Let's talk Core Web Vitals

maybe it makes the server take a longer time, which is faster?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

A lot of frameworks can turn SSR on and off,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

and you can just look at your real user monitoring numbers


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

and see what's better for your users.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Then the second question is, OK, I render it on the server,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

and then there's some JavaScript that has to load and hook in.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Is that slow?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

That can really impact your first input delay.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

But I think that people who are using the hydration framework


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

should also be monitoring what their hydration time is.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

How long did it take before the user was


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

able to interact with your page?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Because if you're not using hydration,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

it can be really similar to LCP.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

But if you're seeing it's really far away from LCP,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

you're going to have interaction problems that we're currently


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

not catching with it.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

We did a long blog post about our long-term ideas


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

on responsiveness that talk a little bit more about things


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

that we might catch better in the future.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

MARTIN SPLITT ANDERSEN HUDSON GALVIN


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

That sounds fun.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

There's a really great point here as well about just the nature


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

of trade-offs.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

There's so many different ways to architect pages,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

so many different frameworks, server side, client side.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

It's just full of options, and it


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

can be a little bit overwhelming for developers.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And oftentimes, a lot of sites just


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

inherit what they've always been using or what somebody else


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

suggested that they use.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

But I think that we're constantly


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

inside Google evaluating the trade-offs of the choices


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

we make and trying to figure out when it's the right time


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

to make a different decision.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And I think that having a common language


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

to measure the outcomes that we want,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

that's really where the value of Corvo Vitals comes in,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

that we can just sort of use these metrics


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

and know that they're the same metrics defined


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

the same way, appearing in crux, but also contributing


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

to search ranking and showing up in your tools.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And that really helps unlock all of the kind of experimentation


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

and testing that are just an inevitable part


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

of good engineering practice.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

I mean, engineering is all trade-offs.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And so our advice in so many of these cases


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

is just measure it and use what works great for you,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

and we're all for it.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

MARTIN SPLITT ANDERSEN HUDSON GALVIN


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

That's particularly true about JavaScript.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Like everything JavaScript just needs


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

to be measured and seen in reality,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

because the answer, unfortunately, often


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

is it depends.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

So I'm guessing when you say like hydration,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

we have to probably explain what hydration is.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Yeah, so say you have a dynamic site.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And the idea is that JavaScript can kind of hook


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

into every single DOM element.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

So the way that these sites were first designed


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

is that basically there wasn't really


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

any HTML served from the server.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Instead, a JavaScript script would generate all the HTML


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

using DOM APIs.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And then all of the HTML would have event handlers.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And the page would kind of be ready all at the same time.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

At the time it is visible to the user, it's also interactable.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

But if you think about the way a web browser works,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

it makes a request to the server.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And then it gets to make an HTML page.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And the HTML page says, oh, load this script.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And so it makes a request to the server for the script.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And then it loads the script.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And the script says, make this DOM.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And maybe inside that DOM, there's images.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And so it's really late in the loading time


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

when it's getting all these things


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

that it needs to build the page.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

So people have this idea that maybe if we rendered


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

on the server, it would be faster.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

So let's have the server understand


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

what the JavaScript is trying to do, generate all the HTML,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

and send it down on that very first request


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

so that you load the web page, you make the request,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

and then the HTML is already there.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

The problem with that is the reason


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

we generated it in JavaScript in the first place


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

is so that all of those DOM elements


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

would have their event handlers hooked up.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

So as soon as you click on something, if it's like a menu,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

it opens or whatever.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

So in server-side rendering, you basically


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

have to download the HTML.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

It's rendering to the user.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And at the same time, you're downloading all the JavaScript,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

processing it, and then it hooks into all the elements.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

So the concern that people have is


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

that hooking into all the elements part


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

is called hydration.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

How long does hydration take?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And most frameworks have a user timing mark that you can use


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

and you can send to your real user monitoring.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And I think it's really important to be monitoring


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

that in addition to Largest Contentful Pain


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

and understanding is your page noninteractable


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

for a long period of time.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

MARTIN SPLITT


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Cool.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

I actually have a follow-up question.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And I know I'm starting to sound dumb for asking


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

all these questions.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

You say a user timing mark.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

What is that?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

So there's a lot of web performance APIs.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

There are JavaScript APIs that give you information


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

about how the page performs.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

There's one for Largest Contentful Paint,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

one for Simple Delay, one for Cumulative Layout Shift.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

But those are really high-level things, right?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Like what was this user experience metric?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And developers obviously need to know some more information


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

about their page load to understand


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

what if these metrics aren't the value I hope for.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

So user timing marks and measures,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

there's some version of the API, whether it's L1, L2, or L3,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

implemented in all browsers.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And you can basically just say performance.mark.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

This thing happened.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

You give it a name.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And then your analytics scripts can listen for those.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And the dev tools will also draw them.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Inside of all the performance things,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

tools like WebPagetest can show them.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

So you can kind of make your own metrics about like, hey,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

I was doing this thing in JavaScript.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

How long did it take?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And then it'll get overlaid with all your other higher-level


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

user experience metrics.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And you can use that to understand what is happening


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

on your page that's making the user experience


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

metric take so long.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

MARTIN SPLITTENBERG


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

I think I've seen those popping up in the performance timeline


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

when you want to mark something specific.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Yeah.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Cool.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

So one question I had there is, it


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

sounds like if you can make your own metrics,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

then potentially these metrics that we have now


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

could evolve over time as well.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Is that something that's planned?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Or how do you see the future of Core Web Vitals


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

looking a couple of years into the future?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Yeah, so my team works really hard on new user experience


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

metrics and on understanding user experience


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

more holistically.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

I think that if you look at the current set of Core Web Vitals,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

they're very focused on the initial page load.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And what we really like to expand on over time


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

is, well, what happens after the page is loaded?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

So you have the first input delay.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

What about the rest of the inputs?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

How can we score a page so that it's


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

responsive to every user input?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

What about things that aren't really user input,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

like animations or like as you're scrolling,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

is the page janking?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

We're researching how to measure what we call smoothness.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Do animations and scrolling happen smoothly or not?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

We're also looking at just improving the existing metrics,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

taking things like single page apps into account better.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And then we're looking at how we might longer term expand


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

into more areas of the user experience, accessibility,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

privacy, security, things like that.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

So cool.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Yeah, it seems like there's always something new happening


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

to kind of keep up there.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Do you have any timelines around these kind of ideas


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

that you've been working on?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Do you expect, I don't know, end of the summer


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

or in the fall sometimes, like suddenly Google will say,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

well, actually, we have different metrics


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

that we care about?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Or how do you see that happening?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

So basically, it's really important for us


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

to get public feedback about the metrics


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

and understand edge cases that we don't see in analysis.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Like how does a developer actually


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

interact with this thing?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And what do they hit in the real world?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

So what we do is we blog about our ideas.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Like I said, we just wrote a blog post about responsiveness.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

We're going to write one about single page apps


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

and write one about smoothness.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

As we write these blog posts, we get initial feedback.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And then we think about how to make it more accessible


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

to developers, like how could they play with it.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And then we try to make sure that we're listening to feedback.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

It's hard to get a tighter timeline


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

because we want to make sure that we've


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

incorporated all the feedback and that we're really


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

listening.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

I think, Vivek, you've been working


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

a lot on how the timelines kind of line up for developers.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Do you want to talk about that part?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Yeah, for sure.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And this has been true really since the start of the web.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And so by being user focused, we actually are trying,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

and I think we're doing a reasonable job of focusing


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

on the things about the web experience that are constant.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Because users are pretty stable.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Users want a great experience.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And that's always been true.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And we hope will be true for some time.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

