it's very easy to focus on word count on a page.


English Google Webmaster Central office-hours from June 12, 2020

And it's very easy to focus too much on word count on a page.


So from our point of view, we don't use word count


as a ranking factor.


It's not that you have to hit a specific word count,


and then suddenly your page is deemed as high quality.


Sometimes really short pages are really good for users.


They perform really well.


Sometimes really long pages are what users are looking for.


That's something where you kind of have


to find that balance yourself.


It's not that from our point of view


we would say you need to hit 1,000 words or 5,000 words.


That's really kind of an arbitrary judgment


that I think doesn't apply in a lot of situations.


So when I tend to see questions coming in where people are


saying, my high quality page has 4,500 words on it,


you should be ranking it better, then my first thought


is maybe you're focusing too much on the number of words


on the page rather than the quality of the content


that you're providing there.


So that's kind of my thought here maybe as well,


in that it's very easy to count the words on a page


and to say this is so, so important because I


have 2,000 words on this page.


But actually, our algorithms don't


look at the number of words.


So you kind of have to take a step back and think


about the page overall.


And with regards to different structured data elements,


it's the same thing.


It's not that the word count matters.


It's really that the value that you're providing


is what's important here.


That said, with regards to FAQ and how-to and maybe


some other kinds of structured data


that I'm not 100% sure of which ones might also apply.


Maybe special announcement would be similar.


It is something where we need to have enough text


to show in this kind of rich result box for a page for us


to actually show it.


So if you have an FAQ section and the question is why


and the answer is because, then probably our algorithms


are going to say, well, this is not very useful.


Maybe you should kind of elaborate a little bit more


before we start showing this in the search results.


So that's something where maybe you'd want to look


at the size of your questions and answers


just to make sure that it kind of aligns


with what would be shown in the search results.


But otherwise, I really wouldn't worry about the word


count of the page.


Some websites use different approaches.


User behavior for desktop, mobile, and AMP,


like on M web browsing using layered approach.


You click on a page.


Your page layer opens with less content compared


to the web version on desktop.


Regular click to URL with a redirect to regular web page


and on AMP.


You click on a URL since AMP doesn't give you


flexibility to do so.


Will this come under good or recommended practices?


I don't know how much it makes sense


to do such vastly different approaches


on different devices.


So that's something where I would


try to be a bit thoughtful on what it is that you're trying


to do there rather than just doing whatever you can do


with regards to the technology.


It's very easy to, kind of similar with word count,


to focus on a technology and say,


well, I can do all of these crazy things.


Therefore, I will do them.


And it looks really fancy.


But is that really what works best for users?


I don't know.


Maybe it is.


Maybe it works well for your users.


With regards to the different versions on different pages,


the thing to keep in mind is with mobile-first indexing,


we will be indexing the mobile version of the page.


So if the mobile version of your page


does not use normal URLs for navigation,


then we will have trouble indexing your mobile site


because we won't be able to access those non-URLs to get


to the content.


So if the whole navigation on the mobile site


is really purely JavaScript-based,


you're swapping out different layers on a page,


it stays on the same URL, there are no actual links


on this page, then we would probably


have a lot of trouble being able to crawl and index that site.


And probably we would not shift that site


to mobile-first indexing at the moment.


But at some point, we're going to kind of make the decision


and say, well, we need to shift everyone over.


And that will mean we'll shift your site over as well,


even if it's not ready yet for mobile-first indexing.


And if really all of the content on your mobile site


is not accessible through normal URLs,


then we will drop that from the index.


So that content won't be shown in the search results at all.


And with mobile-first indexing, it


doesn't mean that it'll be dropped for mobile users.


It'll be dropped for desktop users as well.


So if that content is not accessible on mobile,


we will not be able to index it.


With regards to AMP and mobile and desktop,


we treat AMP pages as being alternate by default.


So we wouldn't use the AMP page for indexing.


There are certainly ways that you can set up a website


so that the AMP page is your mobile page


and you have an alternate desktop page, where you just


have a desktop version and the AMP version.


And in a case like that, we would


see the AMP page as being a normal mobile page,


and we would just index that normally.


The other thing that kind of plays


into this complex scenario of mobile, desktop, and AMP


is that when it comes to the page experience score, kind


of the core Web Vitals, where we're


testing the speed and stability, usability of a web page,


we will test the version that users end up seeing.


So that means we would test the AMP version with regards


to speed and kind of the quality, usability.


From that point of view, we would not


test the mobile version for that.


So that's something where, in this situation,


with mobile-first indexing, we would index the mobile version.


We would use the AMP version with regards


to testing usability and speed.


And we would show the desktop version in the search results


as an alternate URL when people on desktop are searching,


but we would not index the desktop version.


So it gets really complicated.


My recommendation for this kind of situation


is to try to simplify things as much as possible


for your website.


