on how you have that implemented, that could have


English Google SEO office-hours from October 2, 2020

an effect in that if from the home page


you're linking to the articles with a unique URL,


and then from the articles you have the canonical back


to a clean URL, then is that about the setup?


So it is the same URL, it just has URL parameters


in the end of the full URL.


It's like UTM, but we've modified them a bit.


We removed that, I think, about two weeks ago,


but it's not like we're seeing something happening yet.


So one thing you can do to kind of check that hypothesis


is whether those particular kind of the tagged URLs


are ranking in search.


So looking at the performance report to see,


is Google focusing on the clean URLs,


or is Google focusing on the parameterized URLs?


And if Google is focusing on the clean URLs,


then we can figure the canonical part out, and that's all fine.


If Google has been focusing on the parameter URLs,


then it seems like, well, we got confused with your site's


structure, and then over time we will kind of dilute the value,


because we're not sure which of these pages


we should actually be seeing associated with your home page,


for example.


AUDIENCE 1 Yeah, we checked that,


and it's the clean URLs that are ranking.


So the canonical is working the proper way.


But there are so many things that could have happened,


so we're testing and trying and thinking about everything.


Yeah.


I can sympathize with that.


It's like, if there is a big change that happened,


then trying to figure out what exactly is responsible for that


is something that I think anyone would do.


I do think, if you're seeing an overall drop like this


from one day to the next, then it


seems a lot more like a quality issue


rather than a technical issue.


If it were a technical issue, then you


would usually see kind of a subtle decline over time,


where as we reprocess things for indexing,


then some things go a little bit faster.


But it's really something that would take about,


I don't know, a couple of weeks' time to be fully processed.


And if you're seeing it from one day to the next,


then it seems a lot like our algorithms


are kind of classifying your site slightly differently.


I see.


So yeah, this could be the case, because we


saw a small decrease in August 30,


then it accelerated dramatically on September 3.


So by September 3, it started really dropping.


It hasn't been like a couple of weeks in the end.


I mean, technical issues would be a little bit easier


to figure out and clean up.


So I understand kind of focusing to make sure


that all of the technical things are lined up first.


But it really feels like, from a quality point of view,


it might be worth getting some more input from people


and seeing what could you be doing slightly differently.


But I really don't know your website,


so it always feels awkward to say, oh, your website's quality


is bad.


And it sounds like it's not bad.


It's just, well, we thought it was a lot better in the past.


So it's tricky.


I hope that you will have a chance


to just take a look at the site.


And any input that you could give us


would be very helpful to kind of work out what happened.


Sure.


I'll take a look.


OK, let me pause the recording here.


For those of you watching the recording,


thanks for sticking around.


And thank you for everyone who submitted questions


along the way.


I'll still be here a little bit afterwards if any of you


want to stay and chat a little bit longer.


And otherwise, I wish you all a great weekend.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

What's this?


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Hello, and welcome to another JavaScript SEO Office Hours.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Today we have two questions from YouTube,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

and then I'll open the floor for questions


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

from the audience today.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Thanks, everyone who joined today.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

For those who joined live, you can


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

use the chat or the Raise Hand feature,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

or you can just unmute yourself and ask a question if you wish.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

For those of you who are new to the JavaScript SEO Office


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Hours, I do them roughly every two weeks.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

I try to iterate between different time zones


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

or accommodate to different time zones.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

And there will be a YouTube community post on our channel


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

where you can ask your questions asynchronously,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

or you can join the recordings by going to the link


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

that we add to the community posts whenever


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

the episode goes live, like the recording starts.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Sweet.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Today we have two questions.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

First question comes from Ricardo Campachi.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

I hope that I pronounced that correctly.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

He is asking about the differences between raw HTML


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

and rendered HTML and if that could cause crawling problems.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

No, it has not much to do with crawling,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

but I see where you're coming from.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

And they give an example saying, for instance,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

using JavaScript to insert links inside the HTML


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

rendered after the crawl instead of immediately showing


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

those links already in the raw HTML.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

That could be a problem because Googlebot, for some reason,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

may not be able to locate these links that


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

were inserted via JavaScript.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Right in the video from Aleida, we


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

have this lovely Search Central Lightning


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

talk about the web almanac.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

And he links to that.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

She specifically talks about the raw HTML versus rendered HTML.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

My question is, assuming that JavaScript has been implemented


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

correctly, could this discrepancy between raw HTML


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

and rendered HTML really be that problematic?


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

No.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Normally, no.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Because if that were the case, then the obvious consequence


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

would be to advise against using client-side JavaScript


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

unless you really can't do without it.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

To be honest, that's generally a good advice nonetheless


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

because JavaScript is really expensive on the client side


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

and also less predictable on the client side.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

So it's not a bad suggestion to suggest that.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

And the thing is, my opinion on the raw HTML versus rendered


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

HTML topic is that there are no strong reasons


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

to avoid creating or adding, inserting, removing,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

changing content with JavaScript in the HTML


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

and the rendered HTML.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

That's perfectly fine.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

That's exactly why we are rendering.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

That's the whole purpose of the rendering step.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

There are, however, certain scenarios


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

where that is not a great idea and can cause problems.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

One scenario being, if I have a huge site


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

and I am basically limited by crawl budget for my site


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

and I want new pages to be picked up as quickly as


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

possible, then we are looking in the raw HTML already


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

as a first step for links that we could push back


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

to crawling so we can discover, not crawl, not index,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

not rank, discover links quicker.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

And then after rendering, we do that again.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

So if your links only show up after rendering,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

then that might cause a few hours delay


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

until we discover the link and can queue it for crawling.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

So if you are really concerned about that,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

then make sure that the links you really, really care about


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

are in the rendered, sorry, are in the raw HTML


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

as well as the rendered HTML.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Another case where JavaScript content or JavaScript generated


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

content can interfere with us or with search engines in general


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

is when you change information such as meta tags or canonicals


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

and create a misleading situation.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

So to give you an example, link rel canonical.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Let's say we see one URL, let's say example.com slash yolo


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

in the raw HTML as the canonical.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

But then in the rendered HTML, this example.com slash


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

products question mark id 123, both pointing


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

to the same content.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

But now we are getting mixed signals,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

because depending on how quickly,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

so things are happening in parallel in Google Search,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

on our infrastructure anyway.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

So the canonical extraction might happen multiple times.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

And then we might have one canonical


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

that you submit in the raw HTML and then


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

a completely different one in the rendered HTML.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Now, which is the one that we should pick?