So our expectation is that these metrics will evolve slowly,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

that the set of metrics will remain reasonably stable,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

that developers can kind of really get behind them, invest


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

in the tooling and in understanding the metrics


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

themselves, and that there will be some refinement as we go.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Because nobody's going to get it right the first time.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And the web is such a large and dynamic place.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

So we definitely want to be responsive to how


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

the web evolves and how users evolve in their ways of using


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

the web.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

But our intent is for this to be kind of a slow, years


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

at a time kind of process of rolling out and refining


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

metrics that really target the stable aspects of user


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

preferences and user experiences.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Cool.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Yeah.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

So it sounds like it's something where


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

you can kind of count on things being stable for a while.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And we'll let people know when things are lined up


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

to change in the future.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

So a lot of our listeners are very SEO focused.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And this ties into one of the ranking factors


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

that we announced as well.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Do you think people should only focus


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

on speed for SEO reasons?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

I would say definitely not.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

We are interested in speed as Google and as a web community


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

for so many more reasons beyond that.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

We know that the web is a powerful medium


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

and a powerful platform to build applications and reach


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

so many users all over the world.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And making sure that that experience is really, really


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

amazing affects every part of web businesses


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

and the web experiences that we create.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

We've seen direct improvements in usage,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

direct improvements in the conversion funnel,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

direct improvements in conversion actions, newsletter


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

sign-ups, add to cart actions, and then ultimately purchases,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

revenue, ad impressions, ad clicks.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

I mean, across the board, performance seems to always


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

have this really powerful positive impact


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

on the web experience and ultimately on web-based


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

businesses.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

So if you're focused on it because of the changes


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

in the search ranking signal, that's great.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

But there's so many more reasons beyond that


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

to look at the performance and monitor


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

the performance of your page.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And that's really why we kicked this off.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

I think when we decided to look at it as a ranking signal,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

it really was just a reflection of how users respond


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

to pages that are stable and that are fast


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

and have a great experience.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

I should also add, of course, that the ranking signal


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

is important.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

But certainly, there's so many other signals


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

that go into search, the relevance of your content,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

and all of the rest.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

So while performance is super important


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

and the ranking signal is certainly something


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

that gets a lot of press, our goal


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

is really to just showcase how impactful


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

a really high-performing website can be for web businesses.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

JOHN MUELLER-ROSENZWEIGSEN-MARTIN.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Do you think this is something that


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

is more feasible for large companies?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Because it sounds like you have to have a really strong


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

developer team to actually set up all these hooks


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

and put all of this tooling in place,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

make sure the metrics work well.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Does that mean small sites are kind of at a disadvantage here?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

JONATHAN CHAMORROY-OAKLEY.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

I think that there's two ways of looking at this.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And we've observed the ecosystem evolve in a number of ways.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

One is that smaller sites often have more focused businesses


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

and a lighter weight web experience.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

They're trying to do a few things really well.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And that's an opportunity for them to really optimize.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

They also might have less legacy code,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

or fewer older frameworks that they've


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

been working with as a company grew


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

over a long period of time.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And also smaller sites and smaller organizations


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

just can be a little bit more agile.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

They can adopt new practices and often are really


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

hungry to adopt new practices and are


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

looking for the next big thing to grow their business


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

and get ahead.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And so we see a lot of excitement


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

among smaller developers for the ability


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

to have a common language between their ROM analytics


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

provider and their search console metrics


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

and just having it all kind of come together and make sense.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And that can really raise the productivity of a small team.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

But at the same time, even the larger providers,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

a lot of the changes that we're seeing


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

are not terribly complex.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

I remember talking to one tier one news publisher in the US.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And they were really concerned about the interstitial


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

that they put up.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

It was causing layout-inducing animations,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

and their CLS score was being impacted.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

But that interstitial was a really big part of their


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

business.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

It's where they encourage folks to sign up for newsletters


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

or to subscribe to their online news content.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And this was really concerning for them.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

But when we looked at their implementation,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

actually, they could have adopted something


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

like a CSS transform and implemented


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

much the same experience without actually a large number


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

of layout-inducing animations.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And so that's the kind of fix that you


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

don't need to be a huge development shop to make.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

That's the kind of thing that we hope


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

will become easier and more commonplace on the web


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

as these sort of best practices get out there


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

and as we kind of all focus on optimizing for the user


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

experience in this particular way.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

So I think it's a real opportunity for teams


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

big and small to create really great experiences.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And if you're using a platform like Shopify or Blogger


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

or something like that, are you kind of at a disadvantage


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

there because it's being run by someone else


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

and you can't really control it?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

How would you see that?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

That's a great question.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And we view the platforms as kind of a great opportunity


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

for a small set of changes by a core team at the platform


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

organization to speed up hundreds or thousands


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

of different web properties and web businesses.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And so that's another opportunity for smaller sites


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

to benefit from the investments that their platform providers


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

are making.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

We recently did some work with WordPress


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

where we kind of took another look at their lazy loading


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

strategy and came up with a way of improving their LCP score


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

by actually going against what had been the recommendation


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

for a really long time of lazy loading all of your images,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

saying, no, maybe the hero image above the fold


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

shouldn't be lazy loaded.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And you'll actually improve your LCP score.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And so that one change could affect many thousands of sites


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

and many millions of users.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And so we're really looking forward


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

to kind of more fixes of that kind in the ecosystem


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

where, at least for some developers,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

they're just getting better performance over time


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

without having to worry about it too much.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

So cool.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

One question I always get is, especially


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

if you're a small site, you can't do everything yourself.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

So you end up embedding other kind of tools


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

and different features, functionality


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

from third parties.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Does that count for or against you?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

I mean, it's something that you can't really control yourself,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

right?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

This is a challenging one because one


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

of the great properties of the web


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

is that it is so open and embeddable.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And we can kind of combine and remix these experiences


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

in so many different ways.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

At the end of the day, we measure the site as a whole.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

We measure the experience that a particular site


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

has chosen to put together for its users.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And that does include the third parties


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

that the site has chosen to include on that page.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

That can make it challenging if the third parties are


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

potentially not entirely high performing or as high performing


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

as we'd want them to be.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

I think this goes back to our efforts around the ecosystem


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

as a whole.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

We all play a role in making this ecosystem fast


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

and making the web a really great place for users


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

to access information and services.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And certainly, we take that seriously at Google.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

I would just say that we're in the early stages of it.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

We rolled out the Core Web Vitals,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

and it was included as a ranking signal.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And we're providing additional tooling around it.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

But this is a conversation as a community we all need to have.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

I think it's really helpful when we, as Google,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

get feedback from the ecosystem saying, hey,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

I'd love some controls on this particular widget,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

this particular ad element to be able to optimize my Core Web


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Vitals.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And we take that really seriously and prioritize it.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And it's something that we want to work with the ecosystem


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

to encourage across all of the different third parties


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

that web developers use.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

So basically, the site owners who are trying to embed these


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

should go to whoever is providing them and push them


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

to make sure that they're actually


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

embedded in a performant way.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

For sure, yeah.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And they should know that we're an ally here, too.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

I mean, I think we have a lot of work


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

to do to try to understand how third parties can


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

be high performing when they're embedded


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

in a variety of different contexts


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

and just the sheer diversity of the web, understanding that,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

and reporting back about third party performance


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

to the third parties is definitely something


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

that we're looking at.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

One of the third party setups that people sometimes use


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

is content delivery networks.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Is that a magic solution to all of this?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

I think that CDNs definitely have a place.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Anything that speeds up the delivery of your content


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

is going to improve your Core Web Vitals and your overall page


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

experience.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

I don't think that it's strictly necessary.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

I think that, again, it goes back to those trade-offs.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

I think that there's things that we can do on the server.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

There's things that we can do on the client side.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

There's things that we can do with the content of the page


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

and JavaScript frameworks being chosen.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

So it's really hard to say across the board


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

if this is a push for or against CDNs.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