And instead of having three different variations


of the same page, find a way that you


can use some kind of responsive design


so that you either just have two versions, maybe kind


of like desktop-mobile combined and the AMP version,


or maybe there's even a way to move to kind of a pure AMP


framework, where you essentially use AMP for the whole website.


Because AMP is a responsive web framework,


so you could theoretically do that for a lot of things


as well.


John, a question on that.


Do you think then, or is it the websites that haven't yet


shifted to mobile-first indexing,


are websites that need to do something about that?


Will you be notifying websites that


need to do something about that in upcoming months?


Yeah, we've been notifying sites for a while


now with regards to the bigger issues that we've noticed.


So that's something where I expect


us to continue doing that.


With regards to mobile-first indexing,


we recently did a review with the mobile-first indexing team.


And it seems that most of the sites that are remaining


kind of fall into two buckets.


On the one hand, the sites that basically don't make


any changes at all, which are probably


a lot of sites that are either just created once and then


kind of left, or maybe sites that are just kind of,


I don't know, gone stale over the years,


that's kind of one big bucket.


And the other bucket is really large websites


that have complicated setups.


Maybe that's something similar to your website


that you're working on there.


And that's something where we're looking into ways


to make it easier for us to notify them of specific issues


that we're still seeing there.


Great, thanks.


I just had another further question.


We've seen some changes over the last few months.


So since April, Googlebot's slowing down its crawl


by about 40%.


And this is across all of our classified sites.


Is that something that's a global initiative


that you guys are working on?


Or is it something site-specific?


Probably more site-specific.


So I'm not aware of us slowing down crawling in general.


I think that would be kind of tricky,


because the web is still growing.


Content is still coming and going.


Maybe it's just that we're focusing our crawling


a little bit differently in between.


But in general, we should continue


to be crawling normally.


Hey, John.


Hi.


How are you doing?


You're doing great today, right?


Pretty good.


All right.


Good to hear.


John, I have a question regarding the corporate viral.


Using a page as a ranking factor,


it means you need to be able to have your user data


to be able to tell these pages fast, these pages slow.


Is that right?


So when a page doesn't have a significant amount of traffic,


how does it handle in this scenario?


Yeah, so for the core web vitals,


we do show it kind of in Search Console and in PageSpeed


Insights if we have enough data from the Chrome User Experience


Report.


So that's something where if a website really


has a low amount of traffic, then we


wouldn't be able to show anything there,


and we wouldn't be able to take that into account.


But that's something that's very similar to other kind


of ranking factors that we have.


For example, if a website is really new,


then we don't have a lot of historical data


about the website, and we kind of have to guess.


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


we would be able to take this situation


and still say, we don't have any speed data about this website.


Maybe it's a completely new website.


Maybe it's something where there's just not


a lot of traffic to this website.


But we still have to rank it somehow in search.


So it's not that we would remove it completely from search.


We would just say, well, for this particular ranking factor,


we don't know.


We have to make some assumptions,


but we will try to compare it to other websites anyway.


This is all right.


Thanks.


So I wouldn't worry about it if it's just that you don't


have a lot of traffic yet.


If you're working on your website, then over time,


probably you will have a bit more traffic.


So hopefully that kind of settles down.


But it's not something where we would say,


well, we would never be able to show this website in search.


So it makes traffic in the ranking factor in the scenario.


We could say that.


No.


I don't think that would be safe to say,


because it's really just about us having some amount of data.


It's kind of like saying, well, age is a ranking factor,


because if a website is completely new,


Google doesn't know how to rank it.


Therefore, it's not old enough to rank.


But we have to deal with these kind of situations


where we don't have data all the time.


There are lots of ranking signals


that we have where we just don't know for individual websites,


and we kind of have to guess.


And especially with new websites,


people see it in different ways.


So some people talk about kind of the honeymoon period


where Google is ranking my website very highly,


because it's a new website.


And other people talk about the sandbox, where it's like,


well, my website is new, and Google is not


ranking my website at all.


All of these situations fall into the general bucket of,


well, we don't have data for this website


for this particular scenario yet.


So we have to make some assumptions,


and we will see if those assumptions were OK.


SPEAKER 2


So my question is related to Google Search.


So what I have noticed recently is


that if you put the title and the date,


the content is ranking on the top in featured snippet.


For keywords like, let's say, that phone's under 10,000,


mobile phone's under 15,000.


If you look at the top ranking keyword, what the sites are


doing is that they are just manipulating the date every day,


every 24 hours.


And these things are coming on featured snippet.


But if you look at the content, it's hardly anything new.


It's just the date is changing every 24 hours.


So is it a ranking factor, or is it a bug,


or what is your take on that?


It's hard to say without looking at some examples there.


It could be that it's something that we


should be able to improve.


What I also notice with a lot of queries


is that it's very easy for a site owner


to get fixated on one specific query


and to start seeing problems there.