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

We don't know.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

There's no right and wrong answer here,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

because maybe it's the rendered HTML that is correct,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

but maybe that one is actually an accident


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

and the raw HTML is the right one.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Then we basically are weakening the signal


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

that we're getting anyway, so we might decide for a completely


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

different canonical whatsoever.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Or just like flip-flop between both of them,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

which makes reporting in Google Search Console really hard.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

So that's not a problem per se, but it leads to problems.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

So you want to avoid sending us mixed signals.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Another thing is that if you are dealing with


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

or if you're changing the meta robots with JavaScript,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

that might have unforeseen or unexpected consequences.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

So for instance, if your raw HTML contains index and follow


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

meta robots, and then you change that to no index with


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

JavaScript, that's fine, because we will see the page,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

we will render it, and then the rendered version


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

has a no index, so we will not index that.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

You're good.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

But the other way around, when you


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

have a no index in the initial HTML, in the raw HTML,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

and not in the rendered HTML, we won't even


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

get to the rendered version, because we


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

are getting the raw HTML.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

We look at the no index, and we're like,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

oh, this page doesn't want to be in the index,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

so we don't even render it.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

So we will never see that the JavaScript removes


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

that no index.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

And then it doesn't work as you want.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

It's like, well, but why?


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

The no index is being removed by JavaScript,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

but somehow Google still sees a no index.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Yeah, that's precisely because there


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

is a no index in the raw HTML.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

So there are lots of edge cases like this


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

where this can be problematic.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

But for instance, changing title tags or meta descriptions


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

or whatnot, it's fine.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Adding links, removing links, changing links with JavaScript,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

all of that is generally fine.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

There is no hard and fast rule to say that's a problem.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

It was just interesting.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

We wanted to see how much of a difference JavaScript makes.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

That's just an interesting fact.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

That's why it wasn't the WebAlmanac.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

It was an interesting question.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

It's like, oh, so we noticed that a bunch of content


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

changes with JavaScript.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

That's no valuation or no judgment there.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

It's just like, oh, that's an interesting observation.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Similar to how it was observed how hreflang implementations


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

are different on mobile than they are on desktop.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Is that a problem?


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Maybe.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Maybe not.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

So it's no judgment statement there.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

It's just like a finding that they


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

made when they were running the analysis for WebAlmanac.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

And I think it's interesting to see


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

that JavaScript is actively being used to change content,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

but it's not a problem per se.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

We, as in Google Search, are working well with JavaScript.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

There shouldn't be any major issues with that.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Now, there's this entire other conversation


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

to be had about should you use JavaScript on the client side


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

for all sorts of things that you could do without it.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

My opinion is no, because usually it


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

has a performance impact.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

And that is potentially something


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

that you want to avoid, I would say.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Awesome.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Then we have a question from AJ.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Galiwale?


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

I'm sorry if I butchered your name.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

I'm trying.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

When a publisher implements AdSense JavaScript code,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

it shows more problems on the mobile page speed tool


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

than before adding AdSense.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

So it affects basic web performance


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

and increases bounce rate, which will affect SEO.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

It is really strange that one Google service is not following


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

the basic speed test guidelines.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Do you have suggestions for publishers


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

using AdSense JavaScript code to improve?


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

That's a question for the AdSense team,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

not really for me.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

It's not strange to see that.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

It's just what happens.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Even Google products are not an exception.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Why would we give preferential treatment to Google products?


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

If it would be a third-party ad network that is not performing


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

up to best practices, we would do the same thing.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

So the Google products are no exception.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Using a Google product does not mean that it necessarily


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

follows all the guidelines.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

That being said, I'm sure AdSense is using on improving


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

that, not using, it's working on improving that and making sure


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

that your websites won't be hit with performance problems


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

when you are using it.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Definitely reach out to them.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

You probably have an account manager that you can talk to,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

or you just use their support or support forum


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

to check what is their recommendation


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

and what are their best practices


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

to avoid performance issues.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Because I am afraid I am not in the AdSense or ads world.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

With that being said, we have exhausted our YouTube


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

questions.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

I think last time we used the Raise Hands


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

feature, that was nice.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

So if you want to do that, or if you


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

want to use the messages in the chat,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

feel free to ask me questions.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

The floor is yours.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Yeah.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Dave is raising his hand.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

AUDIENCE 1 Hi, yeah.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Looking at your inspection tool, when


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

you're inspecting something, not a live one,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

but seeing what's done, sometimes you'll


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

see the results.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

You can open up, you can look at the results,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

and you'll see the same kind of other errors and things.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Are the reasons for those, could they just be sometimes


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

a map render Google thing?


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

I don't actually need to get that.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

I tend to see a lot of things like images.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

That's still recorded as another error?


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Or does other error mean that actually we


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

wanted to get this results at this time,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

but we couldn't for whatever reason?


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

MARTIN SPLITTENBERG Very good question.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Thank you very much.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Normally, the other error is something


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

that just is a transitive thing.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

And especially with images and certain resources,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

like tracking pixels or ads, we usually


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

don't fetch them.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

So for images, for instance, image search fetches them,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

and they have their own system of how they do that.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

So we are acknowledging that there


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

is an image, the alt text that is attached to it


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

and where it is positioned on the page,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

but we don't really necessarily directly care


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

for the image content.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

That's a matter of image search then.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

So not fetching images with another error, that's OK.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

That's not nothing that you need to worry about.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Same goes with non-essential resources,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

such as tracking pixels and ads and stuff.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

If you see one that persists for quite a while,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

it's worthwhile checking what's happening on the server.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

If it gets requested, if it gets requested, what happens then?


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Does it time out?


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Is it taking a very long time?


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

But normally, you would then get a more helpful and specific


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

error than other error.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Very, very good question.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

All right.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Any more questions?


