.


Why should developers learn SEO?

So usually when you come to a developer and you say, we want to improve the SEO and that's


Why should developers learn SEO?

why we're doing this.


Why should developers learn SEO?

This is like a non-starter, right?


Why should developers learn SEO?

Because they're like, well, I don't want to make things for machines.


Why should developers learn SEO?

I want to make things for users or in the case of accessibility, I want to make these


Why should developers learn SEO?

things accessible to more people.


Why should developers learn SEO?

So I think appealing to users as the reason you're doing something as opposed to just


Why should developers learn SEO?

search is a more pragmatic way to motivate people to get interested.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Because at the end of the day, that's what your focus should be on as somebody who is


Why should developers learn SEO?

improving the SEO of your site.


Why should developers learn SEO?

It should ultimately come down to users.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Although we all know that there are aspects that you have to do sometimes to appease the


Why should developers learn SEO?

machine a bit.


Why should developers learn SEO?

But that's also just the way computers work.


Why should developers learn SEO?

They're not mind readers.


Why should developers learn SEO?

So I think it's that kind of balance of explaining the why.


Why should developers learn SEO?

This is how Google discovers, indexes content, serves it and ranks it.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And then on the other hand, this is the impact it's having on users.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Here's how we can make stuff work better for both search engines and users at the same


Why should developers learn SEO?

time, make it more accessible, easier to understand, cleaner DOM, more performant.


Why should developers learn SEO?

All of those interests are actually aligned between SEO practitioners and developers.


Why should developers learn SEO?

It just doesn't usually get discussed.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And I think part of that also comes down to the fact that both devs and SEOs struggle


Why should developers learn SEO?

sometimes to get prioritization for these tasks.


Why should developers learn SEO?

So at the end of the day, you're more hot fixing stuff than you are working on strategic


Why should developers learn SEO?

things together.


Why should developers learn SEO?

True.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And that's a challenge too.


Why should developers learn SEO?

It's also that the departments are usually like there's an engineering organization and


Why should developers learn SEO?

then there's the business or marketing organization and bridging the gap is not like working proactively


Why should developers learn SEO?

together is not always easy on an organizational level.


Why should developers learn SEO?

So that's also probably hindering this kind of conversations and collaborations to happen.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And yeah, interesting.


Why should developers learn SEO?

I just realized I remember the way that I usually try to get developers hooked is also


Why should developers learn SEO?

to just have them think about building their own search engine.


Why should developers learn SEO?

What would websites have to do to be friendly to these?


Why should developers learn SEO?

And what kind of optimizations would you do as a search engine where developers might


Why should developers learn SEO?

choose a path that these optimizations cause problems?


Why should developers learn SEO?

And that also sometimes works like trying to figure out, like turning it around and


Why should developers learn SEO?

going like, okay, so now you're solving the engineering problem here on this side, on


Why should developers learn SEO?

the website creator side, but what would you be working on if you were on the engineering


Why should developers learn SEO?

side of the search engine?


Why should developers learn SEO?

And then things like accessibility and having properly ordered your headings and having


Why should developers learn SEO?

a meta description, having links being actual links with URLs to point to so that you can


Why should developers learn SEO?

crawl them, it becomes an obvious choice, which it is not when you don't think of the


Why should developers learn SEO?

other side.


Why should developers learn SEO?

So that's my approach to this.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And I like your approach of saying, here's what you need to do and what needs to be happening


Why should developers learn SEO?

for the bot to be able to consume your content.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And this is the impact it's having.


Why should developers learn SEO?

I think I was missing the impact component a bit.


Why should developers learn SEO?

So that's really interesting.


Why should developers learn SEO?

That's really interesting.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And you say measuring impact on ranking is so hard.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And yeah, naturally, because ranking also depends on what other people are doing.


Why should developers learn SEO?

So it never is single variable testing, right?


Why should developers learn SEO?

Yeah.


Why should developers learn SEO?

I mean, you can try to make a test and then Google decides, wow, it's Christmas.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Let's have a cold update.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Okay.


Why should developers learn SEO?

I'm a little bit bitter, right?


Why should developers learn SEO?

Because we've had a lot of updates this summer, but like, you know, you can try to change


Why should developers learn SEO?

something and this has happened to myself.


Why should developers learn SEO?

It's happened to friends.


Why should developers learn SEO?

All right.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Don't need to call you out, but you know, like it's you, you make some changes and then


Why should developers learn SEO?

it's like, well, you know, now there's an update or whatever it is.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And you're like, well, anything that I was trying to test is now suddenly even less stable


Why should developers learn SEO?

in terms of being able to give me some reliable learnings.