But when we look at that on our side,


we see, well, 10 people searched for this query last month.


And then from our point of view, it comes across as something,


well, maybe we don't need to spend a lot of engineering time


to improve this particular query or this particular kind


of query because it's just so rarely used.


It's something that a site owner would


use when they're copying and pasting their titles


or when they're explicitly checking something


to see if a competitor is ranking for something exact.


Then you might see that, and you might look at it and say,


well, it looks really bad.


And Google is getting misled by this kind of guy


who is trying to manipulate the search results.


But if you're the only person who


is seeing this, essentially, maybe a handful of other people,


then maybe that's not something that you need to worry about.


And maybe that's something that our engineers don't


need to worry about.


But it can also be that it's affecting


the query that is very visible and where


we should be doing a lot better.


So if you can give us some of those details,


that would be fantastic.


You could drop them here in the chat.


I'm happy to pick them up and pass them on to the team.


SPEAKER 2 I think someone has already listed on the chat,


John.


I just see someone by name on digital.


He has already given some examples, I guess.


So I just read his thing.


And it's happening in Google Search India.


So I just noticed it, so I thought I'll just ask him.


Thanks, John.


JOHN MUELLER Sure.


I'm happy to take a look at these things.


I always get the transcript afterwards.


So it makes it a little bit easier


to double check with the teams on that.


Cool.


Let me pause the recording here.


If any of you want to stick around and chat


a little bit longer, you're welcome to do that.


But just for sakes of having a reasonable cut


off for the recording, thank you all for joining in.


Thanks for all of the quick questions that you submitted.


It's always good to see a bunch of new faces as well.


And wishing you all a great weekend


and maybe see some of you, one of them in future times as well.


Google Search Console Training: Stay tuned!

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


And today, I'll talk about how to use Search Console


to improve your AMP implementation,


how to request your content to be temporarily hidden


in Google Search results,


how to use the Search Console sitemap report,


how to use Search Console to learn which of your pages


have been crawled and indexed by Google,


how to use Search Console to monitor your site's performance


in Google Search.


Stay tuned.


No, it's not like that.


It's...


And here's a trick for you.


See that?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Welcome, everyone, to a special episode of the Search Off


Search Central LIVE Q&A

the Record podcast.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Our plan for this series is to talk a bit about what's


Search Central LIVE Q&A

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


Search Central LIVE Q&A

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


Search Central LIVE Q&A

This episode is a bit special, as you'll soon


Search Central LIVE Q&A

see, or rather hear.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

My name is John Mueller.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I'm a search advocate on the Search Relations team


Search Central LIVE Q&A

here at Google in Switzerland.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I'm joined for this episode by Martin and Gary, also both


Search Central LIVE Q&A

on the Search Relations team.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

As I mentioned, today's episode is a bit special.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

It's a recording from the Search Central Live


Search Central LIVE Q&A

event that took place at the end of February 2021.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

As the name suggests, for Search Central Live,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

we wanted to do as much as possible live,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

including an episode of this podcast.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Live recordings are always a bit special.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

No matter how much you prepare, unexpected things can happen.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So this was definitely quite an exciting experiment.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

On top of that, we aim to have Search Central Live take place


Search Central LIVE Q&A

at a time that's more convenient for folks in the Asian Pacific


Search Central LIVE Q&A

region, which was the middle of the night for us.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Thankfully, Gary and Martin are no strangers


Search Central LIVE Q&A

to both jet lag and recordings.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So I think it all worked out nicely in the end.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

For this episode, instead of the usual back and forth


Search Central LIVE Q&A

between us, we decided to try to answer some of the questions


Search Central LIVE Q&A

that we received from the audience


Search Central LIVE Q&A

during the course of the event.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I hope the selection of questions, the answers,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

and the discussions are interesting to you.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So without further ado, let's switch over


Search Central LIVE Q&A

to the live session.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So I found a question.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Oh, is it?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I'd love to hear your takes on it.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

What would you say is priority number one


Search Central LIVE Q&A

when launching a new site and a new domain


Search Central LIVE Q&A

for a local business?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I would say good content.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So local business, like a bakery?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Yeah, maybe definitely say where you're located,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

what your opening hours are, what's on offer.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

These kind of things, I guess, make a lot of sense.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Gary, anything from your end?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Yeah, that's an awesome question, actually.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I don't think that we go too much into detail


Search Central LIVE Q&A

about these kind of things.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And perhaps we should, because when


Search Central LIVE Q&A

you're launching a new site, then very often it's


Search Central LIVE Q&A

kind of hard to come up with the content.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I have a friend.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

She lives in Austin, and she's a dog instructor.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And they launched a new website, and she


Search Central LIVE Q&A

had ideas about what she could put on the website.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

