with this kind of a problem, is that they


English Google Webmaster Central office-hours from September 27, 2019

go to an extreme on the category page


in that they include those keywords over and over


and over again.


And what happens in our systems then is we look at this page,


and we see these keywords repeated so often on that page


that we think, well, something is kind of fishy with this page


with regards to these keywords.


Maybe we should be more careful when we show it.


So it might be that you're essentially going down.


Oops.


Jonathan, I think you're presenting your screen.


It might be that you're kind of overdoing it


with the category page in that it would perhaps make sense


to kind of move back a little bit


and say, I will focus my category page on these keywords


and make sure that it's a good page for that,


but not go too far overboard.


So that when we look at this page,


we'll see, well, this is a reasonable page.


There's good content here.


We can show it for these terms.


We don't have to worry about whether or not


someone is trying to unnaturally overdo it with those keywords.


Yeah, makes sense.


And quickly, do you think that obviously backlinks


to that specific category page will help alongside obviously


kind of natural backlinks to the website in general?


Yeah, I mean, that's something that


doesn't cause any problems.


And from our point of view, in general,


backlinks from other websites are something


that we would see as something that would evolve naturally


over time.


So I don't think you'd need to go out


and kind of artificially build backlinks to a category


page like that.


Yeah, yeah, OK.


What I would also do in a case like this


is kind of go with the assumption


that you won't be able to fix this very quickly.


Not that it's impossible, but kind of


assume that it's going to stick around a little bit,


because sometimes our algorithms do take a bit of time to adjust


and find a way to make it so that when users land


on that product page that they realize there's actually


a category page that might be more useful to them.


So something like a small banner or some other visual element


on the page so that when users go to that product page,


they can find their way to the category page fairly easily


so that you don't have to worry about the short-term problem


that maybe the wrong page is ranking.


And in the meantime, you can kind of


work on creating a reasonable solution for the category


page itself.


OK, all right.


Thanks for your help.


Sure.


John, one related question about rich snippets.


OK.


So about final changes in rich snippets,


the last changes in rich snippets.


So if we have a hotel website, if we embed the link


from Google My Business, is it possible to show


this rich result in SERP or not?


If it's a review about your business


that's hosted on your business website,


then we would not show that.


But it doesn't matter if we use third party like Google


My Business.


Yeah, it doesn't matter where the review comes from.


So if you use, I don't know what they're all called,


then that's something where if it's


a review about your business that you're hosting


on your business, then we would just not show that in search.


Product reviews are fine.


So if you're reviewing a product and that's


on one of your product pages, that's perfectly fine.


OK, thank you.


And one related question about the question from the lady.


So your recommendation for category pages


is sometimes you see some keywords,


target keywords on the page.


And this is not very natural.


It looks not very natural.


What do you mean?


These keywords are in the product titles?


So what happens in practice there


is our algorithms look at this page


and think there's a lot of keyword stuffing happening.


And then we will be kind of extra critical


when it comes to that keyword and that page.


So sometimes we see it that you have a category page,


like I don't know about t-shirts,


and all of the products that you link


have like blue t-shirt, red t-shirt, green t-shirt,


and everything t-shirt, t-shirt, t-shirt, t-shirt.


And then on the bottom, you have a half a Wikipedia page,


kind of like t-shirts are made out of cloth,


and t-shirts this and t-shirts that.


And then that's something where when our algorithms look


at this, they're like, there are 500 mentions of the word


t-shirt here.


Maybe this is not the best page to show for this topic.


Yeah, I missed it.


Thank you so much, John.


Sure.


John, if you let me, I have another question.


Let me run through some of the submitted questions first,


and then I'll get back to everyone.


Always good to kind of make sure that the people who


weren't able to join in person also


have a chance to get the question asked.


I work for an agency that has mostly European clients.


For almost all clients, we see a big spike in impressions


around the 22nd and 23rd of September,


and the next day they went back to normal.


Is this a bug in Search Console?


I'm not aware of any bug related to that.


So I don't think there was anything


that leaked from what I know.


Hey, John, if I may, just related to that,


there's something I sent you a couple of weeks back,


and it was around the 29th of September,


where we saw a huge increase in searches


for this particular keyword.


It went from an average of about 7,000 to 8,000 searches per day


to around 4 million per day.


So we've done, right?


Yeah, that was last month.


And that sort of continued.


The numbers are becoming smaller,


but it's still in the millions.


And when we've investigated it, we've


sort of looked in Google Trends as well,


and we've seen the spike for the same keyword as well.


And it's a bit odd, just because some countries, for example,


if you pop up Google Trends and you put the word loans


in there, you'll see that even in Germany,


in all these different countries that


don't tend to search for the term loans, it just spikes up,


and it correlates with the Google Search Console data,


which obviously lends me to believe


that there's an issue not with Google Search Console,


but with Google Search.


There's some sort of bug or something that's


causing impression spikes.


Yeah, I think the team is looking into that.


I don't know what the solution will be there


if we can kind of recalculate the Search Console


data and all of that.


But I know they are looking into that.


Oh, perfect.


That sounds a bit different from this question,


though, where it's like in September, on two days,


they saw a spike.


I don't know.


It's from me, actually.


Oh, fantastic.


So for one of the clients which does e-commerce,


we saw a spike from 300,000 impressions a day


to over 700,000 impressions.


The next day, it went back to 300,000.


And I have examples from multiple clients


in different areas.


Could I ask a colleague of mine that has your email


to send you some examples?


Sure.


OK.


Thank you.


Yeah.


I'm happy to take a look.


I mean, one of the things that might be playing a role there


is if this is, I guess, probably not.


But we have the new fresher data in Search Console.


And that's calculated in a slightly different way


to get the data as quickly as possible into Search Console.


So after, like, during that time when it's fresh,


then you might see slightly different counts there


than you would see when it's kind of settled down.


But it sounds like if it's from the 22nd of September


and now is the 27th, then probably that's


not what you see.


But happy to take a look.


OK, thank you.


All right.


We have the site for fetching and rendering


of above-the-fold images seems to work well


with the URL inspection tool.


Images don't get indexed in image search, though,


and don't get displayed in root snippets.


Above-the-fold images are lazy loaded.


Is indexing for lazy loaded images above-the-fold


not supported?


Lazy loading images, if you do them in a way


that they work in the URL inspection tool,


that is definitely supported for image search,


and with that also for rich snippets, whatever rich snippets


rely on images.


What might be happening here is that these images are otherwise


blocked for image search.


So that could be with the robots meta tag.


I forgot what it's called.


To block images from being indexed on a page,


that might be something that is playing a role here.


It might be that the images themselves are somehow


blocked from being indexed, in that we can still crawl them,


but we can't index them for image search.


Perhaps that's some, so I'm not 100% sure,


but it could be that you're blocking the images


with robots text, for example, and when we render the page,


we can still fetch those images for rendering,


but we just can't use them for image search.


So something like that, I suspect, is happening here.


If we can fetch the images when we render the page,


then the lazy loading part, that sounds like that would be OK.


And in general, images can be lazy loaded.


So that should all kind of work.


If you can't get this to work, then send us the URL,


maybe post in the Webmaster Help Forum,


or drop us a note on Twitter so that we


can take a look to see where things are getting stuck.


Who do you contact at Google when a malicious site generates


80,000 links to your site and tanks your rankings?


You can send me a note if you want.


In general, though, this is something


that our algorithms are pretty good at dealing with.


So that's something that we should


be able to deal with without any issues on your site.


Lots of spammy sites link all over the web,


and they generally don't cause any problems there.


So if you're seeing bigger changes in rankings,


then it might also be that these are just


normal changes in ranking.


If you're really worried that the site is causing issues


with regards to search, then you can use a disavow file.


With a disavow file, you can submit a domain.


So if there's one site that's generating 80,000 pages that


link to your site in a way that you don't like,


then you can just submit that domain in a disavow file,


and all of those links will be ignored.


So that's something that you can kind of take into your own


hands if you want.


You can also send us a note.


We can double check with the web spam team.


But pretty much all of the cases that people have sent my way,


they were things where on our side,


we were already essentially ignoring those links.


Can you give an example of an excessive link exchange?


So there are situations where a link exchange is natural.


For example, you write an article


that links to a restaurant, and the restaurant might link back


to the article.


Yes, that kind of back and forth linking


is completely natural and not something


that I would worry about.


It's quite often the case that you have a customer,


and you link to your customer, and your customer


is really proud to kind of sell your product,


and they link to you as a supplier of the product.


This kind of back and forth linking is completely natural


and not something that I would worry about.


The excessive kind of link exchange


are really when tons of sites are linking across each other.


So we sometimes see that you'll have a group of sites that


work together, and in their footers,


they'll cross-link to all of the sites that are kind of involved


in this kind of link exchange setup.


So that's really something where if you're really obviously


doing that just for the sake of search engines,


and that's something that we might pick up on,


if you're doing this in a natural way in that sometimes


people link to you and sometimes you link to them,


then that's not a problem.


A question about infinite scroll impagination.