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

A few people contemplating.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Again, you can also use the chat if that is


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

more comfortable or convenient.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

If there are no further questions,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

then I'll use the opportunity to ring the bell for tomorrow's


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Twitch stream at, I think it's 5 PM CEST,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

so Central European Summer Time or Daylight Savings Time,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

where I will get back into robots.txt parsing for Node.js.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

I'm slightly nervous about that, but it'll be probably fine.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

We'll live.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Oh, Mihai, yes.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

I thought of one.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

So I'm curious whether is it a problem if, for a website that


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

uses different mobile and desktop,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

it serves different mobile and desktop HTML,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

and the way it builds the HTML might use JavaScript,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

might not use JavaScript based on whether it's


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

mobile or desktop.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

If it's trying to do that without necessarily detecting


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

the viewport but the user agent instead.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

So serve, even if the viewport is a desktop viewport


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

but the user agent is detected as being, for example,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Googlebot smartphone and serves the mobile version,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

can that lead to any issues, or should the viewport


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

be always taken into account when deciding whether to serve


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

a separate mobile version?


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

I think that doesn't really make a difference as long


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

as the content is there and probably roughly


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

equivalent to what you want to see.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Obviously, if we are not seeing content on both the desktop


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

version and the mobile version because you're always serving


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

as the mobile version and that one is incomplete,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

then we won't be seeing that specific part of the content,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

and we might be missing part of the link graph of the page.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

But in general, it should not be a huge issue.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

I would recommend taking the viewport into account


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

because sometimes weird things happen.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

I remember a couple of years back,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

I was working from my phone using a Bluetooth keyboard


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

and then an external screen that I was casting to


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

and then getting mobile versions of everything,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

even though my viewport was gigantic because it wasn't,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

I think, a 32-inch screen or 35-inch screen


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

even because it was a TV.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

It wasn't an actual screen.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

That was annoying, but it's not a Google problem specifically.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Good question.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

OK, so the user agent should be enough to take into account


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

when serving, when using separate mobile version


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

and serving the mobile version.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

For us, that should be account.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

In general, I would argue that you


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

should do viewport detection rather than user detection.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Yeah.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

And one more thing regarding what you mentioned earlier,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

links and generating links and adding them post


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

after the raw HTML is being served.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

If only a part of these links are served through the raw HTML


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

and another part is served client-side JavaScript


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

rendering, can that generate any issues at any point?


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

No, no.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

As I said, the only thing is that we will discover them


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

later in the indexing run.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

So basically, we crawl, we discover links


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

in the raw HTML, then the page needs to be rendered,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

and then we are discovering the links that


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

are being JavaScript injected.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

For small pages, for small sites with less than, I would say,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

a million to 10 million pages, if you are lower than that


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

with the amount of pages that you've got,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

you will never, ever run into problems.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

And even the larger ones might only


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

occasionally run into the problem


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

that links get discovered later than they want to.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

So no problem besides link discovery delay.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Right.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

These links in question are actually


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

part of the main navigation.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

So they usually don't change in terms of,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

so the discovery wouldn't necessarily be a problem.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

I'm just curious whether it would


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

be a problem in terms of how they pass ranking signals


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

and everything else.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

OK.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

So it's all the same.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Yeah.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

That sounds good.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Oh, Jacqueline was posting a follow-up question.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Are we talking about dynamic serving, looking at UA,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

WRS, caches, resources?


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

And that's OK, but do you cache URL using UA as a key?


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

That's a question that I love the questions that


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

are coming, because that's a question that I


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

don't have the answer to.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

And that means that you've just given me


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

a task for the next couple of days,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

because I think they might have separate caches,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

but I don't know.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Because caching does happen within the crawling


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

infrastructure, but I don't.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Actually, no.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

No, no.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

That's not true.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

That specific cache that we are talking about,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

because you're talking about WRS, WRS has its own cache,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

which is interesting, because so the architect, just


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

like spinning the beans a little bit,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

the architecture is roughly that there is the WRS, which


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

caches nothing and has no network interactions whatsoever.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

And then there's like a layer around it.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

That's what the, I can't say the name,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

but it's larger than the WRS.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

The WRS really is just the rendering service.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

And then there's like a slightly bigger layer on top of it,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

and that actually has prioritization, error retry,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

quality of service guarantees, caching,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

and it also interacts with the crawling subsystem


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

to actually fetch things.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

And I don't exactly know how this caching layer,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

this caching component of that larger thing that


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

wraps around WRS is actually organizing its cache.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

So that's a really good question.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

I would expect it to be different per UA,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

but I don't know if it is.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Very good question.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

It's an implementation detail in the end, but it's a good one.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

It's like I'm interested in these things,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

so very good one.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Sweet.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Ladies and gents, yeah, here we go.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

So one last one.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

One thing that I have seen is back to the canonical tag


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

being changed and stuff like that.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

One thing I did see that I thought sounds a bit wrong


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

is that the initial HTML that the developers had done,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

sent out, contained an empty canonical tag that then got


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

filled in.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

That seems like that could be a bit of a disaster,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

but would that actually cause trouble?


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Would Google see that the initial HTML canonical tag was


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

emptying out?


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

That sounds like nothing.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Let me fill it in.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

I mean, to me, it sounds the best.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

It's just not tagged on at all if you can't prefix it in.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

I would be with you on that one, because I don't exactly


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

know how we're doing this, but I think we are resolving URLs.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

And if the URL is empty, it might just basically


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

self-canonicalize.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

And if that's what you want, you're probably OK off.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

You might not fall into a hole with that.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

But if that's not your intention,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

then you might have just given us


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

the situation where you basically just have a URL,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

even though you didn't, and then just change it.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

So you're back in a bad space.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

I would argue, yeah, you're right.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

It's probably better to not have a canonical tag.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

I mean, if you are changing it anyways,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

that means that you're navigating the DOM tree


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

to find the canonical tag and then place the value on it.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

What's the difference in terms of just creating


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

that canonical tag and injecting it into the DOM tree?


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

So I would argue that that's probably a safer solution.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

AUDIENCE MEMBER 1 Yeah.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

OK.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Thank you, Martin.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

MARTIN SPLITTMANN Very good question.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Thanks, Dave.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

All right.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Hold on.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

There is, ah, hi, Dito.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

So any questions in the chat or use the Raise Hand feature?


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

We're slowly wrapping things up.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

I don't know.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Let me check YouTube one more time,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

because sometimes questions do arrive here after the fact,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

after we go on with five comments.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

I think that might.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

No, that has been me.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Never mind.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Ooh.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

OK.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

There's just chit chat in the chat right now.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Let's see, Twitter.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Does Twitter have any follow-up questions?