But when I looked at the website, then to me,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

it felt very minimal or not focused.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And of course, the problem is that I can't tell her anything,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

because we are friends, and then it's kind of weird.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

But eventually, someone pointed out to her


Search Central LIVE Q&A

that the content is very narrow and very minimal or too


Search Central LIVE Q&A

minimal.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And it was also not very precise.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

She was not describing well what the business was about


Search Central LIVE Q&A

or where it was exactly or how someone can get the service.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So those are very important, in my opinion.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Like, tell people what you are doing,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

exactly what you are doing, what you are capable of,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

and what kind of services you offer,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

and also where you operate.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Because yeah, she's in Austin, Texas.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

But based on the website, it could


Search Central LIVE Q&A

have been anywhere in the continental US.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So perhaps a narrower, I mean, if you pinpoint your service


Search Central LIVE Q&A

area, that would be useful.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And also what service you're offering and what products you


Search Central LIVE Q&A

are having in your shop that sells products.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And it was the best thing ever.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And the soldiers were coming, and they were eating,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

and they were drinking.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And then it just goes on and on and on and on and on.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And you are like, but where's the damn cookie recipe?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

MARTIN SPLITTENBERG


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And the best is when that happens


Search Central LIVE Q&A

in the middle of the recipe.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

You have your hands full of stuff,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

and you're in the kitchen and just


Search Central LIVE Q&A

trying to figure out what's next.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And then you're basically scrolling with your elbow


Search Central LIVE Q&A

or something like, what is happening here?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Because I don't care about the history of your local mill


Search Central LIVE Q&A

or something.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

GARY ILLYES-SELLERSI mean, by then, your phone probably


Search Central LIVE Q&A

locked itself, so you also have to unlock it somehow,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

which is very hard with the elbow.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

MARTIN SPLITTENBERG Face ID, my friend.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

GARY Oh.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

MARTIN SPLITTENBERG Which I actually, ironically,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

do not have enabled.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

JOHN MUELLER Going back to the question,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

like for local businesses, I'm sorry.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Going back to the topic.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

GARY John is trying to keep us focused.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

That's a nice change.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So yeah, I don't know.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

For local business, I think also everything around Google


Search Central LIVE Q&A

My Business is really useful because it kind of forces


Search Central LIVE Q&A

you to provide all of that metadata for your business.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Like, your opening hours is like, give me times.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Don't describe when your business is open.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Give me a clear address, a name, a description


Search Central LIVE Q&A

of your services.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I think you can also add products now.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So all of that, I think, is super useful.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And from an SEO point of view, the one thing


Search Central LIVE Q&A

that I think is also important is


Search Central LIVE Q&A

that you have the reasonable expectations.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Like, if you're starting off with a new business,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

you're not going to rank number one for bookstore in the US.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

It's like, you have a small niche that you work on.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And you can grow out of that and grow a little bit larger


Search Central LIVE Q&A

over time.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

But you kind of need to kind of grow with the assumption


Search Central LIVE Q&A

that, first of all, you want people nearby to find you.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And partially, that's done by people who know your name, who


Search Central LIVE Q&A

can search for you directly, and partially,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

people who just see you in maps and other kind of listings


Search Central LIVE Q&A

where they can find local businesses.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Also, think about whether you can


Search Central LIVE Q&A

adapt to the current situation or to the situation that's


Search Central LIVE Q&A

in your area.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And try to mention that on the website.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Because, for example, I know that in Portland, there


Search Central LIVE Q&A

was this, I remember it because of the mention


Search Central LIVE Q&A

of the bookstore.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

There is this little bookstore that, when this pandemic


Search Central LIVE Q&A

started, they started delivering books


Search Central LIVE Q&A

to the doorstep of the people.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And then they could exchange the books for some, like,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

few cents.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Well, probably not a few cents.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Well, actually, a few cents to another book.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

It was a used bookstore, so it was probably just a few cents.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So when someone was finished with reading something,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

then they could just basically return the book


Search Central LIVE Q&A

and get a new one that they chose


Search Central LIVE Q&A

from the online inventory.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And it got really famous locally in that area


Search Central LIVE Q&A

where they were delivering.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And I think that's also something


Search Central LIVE Q&A

that you can think about, which kind of almost goes


Search Central LIVE Q&A

into the area of link building.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And Gary is going to give me that look, I'm sure.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I am already giving you the look.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

OK.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

But I mean, doing things that are kind of magical and kind


Search Central LIVE Q&A

of out of the ordinary, where people start writing about you,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

where local news sites, they've mentioned, like, oh,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

this company is doing something fantastic, maybe, I don't know,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

on radio even, where you don't really get a link.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

But you get mentioned, and people can search for you


Search Central LIVE Q&A

and find you online because of that.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So kind of taking a step out of the comfort zone


Search Central LIVE Q&A

and doing something that people like to see.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I think that's also really useful.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And that's also the way to compete with the bigger