What's the SEO-friendly method?


Is the article from 2014 still valid?


Yes, you can still use the setup from the article from 2014.


The important part when it comes to infinite scroll


is that we're able to reach all of the pages


that you have involved, and the best way to do that


is to link to all of those pages individually.


So if you have, for example, something


that's set up to do infinite scroll for you,


then make sure that you also have kind of pagination links


on that page so that you can crawl the individual pages


individually as well so that we can pick all of these pages


up ourselves.


The one thing that's no longer necessary from that old article


is the rel next and rel previous links.


Those are things that we no longer


use when it comes to search.


But normal links impagination, perfectly fine.


Great way to deal with infinite scroll impagination.


Is it mandatory to just have one H1 tag on a web page,


or can it be used multiple times?


So we get this question multiple times as well.


You can use H1 tags as often as you want on a page.


There is no limit, neither upper nor lower bound.


H1 elements are a great way to give more structure to a page


so that users and search engines can


understand which parts of a page are


under different headings.


So I would use them in the proper way on a page.


And especially with HTML5, having multiple H1 elements


on a page is completely normal and kind of expected.


So it's not something that you need to worry about.


Some SEO tools flag this as an issue


and say, oh, you don't have any H1 tag,


or you have two H1 tags.


From our point of view, that's not a critical issue.


From a usability point of view, maybe it


makes sense to improve that.


So it's not that I would completely


ignore those suggestions, but I wouldn't see it


as a critical issue.


Your site is going to rank perfectly fine with no H1 tags


or with five H1 tags.


Are there plans to have Google My Business data and reporting


rolled into Search Console?


Similarly, are there plans to have the Search Console


geographic drill down further than just country?


So I'm not aware of either of those plans.


I think it would be pretty cool to have more Google My Business


data in Search Console.


In the past, these have been clearly separated.


So it's not something that's really overlapping.


But maybe that makes sense.


I don't know.


To be honest, I don't know exactly what


data is shown in Google My Business dashboard.


With regards to further drill downs than just country,


I don't know if that would be easily doable in Search Console


just because of the way that the UI is set up.


But that seems like a good feature request.


So what I would do there, and probably also


for the Google My Business data, is


to make sure to submit feedback directly in Search Console.


The team actively goes through that feedback


on a regular basis.


So if this is something that lots of people


think would be really useful, then who knows?


Maybe they can find a way to make it work.


We fold our text with CSS so that the page is not too long.


This is seen as a positive by user surveyed.


In former times, it was said that this


could be done for mobile pages.


We also do this on our desktop page.


Since we switched to mobile first indexing,


our idea is it wouldn't hurt desktop.


Is that true?


Or are our long explanatory texts


no longer so important from Google's point of view


because you only see the headline,


the rest is only visible after clicking?


So I think there are two aspects here.


One is if users don't need these texts,


then maybe you don't need them on your pages anyway.


So that's the more general thing.


If you're folding these long texts back with CSS


and people have to click on them to actually see the text,


you can track on your side if users are actually


using that to expand that text.


And if nobody is expanding that text,


then maybe this text isn't really useful for people.


And maybe you can save yourself a lot of questions and trouble


by just getting rid of the text that would otherwise


be folded away like that.


So that's, I think, the one thing to first figure out.


Because if you can remove that text,


then you don't have to think about how do I implement it.


With regards to implementation, when


it comes to mobile-first indexing,


we will index only the content on the mobile version


of the page.


So if you have different content, different HTML


that you serve to mobile users and desktop users,


we will only use the mobile content.


And we will use that content to rank both the mobile


and the desktop page.


So if you're changing something on your mobile site,


then that would be reflected in the desktop search results


as well.


It's not that we would say, well, the desktop site


says this, so we'll rank it like this.


And the mobile site says something different,


we'll rank it slightly different.


So in that regard, if you've changed it on the mobile site


and we switch to mobile-first indexing,


we're already using that for indexing.


Why do sites that have thousands of spammy backlinks


get ranked higher?


So yeah, I don't know.


That seems like a bad thing, right?


So on the one hand, we can sometimes get things wrong.


So that's always an option that maybe we're


getting something wrong, maybe we're not recognizing


problematic things on a site.


And in cases like that, always feel


free to send us a spam report.


That's something that the web spam team really appreciates.


On the other hand, sometimes sites have lots of spammy


backlinks, and they rank despite those spammy backlinks.


So what often happens is on the one hand,


we try to ignore all of these spammy backlinks.


So maybe a site is just ranking based on other signals.


There are also cases where our algorithms might look at this


and say, well, there's so many spammy backlinks here


that we can't just ignore them.


We have to assume that there's a lot of malicious intent here,


and we have to be even more careful.


And in cases like that, we might demote a site slightly


in search so it wouldn't rank as visibly.


However, it might have tons of really good signals


that are also associated with that site.


And that might mean that we show it a little bit lower,


but it's still fairly high in the search results.


So just because something has spammy backlinks


doesn't mean we would not show it in search.


We try to take those spammy backlinks into account,


essentially by trying to ignore them


or trying to treat them appropriately.


But that doesn't mean that the site wouldn't show up in search.


And I think a really good reason for us doing it like that


is that there are lots of people who are confused


and don't really know what they should be doing when


it comes to search.


And they get advice from all kinds of people.


And these are people who might know what they're talking about


and there might be people who have no idea what


they're talking about.


And a lot of these sites that are a bit confused,


they end up doing weird things more or less accidentally


because they don't know what they should be doing better.


So this is something that we saw quite a bit, I don't know,


in the early days where people would be doing crazy keyword


stuffing on their pages because they thought the more that you


mention these keywords, the more the site


will rank for those keywords.


And when we looked at that, we realized


that these were not malicious spammers who


were trying to abuse our systems,


but rather just people who don't know what to do.


So that's kind of where our idea of, well,


if we can just ignore the problematic things that they


do, then we can focus on the good things that they do.


And we can rank a site based on that.


So that's, in short, kind of why you


might see this kind of situation where


you see a competitor or another site ranking fairly


well in the search results, and you dig into that site


to try to figure out what kind of magic trick did they find.


They have all this spammy stuff, and they're still ranking high.


And it's like, should I do spammy stuff as well?


And on the one hand, I don't think it makes sense


to copy what other people are doing.


But on the other hand, it's also worth


thinking that maybe there are other things that this site is


doing really well, and it's not so much the spammy stuff that


is making the site rank well.


Are the core updates based mainly on content or a mix


of content and links?


The core updates that we make essentially


affect the core ranking algorithms that we use.


And for that, we use lots of different signals.


So it's not just the content, not just the links.


Branded terms, for example, Harley-Davidson versus two


words.


I write content for authorized Harley-Davidson motorcycle


dealers, and I keep losing my rankings


because customers don't search with the dash or with the hyphen


and for trademark rules, I need to keep the hyphen.


So what can we do there, essentially?


So there are two things here.


On the one hand, I took a look at some of the search results


for with a hyphen versus without a hyphen,


and we do recognize that these are synonyms.


And we do try to treat them the same, more or less.


So that's something where I wouldn't see the hyphen itself


as being a reason for your pages not to be able to rank.


That's one thing.


The other thing is that if you want


to appear in the search results for what people are searching,


then maybe it makes sense to have content written


in a way that matches what people are searching for.


So hyphen or not is probably, on the scale of things,


a trivial thing.


And it's not going to be affecting that.


But you could imagine situations where maybe you


have a pharmaceutical product which has a fancy medical name


and has a kind of a general colloquial name as well.


And users might be searching for that easier name


because that's something that they hear about


in terms of trends.


And if you're only using the fancy medical name


on your pages, then you're going to have trouble


ranking for those terms.


And whether or not you have trademark rules or guidelines


that say that you should only be using this kind


of long medical name, if you don't use the words


that people are using to search for your pages,


then it's going to be trickier to rank for those terms.


It's not impossible.


We can understand, in the case with a dash or not,


that's something easy to understand.


Even in the case of a kind of a long medical name


versus a colloquial name, that's something


we can try to figure out, that these are similar or synonyms.


But if you're not mentioning what people are actually


searching for, then you're going to have a hard time.


So if you're writing content for users


and you know they're searching in a particular way,


then try to take that into account.


Duplicate content.


I'm sharing all my content across different platforms,


like Medium, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and cryptocurrency blogging


platforms.


That one kind of stands out a little bit.


Will I be penalized if Google crawls the same exact articles


across the web?


No.


You will not be penalized for having the same exact content


across the web, even if it's on cryptocurrency blogs.


But you are competing with yourself.


So if you have exactly the same content


on multiple different websites, all of these pages can rank.


And all of these pages can collect signals


in that maybe people link to these articles


because they're really great articles,


but they're all still competing with each other.


And if you're writing in a very competitive niche,


then that kind of competing with yourself


could be making your pages less visible.


So it's not that Google would be penalizing


your site or your content and say,


well, this guy has his content even on a cryptocurrency blog.


It's more that you're competing with yourself.


Like this article on LinkedIn is competing


with the one on Medium, competing


with the one on Tumblr.