I think it's really site specific.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

If you're trying to reach a global audience,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

we found that just getting bits from New York to London


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

or Singapore to Sydney is going to be challenging.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And so there's definitely opportunities


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

to just co-locate content closer to your users.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And that's kind of a responsibility of a global web


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

property these days anyway.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Certainly something that Google recognized early on


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

and invested heavily in.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

But I think that if you're serving a local audience,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

the requirements are a little bit different.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And you might actually find more value


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

in taking a hard look at, are your images optimized?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Or are you loading that JavaScript framework


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

that you don't end up needing or using?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

So it's really site specific.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

I don't want to paint the picture that everybody needs


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

a CDN in order to be fast.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

There's one interesting thing about CDNs that I observed in the wild, and I have done myself.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

I'm not proud of that, but it works.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

You can use CDNs as a workaround for a bunch of things.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

So for instance, if you do not have a development team that can help you actually redeploy the


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

site with optimized images, some CDNs offer you the opportunity to basically, because


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

it's an inflection point, right?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

All the traffic goes into the CDN and then the CDN rebalances it across the world.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

That's one feature.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And then the other feature is also all your content serving goes through the CDN.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

So some of them have what's called edge workers.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Some of them call them differently.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

But basically, you get the opportunity to run an optimization as part of your CDN provider.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And that's a really cool workaround that can be a quick fix for some of the things that


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

you might not necessarily get.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And I've seen people improve their performance because of that.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

It is not necessarily what a CDN is meant to do, but you can use it as a workaround


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

for something like that.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

That's pretty cool.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Yeah, the whole field of edge computing is really compelling and I think could be really


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

helpful in a performance context.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

So taking a step back from a practical point of view, how would you even figure out where


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

to start?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Would you just put everything on a CDN, like Martin said, and then wait a month and see


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

what happens?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Or what kind of tips would you have for people who are just getting started on this?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

So I think that the most important thing to do first is to look at what are your actual


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

numbers.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

What are your LCP, CLS, and FID in the field?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Use Search Console.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

What are your numbers?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

What pages are those coming from?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And then take a look at those and try to figure out what are the most important things.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Tools like Lighthouse have audits or focuses that can show you, all right, it turns out


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

that my LCP and my FID are fine, but my CLS is terrible.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Let's focus on that in Lighthouse.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Let's look at that in the developer tools.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

So look at the values for your actual site and what real users are seeing, and then use


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

that as a lens to dig into, there's so much lab data.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

We talk about how great it is that there's so much available, but there's more than any


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

one person can do.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Use that as a lens to look into what you should do first.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Cool.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

So you'd basically focus on where is my worst score and then try to improve that.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Mm-hmm.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Yep.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And I think it goes back to the name of the Core Web Vitals.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

I mean, these are the core metrics, right?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

These are the first metrics that measure the user experience, but they're by no means the


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

only useful metrics a web developer should be reaching for.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

There's a whole ton of additional detail in all of the additional diagnostic tools and


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

recommendations.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And so, yeah, time to first buy it and the sort of server side things that might say,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

oh, it's my server that's a bit slow, or it's taking a long time to, you know, there's a


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

high latency connections between my users and my servers.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Those are the things that would indicate that maybe a CDN is helpful, whereas if that's


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

not the long pole in your particular application, then there's other areas to focus on.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Wow.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

That's so much stuff.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

What are we missing?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Is there any aspect that you'd like to include as a tip for the listeners?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

I think one area that we've heard of from partners and from publishers and developers


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

is that it's the growing set of things to be concerned about.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And for a long time, any number of, whether it's maybe an SEO agency or Google or major


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

framework authors, we've had a long and growing list of best practices and potential gotchas


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

and things to read and things to study up on and things to look out for for developers.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And so I think it's worth acknowledging just that some of this stuff can feel overwhelming.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

It can feel like there's a lot to look at.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

I think our goal for Core Web Vitals and the way that it's kind of helped me wrap my head


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

around sort of the entire performance ecosystem of the web has been, let's look at it from


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

the user's point of view first.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

They're looking at their phone.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

It's a piece of glass and it's showing them images and text and giving them the opportunity


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

to interact with it.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And that actually was a really profound kind of simplification because then I can go and


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

pull in all the complexity on an as-needed basis.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

So if I tapped a button and it didn't work and that was frustrating as a user, then I


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

know what set of metrics and technologies and diagnostics that might be able to contribute


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

to solving that.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And I don't have to worry about everything else.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

So I really personally love the kind of user focus that this effort has brought to a lot


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

of these performance discussions.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

It's just something that I hope others see value in that.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And I hope that that becomes the sort of dominant way that we look at creating really great


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

web experiences.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

No, I definitely agree with that.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

I think focusing on the user is the most important thing you can do.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And that guides a lot of the questions that we get, like, should I care about this or


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

that?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Do we use a study or just ask your users?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

All these types of questions, it really does help you narrow down what you need to focus


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

on and what's important.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

So cool.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Wow.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

So much information here.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

It's great to get that directly from the source, from you all.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

So thank you for joining us here.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Thank you for having us.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

It's great.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Yeah, thank you so much.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Cool.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And with that, I guess we can wrap up this episode.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Thanks for joining us again.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And just very briefly, if people have any questions or feedback, you mentioned one email


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

address.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Where could they go for questions?


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Yeah, so for questions, we do our support over Stack Overflow.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

So tag questions with Web Vitals tag.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And then if you want to give feedback, you don't really like some property of a metric,


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

you want to change it, or you want us to understand the use case or something better, Web Vitals


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

feedback at GoogleGroups.com is the right place for that.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Great.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

OK.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

We'll have these links in the description as well.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

So if you're listening along and you didn't catch that completely, check out the description


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

links as well.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

All right.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Well, we've been having fun with these podcast episodes, and I hope you, the listener, have


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

found them useful and entertaining and insightful as well.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And regardless of how you're liking these, let us know if there are any topics that we


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

should cover.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Feel free to send us a note on Twitter, for example, or chat with us on one of the next


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

virtual events that we go to.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

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


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

And thank you.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Goodbye everyone.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Ade, merci.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Thank you.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Goodbye.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals

Thank you so much.


Let's talk Core Web Vitals


SEO Mythbusting 101

If you hear about SEO, what comes to your mind?


SEO Mythbusting 101

Well, keywords, getting the content right sometimes, a good H1 title,


SEO Mythbusting 101

that's probably the first thing that comes to my mind.


SEO Mythbusting 101

But also a lot of myths and things I don't know about.


SEO Mythbusting 101

People say a lot of things out there about how to make your website stand in the top result.


SEO Mythbusting 101

But I don't really know how to achieve that, you know?


SEO Mythbusting 101

Right, fair enough. That's a really good question, how to achieve that.


SEO Mythbusting 101

And I think that's a perfect introduction into what we're trying to do here.


SEO Mythbusting 101

We're trying to bust these myths.


SEO Mythbusting 101

What can I help you with? What are the questions that come to your mind?


SEO Mythbusting 101

Okay, so let's start with something simple.


SEO Mythbusting 101

What is a search engine?


SEO Mythbusting 101

All right. So a search engine is a platform or service or program, whatever you want to call it,


SEO Mythbusting 101

that basically goes through the internet content and tries to catalog it.


SEO Mythbusting 101

It works a little bit like in the library.


SEO Mythbusting 101

So you probably go to a library and ask the librarian,


SEO Mythbusting 101

where can I find a book on topic X?


SEO Mythbusting 101

That's what you do.


SEO Mythbusting 101

And then normally it doesn't take you to basically go through all the books in the library.


SEO Mythbusting 101

You just get the right books.


SEO Mythbusting 101

And that's what search engines do for you.


SEO Mythbusting 101

We find the right content for your purpose.