Search Central LIVE Q&A

players in your area.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Basically, if you can offer something


Search Central LIVE Q&A

that is more than they can offer because of their sheer size,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

for example, that can be super helpful for your own business.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Yeah.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Cool.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I found another question.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Like, if you want one more.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Sure, go ahead.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

How often are algorithms adjusted due to SEOs gaming


Search Central LIVE Q&A

the system?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

More than five.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

In my 10 years, I can recall about four or five times.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So every other year.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

That were not specifically web spam algorithm changes.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

That is less often than I expected, to be honest.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I think sometimes the folks that work on the algorithms


Search Central LIVE Q&A

work to try to just make them work really well.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And we get a lot of feedback from lots of places.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And my guess is a lot of the SEO gaming type things


Search Central LIVE Q&A

are things that we try to catch normally already, right?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Right.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Also, the thing is that we are not going after the SEOs.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

We are improving the quality of the results.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So if we see that there is a systemic problem


Search Central LIVE Q&A

with the results, then we are going


Search Central LIVE Q&A

to try to find the solution for that


Search Central LIVE Q&A

and improve the result quality.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

But we are not saying that, oh, the SEOs are again


Search Central LIVE Q&A

doing this and that, and we have to solve that.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

It's really just like, oh, the quality of the results


Search Central LIVE Q&A

is not that great in this particular vertical


Search Central LIVE Q&A

or whatever, so we should do something about it.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So you're saying if SEOs game the system


Search Central LIVE Q&A

and provide better sites, more relevant content,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

that would be fine?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

That would be horrible.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I strongly advise against that.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I see what you're doing.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Also, someone in the community actually


Search Central LIVE Q&A

asked a question that I was recently


Search Central LIVE Q&A

confronted with as well.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Oh, no, actually not recently.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I was confronted with this two years ago


Search Central LIVE Q&A

because it wasn't an in-person event.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

But it feels recent because everything is relative, Martin.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Exactly.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Looking at the timescale of the whole Earth,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

that's relatively recently, I would argue.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And even is asking that specific question as well.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

How has PageRank changed over the years?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And like, I don't think that we want to talk about that.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

No?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

But no, no, let me rephrase the question a little bit


Search Central LIVE Q&A

into something that I think we have been talking about


Search Central LIVE Q&A

and that we could discuss a little, which is,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

are we still using PageRank the same way


Search Central LIVE Q&A

that we did in the beginning?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Or has that changed?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Or has it gone away?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Or what is that?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Are we doing something similar still?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So to answer exactly the question that you asked,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

we are still using it the same way.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Oh, OK.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I see.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Moving on.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I think you asked the wrong question, but OK.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I think I asked the wrong question.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

You're not giving me much here, but I guess that's OK.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

John, do you have follow-up questions or other questions?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

How long is Google going to continue recommending


Search Central LIVE Q&A

dynamic rendering?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Yeah, Martin.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Oh, my.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Oh, come on.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

It was submitted.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Really.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

It's a legitimate question.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So first things first, dynamic rendering


Search Central LIVE Q&A

is when you are serving a pre-rendered non-JavaScript


Search Central LIVE Q&A

version of your page specifically to bots,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

including Googlebot and other bots,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

and the full shebang with JavaScript and everything


Search Central LIVE Q&A

to users.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Oftentimes, that is followed up by is there


Search Central LIVE Q&A

cloaking, to which I say no, unless you're


Search Central LIVE Q&A

showing very different content intention-wise.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

We have been recommending it in 2018, I think,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

and maybe before that.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

We have stopped recommending it when the evergreen Googlebot


Search Central LIVE Q&A

came out in May 2019.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So we don't recommend it anymore.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

It doesn't say that it's going to go away,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

and Redo Trump is also probably going


Search Central LIVE Q&A

to stay supported for a while and maintained


Search Central LIVE Q&A

for a while going on.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

We don't really have any plans of deprecating that.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

It's just we think it no longer is reasonable,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

because it turns out that dynamic rendering requires


Search Central LIVE Q&A

a lot of tech changes in your infrastructure anyway.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

It might look like the simpler option


Search Central LIVE Q&A

if you compare it with server-side rendering


Search Central LIVE Q&A

or server-side rendering plus hydration.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

But in practice, it turns out to be more complicated


Search Central LIVE Q&A

in most cases.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So we don't recommend it.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

You can still do it.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

We just think you should probably


Search Central LIVE Q&A

try to invest in server-side rendering instead.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

If you can't for some reason or if you need a band-aid


Search Central LIVE Q&A

until you have server-side rendering implemented,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

it's still a viable solution.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

But I would consider it a mid- to short-term solution.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