All of these things are essentially


competing for the same terms.


So usually what I recommend is to try


to find one platform where you can keep your content


and have that content be really strong.


So instead of having all of the signals that are associated,


some going to Medium, some going to LinkedIn,


some going to a blog, have all of those signals concentrated


on one version of your content.


That way, we can recognize that this content is actually


really important, that it's something that


is kind of unique out there.


And especially in the competitive landscape,


we can take that into account and say, well,


these other articles are pretty good,


but look at this one article that's


seen as the authority on this topic.


Then that makes it a lot easier for us


to rank that piece of content.


So my recommendation there, especially


if you're kind of struggling with getting your content shown


in search, is try to concentrate things on one platform


as much as possible.


Sometimes it makes sense to reach out to other platforms


and also give some information there.


But the goal, I think, should be in the long run


to make sure that your version of this content,


wherever you want to kind of place your primary place


of residence, essentially online,


that that version is seen as kind


of the authority on this topic rather than


that you're spreading things around to everyone else.


Then cloaking, infinite scroll.


I think we talked about this a bit.


So infinite scroll just ideally use the pagination links.


Then a question about the coverage report.


Oh my gosh, this is a fairly long question.


I probably need to look into that separately.


So if you're kind of writing really long questions


specific to your site, specific to something


kind of that you're seeing with your pages,


I'd recommend taking that to the Webmaster Help forum


where people can kind of drill into the specific problem


that you're seeing and might be able to give you


some advice and tips on what you can do to make


that a little bit easier.


Last week you replied on Twitter about updating a URL.


An example, consider that a previous webmaster


has created an inappropriate URL, say very long ones,


and now we're updating to shorter, smarter ones.


How does Google handle that?


I always see traffic drops in the URL after updating it.


It takes some time to recover.


Yeah, in general, any time you make bigger changes on a site,


you will see some time for things to settle down again.


If you're doing this on a one-URL basis


where you take one URL and you redirect to another one,


that's usually something that we can figure out fairly quickly.


If you're doing this on a broader scale,


like you're cleaning up the old URL structure


that someone has created that has these gigantic URLs


and you're cleaning that up, then keep in mind


that we essentially need to reprocess the whole website


to understand the new context of all


of these pages on your site.


So that's something that will take a bit longer, where


I'd expect, I don't know, order of a couple weeks


to a couple months at least for things to settle down again.


I am a webmaster of a news site.


Even though we rank several times a day,


we appear in Google Discover every now and then.


I've recently noticed that Google indexes our content


30 minutes after we published it, which for news


out outlet is an eternity.


Could this be an issue regarding our site map or some meta tag


that we're missing or something about our content?


It could be any of those, yes.


It sounds like you're kind of on the right track there.


In general, from a content point of view,


that's something that is definitely important.


From a crawling point of view, there


are things you really need to watch out for so that we


can pick up content quickly.


So in particular, what I try to make sure


is that you have kind of hub pages on your website.


So if you're a news website, that your home page


lists the recent articles, or that you


have different categories, different kinds of news


on your site, that those news kind of category pages


list all of the recent articles.


So in that case, what can happen or what usually


happens with news sites is we crawl those home pages


and category pages a lot more frequently than everything


else.


And we'll try to pick up links to the new articles


as quickly as possible.


And if we can crawl those pages, find links to the new articles,


we can try to index those new articles as quickly


as possible.


So that's even without anything from a site map side.


That's one thing I would always make


sure to do, that we can go from kind of these hubs


within a news site and find all of the new articles


extremely quickly.


With a site map file, that's something


you can help us even more.


Site map or RSS feed, both of those kind of work.


What's important for both of these


is that you have the last modification


date of the pages specified there as well.


So that when we look at the site map file


and we find a new URL in the site map file,


we can look at the date and see, well,


this is something that is new.


We really need to pick that up as quickly as possible.


So that's kind of the main thing there.


The other thing, which is probably


more on a basic technical level, is especially


for news websites, we have to be able to crawl quickly


so that we can index quickly.


So for that, we need to be able to access the server quickly.


We need to have the pages come quickly.


All of these speed things are elements


that are kind of critical to us.


And we have an article on our blog,


I think from last year, that talks about this a little bit.


It's the crawl budget article from Gary


that goes into some of the kind of aspects that


are involved with being able to crawl the website quickly


or not being able to crawl it so quickly.


So those are kind of the directions I would take there.


I don't think there's, like, for most cases,


there's not just one magic bullet that you can kind


of tweak, and suddenly you'll be crawled and indexed in minutes.


But usually, it's a combination of different things.


Especially if you're seeing 30 minutes,


then most things will probably be right.


Maybe it's a matter of tweaking some of these things


to make it a little bit better so that you can get that time


down to, I don't know, a minute or two.


Let's see.


I think we have like 10 minutes left.


Maybe I'll just switch over to questions from you all.


I'm sure there might be some things that we can kind of help


clarify as well.


AUDIENCE MEMBER 1 Hi, John.


JOHN MUELLER Hi.


AUDIENCE MEMBER 1 How are you?


JOHN MUELLER Pretty good.


How are you?


AUDIENCE MEMBER 1 I'm great.


So here's my question.


Let's say I have two brands in the same niche, very


competitive niche, say brand A and brand B. Each one of them,


those two brands have basically the same content.


So just for the example, let's say


we're talking about the traveling industry.


So both brands have hotels and flights and so on.


Now, each one of those brands have a different CMS.


And the business wants to migrate to the CMS of brand A.


So to take brand B and migrate it to the CMS of brand A.


Now, the difference between those two brands


are in the URL structure.


So in brand B, the URL structure goes much deeper.


So let's say if you were talking about hotels,


then let's say you'll have cities on brand B,


while on brand A, you'll have only states, for example.


So on this aspect, the risk is already known.


If I will migrate to the basically URL structure


of brand A, I will lose all those deeper pages


and will lose traffic.


But my other question basically is,


because those two brands, once they


will be on the same platform, on the same CMS,


will look the same.


So same UI, UX, and same URL structure,


this might be a risk for, I don't


know if you duplicate websites, but is this a risk,


like having exactly the same two brands that


looks exactly the same, offer the same products and events?


This might be a risk for brand A,


in case brand B would migrate to its platform.


Probably, yeah.


So there are two aspects there.


One is essentially a redesign of a website.


So you're taking the existing website,


and you're redesigning it, creating a new URL structure,


creating new layouts, creating new sets of internal links


by moving from one CMS to the other setup.


That's something that can take quite a bit of time


to settle down.


So especially if you're changing the URL structure,


if you're changing the layout of the site in general,


then that's something where I would


expect that this would take a significant amount of time


And it's something that you need to be really careful about when


doing the migration.


So tracking things like all of the old URLs,


making sure that they all have redirects to the new URLs.


If you're merging pages or splitting pages,


then make sure you're tracking all of that separately.


And that's something where, from a crawling and indexing point


of view, we need to be able to understand


the new structure of the website first.


And that can take quite a bit of time,


especially if you have a website that has a ton of content.


But when you're talking about travel sites,


often there's tons of content out there.


And moving that to a new URL setup that's going to take,


I don't know, I'm just throwing numbers out,


but probably three to six months at least to settle down.


So that's kind of the one thing to watch out for.


The other thing that you already mentioned


as well is that if this new setup that you have


matches a different website that you're running,


then especially if the content also matches,


like you're selling the same products, the same flights,


the same hotels, you have the same descriptions


on both of these sites, then it can


happen that we will look at these pages and say, well,


these are essentially equivalent.


The brand name is different on these,


but the content is exactly the same.


We will pick one as a canonical.


And we'll just index that version, the canonical version


of that content.


And what might happen there is that suddenly


everything switches over to one website,


or some content switches to one, and some content


switches to the other one.


It's kind of hard to say ahead of time how that will pan out.


But if it's the same content, then technically that


makes sense.


It's not that this would be a bad thing


from our point of view.


So assuming that this can happen across these two websites,


one thing you might want to consider as well


is just say, well, if Google will see these


as the same website anyway, why don't I


just migrate both of these kind of sites to one website


and make one really strong website


rather than have two that are essentially


providing the same content?


So that's one thing to kind of think about there.


If these two brands are really positioned differently,


and from the content point of view,


you really have different content, maybe one is,


I don't know, targeted for business travelers,


the other one for kind of, I don't know, last minute people


who are just traveling for fun, then maybe it


makes sense to keep those separate.


But then I would make sure that the content is also


really different.


And then I don't see a problem with having two of these sites


kind of doing similar things if you're really targeting


completely different target areas,


and you're really providing content that's different.


When people look at these pages.


But if you're providing the same content


across both of these sites, I would


assume that our systems will say, well,


this is kind of the same.


Maybe we should just fold it together.


Yeah, well, basically, it's not the same content exactly.


Like the user values are pretty different,


and the target audience is a bit different,


even though we're talking about the same niche


or the same industry.


Nevertheless, my big concern was just


because of the similarity of both the URL structure


and the site, the design of the website,


that it might be considered as duplicate.