SEO Mythbusting 101

All right. But when I heard of search engines, I also heard this word called crawling.


SEO Mythbusting 101

Is that a thing?


SEO Mythbusting 101

That's a thing.


SEO Mythbusting 101

So the way that we are doing this, or search engines do this,


SEO Mythbusting 101

is by first going through the entire internet, and we have links from one page to the other.


SEO Mythbusting 101

So we are using that.


SEO Mythbusting 101

We start somewhere with some URLs, and then basically follow links from there on.


SEO Mythbusting 101

So we are basically crawling our way through the internet one page by page, more or less.


SEO Mythbusting 101

And then once we have these pages, have found them, have grabbed the content from the internet,


SEO Mythbusting 101

we need to understand it, we need to figure out what is this content about, and what purpose does it serve.


SEO Mythbusting 101

So then that's the second stage, which is indexing.


SEO Mythbusting 101

So then we figure out, so this page is about ice cream, this page is about ice cream in Miami,


SEO Mythbusting 101

this page is about marmalade and stuff like that.


SEO Mythbusting 101

And then the last step is if you type something in, you don't type in, I want this particular thing here.


SEO Mythbusting 101

You just go like, I need ice cream, ice cream online, Medellin.


SEO Mythbusting 101

Right?


SEO Mythbusting 101

Yes, you got it.


SEO Mythbusting 101

So we then basically look into our index and find the ones that are serving this purpose.


SEO Mythbusting 101

And then we try to figure out which is the one that serves these purposes perfectly or best.


SEO Mythbusting 101

And then we rank these higher than the others and show you the examples that we found from the index.


SEO Mythbusting 101

So how do you know which results are more relevant to a given user?


SEO Mythbusting 101

That's a really good question.


SEO Mythbusting 101

We have over 200 signals to do so.


SEO Mythbusting 101

So we look at things like the title, the meta description, the actual content that you've got on your page,


SEO Mythbusting 101

images, links, all sorts of things.


SEO Mythbusting 101

It's a very complicated question to answer what ranks you best.


SEO Mythbusting 101

But yeah, we look at a bunch of signals.


SEO Mythbusting 101

Now if you could give me like top three things that I should consider, what would that be?


SEO Mythbusting 101

Right.


SEO Mythbusting 101

So us being developers originally, you probably want me to say, oh yeah, use this framework or use that framework.


SEO Mythbusting 101

That's not how it works.


SEO Mythbusting 101

You have to have really good content, and that means you have to have content that serves a purpose for the user.


SEO Mythbusting 101

It's something that users need and or want.


SEO Mythbusting 101

Optimally, they need it and want it, like ice cream.


SEO Mythbusting 101

So if your content says where you are, what you do, how you help me with what I'm trying to accomplish, that's fantastic.


SEO Mythbusting 101

If you just have a page that says, we are a fantastic company and we have plenty of products, that's not serving a purpose.


SEO Mythbusting 101

So you want to make sure to serve the purpose of the people who you want to attract and who you want to interact with your content.


SEO Mythbusting 101

And you want to make sure that you're using words that I would be using.


SEO Mythbusting 101

If you use a very specific term for your ice cream, let's say like smooth cream 5000 or something like that,


SEO Mythbusting 101

I'm not going to search for that because I don't know about it.


SEO Mythbusting 101

I'm just going to go like, I need ice cream.


SEO Mythbusting 101

It's good to mention it somewhere so that I know if I look for that trademark, I find it as well.


SEO Mythbusting 101

But if I'm exploring ice cream around me, I don't know what particular ice cream there is.


SEO Mythbusting 101

If there's like a specific brand, fantastic, but that's not what I'm looking for.


SEO Mythbusting 101

So speak the language that I'm using.


SEO Mythbusting 101

So you're saying more like a pitch.


SEO Mythbusting 101

It is like an elevator pitch.


SEO Mythbusting 101

It's like an elevator pitch, exactly.


SEO Mythbusting 101

When we two meet and you have a fantastic product or I have a fantastic product, I wouldn't go like, yeah, the Blurbmaster 5000 is fantastic.


SEO Mythbusting 101

And you're like, yeah, that's insane.


SEO Mythbusting 101

What does that do?


SEO Mythbusting 101

So do that.


SEO Mythbusting 101

Do an elevator pitch and help us put you in contact with the right people.


SEO Mythbusting 101

So content is number one priority.


SEO Mythbusting 101

Could you mention other two things that are important for the SEO?


SEO Mythbusting 101

You're going to love them because they are technical.


SEO Mythbusting 101

So the second biggest thing is make sure that you have meta tags that describe your content.


SEO Mythbusting 101

So I have a meta description because that gives you the possibility to have a little snippet in the search results that let people find out which of the many results might be the ones that help them the best.


SEO Mythbusting 101

And have page titles that are specific to the page that you are serving.


SEO Mythbusting 101

So don't have a title for everything.


SEO Mythbusting 101

The same title is bad.


SEO Mythbusting 101

If you have titles that change with the content you're showing, that is fantastic.


SEO Mythbusting 101

And frameworks have ways of doing that.


SEO Mythbusting 101

So consult the documentation, but there's definitely something that helps with the content.


SEO Mythbusting 101

And the last bit is performance.


SEO Mythbusting 101

I hear it.


SEO Mythbusting 101

Right?


SEO Mythbusting 101

Performance is fantastic.


SEO Mythbusting 101

We are talking about it constantly, but we are probably missing out on the fact that this is also good for being discovered online.


SEO Mythbusting 101

So performance is not just making my website faster, but it's also making my website more visible to others.


SEO Mythbusting 101

Correct.


SEO Mythbusting 101

Because we want to make sure that the people clicking on your search results, clicking on your page, getting this content quickly.


SEO Mythbusting 101

So that's one thing that we want to make sure as well.


SEO Mythbusting 101

So it's one of the many signals that we are looking at.


SEO Mythbusting 101

But also, it just helps your users.


SEO Mythbusting 101

They get happier.


SEO Mythbusting 101

If I want ice cream really badly, then I get the page quicker.


SEO Mythbusting 101

That's fantastic.


SEO Mythbusting 101

So if you want to look at performance, I highly recommend looking into hybrid rendering or server-side rendering if you can.


SEO Mythbusting 101

Because that gets the content quicker to the users usually.


SEO Mythbusting 101

Also, you might have bots that don't run JavaScript.


SEO Mythbusting 101

So Googlebot does that, but not everyone else does it necessarily.


SEO Mythbusting 101

So you want to make sure to probably figure out something like dynamic rendering if you don't want to make code changes.


SEO Mythbusting 101

Because I understand we are all pressed for time, we have lots of bugs and features to fulfill and work through.


SEO Mythbusting 101

So if you can't change the code, dynamic rendering might be something that gets you there.


SEO Mythbusting 101

If there are rendering issues with your content.


SEO Mythbusting 101

But besides that, I would say definitely look into performance optimization.


SEO Mythbusting 101

Get the content quicker.


SEO Mythbusting 101

Get the first content full paint in there quicker.


SEO Mythbusting 101

Optimize your servers, optimize your caching strategies.


SEO Mythbusting 101

Make sure that your script doesn't have to run for 60 seconds to fetch everything that you need.


SEO Mythbusting 101

So those are things that you should definitely look into.


SEO Mythbusting 101

I guess performance is something that pretty much everyone in the developer community is looking into.


SEO Mythbusting 101

Certainly, yes. Or they should at least.


SEO Mythbusting 101

They should. I hope that they do.


SEO Mythbusting 101

Okay, so we already discussed all these basics around SEO and search engines and how to position my website in the top search results.


SEO Mythbusting 101

Now the question is, why is it so important for companies to rank in the top results?


SEO Mythbusting 101

Right. So you're a web developer, right?