JOHN MUELLER-GRANTY


Search Central LIVE Q&A

How would you decide between leaving something


Search Central LIVE Q&A

client-side rendered and implementing


Search Central LIVE Q&A

server-side rendering?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Is there some simple guideline that you can tell people,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

or is it mostly, it's like, if you know what you're doing


Search Central LIVE Q&A

and you're already doing it, then that's good?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

What kind of tip?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Our CTO in the previous company once said to me,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

and that rang very true, and I just


Search Central LIVE Q&A

like the clarity of the sentence,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

don't fix what isn't broken.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So most JavaScript frameworks come as client-side rendered


Search Central LIVE Q&A

out of the box.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So if you use them, you very likely


Search Central LIVE Q&A

end up with a client-side rendered application.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

If your stuff gets indexed and can be crawled and indexed


Search Central LIVE Q&A

and rendered, then that's not an issue.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

You shouldn't be trying to fix something that isn't broken.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

If you are seeing issues in terms of, let's say,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

for instance, conversion rate because people are docking out


Search Central LIVE Q&A

because the site is flaky because of JavaScript,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

maybe server-side rendering is a good practice.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

If you see your site being really slow


Search Central LIVE Q&A

because the specific client-side rendering strategy isn't going


Search Central LIVE Q&A

to go so well with the amount of content you have,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

then maybe server-side rendering is a good strategy.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

In general, server-side rendering


Search Central LIVE Q&A

is usually making things more robust and faster for users,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

but that doesn't always have to be the case.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And maybe you have lower-hanging fruit elsewhere.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So don't apply it as a fixing all solution.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

It's not a silver bullet.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

It's not going to take away all the problems.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

But if you see issues that stem from the fact


Search Central LIVE Q&A

that some content is, for some reason, inaccessible


Search Central LIVE Q&A

or really slow or hurts performance,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

and that comes specifically from running all the JavaScript


Search Central LIVE Q&A

in the browser, then yes, you can get rid of that by


Search Central LIVE Q&A

or reduce the impact of that by using server-side rendering.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So cool.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Yeah.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And since you mentioned performance,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

would using client-side rendered or server-side rendered content


Search Central LIVE Q&A

affect things like Core Web Vitals,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

or is that kind of separate?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

No.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So the Core Web Vitals are trying


Search Central LIVE Q&A

to model and quantify the user experience of a page loading


Search Central LIVE Q&A

on the user's device.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And it turns out that if you think about your content,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

you have HTML, you have CSS, you have JavaScript,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

you have images, maybe videos, maybe sound files.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

It turns out from all of these, the most expensive asset


Search Central LIVE Q&A

is not images, is not video, is not audio.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

It is JavaScript.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And that's because the JavaScript


Search Central LIVE Q&A

has to be downloaded.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

That usually is relatively large.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

It can be multiple megabytes that you


Search Central LIVE Q&A

have to download before you actually get to even get closer


Search Central LIVE Q&A

to seeing the content.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And then you have to actually parse the JavaScript


Search Central LIVE Q&A

into a machine-readable format because it's human-readable


Search Central LIVE Q&A

and not necessarily machine-readable.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

It needs to be parsed into something that is,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

or translated into something that is machine-readable.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And then it's being executed.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And then if that execution triggers more network requests,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

you have to wait for those network requests.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And then the content comes in.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

That is never going to be as fast as content coming in


Search Central LIVE Q&A

through HTML.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And then immediately network requests


Search Central LIVE Q&A

happen for the images.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And then immediately, if it's like progressive JPEGs,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

you can even start rendering and showing the image


Search Central LIVE Q&A

as it arrives from the network.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

You can't do that with JavaScript.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

JavaScript needs to be fully downloaded


Search Central LIVE Q&A

before it even is translated into machine code.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And only then it can actually start doing stuff on your site.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So the COVID vitals will very likely be affected by this


Search Central LIVE Q&A

because the sheer fact that it takes so many extra steps


Search Central LIVE Q&A

to get to the content means that the largest contentful pain is


Search Central LIVE Q&A

going to happen later.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

The fact that every browser tab is basically


Search Central LIVE Q&A

doing one thing at a time and one thing at a time only


Search Central LIVE Q&A

means if it's executing JavaScript,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

it can't do anything else.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

As long as your JavaScript executes,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

you cannot scroll the page.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

You cannot type into input fields.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

You cannot click buttons.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I mean, you can.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

It's just nothing happens.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So the first input delay might also suffer.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

If JavaScript injects things or moves things around


Search Central LIVE Q&A

on the page, then also your visual stability


Search Central LIVE Q&A

might actually suffer.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So you might see impact on all three


Search Central LIVE Q&A

of the Core Web Vital metrics.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

OK, so the short version is don't use JavaScript.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

No, that's not the short version.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Use it reasonably.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

It's saying, oh, you can cut yourself with a knife.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Don't use knives ever.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Good luck.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Good luck in the kitchen without a knife.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

If you are making soup, you'll probably get away with it.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