Why should developers learn SEO?

So yeah, there are just so many factors.


Why should developers learn SEO?

At the end of the day, I don't obsess over it that much.


Why should developers learn SEO?

I just try to keep making it better, keep iterating on old content until it ranks number


Why should developers learn SEO?

one and where and I stopped touching it out of fear.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Usually, usually, sometimes I have to, you know, to make sure it's still accurate.


Why should developers learn SEO?

But I don't know.


Why should developers learn SEO?

I think at the end of the day it's a fluid situation and you have to treat it as such.


Why should developers learn SEO?

But yeah.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Yeah.


Why should developers learn SEO?

So it's exactly that.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Focus on building the actual product and doing the right thing for the user.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And as you say, eventually search engines usually reward good things.


Why should developers learn SEO?

It just might take a while.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And yeah, core updates are an unfortunate reality.


Why should developers learn SEO?

But they are important to make sure that we keep adapting as the web keeps adapting and


Why should developers learn SEO?

to improve our search results.


Why should developers learn SEO?

We need to change things around, which unfortunately collides with everyone trying things out and


Why should developers learn SEO?

testing sometimes.


Why should developers learn SEO?

But that's just an inherent feature of the reality there.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Cool.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Awesome.


Why should developers learn SEO?

So yeah, in that case, I am very, very grateful for the conversation.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And so, so happy to see developers crossing into the SEO sphere.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And yeah, it was great talking to you.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Thanks a lot for your time.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And thanks to everyone watching this.


Why should developers learn SEO?

I hope you enjoyed it and learned something as well.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And yeah, stay tuned for more episodes.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And again, thanks a lot, Monica, for being here with me.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And all the best for your product.


Why should developers learn SEO?

And keep blogging.


Why should developers learn SEO?

I really like the blog.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Thanks, Martin.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Really appreciate you having me.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Yeah.


Why should developers learn SEO?

It's...


Why should developers learn SEO?

Okay.


Why should developers learn SEO?

Okey dokey.


Why should developers learn SEO?


English Google Webmaster Central office-hours from February 18, 2020

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


Office Hours Hangouts.


My name is John Mueller.


I am a webmaster trends analyst here at Google in Zurich.


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


where anyone can join in and ask any kinds of questions


around websites and web search.


And we can try to find some answers for you.


Bunch of things were submitted already.


But as always, if any of you want to get started


with a question of your own that's


been burning on your mind, feel free to jump in now.


I could go ahead, I guess.


All right.


Take it away.


This is in regards to actual site map handling


for very large websites, or large websites,


hundreds of thousands, millions of URLs.


And the website is in the classifieds area.


So there's a lot of new URLs popping up


like every minute, every few seconds, something like that.


So obviously, there's the documentation


on building a site map.


You can update it dynamically, as you should,


and then ping Google to let all that the site


map has been updated.


What do you do when that update frequency is incredibly large,


and every few seconds you get a new URL or something like that?


Is the site map still a good way to notify Google of the URLs?


Given that it's not a publisher, so we cannot really use the,


I'm not sure if you can use the news kind of site map,


because I know that's also an option, but more


for publishers.


So what would be the best practice here?


You can definitely still use a site map,


or you can use an RSS feed.


I think those are kind of the directions I would go.


The one thing I would try to do is maybe split it up


into parts where you have the recent content and kind


of the more stable or longer form content,


so that you don't have to submit all of your site map files


every time there's a change.


So that you have something like a site map


file for the last day or for the last couple hours,


and you just resubmit that one when there


are updates that are happening.


And then over time, when a URL stays around for longer,


you can move it to one of the more stable site


map files on your site.


But essentially, you have kind of one smaller file


that you submit with the regular updates.


With an RSS feed, that kind of happens automatically,


because the RSS feed only has the last couple updates in it.


And with the RSS feed, you can push those to Google as well


with PubSubHubbub or Web Push, what it's called now,


to kind of send those updates a little bit faster.


But that's kind of the direction I'd go.


I wouldn't try to update all site map files all the time


and just send all of them again, because that's


too much work on your side.


And it's like we process all of the millions of URLs,


and we only find 25 that are new.


So you might as well just send us those new ones separately.


MIHAI APERGHIS


Again, given that we might have like 50 URLs a minute


or something like that, 50 new URLs a minute.


I would submit them once a minute, maybe,


once every couple of minutes, something like that,


so that you have a reasonable set,


but you're not polling Google constantly with submissions.