So I'm just asking specifically more.


Let's say the content is different,


but the brands looks like pretty much the same.


You know, different colors and different icons and logos


and stuff, but the basic structure of the website


is identical.


I think if it's purely the structure, that's no problem.


If the content is really equivalent or identical,


that's where we would kind of think about,


well, maybe it's the same thing.


So you can think about it kind of like a blog.


Like a lot of different blogs are set up in the same way.


They have the same URL structure,


the same kind of heading and sidebar type thing,


but they're very different blogs.


So it makes sense to index them individually.


However, if the content were also the same,


then that would be a case where we would say,


well, they look the same.


They have the same content.


Maybe we should fold some of these together.


So that's kind of where I would watch out for.


Like if it's not like the design and the URL structure


is not really what I would worry about when folding things


together.


It's really the content itself.


Got you, thank you so much, John.


Hey, John, I've got a quick question on if we can go back


to structured data.


Is it possible to have FAQ page markup, structured data,


and product review ratings show up simultaneously


in the search results?


I don't know.


You can try it out.


We can test.


Yeah, yeah, so some types of structured or rich results,


we can combine in the search results and some kind of clash


in the sense that it just doesn't work well


and the search results work together.


So we only show one or the other.


When it comes to situations where we show one or the other,


it's not possible for you to kind of give prioritization.


So I prefer to have my product review shown and not the FAQ


if you have to pick one.


But rather, our algorithms will try to pick one and not


show the other.


Sorry for that.


It's possible.


We have it.


Oh, you have it.


OK.


Oh my gosh.


Jonathan can run off and implement it everywhere now.


Cool.


Joe, may I ask you a question?


Sure.


Me and also my competitors are hiding our advertisement


on our page from Google.


I am wondering is it harmful or not because they are content


and we are hiding it.


But they are ads, not real content.


In general, you wouldn't need to hide ads on a page.


So that's something where from our point of view,


having ads on a page is normal.


It's not going to be a problem.


What I do know is that a lot of ad networks


have their ads blocked by robots' text


just so that they don't get bad impressions.


Those kind of things, that's perfectly fine.


Oh, OK.


OK, thank you.


OK, John.


OK, let me just pause the recording here.


You're welcome to stick around a little bit longer,


but kind of so that we have a reasonable length


for the YouTube recording.


Thank you all for joining in.


I hope this was useful.


And I wish you all a fantastic weekend.


Rendering & Crawl Budget - #AskGooglebot

Today's question comes from Michael, and it's,


does intensive use of WRS also reduce crawl budget for a site?


Thank you for your question, Michael.


There are a few things that come together here,


so let's briefly unpack them before we dive into the details.


WRS refers to Web Rendering Service,


which is what Googlebot uses to render pages like a browser.


So that we can index everything in the same way


that users would see it.


Crawl budget refers to the system


that we use to limit the number of requests


that we make to a server so that we don't cause problems


during our crawling.


This isn't something that most sites


need to worry about since Google has no problem crawling


enough URLs from most websites.


While there is no specific threshold,


I'd consider crawl budget a topic


that mostly large websites.


Let's say sites with more than a few hundred thousand URLs


really have to think about.


For crawl budget, our systems automatically


determine the maximum number of requests


that a server can process over a given period of time.


This is done automatically and adjusted over time.


As we see that the server starts to slow down or return server


errors, we reduce the crawl budget


available to our crawlers.


There's a bit more about crawl budget in a blog post linked


in the description.


If you want to check that out.


For rendering, our services need to be


able to access embedded content, such as JavaScript files, CSS


files, images, and videos, as well as server responses


from APIs that are used on the pages.


We use a lot of caching to try to reduce


the number of requests needed to render a page.


But in most cases, rendering results


in more than just one request, so more than just the HTML file


being made to the server.


In short, if you're working on a large site,


then reducing the number of embedded resources


required to render a page can help with crawling.


Of course, doing that usually also


makes pages faster for users as well,


so you can cover both sides at the same time.


I hope you found this video useful and insightful.


If there's something else you want to add


or if this video helped you in some way,


feel free to comment below.


SEO for Google Images | Search Central Lightning Talks

I'm John Mueller, a search advocate at Google.


Part of my job is to help folks like you grow their web presence


through the help of Google Search.


In this session, we'll talk briefly about Google Images,


other places where images are shown,


and go through best practices for images.


Let's start by taking a look at Google Images.


Google Images helps users to visually find web pages


for a wide range of tasks.


Whether it's kicking off a do-it-yourself project,


cooking a meal, styling an outfit,


or, as we've recently seen,


learning how to cut your own hair at home during the quarantine,


Google Images shows users the relevant images and web pages


from across the web,


so it's as easy as possible to find what you're looking for.


In the Google Images results, we show a preview image,


attribution, and a headline from the page.


Users can expand the preview to find out more about the image


and the page's content.


If a result is deemed to be a product, a recipe, or a video,


which you can specify with structured data,


we show that information to the user.


Where appropriate, we give users information


about an image licensing opportunity.


And, of course, there's a big button to visit the page directly.


There's more than just Google Images, though.


Image previews can also be shown for traditional web search results.


They may be relevant to a user's query or representative of a web page.


For example, an image of a recipe might be shown.


Additionally, there's Google Discover,


a neat way for users to explore content about topics they're interested in.


In Discover, a relevant preview image may be shown for your pages.


In some, preview images can be shown directly in Google Images.


They can be shown as relevant results


or as additional context for additional pages in Google Search


and as previews in Discover.


Before we get too far, I'd like to encourage you to take a step back


and think about what you'd like to achieve with your images.


Getting the images indexed is rarely the goal.


For example, consider these questions.


Do users try to search visually for your content?


And if so, how might they be searching?


What preview of your site's content would they find compelling?


And do your pages have an image that's particularly relevant for that page?


It's useful to consider these questions from the start.


They can help guide you to including your images


in a way that's relevant to your site's goals.


For example, if you publish your poetry


and decorate it with generic floral clipart,


it's unlikely that users would be searching for flower clipart


in order to read your poetry.


On the other hand, if you created those graphics


and you want to provide them to others,


then that might be a legitimate search query.


In the end, it's up to you to determine if and how you'd like content


from your website to be shown in Google.


You know your audience and your site's goals best.


All right, let's take a look at our recommendations for images.


Start by providing good context.


Make sure that visual content is relevant to the topic of the page.


We suggest using images where they add value to the page.


Use appropriate page titles and headings to provide context.


Remember your users and how they might be searching for your content visually.


What are the words and phrases they might use,


and are you using them on the right pages?


Next, optimize image placement.


Whenever possible, place images near relevant text


and ideally provide a caption close to the image.


Consider placing the most important image near the top of the page.


Don't embed important text inside of images.


In particular, avoid doing that for page headings and menu items.


Not all users and search engines can access text in images.


Translation tools won't work on images,


and often these images don't make particularly useful previews for your site.


Use alt attributes.


These alt attributes are a way to provide information


about the image to users who can't see the images.


This is good for accessibility as well as for search engines.


Use high-quality images.


High-quality images appeal to users more than blurry, unclear, low-resolution images.


Sharp images are often more appealing in the result thumbnail


and increase the likelihood of getting traffic from users.


Create informative and high-quality sites.


Good content on your pages is just as important as visual content for Google Images.


It provides context and makes the results more actionable for users.


Page content may be used to generate a text snippet for the image,


and Google considers page content quality when ranking images.


Create mobile and desktop-friendly sites.


Users search on Google Images more from mobile than on desktop.


It's important that you design your site for all device types


and sizes.


Use a mobile-friendly testing tool to test how well your pages work on mobile devices.


Then, use a good URL structure for your image files.


Google uses the URL path as well as a file name to help it understand your images.


Consider organizing your images' content so that URLs are constructed logically.


Avoid changing your image URLs


and use 301 redirects when they do need to be changed.


Images tend not to be crawled as frequently as web pages,


so it's important to use persistent URLs for them.


And when it comes to URLs, make sure they're not blocked by robots.txt


if you'd like them used as previews on Google.


Let's briefly talk about robots.txt.


If you don't want images from your pages to be shown in search,


a good way to do that is to disallow their crawling in the robots.txt file.


This file needs to be in a specific machine-readable format,


so it's good to double-check that you're blocking the appropriate URLs properly


and not blocking too much.


While we feel it's often useful to allow users to search visually for your content,


this is ultimately your decision as a site owner.


Whew, that's a lot.


Following these general best practices will definitely help search engines


to better understand your site's images already.


If you want to go further, we also have some advanced techniques to consider.


Add appropriate structured data markup.


Structured data is a way of providing machine-readable information


about your pages and their content.


Depending on the type of page, you might use different kinds of structured data.


For example, a recipe page may use recipe structured data.


A news article might use news article structured data,


and an e-commerce site might use product structured data.


We have information about all kinds of structured data


in our developer documentation.


Consider allowing large image previews.


Including compelling, high-quality images in your content


is more likely to generate visits from Discover.