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

I got one more.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Yeah.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

I don't remember how close the mobile-friendly test


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

tool is to the URL inspection tool in Search Console.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

This is slightly related to JavaScript, I guess,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

in the sense that we're working on a project


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

where the main crawler is still the Google desktop crawler.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

And I've noticed that this is likely


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

because of some issues with certain links that, on mobile,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

aren't being rendered or loaded in any way.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

So I assume this is one of the reasons why


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

we're in the last batch of being moved over


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

to the mobile crawler.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

And within the URL inspection tool,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

so the developers have implemented some fixes in order


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

to try to render the correct links as similar to desktop


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

as possible.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

So trying to see if everything works OK on Google's end,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

especially with these kind of user agent-related changes


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

that they've done.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

I'm still seeing the URL inspection test,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

a live test result. It's still the desktop view.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

And I assume, unless we're being moved over


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

to the mobile crawler, we're going


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

to see the desktop result regardless of what we do.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

So is the mobile-friendly test result


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

a good alternative to use in order


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

to see if Googlebot is seeing what we want it to see?


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Yeah.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

So it's quite interesting.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

There's a pipeline called the Single URL Inspection


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Tools, or SUT, depending on who you ask, I would say, SUT,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

which is kind of unified.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

And the way that it works is so the rich results test


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

and the mobile-friendly test, as well as the URL inspection


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

tool and the live test, are all using that pipeline.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Now, the mobile-friendly test, by its sheer purpose,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

always uses the mobile crawler, because that makes sense


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

in that specific case.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

The URL inspection test gives you whatever happened in actual


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

like the view crawl page gives you whatever happened


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

in the actual indexing run.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

So that's either mobile or desktop,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

depending on if you're in the mobile-first index or not.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

And the URL inspection tool live test,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

because it wants to show you specifically


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

what would happen if the indexing pipeline would run,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

uses also that setting, like depending on if your site is


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

switched over to MFI or not.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

It might just give you the desktop or the mobile one.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Rich results test lets you choose,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

because there, making it always desktop or making it always


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

mobile doesn't make sense, because you might


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

have different versions of your patient.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

You might want to see both of them.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

But they're all basically, once you're through the interface,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

they're pretty much all the same,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

just with different settings.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

MIHAI APERGHISLOOO-MUNDEZ-SINGH CAMPBELLO-MUNDEZ-SINGH


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

But with the rich results tool, doesn't, I mean,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

once you're moved over to the mobile crawler,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

doesn't the rich results and structured data


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

interpretation, isn't it always based on the mobile version?


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Yes.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

But that you would see in the URL inspection tool,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

in the rich results testing tool,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

in the rich results test.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

That's what I was speaking about.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

You can choose.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

You can always choose.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Yeah, but why?


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Because you might want to see what happens in desktop.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

But Google wouldn't use the structured data that's,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

even if it's different, wouldn't Google still


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

use the mobile structured data even for desktop snippets?


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

No, no, no, it would not.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

But you might still want to see what the desktop crawler sees


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

and what the mobile crawler sees, especially


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

if you're in the transition period between MFI and not.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Sure.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

But once you're on the mobile crawler,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

so you can still expect somewhat amount


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

of crawling from the desktop?


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

I would think so, yeah.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Yeah.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

At least for a transition period,


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

I'm not sure if we will ever stop it at some point.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

But I'm pretty sure for a while we'll not


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

stop crawling with desktop.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Cool.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

All right.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Any other questions?


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Sorry, Lynn.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

In which case, ladies and gents, it has been a huge pleasure.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Thanks so much for joining me.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Thanks for everyone watching this wonderful video.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

I'll put this video up probably later today.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

And then we will see each other again next week.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

No, sorry, in two weeks.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Awesome.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Thanks a lot.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Stay safe.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Stay healthy, everybody.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Bye.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Cheers, Martin.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021

Cheers.


JS SEO office hours April 21, 2021


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Why don't developers know the basic practices for technical SEO?


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Why does SEO matter for us developers?


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Why don't developers follow the documented best practices?


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Why can't SEOs give us technical guidance?


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Hello and welcome everybody to a new episode of SEOs and Developers.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

My guest today is Ruth Mesfun and she is a software engineer at Zillow based on the East


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Coast of the US.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And I saw her as a public speaker and I'm really, really excited to talk a little bit


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

about her experience with the SEO world from a developer's perspective.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Ruth is also the owner of a super cool one of a kind painting that lives on the wall


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

of her apartment.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Hi, I'm with Martin Schblitt who works as a developer advocate in search relations for


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Google.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

He lives in Switzerland and he has a big personality and loves to dive.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Ruth, I'm super excited to have you here.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

I saw you at a, I think it was React Next Summit where you gave a talk on SEO for developers


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

and specifically I think you focused on ReactJS.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Was that right?


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Yeah, in regards to mobile first indexing.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Yeah.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Right.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Yes.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

That was super, super cool.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And I was so elated when I saw that because I see so very few non-SEO people talk about


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

SEO, especially in developer circles.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

So it was very refreshing to see you do that.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And what was the experience you had giving that talk?


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Did a bunch of people say like, Ooh, I didn't know that and that was interesting and exciting?


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Or were you met with like suspicion or what happened?


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Like did you get any feedback on that?


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Yeah, I didn't have any feedback in regards to suspicion.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

A bunch of feedback was mainly, it was like, Oh, I didn't know it was that easy.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Like, Oh, I already know this stuff kind of thing, but they didn't realize that actually


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

connected with SEO.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

So it was great to essentially like build a bridge, if that makes sense.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

It makes perfect sense because this is exactly why this video series exists because I think


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

this bridge needs to be built and it hasn't been built not only specifically to specific


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

topics like mobile first indexing or client side rendering, server side rendering, all


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

that kind of stuff.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

But I think also in general, like between our two professions or like the two sides


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

of the coin, one being SEO and the other one being development or engineering, there isn't


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

as much of a bridge.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

I breached into this space in 2018 when I joined Google and it was tricky to even get


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

developers interested in SEO.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

So what got you interested in SEO?