And the other one can be like once a day, the bigger one.


And regarding the bigger one, that will likely


also have a lot of classified ads that are expiring,


so they're no longer available.


Is that fine if they're still in the site map or that they


disappeared the day after?


So that's not a big problem.


Yeah, I think especially with classifieds which


have a specific runtime, I would use the unavailable after meta


tag to let us know that this is something that will be valid


for the next week or whatever.


And then that's something that we


can take into account a little bit faster,


rather than having to refresh every page


and then check for the no index.


OK, so if you had to choose between the site map


version and the RSS version, is there any benefit to either?


I don't see any big advantage either way.


No.


It's like whatever is easier for you to generate.


That's kind of what I would focus on.


We'll try one of the versions, see how it works out,


and take it from there.


OK.


Thanks.


Cool.


John, I have a tangential question on that,


particularly to the unavailable after.


I work in the automotive industry,


and we're seeing a lot of vehicle detail pages


that remain on the website long after the vehicle has sold.


And then it's kind of muddying the waters,


because each of those product pages


essentially has the manufacturer and the make and the model


of each one.


And so we're ranking for those make model keywords.


If we were to put in unavailable after, say, a week from today,


would the crawler come back and check


to see if it's changed before it hits that date?


And if we change the unavailable after date


to then extend it, could we roll that so that it?


OK.


Awesome.


Yeah, that should work.


I mean, you can definitely change the unavailable


after date.


And if we recrawl that page then and we


see that it's still there, then we'll still keep it in.


So I think that might be an option.


In general, though, with a lot of these things,


I think you have to assume that sometimes we


will try to send people to a page that


doesn't exist anymore.


So catching that in some kind of a user-friendly way


is also very important.


We have redirects that go to a search result page or a soft


404 or a soft 404 afterwards.


So there is a fallback.


I just want to make sure that we have


the most efficient line of defense first.


And then if that fails, then we have a fail safe


and that it would all still be customer approved and friendly.


That sounds good.


Cool.


Hi, John.


Arnoldo here.


Hi.


Hi, how are you?


Colin, in relation with the case we


have open for IKEA in a previous session or agency in Germany,


they contact you through this forum.


So now we are in the process of cleaning out


basically a lot of old content.


We are just doing a clean up.


But we still see that Google ignored the German language


version and ranked the Austrian.


And then in Search Console, we see also


that the referral pages are like third party external spammy


domains, which is weird.


And that is the behavior that we see.


But we've been doing basically checking all the basic stuff.


And we still see that Google don't catch the German version


yet.


Yeah, sometimes these things take a while to settle down.


So especially if there used to be


or if there still is the same content in the same language


on multiple URLs, then it can happen


that we pick one of the country versions as the canonical


and we show that one in the search results.


But I think I looked at it with the team


after the last Hangout where this was mentioned.


And it sounded like that's something


that the team is looking into to see if we can speed that up


in general so that it doesn't last


as long for sites in future.


Yeah, I understand.


Thanks.


The other behavior that we see is that Google is actually


showing on SERPs like all platform, like URLs,


like sites that we migrated since two years ago.


And then also back in March, we did another migration.


So it looks like you guys keep these old URLs as a fallback.


Or why is that happening?


I don't know which exact URLs you're looking at.


But in general, there are two main reasons when this happens.


On the one hand, when the canonicalization


from our point of view is not completely clear.


So if we're not perfectly sure which one of these URLs


from the set of pages that we think belong together


is the right one to show, then that's


something where we might pick one which you think


is like an older one or that we shouldn't have picked.


And that's something where we use a lot of different signals


to try to figure out which of these pages to show.


And sometimes if those signals don't match,


then we have to kind of make a judgment call.


Or rather, our algorithms do that.


So that's the one thing.


And the other time that I see this happening fairly


frequently is if you explicitly look for the old content.


So I don't know if that's what you're seeing.


But for example, if you move from one domain to another


and you do a site colon query for the old domain


or you search explicitly for the old domain or the old brand


name or something like that, then we'll still


show you the old domain even though we've moved everything


over to the new domain.


And that's something that can happen for, I think,


several years going forward or from the past,


where if you search for something that has moved


a couple of years ago and we think


you're explicitly looking for that,


then we'll try to show it to you because we're


trying to be helpful.


But from kind of an SEO point of view,


from an analytics and tracking point of view,


you don't want Google to be helpful.


You want to see the kind of new thing.


But that's sometimes the confusing setup that happens.


And if they're a redirect setup from the old one


to the new one, then even if users see the old one


in search, they'll make it to the new one.