But if you're trying to cut meat or something,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

how do you do that without a knife?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

GARY I've become vegetarian.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Yesterday, I made seitan.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

It was great.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Wow.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

MARTIN SPLITT I need to probably ask for recipes then.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

JOHN MUELLER Be careful.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

We'll start telling you about his grandmother.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

GARY I was a very interesting person.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

MARTIN SPLITT You are a very interesting person.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I'm sure the rest of your family is fantastically interesting


Search Central LIVE Q&A

as well.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Cool.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Yeah, I don't know.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

It's like so many other questions are still here.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Here's one.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I don't know.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Maybe this one works.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

What's the difference between the label penalty


Search Central LIVE Q&A

and basically a page not showing up at all because Google


Search Central LIVE Q&A

chooses to show another site with the same duplicate


Search Central LIVE Q&A

content?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Oh, my.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So basically, I don't know, a penalty, a manual action,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

or we just show a different site instead?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Well, a manual action, you get a manual action,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

or a site gets site, or a section of a site


Search Central LIVE Q&A

gets a manual action when they do something


Search Central LIVE Q&A

or they attempt to manipulate their rankings with something,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

like with links, with gibberish content,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

or I don't even know what.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I'm not very versed in the web spam policies.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

While the ranking is more natural,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I want to say, in that you have full control over what's


Search Central LIVE Q&A

happening there, at least in most of the cases.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And it's not targeted.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Manual actions are always targeted.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Basically, you did something against our guidelines,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

or that was against our guidelines,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

and you are getting a manual action for that,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

while an algorithmic change is most likely trying


Search Central LIVE Q&A

to fix a systemic problem.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And you just happen to have that problem, I guess,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

or contribute to that problem.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

But it's not targeted to your site.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And I guess the situation where a different page is shown


Search Central LIVE Q&A

because it's exact duplicate content of the own page,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

then it's like that's not necessarily a spam thing.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

But products, for example, if different sites


Search Central LIVE Q&A

have this exact same product description,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

we don't need to show all of the copies in the search results.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And we tend to just pick one of them.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So it's not a sign that you're a spammy site,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

just because you're using products that other people are


Search Central LIVE Q&A

selling too.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

GARY ILLYESISIOSAIDO, MALCOLM DICARLO, MALCOLM DICARLO,


Search Central LIVE Q&A


Search Central LIVE Q&A

MALCOLM DICARLO, MALCOLM DICARLO, MALCOLM DICARLO,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

MALCOLM DICARLO, MALCOLM DICARLO, MALCOLM DICARLO, GARY


Search Central LIVE Q&A

ILLYESISIOSAIDO, MALCOLM DICARLO, MALCOLM DICARLO,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

to go and fix it.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Yeah.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I guess in both cases, you just go and fix it.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

With manual actions, you get an email telling you to fix it,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

and the other one you kind of figure out on your own.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

But yeah.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Just go fix it.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

It's as easy as that, isn't it?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So I have another go fix it question.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Is it better to keep AMP pages with issues


Search Central LIVE Q&A

or to remove the AMP pages completely?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Is this a trick question?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I will shut up open now.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I think Gary has opinions about AMP.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

It's a wonderful question.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I don't know.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

From my point of view, it's like if you


Search Central LIVE Q&A

know your pages are broken, it's like fix them or remove them.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

It's not super complicated.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I mean, I don't know what kind of issue it is.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

But if you know something is broken


Search Central LIVE Q&A

and you want to make sure that you're putting your best


Search Central LIVE Q&A

foot forward, then make sure you're


Search Central LIVE Q&A

putting something that works forward, right?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

MARTIN SPLITTENBERG I think that makes sense.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And if you want to reap the benefits of AMP,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I'm pretty sure having a valid AMP page


Search Central LIVE Q&A

is the first step towards that.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So you might get away with it working well enough


Search Central LIVE Q&A

to be considered as a page, but it's not going to get you


Search Central LIVE Q&A

much of AMP's benefits.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So I would argue that, especially


Search Central LIVE Q&A

if you have a non-AMP version that is fine,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

then having a broken AMP version around


Search Central LIVE Q&A

is probably inviting more trouble than it's


Search Central LIVE Q&A

giving you any benefit.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So yeah, I would probably remove the broken one or fix it.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

GARY I will keep another example.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

hreflang was unrelated to hreflang.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

It's very close to my heart for reasons.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

MARTIN SPLITTENBERG I was about to say,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

you're related to hreflang.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Is it your brother or your sister?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Oh, that's why it's rel hreflang, now I get it.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

GARY ILLYES-SEYMOUR Exactly.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

But there are the, how to put this nicely,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

there was this big company who at one point


Search Central LIVE Q&A

decided that they couldn't measure


Search Central LIVE Q&A

the benefit of hreflang.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So they decided to remove it from their sites.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And their rankings tanked.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