For large image previews, the images need to be appropriately sized


and the feature needs to be enabled


either with the maxImagePreviewLarge robots meta tag


or by using AMP.


When providing images, add licensing information.


This helps users to understand the opportunity to license images,


shows appropriate image credits,


and makes it easier for them to acquire a license for the image.


This can be done with structured data on the page


or metadata within the image.


Consider speed.


Images are often the largest contributor to the overall page size.


We recommend applying image optimization using lazy loading


and responsive image techniques


to provide high-quality and fast user experiences.


Depending on your website, AMP pages may also be an option


for making fast loading pages.


That's quite a bit to keep in mind, but how do you get started?


A good general approach when reviewing and improving a website


is to pick a sample of pages from various parts of your website


and to work on those first.


Checking those pages regularly helps to double-check your progress.


This will help you determine which changes to make


and how to best make them.


Once you've worked it out for a few pages,


it's often relatively easy to apply that to the rest of your website.


Google Search Console can help you to recognize potential problems


and opportunities, as well as giving you insights


into how your pages are showing in search.


For example, you can confirm that your structured data


is recognized properly, check the site speed,


and track how its images are performing.


Check out the videos on Search Console to find out more.


The information from this talk is also available


in our developer documentation.


I'll add a link to the description below


if you'd like to follow up there.


Thanks for watching.


I hope you found this lightning talk useful and insightful.


If you have any comments regarding this session


or would like to help us to make these videos even better,


please leave a comment here with the video.


And, as always, if you have any questions,


feel free to drop by our help forums to discuss with the experts,


contact us on Twitter, or join us in one of our events.


Bye, everyone.


How does the geographic location of a web server affect SEO?

Today's question was posted on YouTube, and it asks whether migrating a website's


hosting location to another country affects SEO.


When it comes to moving hosting, you might see our systems initially slowing down crawling


a bit.


Anytime we recognize a hosting change, we want to be sure that we don't cause any


problems, and so we tend to automatically slow down crawling as a precaution.


Over time, once our systems can tell that going faster doesn't cause any issues, we'll


speed up again.


This is independent of the kind of hosting change that you make.


It doesn't matter if you're moving to a different provider down the road or moving


to another country.


One practical effect you might notice is that larger geographic moves can affect how quickly


a website loads for users.


Due to physics and computer networking, it can take longer to reach a server that's


far away.


Depending on how strongly this is visible, that can play a role in speed and the page


experience ranking factor for a website.


To be as close as possible to users, some websites even use servers in many different


locations.


A content delivery network often does this.


If you're using a hosting platform, they may already be doing this for you, too.


This configuration is fine for Google.


With regards to SEO, the server's location is not used for geotargeting.


If you want your website to target users in a specific location, you would need to use


either the country code top-level domain or the appropriate setting in Google Search Console.


I hope this gives you some insight into what happens when you move your server's location.


Why does a site:query not show all my pages? #AskGooglebot

Today's question comes from YouTube and is,


when I check my website in Google,


it only shows 28 instead of 180 URLs.


Why is that?


The short answer to this question


is that a site query is not meant


to be complete nor used for diagnostics purposes.


A site query is a specific kind of search


that limits the results to a certain website.


It's basically just the word site, a colon, and then


the website's domain name.


While using this query limits the results


to a specific website, it's not meant


to be a comprehensive collection of all of the pages


from that website.


If you're keen on finding out how many pages Google


has indexed from your website, then use Search Console instead.


Google Search Console is a free tool


that site owners can use to get more information about how


Google Search sees their website.


Within Search Console, you can see


how your pages are shown in search,


as well as the number of pages that are currently indexed.


So in short, don't worry about the counts


shown in a site query.


Use Search Console instead.


And that's it for this time.


I hope you found this useful and insightful.


See you in the next episode of Ask Googlebot.


And don't forget to subscribe to see them all.


There you go.


Yes, there you go.


So there we go.


Lets keep going.


Once more bybone.


How to SEO optimize your ecommerce website (8 Tips)

So you want your e-commerce website to be number one in search results?


Go for it!


The challenge is, is so does your competitors.


Hi, my name is Alan Kent and I'm a Developer Advocate at Google.


In this episode, I introduce some basic SEO tips particularly relevant to e-commerce.


These tips are not a guarantee of success, but they will help you get started on your


SEO journey.


SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, covers actions you take to improve the ranking of


your web pages in search results.


You can have different goals when you tackle SEO.


For example, a website that earns revenue from showing ads typically wants to increase


the volume of site traffic.


However, for e-commerce, a more common goal is to increase sales.


A large number of visitors that do not make a purchase is less useful than a smaller number


of visitors that do make purchases.


Similarly, think about which products you want to drive traffic to.


Do you want to drive traffic to fast selling products in the hope of getting return visits,


or to products with a higher profit margin?


There is no single best answer for all sites.


Such considerations come from your business strategy.


It is, however, important to think through your goals for your own site so that you measure


and optimize your support for your business goals.


In this episode, I share 8 SEO tips for e-commerce sites, but there are many more great resources


on Google Search Central.


Check out the video description for additional links.


Let's dive in.


The first tip is to nail the technical basics.


Maybe you've developed a great content strategy, but you're not getting the traffic you expected.


The first step is to make sure you have the technical basics in place.


For example, if Google cannot crawl your website, it does not matter how great your content


is.


One great tool to find technical issues on your website is Google Search Console.


There are a number of reports available reporting on a range of potential issues on your site.


To address issues on your site, follow the advice given by Google Search Console.


If there were issues with individual URLs that you have since fixed, use the URL inspection


tool to check to see if issues have been fully resolved.


Also, if you control the URL structure of your site, make sure your URLs and internal


linking are friendly to crawlers.


Check out Designing a URL Structure for E-commerce Websites on Google Search Central for advice


on how to design URLs for your website.


If your platform does not give you control over the structure of URLs on your site, don't


worry.


Many common platforms take care of these issues for you.


Next, it is worth checking details such as page titles.


Consider including the details in the title, such as the brand name and the color of products,


so that the title provides useful information to shoppers and clearly distinguishes between


different products on your site.


The page titles are used as a basis for the title links shown in search.


You may also consider adding structured data to your web pages to ensure Google correctly


understands the purpose of each page.


For example, there is structured data for describing products on product pages that


can help Google understand your product attributes with greater accuracy.


Again, check out Google Search Central for advice on adding structured data to your web


pages.


Final, review the remaining e-commerce guidelines on Google Search Central for additional techniques.


There are many considerations, such as whether to keep out-of-stock products listed on your


site and if so, how to inform Google that they are currently not available for purchase.


Product pages are an obvious choice to optimize.


You want shoppers who are ready to purchase to find the product on your site.


But what else?


Tip number two is to have content relevant to users at different stages of their shopping


journey.


For example, your homepage may be a great landing page for a shopper who wants to buy


a photography gift but does not know what to buy yet.


Your homepage often describes many products you have in stock, along with special offers.


Category pages allow you to get more targeted, describing areas you have a range of products


in, for example bags to hold photography equipment.


Rather than products, shoppers early in their shopping journey may be looking for advice


on how to pick the right product.


Product reviews may be more important to such shoppers.


Providing useful resources for shoppers may also help increase the recognition and reputation


of your website.


To check the breadth and quality of your site, think about likely searches by shoppers at


different stages in their shopping journey.


Once you have a set of queries, try them out.


Does your site come up well positioned?


What about your competitors?


Also check the Search Console Performance Report for queries where your site is being


shown.


This may help you understand where you are doing well and where you are not.


Once you have determined a set of queries that you want to rank well for, analyze sites


that rank higher than your own to see what inspiration you can draw from them.


What gaps exist in your own site?


How can you fill out your own unique story so you stand out from the crowd?


If you find product pages are struggling against competitors selling the same products, consider


writing your own product descriptions in a way that is unique to your site.


This can help you capture different search traffic than your competitors.


In summary, develop your own content strategy, try it out, measure its effectiveness, then


continue to refine and adjust to help create your own distinctive voice for your site.


The third tip is to make sure you mark up your product variant pages correctly.


Product variants are when you have multiple colors or sizes of the same product.


Informing Google of the relationship between product pages can help Google better understand


your site content.


To look for issues, Google Search Console can be used to explore the relationship between


pages and their levels of traffic.


The URL inspection tool can also be used to check the status of individual pages.


On your site, it is recommended to give each product variant a unique URL.


For example, add query parameters to hold the product color or size.


Then select one of the variants to be the canonical variant.


All variants should include the URL of the canonical page to help Google understand the


relationship between the pages.


Finally, check that the canonical page includes text describing all of the variants available,


such as all colors and sizes.


This could be using text in the product description, such as, this product is available in green


and blue.


But it can also be as simple as having a color swatch on a page to let the user change the


color with alt text describing each color choice in text.


This is so the canonical product variant page will match searches for all of the variant


colors and sizes a user may try.


There are also a number of sales events that occur on a recurring basis, such as Mother's


Day.


Tip number four is to make sure you reuse the same URL across all event occurrences,


rather than introducing a new URL for each event.