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

It was actually really funny.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

So at a previous job I was in, we were hearing about this mobile first indexing, but didn't


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

really get into it.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

We're like, okay, whatever.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And we had other projects to do until someone said, wait, I think that mobile first indexing


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

or mobile first is going to mess up our index ranking because we don't do mobile first and


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

we have like a separate page for mobile.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And so when we were looking into it, we were like, oh my God, yes.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And then at the time Google's deadline was September and it was already end of July.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And we're like, ah, we got to get this done.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Oh my.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

That was the reason why, especially since where I was working was like a marketplace


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

essentially.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

So we didn't realize how heavily reliant we were on Google searches.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

So yeah, our users would search for us on Google and most of the time, and that's how


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

they got to our site.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

We thought that it was just like word of mouth or I don't actually, honestly, I didn't even


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

think about how they came to our site.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And then having like a big change in the way that Google and other search engines work,


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

then probably becomes a surprise priority.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Yeah, yeah, it was definitely a surprise priority for our team.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And I mean, I've worked as a developer for over a decade at this point.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And I've experienced that where like out of the blue, someone from the marketing department


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

comes in and said, we have an SEO problem that we need to fix.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And then oftentimes they have a really hard time even formulating it.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

So the fact that you started with knowing that you were looking for mobile first indexing


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

is already very nice because oftentimes it's just like, we have an SEO problem.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

It's like, what is it?


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

We don't know, but we have an SEO problem.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

It's like, oh, great.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And then you need to figure out what you don't know.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

It's like, how do I search for we have an SEO problem?


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

How am I going to get a meaningful search query for this?


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

But where did you then take to, like what kind of resources did you look to in terms


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

of figuring out what you need to do and what is like the supposed best practice and what's


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

the solution to the challenge you were facing?


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

How did you go about this journey of figuring out what you need to do next?


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Yeah, so I really like front end in general.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

So I naturally gravitated to, oh, yeah, I'll do research on SEO for my team and be one


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

of the experts.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

I'm going to put in quotation experts because there's no way I'm an expert at SEO.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

But to be well informed to explain it to my team and whatnot.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And honestly, the webmasters videos, like I watched almost all of Google's SEO videos.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Oh, wow.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Yeah, because I was like, all right, well, they're the ones who are setting this whole


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

mobile first indexing thing.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

So they must be like the experts if they're the ones doing it.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And so I watched the videos, which was great.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

So even like y'all's like quarterly or I think it used to be monthly videos of like what's


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

going on and what's the updates.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

I'd watch those.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And then all the best practices that you Google put for mobile first as well.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

I read those up.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And also had like a couple of resources in regards to the difference between desktop


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

first versus mobile first, because I think a couple of the rules or guidance guidelines


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

changed a little bit because it was mobile first now.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

So yeah, but honestly, I just went straight to Google for everything.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Because since you were the, well, not you, Martin.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

It wasn't me.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

But since Google was the one who stated that they were going to make it mobile first indexing


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

only, I figured they were the most expert in SEO for what we were looking for.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Interesting.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

I mean, it's very flattering to hear that you watch all the videos and you probably


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

are a fan of Google Search News at this point.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

John is going to be really excited about that as well.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

But it's quite interesting that you went straight to, well, the source as far as it goes there.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Because a bunch of people are not.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And especially developers oftentimes are like, ah, how hard can this be?


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

We don't really need to do any research.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

We'll just fudge our way through it.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

So it's really, really cool to hear that you went with that.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And did you have any experience of looking at third party sources that said other things?


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Or did we have any holes where you're like, oh, there's information missing?


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

That's actually the main reason why, honestly, I went straight to the source.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

It's boring as that might sound of like, oh, go to if you literally Google mobile first


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

indexing and you find webmasters, Google, click that.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

The reason why was because there was a lot of misinformation with third parties.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

So for instance, I had a product manager who came up and was like, oh, no, we can't do


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

accordions or this or this or this because that's going to hide the data and it's not


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

going to show.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And I didn't read that on the mobile first indexing.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

That doesn't make sense.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Oh, I saw it on this article.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

So I read the article and I was like, well, this article seems like it's a couple of years


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

old.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And this looks like they are talking about desktop and not mobile first.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

So this might be at a date.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And just like and I think some people ran with that article essentially and wrote their


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

own articles of what the complications of mobile first.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And I was like, no, you can still they're trying to make sure that they're more forgiving


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

because it's mobile first.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And there's like such a compact screen now that it doesn't make sense that they're going


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

to say no accordions, no this.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

It's more of like, oh, like as long as you're doing server side rendering, it's populating


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

data, like all this stuff.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Like it's more forgiving because it's mobile first.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And so looking through and going back to the source, which was Google, I was able to tell


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

them like debunk that statement or that resource essentially.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Yeah.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

But that's really, really nice because oftentimes information used to be correct and then things


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

change or people looked at one specific aspect and then generalized that too much.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

That does happen.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

That happens all the time.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

That happens in development too, where people are like, you cannot test, I don't know, Angular


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

code.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And it's like, well, actually you can.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

You just have to know how.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And yeah, I don't know.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

It's good to hear that we could debunk some of that stuff.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

That's nice.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

But to be honest, I would just wish because if you think about it and if you look at what


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

you discovered and what people have said, it's like a lot of it, there are some aspects


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

that are kind of rocket science, but a bunch of it is relatively easy to grasp concepts


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

and best practices.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And yet most developers don't really pay attention to it or don't care about SEO.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Do you have any idea where that could come from?


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Why don't they just know these things?


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Because I think all of us know how to make a semantic link and what semantic HTML is


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

supposed to look like and what the latest JavaScript feature is and where it's useful


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

and how it works and what's the syntax for it.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

But these kind of basic concepts seem to be missing in the development world.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

So a couple of things.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

I think there's like two or three points in regards to that.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

So one, I don't think every essentially developer knows about JavaScript and like semantics


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

and structures and whatnot.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

I would assume that most or if not all front end engineers should, but not all software


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

developers.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Fair enough.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And then the second thing is I honestly, I didn't realize the importance of SEO until


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

we completed our SEO project to be mobile first.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And then our product manager in the market, actually the marketing team sent it to our


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

product manager and the product manager told us like, oh, we had a huge increase of views


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

on our site and which converted into like an increase in sales or revenue.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And they're like, well, and when they showed us like the graph, it literally made it a


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

nice incline right at the time we shipped our project essentially or turned on the feature