SEO Mythbusting 101

Yes.


SEO Mythbusting 101

You build stuff on the internet.


SEO Mythbusting 101

Do you want people to use it?


SEO Mythbusting 101

Certainly, yes.


SEO Mythbusting 101

Certainly, right?


SEO Mythbusting 101

So in order to make sure that people can use it, they have to know about it.


SEO Mythbusting 101

And unless you are probably one of the really big players, you might not.


SEO Mythbusting 101

And even for the big players, if they launch something new, you might not know about it.


SEO Mythbusting 101

And you're not looking specifically for products.


SEO Mythbusting 101

You're looking for something that serves a purpose for you.


SEO Mythbusting 101

I want to know how I built this thing with a framework.


SEO Mythbusting 101

I want to know where to find the best ice cream in the place I am in.


SEO Mythbusting 101

I want to find the cutest dogs and puppers online.


SEO Mythbusting 101

So I have a purpose. I don't know who serves this purpose necessarily.


SEO Mythbusting 101

If you build the best ice cream PWA ever in, let's say, Medellin?


SEO Mythbusting 101

Is that how you pronounce that?


SEO Mythbusting 101

That's right.


SEO Mythbusting 101

Perfect.


SEO Mythbusting 101

So if you build the best PWA to order ice cream online in Medellin, then I don't know about that,


SEO Mythbusting 101

especially if I come as a tourist.


SEO Mythbusting 101

But if I type that into a search engine, like, order ice cream in Medellin,


SEO Mythbusting 101

and then it goes like, hey, this PWA does this trick.


SEO Mythbusting 101

You want to be the first couple of, because I'm not going to go to page 99 and go like,


SEO Mythbusting 101

oh, yeah, this might be the perfect thing, because Google and other search engines


SEO Mythbusting 101

are trying to figure out what is the best for this purpose, and then show me those upfront,


SEO Mythbusting 101

and then I might pick from those, because normally they're pretty good.


SEO Mythbusting 101

I think that covers all the questions I have.


SEO Mythbusting 101

Fantastic. So you feel ready to build stuff that is excellent.


SEO Mythbusting 101

That is so cool.


SEO Mythbusting 101

Thank you so much for being here.


SEO Mythbusting 101

Thanks for being my guest, and I hope that this helps other developers as well.


SEO Mythbusting 101

And developers and SEOs can be friends, I think.


SEO Mythbusting 101

I think so, yes.


SEO Mythbusting 101

I think so. Thank you.


SEO Mythbusting 101

Oh, are we still on?


SEO Mythbusting 101

Please stay tuned for another episode of SEO Mythbusting.


SEO Mythbusting 101

Next time with Suess Hinton, we'll talk about what is Googlebot.


SEO Mythbusting 101


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

So my name is Alan, I'm here to talk about WebDuplication.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

So probably I should explain what WebDuplication is first.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

So what we do is we identify and cluster duplicate web pages,


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

anything that looks the same basically,


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

and then we take these clusters, we pick representative URLs


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

that actually get put into the index and served to users at search time.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

In the process we generate a mapping from dupes to these representative URLs,


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

which we usually call canonicals,


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

and we forward the signals some of the time


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

so that these de-duplicated pages don't just lose their signals,


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

you can keep them.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

So why do we do this?


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

Well, first most intuitive answer is that search users don't want to see the same result 20 times,


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

you know, same page over and over again, that's not a very good search experience.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

The second reason is that once you have removed all these pages,


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

you actually get a bunch of space back in the index


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

so you can serve more unique results, so you can start handling long tail queries.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

And this is also advantageous to webmasters


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

because you can retain signals for your site when you redesign it,


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

when you move pages around, the signals get forwarded from the old location


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

to the new location.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

And the last thing that we get out of this is we get what we call alternate names.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

Now this is two different things kind of at the same time.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

These days it's used mostly for localization,


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

but the older use is if you wanted to rebrand your site.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

We used to be, let's say that Larry decides that he's tired of Google


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

and he wants to fold it into Alphabet, he redirects google.com into the Alphabet page.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

Well, we can still serve a search for Google with google.com


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

because we'll know that Google is now an alternate name for Alphabet.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

Okay, so I'm going to talk about three things in specific.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

So the signals that we use to cluster pages.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

I'll talk a little bit about localization specifically


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

because localization tends to get kind of caught in the grill a little bit here.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

And then I'll talk a little bit about how we select representative URLs.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

So the signals that we use, there's a bunch of them.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

The three that are most prominent and that are most at your disposal as well


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

are redirects, the actual content of the page, and rel canonical tags that you send to us.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

There's a few others that we use, mostly variants on URL normalization,


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

but those are a little different.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

So redirects are the most trustworthy signal that we get.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

This is one of the reasons why when you guys redesign your sites


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

we always suggest please redirect the old pages to the new pages


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

because then it makes it very trivial for us to identify, oh yes, this guy is now over here


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

and we can continue to forward the signals as correct, as appropriate.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

Now, in terms of content, to the surprise of no one,


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

we take checksums of the content of your page.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

We make a number of various efforts to ignore the boilerplate in them.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

Now what you might be surprised by is that what sometimes gets caught in the grill here


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

is what we call soft error pages, where someone has served us a 200


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

and then some kind of very fancy elaborate looking crypto error that says


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

sorry, this page is not here.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

We do have some machine learning models that try to catch these,


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

but webmasters are very, very creative and constantly surprise us


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

with new ways of representing what is basically this page is not here.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

So this is one of the reasons why we prefer getting an HTTP error


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

because then instead of just dupilimiting your page,


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

we can do error handling, which is a little bit different.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

One of the things that often gets caught here is site goes down for maintenance


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

and puts up a this page is down for maintenance


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

and suddenly half the site is gone because we crawled it while you were in maintenance mode.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

So please service a 500 instead of a 200.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

Now finally, the rel canonical annotations that you guys use,


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

they get fed directly into clustering.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

We have a fair amount of validation in front of these guys


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

because sometimes people make mistakes.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

My favorite one was when we opened up one rel canonical


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

to discover something to the effect of open squiggly brace,


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

open squiggly brace, rel canonical target, close squiggly brace


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

across the entire site.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

But this happens in ways that are not so obvious,


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

like your entire site is rel canonical to four slash,


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

so please check your scripts.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

Now, on localization, most of the time when you think localization,


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

you say, okay, here's the French version of my page,


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

here's the German version of my page,


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

and they have nothing to do with web deduplication


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

because the content is completely dissimilar.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

Now, when deduplication does get involved is when, for example,


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

you have same language, different country,


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

or someone decides to get clever with a bunch of geo redirecting,


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

and to us it all looks like the same page,


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

so everything gets jammed into one cluster.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

Same for, you know, we see a lot of cases


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

where people localize only the boilerplate,


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

and then we throw out the boilerplate,


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

and then it looks like the same page to us.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

In these situations, we're basically hoping that you guys will tell us


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

what to do with your hreflangs because to us,


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

it looks like you guys have sent us the same page.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

Okay, so picking representative URLs.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

Obviously, if we jam a whole bunch of your pages into one cluster,


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

then we have to figure out which one actually goes into the index.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

We have a machine-learned trained system that has every signal compete,


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

or every pair of pages compete on a set of signals that we've chosen.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

The main thing that we try to do here is avoid hijacking.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

That's like rule number one.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

Everything else falls behind that.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

And in that case, it's actually very useful.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

We get escalations via WTA through the forums,


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

and these are a great source of reports for us.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

Once we get past hijacking, our second concern here


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

is basically the user experience.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

So, you know, is this really a good page to send the user to?