This can help Google correctly understand and trust the purpose of such pages.


To identify problems, check the URL for promotional event pages on your site.


Sorry, there are no automated tools for this.


For example, avoid URLs that include the current year in the path.


Once you've picked a URL for a promotional event, remember to reuse the same URL each


time.


After the event, consider leaving the page up with a summary of previous offers or describing


products that are likely to be on sale next time.


For example, for Mother's Day, you may include a number of traditional Mother's Day gifts


that you sell.


Update the page before each event with the current offers, but keep the page alive and


in Google indexes all year round, rather than waiting for Google to find and index a new


page each time.


Tip number five is performance of web pages matters.


Performance is obviously important to users, as a page that takes too long to load may


be abandoned by the user.


Performance is so important that user experience has also been made a Google ranking signal,


influencing the ranking of pages in search results.


This can be particularly important if you use the same supplier-provided product description


as other sellers online.


If two product pages have the same textural content, page speed may be the factor that


decides which page comes first in search results.


The Page Speed Insights report is a useful report for checking the performance of the


web page.


You can provide the URL of one of your pages, and it performs a number of lab tests on the


page, as well as displaying field data from the Chrome User Experience report for your


page, if available.


You can also use tools like Google Analytics to measure the performance of your pages.


The Page Speed Insights report includes a list of potential problems it identifies on


your site.


It also includes a list of recommendations on how to address the problems.


You can also check out the other episodes in this series for advice on specific topics


such as image and JavaScript optimization.


OK, so you've been following Google's SEO advice for a few weeks now, but you've not


seen much benefit.


What's next?


Tip number six is, wait for it, to be patient.


SEO, unfortunately, is a long game.


Some ranking signals may take many months to change.


Worse, there is no guarantee of success.


The HTTP Archive reports that approximately 20% of the website it archives support e-commerce.


That means there is a lot of online competition out there.


Google Search Console, as previously described, is the best tool to check that your content


on your site is being indexed correctly without errors.


It can also be used to explore traffic to your site.


If traffic is trending upwards, that may be a positive sign you're on the right track.


It can take months to reap the benefits of a content creation strategy.


But that does not mean there is nothing you can do until then.


Think about how to diversify your site traffic sources.


Do you have a marketing campaign?


Are you active on social media?


Do you have an email newsletter?


Have you approached independent reviewers to review products on your site?


If you also have a physical store, do you have signs or pamphlets that link to your


online presence with URLs or QR codes?


As well as the additional direct traffic, authentic external links to your site can


improve your ranking.


If you have done your best to improve your site, but are still not getting the results


you want, tip number seven is to seek professional help for your website.


There are many agencies available to provide expert SEO advice.


Beware, however, of schemes that claim to improve your ranking by paying them to create


more links to your site.


Artificially linking to pages on your site goes against Google quality guidelines and


may have negative repercussions on your page rankings.


Still here?


Great.


Let me finish with my ultimate tip for SEO.


Remember, it's all about the user.


The ultimate goal for Google search is to put the best possible content in front of


users performing a search.


Algorithms change over time, but the ultimate goal does not.


This does not mean you should not measure your site's performance.


It is still recommended to make use of tools such as Google Search Console and Google Analytics


to collect data on your site.


But think about changes to help your customers rather than focusing on Google search results


specifically.


For example, check the bounce rate of pages on your site.


If users land on a page but do not stay on your site, it may be worth reviewing your


content strategy.


Maybe you're attracting the wrong sorts of users with your current content.


The best strategy is to create content and experiences that best serves your customers.


Rather than think about Google-specific ranking algorithms that seem to work at the moment,


build your content strategy around serving your customers and let Google worry about


the search algorithms to find the best content.


This may involve checking what typical customers are searching for or staying on top of current


search trends.


Google makes search trend data available for public access at trends.google.com.


As well as textual content, also make sure you include high-quality images and videos


on your site.


Visual media is increasingly important on ecommerce sites and the web in general.


I hope you found this episode on SEO tips for ecommerce websites useful to get you started


on your SEO journey.


To be informed of new content as it becomes available, make sure to like and subscribe.


English Google SEO office-hours from March 18, 2022

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


SEO Office Hours Hangout.


My name is John Mueller.


I'm a search advocate on the Search Relations team


here at Google in Switzerland.


And part of what we do are these Office Hours, where


people can jump in and ask their question around their website


and web search.


We have a bunch of questions submitted on YouTube.


I don't see any hands raised so far.


But if any of you want to get started


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


All right, Hazel, go for it.


AUDIENCE Hi, John.


I guess I'll be the first one.


Can you hear me?


JOHN MUELLER Yes.


AUDIENCE OK, good.


So I've got one question about page title and description.


So a few days ago, we optimized our page title


and description.


And after that changing, we see the title and description


change when using the site to search in the Google.


But after a longer while, the title and description


has been back to the one at the first place.


So in this case, does Google think the former title


and description are better than the one we optimized?


That's why it changes.


Any other possible reason that may cause this?


JOHN MUELLER I wouldn't necessarily


assume that if Google changes it to something,


that Google thinks it's better and that you


should use that title too.


It's more that our systems have selected a different title.


And usually, the title is picked on a per page basis.


So that would feel a little bit weird


if we show one title first and then shift it


to a different title later on.


So it might also just be that we kind of have shifted


to an older version of the page for indexing and processing


in general.


And then we'll shift back to the new version


as soon as we can kind of process that properly again.


So from that point of view, I wouldn't necessarily


see it as a sign that kind of what you did


was not perceived as being good by Google.


But it's just being shown like that.


And one of the things you can do, specifically with titles,


because they're based on the page itself now and not


on the query, is you can submit that page for re-indexing


and reprocessing.


And then pretty much as soon as that is reprocessed,


you can look at the title with a site query


to see what is the current title.


And you can use that process to kind of fine tune the titles


that you give on your pages and see how does Google actually


show the title?


Does it change the words?


Does the separator make a difference?


Do kind of like parentheses or brackets make a difference?


And essentially, kind of optimize


the title for what you would like to have


shown for that specific page.


And since you're working on a larger site,


probably you have templates that are


across lots of different pages.


Sometimes you can update those templates


as well to use kind of the same things


that you learned from optimizing a single page title.


Yeah.


Yes, we do have the templates, like you said,


for our different specific page type.


So I think in a situation like this, what I would do


is try to see is Google maybe accidentally switching back


to an older version of a page in general?


And will it switch back to the new version


to separate out the aspect of the page title changing


and then going back?


And then really try on a per-page basis


to figure out what is the best way for you


to show titles so that they can be picked up and shown


in search.


OK.


OK, good.


I'll try the method you said.


Thank you.


Cool.


All right.


Rado.


Hey, John.


Hi.


I have a question.


Imagine a franchise with 100 franchisees.


Every franchisee has a microsite after the domain,


like domain slash branch one and the corresponding URLs.


Now, what would be the best practice


to have a content display?


Well, it's really hard to have 100 branches have


100 different contents.


Pretty much, it will be saying the same


as they are part of the same franchise.


They're offering the same two services.


They're following the same rules and procedures.


And is that a problem from perspective of Google?


Like, from a user perspective, it


doesn't matter as a user is looking


to solve a problem in a given location.


And so for the user, it doesn't matter


if that same content or nearly the same content


is visible on 100 other pages.


Now, what does Google think about it?


Now, I think there are two aspects I would look at here.


On the one hand, I would watch out


for creating doorway sites, doorway pages.


And that's something that we have mentioned in the Webmaster


Guidelines.


Usually, doorway pages are more about kind


of like swapping out one word on a page,


essentially, where the rest of the content is the same.


So if you have a specific service


that you create pages for every city nearby, or every street,


or every region nearby, and you create hundreds


of these pages that are essentially just driving traffic


to the same business.


That's one thing I would watch out for.


I think with franchises, probably that's


less of an issue because these are essentially


separate businesses.


It's not the same business that has hundreds of different


location pages.


It's really essentially separate businesses, at least


from what I understand from your case.


Yes, exactly.


Exactly.


And the other thing is I think more of a strategic question,


which is around how you want your content to be


findable in search and what you consider


to be important with regards to your content.


In particular, if you take kind of the critical content


and you duplicate it across these hundreds of pages,


then you're kind of diluting the value of that content


across these hundreds of pages.


And you kind of have to balance the aspect of people trying


to find individual locations with your kind


of competitiveness of your primary content.


So for example, if you have, I don't know,


information on how to do some specific service on your car


or something like that, then that's


something where maybe there is a lot of competition in the search


results and you want to have a really strong page.


And if you want to have a really strong page,


then usually you don't want to kind of dilute


that page across all of these hundreds


of other kind of separate location pages.


Yeah.


So that's something where I think


from a strategic point of view, some content you'll


want to kind of like keep in one place,


and other content will make sense to separate out


on these individual pages.


It's not like being 100% duplicate, probably like 70%,


because there will be some uniqueness


due to the different specifics of every branch of the success


rate in closing deals, et cetera, et cetera,


because they are in the real estate.