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

flag so it was used and we're like, oh, this is important.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And I don't think it's, yeah, it was great.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And I don't think it was just because of SEO to be honest.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

I think a lot of the things we did was made our pages more performant, made it more user


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

friendly, made it more accessible.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And those are actually the like big three items or key items when it comes to SEO and


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

mobile first indexing.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Exactly.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Like you shouldn't, and there's like two things that I want to tag onto.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

One is it's very interesting you say that like, oh yeah, we didn't just do things for


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

SEO purposes.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

We did things for the user and that was rewarded in search engines, which is exactly what we


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

want.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Like a search engine tries to find the best possible experience and the best possible


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

answer to a query from a user and present sites that are good for the user to fulfill


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

whatever intention they had with a query they entered into the search engine.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

So making it better for the user is usually also equal to making it better for search


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

engines.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And the other thing is, was that like the first time this kind of information like,


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

hey, here's the thing you did, here's the impact, was that the first kind of opportunity


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

where they brought back impact information to the changes you made?


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Or is that something that only sales normally does?


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

We're like, oh, you've deployed this new feature and it has gotten us this amount of customers


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

that we didn't have, or like this amount of revenue that we didn't have before.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Or does that happen more often or does it happen more often but not with SEO?


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Do you usually get to see the impact of your work?


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Yeah, so for all of our projects, we always get to see the impact afterwards.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

It's not rewarding if we don't, at least for me it's not rewarding.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

100% agree.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Yeah.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Regardless of if it's revenue or like use, ease of use because of that feature or increase


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

of review ratings or whatnot.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

But for the SEO one, like honestly, I did not expect, I don't know why I didn't think


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

of it, but I honestly didn't expect that we were going to get a result so quickly or any


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

real result.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

I just thought, oh, this is going to help with SEO.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

That's going to increase traffic eventually.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Or at the minimum case, keep it at the same, which was actually our goal was like, let's


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

not deprecate or decrease our index rating was like our actual goal.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

So the fact that it not only, like we like not only kept it or we not only we didn't


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

get it deprecated or like decrease our ranking, like it looked like it had like a positive


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

effect.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And in regards to our users, so.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Nice.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And to be honest, I'm not blaming you for not expecting or anticipating that, but it's


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

something that I find interesting.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

So like the SEO team doesn't usually like, or let me, let me rephrase the question.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

How often before did the SEO team interact with the engineering side of things?


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Not that much.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Okay.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

That's interesting.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

That seems to be like the underlying systemic issue between developers and SEOs that there


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

is like this weird gap and there's not that much collaboration or information sharing.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And that's really, really unfortunate because oftentimes SEOs tell me that they are kind


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

of fighting the development and a team like, Oh, they, they want to roll out this thing


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

and they screw us up.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And then we have to clean up after them for like a month.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And I'm like, but did you talk to them beforehand?


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Well, they didn't talk to us beforehand.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And I'm like, ah, so no one wants to talk to anyone at any capacity or time, which is


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

like super unfortunate.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And I feel like this is close to the root cause of the issue where developers don't


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

care that much about SEO or don't even know about SEO, right?


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

I think that it's mostly of a combination of the developers don't know about SEO or,


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

and a like don't understand the value or the importance.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And then I would also say there's a third thing of like not realizing how easy to do


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

that either SEO practices or run through if like the feature you're building or developing


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

might be performant or like not performant, which would actually cause a decrease in SEO


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

and a decrease in performance in your site, which is not good.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Fair enough.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Yeah.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

So I think those are the combinations.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

If it's something that deals with, in my opinion, if it's something that deals with main pages


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

on the site that is going to be searchable on Google, right?


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Then that's something that should like during the roadmap or design doc or PRD, like the


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

SEO person, SEO manager or expert should come in and look into and get their feedback on


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

it.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Just so, cause it's just so hard as a developer that you build this feature and then you come,


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

you have to come back to fix it.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

You want to hopefully be able to complete the first iteration of it before having to


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

fix bugs ideally.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And then I think the second thing is in regards to it is there's like a couple of tools that


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

developers can actually utilize to see if that feature is going to be performant or


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

not, or at least use it while you're building this feature.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And then eventually you'll like develop a muscle where you could kind of feel that this


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

is going to be like a performant feature.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

So Lighthouse was super useful on that.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

The web platform team built a script around Lighthouse.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

So whenever you built like a feature and it has like a feature flag, you can run the script


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

like 500 times with that feature flag on or off and off to see the difference of performance


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

between the what's already on PRD versus what you're going to push through essentially or


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

yeah.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And so we're able to see, Oh, this is like, this is going to make a, which is always the


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

happy person or this is going to make things better.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Like, like LCP is lower.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

This is great.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

It's true.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Yeah.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

I think it's important to integrate that in your workflow as developers so that it kind


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

of becomes a natural part of your work and you see the impact as often as possible.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Right.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Or, yeah, exactly.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Or there's, I forgot what it's called.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

I think it's called bundle phobia.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

So whenever introducing new packages or if someone's like, Oh, I love this package of


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

like a graph package, for instance, of building graphs or whatnot, I always go to a bundle


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

phobia to see how large the package size is because if it's too large, right, even if


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

it is a great package, like that's going to actually decrease our performance and it will


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

increase load and it won't give a great user experience, which can also mess with our index


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

rating or SEO score.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And it's like, is it worth that?


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

That's a little rocket science.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

I like that.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And I think like rocket science in this case is actually a very apt comparison because


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

in rocket science, you have this issue that you want more thrust, so you need to add more


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

fuel, but more fuel means more weight and more weight means you need more thrust.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And then there's like the sweet spot where adding more fuel actually gives you more thrust


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

and not so much weight that it's like offsetting negatively, but eventually just adding fuel


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

just means that the thrust you gain from the extra fuel is not as big as it needs to be


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

to actually offset the fuel that you added.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And then you get negative increase or a negative benefit from it and you actually lose performance.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And it's similar to that with packages.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

It's like, oh, we need graphs.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And then you're like, oh, okay, shit, we need a thing to make graphs now.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

So there's this one package A and then there's the other package B. Both of them allow us


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

to make graphs, but one adds so much more weight to the page that needs to go through


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

the wire and only adds this little feature of graphs where the other one is smaller and


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

also adds this little feature.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

So you should go for that one.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

But that's the smaller one package B that is smaller does not necessarily make it easier