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

So, you know, something like a slow meta refresh is a bad experience.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

Security, if the page has an expired certificate, it's a bad experience.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

One thing that people fall into here is that we actually care quite a bit


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

about your dependencies for secure pages.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

So if your secure page has insecure dependencies,


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

we're not sure that it's going to work properly.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

It might just have a broken script. It might not render.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

So check your dependencies.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

And then finally, once we get past all that,


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

then all the stuff that you guys have really direct control over.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

So you can just tell us your real canonical target is the URL


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

that you think we should make canonical of this cluster.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

Great. Or you can use redirects, particularly 301s.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

In this case, they are a signal.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

And sitemaps we use to some extent, because, well,


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

these are pages you prefer this to crawl,


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

so there's probably good reason for us to use them.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

Okay. So finally, to recap, some suggestions from what I just said.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

Use redirects to clue us in to how you redesign your site.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

Send us meaningful HTTP results.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

Check your real canonical links.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

Sometimes there's broken scripts, that kind of fun stuff.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

Use hreflang to help us localize.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

Please keep reporting those hijacking cases to the forums.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

Secure dependencies on your secure pages.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

And finally, try to keep your canonical signals unambiguous.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

Sometimes we see webmasters will say,


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

here's a 301 with a real canonical pointed the other way.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

And then we're like, well, I don't know what to do.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

Webmasters told me both cases are good.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

So if you can keep them unambiguous, then you'll get what you want.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

If they are ambiguous, the system's probably going to just go off


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

and find something else.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)

All right.


Web Deduplication (WMConf MTV '19)


English Google SEO office-hours from December 11, 2020

All right, welcome, everyone, to today's Google Search Central


Office Hours Hangout.


My name is John Mueller.


I'm a search advocate at Google.


And part of what I do is these Office Hours, where


people can join in and ask questions around their website


and web search.


And we can try to find some answers.


And wow, lots of people joining today.


Lots of questions submitted.


This is good.


Cool.


A bunch of things were already submitted.


But if any of you want to get started


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


Hi, John.


Hi.


I have actually two questions.


So first one is about changing website.


So one of our clients, they change their website.


They move the website from WordPress to Drupal.


Fortunately, we are keeping the same URL, like WordPress.


So the URL structure will not be changed.


The only thing they are going to change the design of the site


and content, they are going to add more content.


Now, the question is the ranking they have,


for those who are at this moment,


if they make this content change and design change,


will that affect the ranking?


It can, yes.


I mean, any time you change your website,


then that's something that should


be reflected in your rankings, right?


So if you add text to your pages, if you remove text,


if you change the internal linking,


if you change the layout so that you have different things


as headings and titles, then that's


something that should be reflected in search.


So keeping the URLs the same, I think,


makes it a lot easier because we just


can keep a lot of the signals already.


But we still need to look at the content,


like what is on these pages, how they're


linked between each other.


And it's not the case that it will always


be a negative change.


A lot of people do these kind of migrations


because they want to improve things because it's like,


well, I noticed my internal linking is bad with my old CMS,


and I moved to a CMS that does internal linking a lot better.


So that helps me to kind of get my site crawled better,


for example.


And the next question is about backlink, so how does Google


measure the weight of a backlink?


Some people get business listing.


Some people get backlink from the content.


Some people get backlink from the regional site,


like dotcom.au.


Some people get backlink from dotcom site.


Does Google differentiate that, OK, these are Australian sites.


They're getting backlink from dotcom.au.


We are giving more importance because they


are getting dotcom.au.


Or is it the same getting backlink


from dotcom and dotcom.au?


And what about the other type of backlink, business listing


or getting backlink from content?


That gets really complicated.


So I mean, what we wouldn't differentiate


is just because they're different top level domains.


So it's an AU site and a dotcom or UK site or whatever.


It's not that we would say they have different weights


or individual types of links.


But we do try to differentiate by the type of link that it is


and to figure out what is its importance with regards


to the context that it provides.


Is it something that tells us a lot about the page


that it's linking to?


Or is it something that is more like, oh, by the way,


we're also here kind of thing, which is more like, well,


like, OK, we saw it, and that's OK.


Thank you.


Hey, John.


Good morning.


Morning.


I have a question about archiving.


So we have a site with a large number of press release pages.


These are quite old, right?


Maybe from 2015 and maybe even older.


And the thing is they have accumulated


a large amount of backlinks, but they don't get any traffic.


But these are quite high-order domains are pointing to them.


But now we want to clean them up because they are taking up


the real estate, or at least it becomes a bit too big there.


Now the thing is, so I was thinking of, OK,


we can move it to an archive.


But I still would like to benefit from the SEO power


these pages have built up over time.


So is there a way to do this cleverly?


So basically, so moving them indeed to an archive,


for example, subdirectory, but then still, let's say,


benefit from the SEO power?


Yeah, I mean, you can just redirect them


to a different part of your site.


If you have an archive section for this kind of older content,


which is very common, then kind of moving the content there


and redirecting the URLs there, that essentially tells


us to forward the links there.


But we were also thinking, because a lot of them,


so they need to be there still for, let's say,


legal purposes, for example.


But I still would like to say, OK,


and the crawler doesn't need to access these folders for me


all the time.


So I was thinking about disallowing that folder.


But will disallow a subdirectory?


Will this also mean that the build up SEO power will be


ignored from that point onwards?


Because in a sense, I was thinking like this.


What you say is to the crawler, hey,


you don't have to crawl this folder anymore.


But I don't think we say ignore the build up SEO power, right?


Or do I see this wrong?


So probably we would already automatically crawl less


if we recognize that they're less relevant for your site.


So not the case that you need to block it completely.


If you were to block it completely with robots.txt,


we would not know what is on its pages.


So essentially, when there are lots of external links pointing


to a page that is blocked by robots.txt,


then sometimes we can still show that page in the search results.


But we'll show it with a title based


on the links and a text that says, oh, we


don't know what is actually here.


And if that page that is being linked to


is something that is just referring


to more content within your website, we wouldn't know.


So we can't indirectly forward those links


to your primary content.


So that's something where if you see that these pages are


important enough that people are linking to them, then


I would try to avoid blocking them by robots.txt.


The other thing to keep in mind also


is that these kind of press release pages,


things that collect over time, usually the type of links


that they attract are a very time-limited kind of thing,


where a news site will link to it once.


And then it's like when you look at the number of links,


it might look like, oh, there are lots of links here.


But these are really old news articles,


which are in the archives of those news sites, essentially.


It's also kind of a sign, well, they have links,


but those links are not extremely useful,


because it's so irrelevant in the meantime.


SPEAKER 2


I just wanted to know how Google determines if a particular piece


of content is copied or not, and who is the actual original


source for that content?


How do we determine if it's copied?


I think it's kind of tricky in some aspects.


In some aspects, it's really easy,


because if you take a piece of text and you search for it,


then if exactly the print text is on the web or on other pages,


then that's a pretty good sign that it is copied.


But it's also something where it would not


tie the default to that copy.


For example, if you have copied content


that is more along the lines of boilerplate text,


like you have a legal disclaimer on the bottom of your site,


which is something that you have across all


of your pages of your site, then technically, that's


copied content.


But practically, for us, that's not really an issue,


because these are things that people are generally not


searching for.


It's not that they're searching for the legal disclaimer


and they want to find your site.


It's more they're looking for your primary content.


And in that regard, it's something where we try to weigh


the copied content appropriately,


but also still look at the rest of your site.


So I don't know, actually, if that helps with regards


to your question.


So that's kind of the thing.


It's easy to recognize that there's


copied content on these pages, but it's


hard to figure out what we should


do about that copied content.


In regards to who is the author or the owner of that content,


I don't think we go and make any judgment in that regard,


because that's really tricky.


We can't determine who is the owner.


And sometimes, the person who wrote it first


is not the one, for example, that is the most relevant.