And it's not that the ranking would be any different if we


picked the new URL by default.


SPEAKER 2. Would you recommend right now we have the hreflang


or it will not make any difference?


It wouldn't make any difference.


If we see it in the sitemap and it's


the right URLs in the sitemap file,


that's exactly the same from our point of view


as if it's on the page.


OK, perfect.


Thanks.


Sure.


I'll keep joining here and see how this develops.


Thank you for your answers.


John, in a space where you've switched domains,


would clearing the cache then remove those index pages


from the previous domain?


No.


So I assume you mean the kind of the removing the cache


tool in Search Console?


Yes.


Yeah.


Now, that wouldn't change anything.


That's basically, it just hides the cache page


from the search results and removes the snippet.


It wouldn't change anything from the indexing side.


In general, the URL removal and the cache update tool,


they don't change anything from indexing.


They just try to apply a bandaid in the search results


when someone searches for it.


OK, would removing the old domain,


completely shutting it down, then remove


the results for the old domain?


Yes, it would remove those results,


but it would also prevent you from getting


any of the traffic if we accidentally


sent people to the old domain.


So that's something where I would recommend


just keeping the redirect up.


And that's something, over time, we'll pick that up.


The tricky part I've seen is when you change your domain


name and people used to search for your domain name


specifically, because maybe the domain name is almost


like a part of your brand, then those


are cases where if someone searches for the old domain


name, we'll still show the old domain name.


But if you look at the cache page for that URL,


then oftentimes you'll see we've actually


indexed the new version.


We're just showing the old URL in the search results


because we think that's what people were looking for.


Does it maintain the old metadata, the old description,


or will it appropriate the new domain title and description?


Yeah, it takes everything from the new domain.


So if we've switched indexing to the new one


and we just show the old URL, then all of indexing


is based on the new one.


The ranking is based on the new one, all of that.


So it's really just the URL that's


shown in the search results.


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


And if you have more questions along the way,


feel free to jump on in.


Hopefully we'll have some time towards the end


as well to go through some other live questions.


So some of these are pretty long.


I'll try to shorten them a little bit.


The first one is, we have over 3,000 articles in our help


section, and we want to make them available in 25 languages.


Would using the Cloud Translation API hurt our website?


So of course, we'd use the Translation API markup


and warnings.


Would these articles be considered low quality?


Is that too many articles?


We can't do this manually.


So first of all, I was not aware of the Translation API markup.


I looked that up.


That was pretty interesting to see.


That's kind of a lang attribute that you


can add to the pages or to elements on a page


when they're machine translated, which helps our systems


to understand that this is actually


machine translated content.


We shouldn't use it to learn further translations.


So that's pretty cool.


So from a purely technical point of view,


there's a bit of a split, I would say,


within Google with regards to what we'd recommend doing


there.


On the one hand, from the Webmaster Guidelines point


of view, we might consider this to be automatically generated


content.


And we'd say, well, you shouldn't


allow automatically generated content to be indexed,


especially if it's lower quality content.


I think with machine translation,


it's kind of reaching a point where machine translations are


actually pretty good.


And it's no longer the case that machine translated content


reads like gibberish, and you can barely


guess what the meaning is.


But actually, it's fairly reasonable translation.


So from that point of view, you could argue either way


and say, well, this kind of content


is reasonable enough for me to stand behind as something


that I would publish on my website.


And in that case, that might be an option for you to say,


well, I'll take these and run it over the articles that I have


and generate it for the languages


that I think are important for our users.


That might be something to take a look at.


On the other hand, especially when


we look at the quality of a website overall,


we do look at the quality overall.


And if you're taking 100,000 articles


and you're running translations in 25 languages over it,


then it's going to be really hard for you to confirm


that the quality that you're generating like this


is actually high enough that you'd


be able to stand behind it and say,


well, this is what I want my website to be known for.


So that's something where I would take this step by step


and think about it incrementally, try things out,


test some languages where you have testers who can help you


to double check that the localization is really actually


useful translation and not just like you


can kind of guess what the meaning is translation.


And if you can determine that those languages


for specific articles on your website


are actually pretty good, then that


might be something you'd want to set to be indexable.


On the other hand, if you're really


unsure if this is something that you


want to have indexed for your website to kind of stand behind,


then that's something where maybe you'll set it to no index.


Or you'll use just the JavaScript widget


so that it doesn't generate any separate pages


for your website.


So that's something where there isn't this by default behavior


that we would say, oh, if you use this kind of translation,


then we'll think your website is really fantastic.