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

for developers.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Like the other one might be the more comfortable for developers and then developers gravitate


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

towards the wrong choice.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Yeah, that's actually what happened with us.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

It was like we saw this package A had all the bells and whistles.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Package A was also ten times the size and Web Platform was like, no, we're not doing


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

this.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And then we did package B. It was still a little large, but not as large as package


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

A. And we were like, uh, performance still, we weren't feeling comfortable.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

So then we just built the graph ourself because it was a bar graph.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

We're like, it's just a bar graph.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

We don't need all of this.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And no package means lighter.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

So this is great.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Yes, good performance culture right there because I've felt I fell into this trap so


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

many times was like, oh, that this library is really nice and it makes everything go


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

so fast and easy.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

But then you see like, oh, but it's actually dragging down our performance.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And unless there's a performance culture where someone keeps you accountable for that, it


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

kind of just happens.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And then the website just grows and bloats.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

So that's really cool.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

That's really nice.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

You said something about low hanging fruit that you didn't know about.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Is that something that you would have hoped for or expected the SEO team to reach out


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

to you that they like, because they probably knew about these low hanging fruit, but they


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

didn't necessarily communicate them or maybe they didn't know about them.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Would you want SEO teams to be more proactive when it comes to like, oh, there's like the


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

small change that you can make that has this huge impact and this positive impact?


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Is that something that you would expect help from your SEO experts with?


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Yeah, I think that would be super helpful on if we hear what the low hanging fruit is


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

and we can tell you if that is actually really simple and easy or not.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

So most of the time it is.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

It's like, oh, OK, I just need to like update, add, I just need to add like lazy loading


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

for all the images.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Right.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

That's really easy to do.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

That's true.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

That's easy to do.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Lazy loading is a perfect example of that.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Yeah, we are trying to give guidance to SEOs in our documentation for like low hanging


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

fruits, but it's tricky because low hanging fruits for one project and one tech stack


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

might not necessarily be low hanging fruit for the others.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

So again, I think there needs to be a dialogue.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

I think it's perfectly fine if an SEO comes like, hey, this thing would have a big impact.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

How hard is it to do this?


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And then you are the experts on the engineering side, so you can evaluate if it's a low hanging


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

fruit or not.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

So again, there needs to be a dialogue, I guess.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Yeah.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

I also think that though I don't know how if this is something that like every team


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

can do, but I think it was really helpful that I was really excited about SEO.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

I'm usually excited for SEO and accessibility.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Yeah, so because of that, I was almost like a liaison kind of thing of like being able


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

to connect like, oh, what are the SEO best practices and be able to translate it to the


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

team and they'd be able to go to me.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And since I already have like a strong relationship with my teammates, it was like the trust was


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

already there.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And then what they did afterwards was they actually added like an SEO expert within the


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

team because we dealt with all the essentially all of our pages were pages that were searchable


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

for Google.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

So they're like, oh, you need to like a kind of like an SEO expert.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

So they actually added an SEO member to our team.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

So like he was essentially our go-to person for questions.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

I think that's really, really cool.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And I would love to see that more often because I think this liaison that you built and then


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

the SEO expert in your team, that's a very, very essential thing.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And I think it requires to a certain degree.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

I'm not sure about your SEO expert that you got in your team.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

It is helpful if that person is at least technically inclined or has an interest in development


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

and engineering.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

I guess it works if they don't, but I don't know how it was in your case.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Did they also know bits and pieces about development, not necessarily being developed for themselves?


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

I don't think that he necessarily knew pieces of development.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

It's kind of like a product manager.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Like if it's not like a non-technical product manager might not know all the technical aspects


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

they rely on us, but will say like, this is what I want or this is why we need this and


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

this is why this is important.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And then it's the developer who pushes back saying, I think this is going to be like a


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

higher complexity.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Or can we do it this way to achieve the same goal?


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

I see.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Yeah.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

That's interesting because I always assumed that for this to work, they have to have at


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

least some technical knowledge.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

But I guess if you look at it from a product manager's perspective, it doesn't have to


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

be.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

It's perfectly fine.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Yeah, that's interesting.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

That's really, really cool.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

That's really, really interesting.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

The other thing that I was wondering is, you said like, oh, it was interesting and it's


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

like rewarding to me to see the impact of my work and to find out about these low hanging


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

fruits.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

So what you're saying is, just to make sure that I understood that correctly, what you're


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

saying is developers generally are interested in the impact of their work in terms of SEO


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

and doing SEO work for the benefits that you can reap by doing it.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

I'll do it based on essentially, I'm not going to generalize it, but I'll say based on myself


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

and my team and the teams I've worked in in the past and currently actually, is we are


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

very invested in our users.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

We are user driven, user centric.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Basically about our users and wanting them to get whatever need they are, whatever our


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

goal is, essentially is allow our users to easily use our apps or our page and do the


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

thing that they wanted to do on our site.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And so essentially, if that's not happening, we're not doing a good job and we feel bad.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

We're like, oh, we want them to access this.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

This is important.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Or what was the point?


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

So I'm very result driven and I know the teams I've been in have been result driven and that's


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

in a place of the love for the user.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

That's a really nice, oh yeah, I like that statement.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

So I do hope that there's a lot more developers like you and your team who are doing it for


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

the love of the user, which I think is the right attitude to things.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And I think actually, SEOs fundamentally are also doing it for the love of the user, except


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

that they work towards or through a search engine, which I think we are doing it through


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

front end technology.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

So different means for the same end goal.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

So I think we share that end goal.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And I would hope that we would connect more to reach this goal together.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

So yeah, let's hope that this series and these conversations do help to shape the path and


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

more teams to be like this.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Keeping fingers crossed.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Awesome.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Excellent.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Ruth, this has been really, really cool, really interesting.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

I learned a bunch of new stuff, for instance, that having an SEO expert on your team, even


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

if they don't necessarily are technical, is super helpful and can help make these things


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

more visible and share insights into what could be done to improve SEO and then leaving


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

it to the engineering team to figure out how easy or how low hanging this specific thing


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

is.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Thanks a lot for your time.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

Thanks a lot for being here.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And thanks everyone who's watching the video out there.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

I do hope you got something out of it as well.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?

And see you soon for another episode.


Why should you want a SEO-Dev liaison?