So we see this a lot of times, for example,


with our own blog posts, where we will write a blog post,


and we'll put the information we want to share on our blog post.


And someone will copy that content,


and they will add a lot of extra information around it.


It's like, here's what Google really wants to tell you.


And it's like reading between the lines,


and the secret to Google's algorithms.


And when someone is searching, it's


like, maybe they want to find the original source.


Maybe they want to find this more elaborate, I don't know,


exploration of the content itself.


So just because something is original


doesn't mean that it's the one that


is the most relevant when someone is


looking for that information.


SPEAKER 2


All right.


Anything else before we jump into the questions?


SPEAKER 3


I submitted my question, but I can jump in now, if that's fine.


So if you recall, I'm checking in again


about our domain migration.


We migrated our domain at the beginning of August,


had almost total traffic loss after connecting


in a few of these sessions.


It was indicated that Google Engineering was


able to make a partial fix for us.


That was towards the end of September.


And then we did start to see slow, but some recovery.


We were eking our way to almost 50% after about four months


and right before the Broadcore update.


And now we dropped to basically back where


we were post-domain migration.


So my question is, if you think it's possible


that the partial fix that we were


able to get via the engineering team possibly got reverted,


or just otherwise, how we should try to make sense of what


happened with the Broadcore update,


we're of course trying to look through that lens just


neutrally and try to think about what


we can do to improve the site.


But with where we were before the domain migration loss


and where we are now, it's a little hard to not think


that we're still just dealing with domain migration issues.


And if that seems likely to you, and any advice from here?


Yeah, I don't know.


I think it's kind of awkward that these kind of issues


pop up with domain migrations.


Sorry that you're struggling with this.


I think with the issue that you're seeing now,


I don't think that would be related


to the fix in the domain migration being reverted


or kind of being blocked.


My assumption there is that it's more


that the general core update is also affecting your site,


and it's like this combination of those remaining lingering


issues plus the core update is essentially


what you're seeing there.


So I will definitely take a look with the team


to see if there's something more specific that's going on there


that we need to watch out for.


So that's now.


I don't know.


So one of the things that we ended up doing specifically


after running through your issue is trying to figure out


how many other sites might be affected by these kind of site


migration issues.


And it seems like it's extremely rare, which doesn't really


help you that much.


I don't know, it's like a special case kind of thing.


But at least that's a little bit calming on my side,


but it's something where I still think


we should be able to do a better job handling


these kind of migrations and not run into issues where people


have to contact us, essentially personally, with regards to,


I don't know, getting things back to normal again.


But so if I remember correctly, your site


is about kind of university reviews.


Yeah, it's mostly focused on online education.


Yeah.


I could imagine that the core update is something


that you might want to look into there.


It's like the post that we have.


Yeah, and I know there are a bunch of other SEOs


that have kind of dug into all of those details of what


you need to watch out for with expertise, authority, trust,


those kind of topics.


So I would definitely look into that.


But usually when it comes to core updates,


it's something where it's not just one small thing that you


can fix and it gets better.


It's more of a long-term approach


that you have to kind of look at there.


Yeah, we're doing that internally,


and we've been working with Marie Haynes and Glen


Gabe and some other SEOs.


It's hard to not feel like it's our domain migration that


is still having an extremely large impact on us.


And I'm honestly not sure what else to do except to check


in here when I can.


No, I mean, it's perfectly fine to keep pushing for this.


Because I mean, I try to watch what


is happening with those discussions internally.


But it's also good to see kind of from the external side,


like, oh, it's still a problem.


We still need to look at it.


Yeah.


OK.


Yeah, I'll definitely double check, though,


specifically around the core update


if there's something that might be kind of uniquely happening


with your site that maybe we need to fix in that regard.


OK, thank you.


Sure.


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


And if you have any questions along the way,


feel free to jump on in as well.


In Search Console, we noticed our pages


are marked as crawled, currently not indexed.


Looking into the detail, we see that Google


has found our user declared canonical,


but then picked a completely different and unrelated page


for its Google-selected canonical.


Any idea why this might be?


So usually, this kind of situation


is something where I'd need to look at the details.


So it's a bit tricky without having any URLs there.


One thing you could perhaps do is post in the Help Forum


and try to provide some details, some examples there,


so that the experts there can take a look


and maybe give you some tips or escalate that to the search


team if needed.


One of the places where I have seen this happen


is when a website is set up in a way


that it's hard for us to tell which parts of a URL


are actually relevant.


So that could be, for example, if you


have a number of different websites


that all have the same back end system,


and the same URLs lead to the same content


across the different domains, then it


could be that our systems say, well, actually, the domain name


isn't so relevant here.


We will pick any one of these domains


as the canonical for this kind of URL pattern.


It could also be that you have a URL structure that maybe


something in the path or in the URL parameters


is deemed as being irrelevant to our systems.


In that sense, it's not irrelevant


in that the content is bad kind of thing,


but it's irrelevant in that when we


look at a number of different parameters,


we see always the same content.


And therefore, our systems kind of learn over time


that actually this URL pattern is something that doesn't


lead to unique content, but rather we


can pick one of the URLs that is kind


of in this group of URL patterns and pick that as a canonical.


And that happens regardless of what the actual content is


on individual pages once we've learned that pattern.


So that makes it a little bit easier for us


to kind of deal with canonicalization


without having to crawl the whole site and get stuck


in all of these URL patterns that are essentially


leading to the same content.


And in a case like that, it could


happen that you have a URL structure that,


for a large part, leads to similar content where


we get confused.


But there are individual pieces in there


which do lead to unique content.


And then it could happen like this, that our systems say,


well, all of this is irrelevant.


We will pick one here.


And we don't realize that actually, well, this one here


is kind of an exception.


So if you think that might be the case in your situation,


one thing you can do is try to figure out,


do you perhaps have this kind of pattern of URLs


that all lead to the same content?


You could do something like look at your server logs


to see which URLs are being crawled.


And based on those, try those URLs out in your browser


and see, is this something that is all


leading to the same content?


Is Google somehow getting stuck with URL parameters


or with crawling of the website?


And based on that, you can work to kind of exclude


the discovery of these irrelevant URLs


and focus on the ones that you really do want to have indexed.


I noticed that often when we publish


a new article on our site, the article's ranking starts


to improve as time goes by.


For example, in this case, it took five months


from the date of publication of the article


to reach a stable ranking.


This happened despite the fact that the article has not


changed in five months.


It's the same from the beginning.


So I would expect the article ranking


to be the same right away.


Obviously, this is not the case.


So what happens on Google's side in the time


between publication of a new page


and its stabilization and ranking?


I didn't take a look at that specific example.


But it is very common that it takes some time for our signals


to kind of settle down and to better understand


what is on a specific page.


And this is something that is very visible.


For example, if you have a new website,


then you might publish that new website.


And in the beginning, Google might go, oh, it's a new website.


We found it.


If someone is explicitly looking for it, we'll probably show it.


But over time, over a couple of months,


we will try to understand, well, what


is the relevance of this new website?


In which regards is it important for the web?


And then we'll show it maybe for more and more queries


over time.


And that's not something where our systems, I don't know,


it's essentially just something that takes time for us


to collect all of the signals that are associated


with these pages.


And it's not something that can happen from one day to the next.


And it can also happen for individual pages as well.


So it's not just specific to new websites like that.


For some queries, I see Google ranking websites


which have a high amount of ad content, which is creating


a poor search experience.


How is Google dealing with those sites?


It's hard to say without having examples.


But there are various things that we


do take into account with regards to the user experience


side of things.


So on the one hand, we did, I think, a couple of years ago,


an update where the above-the-fold content


is something that we weighed a little bit more.


So that's something where if there's


a lot of ad content above the fold, then perhaps it


might be affected by that.


There are other updates that have happened in the past


with regards to speed.