But really, you need to double check that yourself.


And that's something that's sometimes a bit hard to do.


So just blindly going and saying,


I have 100,000 articles, and I want 25 languages,


and hitting the button to generate all of those,


that's probably not the right approach.


But rather, you want to take this step by step


and make sure that you're actually creating something


that is useful for your users that doesn't come across


as gibberish, where if they come to your website


and they see this localized version,


they're like, this doesn't make any sense.


This website is more like spam rather than actually something


reasonable.


Our website focuses on troubleshooting.


And I often find links getting posted


on forums with foreign language or non-English forums.


They're all relevant posts.


Is it negative in the eyes of Google?


The language on my website is 100% English.


So that might be perfectly fine.


Just because people in other languages


are referring to your content doesn't mean


that that's necessarily bad.


I think in general, that's actually a good sign.


If you're creating something so useful


that people refer to it, even if it's not in their own language,


then that's usually a good sign.


So from that point of view, I wouldn't worry about this,


but rather see it as a kind of a positive thing.


It might even be something where you go further and say,


well, lots of people in these specific languages


are referring to my content.


Maybe I can do something on my website


to cater my content better to them even.


But it's definitely not something


where you'd look at it and say, well,


these links are coming from foreign websites.


Therefore, I need to disavow them,


or I need to block them somehow.


It's perfectly fine and natural to get links


from all kinds of websites.


Then, yes?


AUDIENCE 1 It's more of a measurement question.


In Search Console, we have a client that


has a redirection based on IP.


So when someone searches for their brand,


they will be redirected to sometimes even


a different domain than the one showing in the search results.


When is the click counted?


Where is it counted?


So if we show something in the search results,


then we would track that there in Search Console.


So Search Console itself wouldn't know


what happens after someone clicks


on a page in the search results.


In Analytics, you might see that differently.


If you're tracking the user-facing analytics,


then that might be different.


But in Search Console, that would refer just


to what we show in the search results


and which ones people clicked on there.


AUDIENCE 1 OK.


The problem is that I can tell you the search term is HBO.


And we're working with HBO Nordics.


The first result when you search for HBO from Sweden is HBO.com.


We think most of the users click there.


But Search Console data shows over 50% click-through rate


on the Nordic domain, the HBO Nordic domain.


It feels kind of strange to have people


clicking on the second result when the first one is


what they're searching for.


Is it possible that it's double counted?


No, that shouldn't be double counted or anything like that.


I don't know the query and which languages you're seeing this


in, but what can sometimes happen


is that we show an English search


result for something generic like that,


as well as a local search result.


And it might be that users are just seeing,


oh, this English result and the result in my own language,


and they click on their own language version.


Because it's kind of tricky with a query like HBO,


where we wouldn't be able to tell which language the user is


actually searching in.


OK.


Sure.


That might also be something where using hreflang


would help you, because then we would


be able to take the user's language settings


and try to show the right version of that site.


And that's something that you could do, for example,


just for the home page or separately for the home page


from the rest of the site, so that for queries which


are very generic, we'd be more likely able to show


the version that matches the user's language directly.


Thanks.


All right.


And now kind of a structured data question.


I guess a tricky one.


So when you search for a half-dome tent,


the top result is the old product page,


which includes a call out to kind of see the new version.


And there's also a canonical on that page pointing


to the new version of the product.


And I think the question kind of goes into,


would using structured data in any way


help to kind of show the newer version rather


than the older version?


And I took a quick look at some of the URLs


that are involved with this.


And essentially, what is happening is, on the one hand,


we struggled to see the connection between the old URL


and the new one, because it's not that clear of a situation


that these URLs are exactly the same content.


So that's something from canonicalization,


we were kind of unsure if these actually belong together.


And the other part that's coming together here


is that for canonicalization, we use a number of signals.


So we do use the rel canonical on the page, which is something


that's specified well here.


But we also use things like internal linking,


external linking, sitemap files, all kinds of other sources


as well.


And I assume if you take a URL that is fairly well established


and you create a second URL with a product that kind of replaces


the first one, then that established URL


is going to remain visible in the search results


for quite some time until we've really


learned that the new URL is kind of the better version


for these kind of search results.


So that's something where structured data probably


wouldn't change anything there.


So in particular, using something


like successor of or predecessor of,


that wouldn't change anything from our point of view.


It's really just that canonicalization decision


where we have a lot of kind of collected signals


for the old URL and not really a ton of good signals


for the new URL.


And we struggle to connect those two completely.


One thing you could do is redirect from the old version