English Google SEO office-hours from May 6, 2022

All right.


Hi, everyone, and welcome to this episode


of the Google Search Central SEO Office Hours Hangout.


My name is John Mueller.


I'm a search advocate on the Search Relations team.


And our job is personally to help answer questions


from site owners that come up all around their websites


and around search.


So like last time, we're trying things slightly different


this time.


So I'm still not 100% sure how this will all pan out.


I'd really love your feedback along the way.


This time, I'm recording it before the official Office Hours


session has started.


So nobody else is in this session now,


which is kind of weird.


But we'll see how it goes.


Anyway, the recording, I will try


to focus on the submitted questions.


The episodes that we make are going


to be a little bit shorter, maybe about half as long.


And after the recording is complete,


I'll open things up to kind of general public


as well to kind of ask their questions


all around their website.


And we can try to find things kind


of like outside of the recording to talk about.


The goal of this change is to make it a little bit easier


to digest the recording afterwards.


Shorter is usually a little bit easier.


I'm also simplifying some of the questions


here so that it's a bit easier to understand what


the questions are getting at, assuming


I get at the kind of the right thing what people are actually


asking.


If not, feel free to kind of ask more


in one of the next episodes.


And yeah.


And the other thing I think that I'll do


is kind of like with the previous sessions


when we did these live, if there are questions that


are submitted that are kind of off topic


or go into too much detail, I'll probably end up skipping those.


For those kind of things, I do recommend


going to the official Google Search Central help forums.


There are product experts in the help forums


who can help you to kind of resolve a lot of these topics


and who you can discuss these kinds of issues with.


And there are lots of issues around SEO


where there is no absolute answer.


And sometimes it's just good to talk with other people who've


run into similar questions like that before, who've maybe seen


other sites struggle with that, and to understand


some of the options that are available there so that you can


make a decision what works best for your site.


And your site is different from everyone else's.


And what works well for you might not necessarily


work well for others.


But getting some input there I think is super important.


And also getting input from people


who don't necessarily work at Google who might not


have any of the biases that Google employees would have,


that's also sometimes useful because you get a kind


of a wider range of opinions.


At least that's what I tend to see.


In any case, let's look at some of the questions


that were submitted.


And I'll try to get some answers for you along the way.


All right.


The first one I have is, is there any problem


with using web components for SEO,


or is it OK to use them for my website?


So web components are essentially


a way of using predefined components within a website.


Usually they're integrated with a JavaScript framework.


And the general idea there is that as a web designer,


as a web developer, you work with these existing components.


And you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time something


specific is supposed to happen.


For example, if you need a calendar on one of your pages,


then you could just use a web component for a calendar.


And then you're done.


When it comes to SEO, these web components


are implemented using various forms of JavaScript.


And we can process pretty much most JavaScript


when it comes to Google Search.


And while I would like to say just kind of like blindly,


everything will be supported, you can test this.


And you should test this.


And the best way to test this is in Search Console.


There's the Inspect URL tool.


And there you can insert your URL.


And you will see what Google will render


for that page, the HTML.


You can see it on a screenshot, essentially, first of all,


and then also in the rendered HTML


that you can look at as well.


And you can double check what Google


is able to pick up from your web components.


And if you think that the important information is there,


then probably you're all set.


If you think that some of the important information


is missing, then you can drill down and try


to figure out what is getting stuck there.


And we have a lot of documentation


on JavaScript websites and web search nowadays.


So I would double check that.


Also, Martin Split on my team, he


has written a lot of these documentations.


He's also findable on Twitter.


He sometimes also does office hours


like this where he goes through some of the JavaScript SEO


questions.


So if you're kind of a web developer working on web


components and you're trying to make sure that things are being


done well, I would also check that.


All right.


Is it OK to use the FAQ schema to mark up questions and answers


that appear in different sections of a blog post that


aren't formatted as a traditional FAQ list?


For example, a post maybe has 10 headings


for different sections.


A few of those are questions with answers.


So I double checked the official documentation.


That's where I would recommend you


go for these kinds of questions as well.


And it looks like it's fine.


The important part when it comes to FAQ snippets and structured


data in general is that the content


should be visible on the page.


So it should really be the case that both the question


and the answer is visible when someone visits that page,


not that it's kind of hidden away in a section of a page.


But if the questions and the answers


are visible on the page, even if they're


in different places on the page, that's perfectly fine.


The other thing to keep in mind is that,


like all structured data, FAQ snippets


are not guaranteed to be shown in the search results.


Essentially, you make your pages eligible to have these FAQ


snippets shown.


But it doesn't guarantee that they will be shown.


So you can use a testing tool to make sure that everything


is implemented properly.


And if the testing tool says that's OK,


then probably you're on the right track.


But you will probably still have to kind of wait and see


how Google actually interprets your pages


and processes them to see what is actually


shown in the search results.


And for structured data, I think it's the case for FAQ.


But at least for some of the other types,


there are specific reports in Search Console


as well that give you information


on the structured data that was found


and the structured data that was actually shown in the search


results so that you can kind of roughly gauge,


is it working the way that you want it to


or is it not working the way that you want it to?


And for things like this, I would


recommend trying them out and making a test


page on your website, kind of seeing how things end up


in the search results, double checking if it's really


what you want to do, and then going off


to actually implement it across the rest of your website.


OK, next question is kind of a different one.


Is Google OK with publishers plagiarizing their own content?


For example, I wrote an affiliate article


suggesting something for mom.


Can I copy the content of that article


to write more articles for maybe a sister or a wife


or an aunt or a grandmother?


So I don't know what the full definition of plagiarizing is,


but it seems like if you're reusing your own content,


that's not really plagiarizing, well, at least the way


that I understand it.


From Google's point of view, if you're


taking content from your own website


and publishing that again with some elements of the page


change, that's essentially up to you.


And it's something where my assumption is, in many cases,


you're not providing a lot of value


by just copying the existing article


and changing some of the words on it.


So my feeling is, from a strategic point of view,


probably you would be better suited writing something unique


and compelling for those topics or to create


one article that covers these different variations.


So that's something kind of like from a strategic point of view


that I would recommend.


But purely from a policy point of view,


I don't think there's anything specifically


in the way of you taking individual articles


and then making, I don't know, a handful of copies of that.


So that's something where from a purely practical part of view,