There's the Core Web Vitals, which


is going to be launched, I think, in May with regards


to ranking in search results, which also helps there.


But the other thing also to keep in mind


is we use a lot of different factors


to determine ranking in the search results


to try to understand what is relevant for users


in individual times.


And it can very well happen that a page is extremely relevant


in some regards but still has a really bad user experience.


And we will still show it in the search results.


And sometimes we show it highly in the search results.


So just because a page has a bad user experience,


and if we were to take that bad user experience into account,


it doesn't mean we would never show that page.


This is something that is really common.


For example, if you search for a website's name,


then you would expect to find that website.


Even if that website is kind of like doing weird things,


has a really bad user experience,


you would still expect to find that website.


And there is a broad range of different kinds of queries


and kinds of understanding of relevance


that flow into things like that.


So with that said, it's always possible to find these kind


of pages in the search results.


It's extremely rare for us to manually go in and say,


we will completely remove this website from search.


So it never shows up for any queries.


We usually reserve that specifically


for cases where the whole website is essentially


irrelevant, where the whole website is just scraping


content from the rest of the web,


and there's nothing unique of value at all on the website.


Then that's something where the web spam team might go in


and say, this is a pure spam website.


There is nothing of value here.


Then we'll remove that from search.


But for everything else, it's kind of like,


we can still show it.


And in some cases, the other factors play a larger role.


I think this is also really important


because a lot of people don't know everything that they


should be doing on the website.


They don't know all of the details of what is important


or what they should not do.


They don't know those tricks that they heard from friends.


Are they kind of really bad, or are they just kind of bad,


or they do a kind of work sometimes?


And they end up doing lots of weird things.


And all of these websites that do things


which are kind of suboptimal, where as an expert,


you might look at it and say, oh, they


should not be doing this.


This is so clearly black hat against the webmaster


guidelines.


They might not know, and they might


be a legitimate small business, and they just


have their website like that.


And in cases like that, I think we should definitely still


continue to show that website.


It's not that it's completely irrelevant for users.


Maybe they're just doing things in ways


that they don't know any better.


Let's see.


Updating the design of a website plus a few URL changes.


Content remains largely the same,


but getting a few updates when necessary.


There's about 2,000 URLs.


Given the core update is still rolling out,


should I hang on for a week or push the Go Live button?


I would just move forward.


So the core updates that we do tend


to be focused more on kind of like broader changes


in the search results.


And it's not something where if you make a change right


at the same time, then it suddenly


clashes and breaks anything.


So in that regard, I would not hold off and kind of


like artificially hold myself back.


If you're making improvements on your website,


and usually if you change things like this across the site,


then I would classify that as improvements.


And I would just move forward and do those improvements


so that they're live as early as possible.


SPEAKER 2 Thanks, John.


Cool.


Let's see.


We change our website's domain name.


The old one's search ranking was decreased to zero.


However, the new one's search ranking


is much lower than the old site's ranking.


This reminds me of a different question.


However, let's see.


Some experts said it takes up to six months


to achieve original rankings.


How can we speed up the SEO results?


Some backlinks link to the old site.


Do we need to change the links to a new site?


Now, for the most part, I think one


of the things I would strongly recommend


is just making sure that you're following the guidelines


that we have, specifically for site moves,


the details as much as possible, especially if this site move is


still fairly fresh, then making sure


that you have things like all of the redirects set up


so that all of the old content is really


moving to the new site.


That's something I would do.


I would double check all the settings in Search Console


so that you have all of that lined up.


But in our guidelines, we also mentioned the links


to the site, and we do mention that it does make sense


to get those updated as well.


In particular, with the links to the site,


we use that for canonicalization.


So if we're not sure if we should show the old one


or the new one, then if we see that there are lots of links


to one of these versions, then that


helps us to try to make that decision.


It sounds like canonicalization is less an issue there


if you're seeing that there's already no traffic going


to the old domain.


But still, I think updating some of those links


where you can make sense.


We're going to run into the same kind of issue on our side


as well when we did the migration to Google Search


Central from Webmaster Central because it's like,


I think, the Twitter pages or the YouTube main account pages,


they don't redirect for whatever reasons.


So we're also kind of discussing internally


if we should ask people to help update the links, which


is kind of weird.


But I guess everyone has to do that.


In general, it can take a while for things to settle down


after site migration.


But it should, for the most part,


be fairly straightforward.


The one situation where I have seen issues with regards


to site migrations, well, I guess the more common one where


I've seen issues is when the new domain name, the one that you're


moving to, has a really weird history associated with it.


Then that's something where it can get tricky for us


to understand what does this migration mean.


So in particular, if the old domain


used to be hosting a lot of web spam content, then,


or wait, the new domain is hosting a lot of,


or was hosting a lot of web spam content, and you move there,


then we have all of these kind of spammy signals


that are associated with the domain name that you move to,


plus the new signals from your old content.


And that mix is sometimes hard for us


to figure out, like, what does this mean?


So that's something that you might want to look into.


In general, if you're moving to a domain,


so if you're starting a website on a new domain,


looking at the domain's history is something


I'd still recommend doing.


There are lots of things that you can clean up


with regards to kind of taking on a used domain name,


but some things are a lot more time intensive than others.


So in particular, if a website was deeply involved in web spam


and has a lot of really problematic links


from across the web, then that's something


that you might want to clean up ahead of time,


which takes a lot of time.


Another situation where you might


want to kind of keep in mind that it will take a bit of time


is if the domain that you're moving to


used to host a lot of adult content,


then we might have that domain in our safe search list,


essentially.


And as we see that your content is now hosted there,


then that will update automatically.


But it can take a bit of time for us to kind of switch from,


oh, we should be filtering this domain using safe search to,


this is actually a completely normal domain


with traditional content, let's call it.


So those are kind of the situations


that I would watch out for.


If I create a subdomain like m.domain to www.domain.com,


the site is now responsive and the mobile version


is no longer needed.


Should I use a change of address tool in Search Console?


You can use it.


You don't need to use it.


So the change of address tool in particular


helps us when you're moving to a new domain name


because then we can forward those kind of more domain level


signals a little bit easier than if we had


to do that on a per-URL basis.


But if you're moving just between subdomains


within the same domain, then that's


not something you'd need to do that.


It also doesn't cause any problems.


So if you've done that in the past and you're like, oh, no,


I should revert it, don't worry about that.


We're exploring Web Stories and using Tappable, which


we have embedded in our site.


When I test the URL in the Inspect URL tool,


it doesn't show up.


What can we do about it?


I don't know what Tappable is, so it's hard for me


to say what exactly to do there.


Web Stories are based on AMP pages.


So for Web Stories, you would use the AMP testing tool


to see that they work well, that the structured data there


is recognized properly.


So that might be something to check out.


With regards to whether or not these URLs are indexed,


Web Stories by design are normal AMP pages, like I said.


So they can get indexed individually.


And they're set up in a way that they're canonical AMP.


That means it's not like AMP pages that


are associated with the rest of your website,


where you have the canonical as the traditional HTML page


and the AMP HTML alternate version.


For Web Stories, you only have the AMP version.


And essentially, that can get indexed


like any other normal content.


We currently don't show Web Stories in all places,


all countries, I think.


But we do show AMP content pretty much,


I think, in all countries.


So if you have a Web Story, what will happen


is it might be shown in these Web Stories specific surfaces


if you're in one of those countries.


But if you're not in one of those countries,


it'll be shown in the normal web search results.


So it'll be shown just like any other web page might be.


Since it's also a normal web page like any other,


you need to think about the usual SEO aspects there, too.


So things like titles and headings and text on the page,


alt attributes for images, all of the usual things,


they all apply to Web Stories.


It's a bit trickier with Web Stories


because traditionally, you want to make it visually impressive,