So yeah, but in its essentials, it


will be pretty much the same.


They are doing sales, they are doing lettings,


and so you can't hover much around, especially if you


have that many locations.


Yeah, but I still think you need to figure out


which of these kinds of contents are very competitive, where


it makes sense for you to have one central version that


is kind of like highly competitive,


and which of these pages are essentially


trying to target a very specific kind of question from a user,


where they say, oh, I would like to rent a home in this city,


for example, then going to that location page is fine.


Whereas if it's a question of like,


I don't know, how do I calculate the rental fees,


then that might be something where


you have one kind of central page


across all of these different sites.


Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense.


Yeah, yeah, yeah.


Yeah.


OK.


Yeah, thank you.


All right.


Let's see, Phobe.


Hi, good morning.


It's Phoebe.


Phoebe, oh, OK.


No problem.


So my question, it's already posted on the Google channel,


but I'll just repeat it now.


So I work in a content creation agency,


and we work with different blogs.


And the agency's been running for more than 10 years,


and we've never had problems with getting


our articles indexed.


But it's for the last like six months,


all of the new blogs especially are having big problems getting


their articles indexed.


So obviously, we're working on organic traffic.


And if we're not getting our articles indexed,


we can't work on that or optimize any content.


And I was just wondering if there's any specific reason,


maybe there's been some sort of change,


or if we just have to wait and see what happens.


Because we have done a lot of technical revisions


of the site maps and everything.


And in theory, everything should be running correctly,


but we've just noticed this decrease in articles


getting indexed.


Yeah, it's hard to say in general


without being able to look at some of these example sites.


If you have some examples of pages


that you've created that are not super fresh,


but I don't know, a couple of weeks old that are still not


getting indexed, I would love to get some of those examples.


If you can drop them here in the chat, that would be useful.


OK.


In general, though, I think what I


see with a lot of these questions that


tend to come up around my content not being indexed


is that from a technical point of view, a lot of these sites


are really good, that they're doing the right things


with regards to site maps.


The internal linking is set up really well.


But it's more that on our side, from a quality point of view,


it's something where it feels like the bar is slowly going


up, in that more and more people are creating content


that is technically OK, but it's not from a quality point


of view such that we say, well, this is really critical content


to include in the search results.


And usually, that's something that's not tied


to that specific article.


Like if you create an article on a topic,


then it's not that that article will be


seen as kind of lower quality.


It's more that the site overall has been seen as, well,


it's kind of OK.


It's technically OK.


It's not spam, but it's also not fantastic content.


So our systems would tend to slow down


with regards to crawling and indexing of that content


because we're not sure how we would actually show this content


in the search results.


And that's something that I've seen, I think, more and more.


And it's usually less a matter of a technical issue


on a website, especially if other content is being indexed


because if some content works and other content doesn't work


on a website, then from a technical point of view,


probably they're all set up in the same way.


But it's really more the overall quality


of the websites themselves.


And again, I don't know your site.


So it's kind of hard.


Well, in theory, they should be pretty good quality because we


do work with expert writers in their fields.


So that you're mentioning the quality could be the problem


is sort of worrying me.


Would you have any suggestions for us to sort of improve this


because it is like no articles have been indexed


in the last five months.


So it's not like somar and soman.


It's like a major problem in that regard.


Yeah.


And are you seeing that we're crawling the website itself?


No, but we have requested the indexing individually


for each of the articles.


And that still hasn't given results.


So they are being crawled.


And the pages are qualified as discovered and currently not


indexed.


So they have been crawled by Google.


They're just not getting indexed.


OK.


If they're discovered and not indexed,


usually that means we've seen a link to them,


but we haven't actually crawled them.


The next step would be kind of crawled and not indexed.


And then we would index it.


But that kind of means we know about these pages.


And when our systems think that it makes sense


to include more content from those sites,


then we can go off and actually crawl those pages


and index them as well.


It's always tricky for me to say there's


a quality issue with your website


without having actually seen it at all, which


is why I find these examples really useful.


And I bring them pretty much all to the indexing team


themselves so that they can take a look as well to kind of see,


is this really something where our systems are


doing the right thing, or are they confused for whatever reason?


OK, so maybe I could come back next week with a list


of examples, because it is an agency-wide problem.


But I think from a practical point of view,


it's not that we've stopped crawling the web


or that we don't want to index more content.


It's really more that we see a lot of technically valid


content, and our systems are still


limited in the sense that we can't index the whole web.


So we kind of have to figure out how to evaluate the quality


and figure out which of these pages


makes sense to be indexed so that we can actually show them


the search results afterwards.


OK, well, thank you so much for all of the information.


And I'll come back next week with some examples


so we can go into it further.


Thank you.


All right, thanks.


All right, Joseph.


Hello, John.


If you give permission, I'd like to ask two questions.


Sure.


First off, we have a news publishing website since 2009.


We post articles related to recipes, health, fitness,


and stuff like that.


So we have articles that are considered per an SEO tool


as duplicate content.


But what we tend to do is recreate


another version of this recipe, let's say,


or maybe tweak around maybe sugar-free or salt-free


or everything related to that.


So it's still considered as duplicate content.


What this SEO tool suggested is that we remove it


because none of the duplicate content


are being ranked or indexed by Google.


So what is the solution for this?


Yeah.


So I think, first of all, I would be cautious about blindly


following any SEO tool, just as something to start with,


in that SEO tools tend to make assumptions


with regards to what Google will do and what will happen.


And sometimes those assumptions are OK,


and sometimes they're not correct.


And I think taking this kind of feedback from SEO tools


is useful because it's still something


where you can take a look at it, and you


have to make a judgment call.


And you might choose to say, well,


I'm ignoring the tool in this case,


and I'm kind of following the guidance in a different case.


So just kind of to start with, if you're seeing something


even from a very popular SEO tool that tells you,


oh, you should disavow these links,


or you should delete this content,


always use your judgment first before blindly following that.


With regards to duplicate content like that,


or I guess in this case, it wouldn't be duplicate per se


because it's slightly different content,


it's something where you always kind of need


to consider the strategic aspect of how you want your pages


to be shown and what the competitive environment is


like in the search results.


And sometimes it makes sense to have kind of one article


kind of split up into different variations


because these individual variations are unique enough


that people are actually searching for them.


And sometimes it makes sense to combine an article and say,


well, I have three or four variations.


I will make one page out of it.


And usually what happens there is


that one page is a little bit stronger than in the search


results.


So that means if it's a very competitive environment,


having fewer pages that are stronger


is usually a good idea.


Whereas if you're already doing really well


in those kind of queries, then maybe sometimes


having multiple variations is an option


to kind of better target the specific intents


that people have.


And that's not something where I would say there's always


one clear answer.


You should have fewer pages or you should have more pages.


It's really something where if you


see this kind of situation popping up,


you can make a judgment call.


And it's more almost like a strategic decision rather than


an SEO decision.


Yes.


So I think in a case like this, I


would check to see what are the queries leading up


to these pages.


Are you even getting enough visibility for these pages


individually?


And if you're seeing that they're


ranking very badly at the moment,


maybe it makes sense to combine them.


Maybe it's also the case that the competitive environment


for those queries that you're targeting


is so strong that even if you combine it,


it doesn't make a difference.


So it's kind of like, yeah, you have


to look at all of those sides.


Another question is about the broken links on our website.


Our website has around 40K pages and double the links.


So we have around 20K of broken links


caused by a migration gone bad from a platform


to another platform.


Since then, we started noticing a decrease in organic traffic.


We used to rank, let's say, for 20K, 25K per day


in organic traffic.


Now we're only getting like 2K to 3K or 4K at max.


So do you think it's a great metric to SEO ranking


to remove these broken links and 404 pages?


When did you do that migration?


Is that longer ago?


Yes, it happened in 2020, about two years ago.


Yeah.


My guess is for the most part, that doesn't matter anymore.


So it is something I would watch out for with any migration


because essentially, the main thing you want to catch


is the situation where someone externally links


to your website.


And that link to your website essentially goes into nowhere.


So if you see someone externally linking


to a page that is now a 404 page because you forgot


to redirect it, that link is kind of lost.


And if you see that happening at a larger scale,


then those links are things that you will lose.


And that can be reflected in the search results over time


as well.


I'd say for a certain while, you can still


go back and add a redirect for those individual links


that you see like that.


I don't know if after two years, it


would make a big difference unless there


are really strong links that are going to your site


and kind of being lost like that.


So that's kind of what I would look at there is the


if you have a chance to kind of look at a links report


from back then and can double check the more important links


that you find there and see if they still work,


if they redirect to a real page on your website,


that's something where I would perhaps even after two years


go in and see if there's something that you can do there.


You can also estimate this kind of in a rough way


by looking at your server logs if you have access


in that if you see a lot of crawlers from search engines


go to 404 pages, sometimes that's


a sign that they think there's going


to be something useful there, and then they get lost.


So that might be a way to look at it and see,


I don't know, from the last month,


the 404 pages that were accessed by search engines,


which of these should be redirected to something useful.


That's an excellent tip.


Thank you, John.


Sure.


Cool.


Let's see.


Sufayan.


Hi, John.


Currently, I'm working on a website that is based in India,


and we get leads from all over India.


As we can provide our services all over the world,


but firstly, being in India, I want


to rank my service pages in USA to get more leads from there.


So can you help me know what all things I can do so that I


can rank on top of my competitors that are in USA?


I have already done free off page,


changed the UI, UX, and content structure


according to the US region.


So what more I can do to start ranking on the US service


pages that I have created?


Yeah.


It's hard to say without knowing your website.


It's actually an SEO agency that we all


provide only SEO services.


So we need to start getting leads from the US region based


in India.


So usually, the thing that I think you need to watch out for


is, on the one hand, geotargeting,


in that if you're going from a country-specific website


to something that is more global,


then it helps to make sure that from a technical point of view,


your website is available for that.


So in particular, something like using a generic top-level


domain instead of a country-specific top-level


domain, that can help.


The other thing to also keep in mind


is that any time when you go from a country-level website


to a global-level website is that the competition just


changes completely.


And it might be the case that, for example, in India,


you're ranking really well for these queries.


But in the US, the competition is just so much stronger


that even that really well level from India


doesn't translate to something that is reasonable in the US.


And that's kind of, I think, like you've probably


seen from SEO, is not something that you can just


fix with technical issues.


You really have to kind of work on that for the long run


to make sure that your website is actually much, much stronger


and that people kind of see it also as something,


I don't know, relevant for them in their country.


And I don't think there's one technical trick that you


can do to make that happen.


SPEAKER 2 OK, so John, one last question, as technically.


I need 50% sessions from US.


So what I can do, I have some blog pages also,


which gets 50% to 60% traffic from India.


So now I want some 50% traffic from US for the US blogs.


So how can I do that?


I don't think you can just turn that on and turn that off.


I mean, at most, like if you're looking at percentages,


you can block people from India.


But I don't think that's kind of what you'd want to do.


Essentially, you need to kind of grow


your website and your visibility in the US,


or globally at least, so that it becomes more relevant.


And that's usually not something where you can just,


I don't know, put the words on the page a couple of times.


And then suddenly, you're much more competitive.


Because especially in the SEO space,


there's lots of people doing SEO.


And it's very competitive.


And you can't just jump in and say, well,


I will be ranking in a global market


or in a really strong US market immediately.


No.


SPEAKER 1 Yeah, got it.


Thank you so much, John.


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


And if any of you have questions along the way,


feel free to jump in or raise your hand so that I can switch


back to you afterwards.


Let's see.


We're working with an e-commerce client.


Their e-commerce is on Open Source, which is an online store


management system.


On the other hand, their blog is on WordPress.


The main URL is example.com, whereas the blog


is blog.example.com.


What would be the best approach for this client


to get credit from the blogs?


So they already get credit from the blogs in the sense


that probably these sites are cross-linked


between each other.


And that's kind of what we're looking for,


to make sure that the two aspects are linked


between each other so that we can pass signals


from one side to the other.


From our point of view, we don't say


that subdomains or subdirectories


are preferred in any particular way.


Some SEOs have very strong opinions


about subdomains and subdirectories


and would probably want to put this all on the same domain.


But from our point of view, you could do it like this as well.


So that's from, I guess, from our point of view,


this setup would be fine.


If you did want to move it into the same domain,


then practically speaking, that usually


means you have to do some technical kind of tricks,


where essentially you proxy one subdomain as a subdirectory


somewhere else.


And you have to make sure that all of the links


work and all of that.


Sometimes that's quite complicated.


So that's kind of one thing to watch out for.


The other thing I'd say is that sometimes e-commerce systems


also have some limited kind of page creation ability as well.


I don't know in this specific case if that's true.


But sometimes being able to create individual pages


within the e-commerce site is something that you can do.


And sometimes that's enough for the kind of basic level


of blogging that people do on an e-commerce site.


It's definitely not the case that we would say WordPress


blogs are the best.


And they will always rank number one when it comes to blogs.


So if you can create the same content


within a more limited e-commerce kind of text page creation


system, then probably that's just as good.


So that's, I think, another option


that might work out for you.


In Search Console, when looking at the pages report,


I click on one page that has 241 clicks.


I click on the Queries report, and the queries add up to 148.


Do we attribute this to the anonymized queries


mentioned in the Help Center?


Yes, usually that's the case.


So in particular, when you look at the page level,


we can show you all of the information in Search Console.


And that is because there's nothing


kind of unique about the individual page requests.


But when it comes to queries, there


are queries that have only very limited use.


And we would not show those necessarily in Search Console.


That means when you look at the report,


and you'll see on the one hand the number on top


of the report where it says total impressions


or total clicks.


And you can look at the individual impressions and


clicks for each individual query.


And sometimes when you add up the table, it doesn't match up.


And that's essentially due to us dropping those queries that


are kind of anonymized queries.


And that's kind of the differences


that you would see there.


So in Search Console, if you look at it on a page level,


you'll see slightly different numbers


than on a per query level.


And on a query level, when you look at the table itself,


you might see slightly different numbers than the summary


on top.


And from our point of view, if you


want to look at the individual queries,


then the query level data is definitely useful.


But if you want to see the full picture of the impressions


to the site, then you kind of want


to look at the page level or the site level results


and use that for tracking the trends and kind of changes


over time.


Among other activities, my client


sells bakery products on an e-commerce site.


Many of these have a seasonal flair, for example,


St. Patrick's Day.


When their product is in season, they


would like to see it indexed and, if possible,


ranked prominently.


When we went to test and submit the product URL for indexing,


they don't have a field aggregate ranking or review,


both of which are considered optional by schema fields.


Because of this, they get a yellow warning.


In other words, the page can be crawled but not submitted,


indexed, or ranked.


It seems like an optional schema field should


allow the page to be indexed.


Would you agree?


And then it has an example there.


So the page can definitely be indexed,


even if some of the structured data markup is wrong.


The page can be indexed even if the HTML itself


is completely broken.


So just purely because the structured data


is not complete or not optimal would not block indexing.


So that's kind of the first step here.


The other part, I think, is something


that is useful to look at specifically


for e-commerce sites in that it's very helpful for us


to understand what you would consider to be


important across a website.


That means when we look at a website,


if you show us as visibly as possible what you think


is critical here, then it's easier for us to pick that up.


From a practical point of view, that


means when we look at something like the home page of a website


or whatever the most important page is from the website,


let us know about what you consider to be important


and link to that prominently.


So for something like a St. Patrick's Day cake,


that's something where when we look at the home page,


we should be able to see that this is actually


a seasonal thing, and this is really important for you,


and that we find direct links from the home page


to that specific product.


When I looked at this specific example here,


I mean, the page is linked here with that specific St.


Patrick's Day cake.


But when you look at the home page of the site,


it's not mentioned anywhere.


And even kind of like the next level in from that website,


you don't see that this cake is visibly linked somewhere.


That means for us, when we look at this website overall,


even if we see this specific product being mentioned


in a sitemap file, it looks like some random product that


just happened to show up in the e-commerce site.


We don't realize that actually this


is something that is really important to you


and that you would like to have treated kind of prominently


in the search results.


So what I would do in cases like this, where you have especially


some time-limited events happening,


is make sure that you're really visibly linking


to that from the home page, that you include some of the aspects


in the home page as well, so that even if we only re-index


and reprocess your home page, we already


know that there's some information there


that we can pick up on.


So if you have a St. Patrick's Day cake, for example,


and you mention it on your home page,


and we only update your home page for whatever reason,


then if someone searches for a St. Patrick's Day cake,


then we will at least know your home page could


be relevant for that query.


And ideally, if it's linked directly from the home page,


then we can pick up that product as well and see,


well, this is a really important product for this website.


And probably, we can process it a little bit faster


than we could some random other product that you


happen to update on a website.


So essentially, with internal linking,


you can give us a lot of information


about what you care about across a website.


And for a large part, our algorithms


will try to follow that.


It's not that they'll make a judgment call on their own.


It's more that they look at your site,


and they realize, oh, this person


says this is really important.


So we will kind of give it a little bit more weight.


And what you consider important is totally up to you.


It might be something seasonal.


It might be something that you sell really well.


It might be something where you make the most money out of


or something where the competitive environment is


particularly strong and you want to get a foothold in there.


All of that is totally up to you.


But make it as clear as possible when we look at your website,


especially your home page, especially the more important


pages on a site, what you want to be treated in the foreground


when it comes to search.


I have images with some text on it.


In that case, should I use alt text?


I think ideally, if you have text and images,


it probably makes sense to have the text directly


on the page itself.


Nowadays, there are lots of ways to creatively display


text across a website.


So I wouldn't necessarily try to use text and images


and then use the alt text as a way to help with that.


I think the alt text is a great way to help with that.


But ideally, it's better to avoid having text and images.


And the question goes on, should I


write alt text for products for an e-commerce site


since there's already text beneath the product that


describes the product?