It just went away internationally.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And suddenly it was very obvious that they


Search Central LIVE Q&A

need the hreflang to rank well internationally.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And same goes with AMP as well.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

If it benefits you and it's worth


Search Central LIVE Q&A

investing in fixing the issue, then yes, go ahead and fix it.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

But if the ROI is too low for your business,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

then you might as well just remove it.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And I would say the same thing for hreflang


Search Central LIVE Q&A

or any other technology that there's out there.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Because it's your business, you have


Search Central LIVE Q&A

to decide for yourself what benefits it and what doesn't.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

If hreflang benefits your business


Search Central LIVE Q&A

or your business reaps the benefits of hreflang,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

then good.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

If not, try removing it and see what happens.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Because you do need to invest in maintaining it.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

JOHN MUELLER I think if you're just doing AMP for speed


Search Central LIVE Q&A

reasons and you have a really fast site otherwise,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

just have one site and just focus on that instead of trying


Search Central LIVE Q&A

to maintain both of them.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Whereas if you have your AMP version set up in a way


Search Central LIVE Q&A

that it gets created automatically by a plug-in,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

then maybe it's just a matter of updating the plug-in


Search Central LIVE Q&A

and then suddenly everything works again.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I have a question that is maybe just a yes or no thing, Gary.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Is there value in having title tags


Search Central LIVE Q&A

that are longer than the displayable space in the search


Search Central LIVE Q&A

snippet?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

GARY ILLYES-SCHMIDT Yes.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Yes.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

OK.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

That's a nice one.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

That was easy.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I'm shocked.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I like these kind of answers.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

If we can, we should do these more often.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Cool.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And I don't know, lots of things still in the list.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

What does Google feel about PWAs to help improve user experience?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I will mute myself.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

MARTIN SPLITT I will mute myself.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

That's because PWAs include service workers that


Search Central LIVE Q&A

are built with JavaScript, and Gary


Search Central LIVE Q&A

is so happy about JavaScript.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I think, in general, they are great.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I use a bunch of them, actually.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So I do use the Progressive Web App for Twitter, for instance.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I have been using the YouTube one recently as well,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

because they just take less resources on my phone,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

and they work pretty much just as well as native apps,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

at least on Android.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I know that integration on iOS, I think, is not as great.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

But for search, specifically, it doesn't really matter,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

because as far as we can tell, it's just a website.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And certain things like offline support,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

that's something that we don't really


Search Central LIVE Q&A

experience when we crawl or render the pages.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So it doesn't really make a difference to us.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

But a well-built Progressive Web App usually


Search Central LIVE Q&A

is also a fast website.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So a fast website, on the other hand,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

will have good metrics on the cool web vitals, I would hope.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And that is a good thing, and that


Search Central LIVE Q&A

is part of the upcoming page experience.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So that will definitely not be bad.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Yeah, I guess a PWA doesn't necessarily


Search Central LIVE Q&A

have to be completely JavaScript client-side rendered, right?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

No, it does not have to be that.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

OK.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

That's like orthogonal or independent concepts, right?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

You can take any website.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

You can make a static HTML page, add a pre-built service worker


Search Central LIVE Q&A

that allows to cache that so that it's offline capable,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

serve it over HTTPS, and do a few other things,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

like have a manifest file, which is a JSON file, again,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

not JavaScript, and then put all that together.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And you have a PWA, even if it's not really


Search Central LIVE Q&A

running any line of JavaScript besides the service worker.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

The only thing that you need JavaScript for


Search Central LIVE Q&A

is the service worker.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And the service worker allows offline usage of that page.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So it's a price I would be OK paying, I think.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I know that Gary might think differently.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Sounds awful.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I knew it.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I mean, it sounds like something people should just be doing.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

What?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Like when you describe it like that, it feels like, oh, it


Search Central LIVE Q&A

just makes everything better, and you don't add


Search Central LIVE Q&A

a ton of JavaScript overhead.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I think he's just hiding something.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

No.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

He's good for you.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

PWAs.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

OK.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Cool.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Christine is asking if we can get a reason for the title tag


Search Central LIVE Q&A

length answer.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

That was also easy.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I think.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I mean, I tried.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I tried.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So the title length, that's an externally made up metric.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And I think at one point, we blurted out some number


Search Central LIVE Q&A

to say that, yeah, it should be like that, like this long.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Just shut up.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

That might not be true, actually.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Maybe it was just wishful thinking.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

If you blurted it out, it would probably be more than seven,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

or at least seven.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

No, this was before that, before we came up with the seven.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Yeah, number six.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So the reason why I try to steer people away


Search Central LIVE Q&A

from thinking about concrete numbers


Search Central LIVE Q&A

is not even about how we display titles,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

but rather how we construct our serving index


Search Central LIVE Q&A

and how we tokenize the page itself.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And there's no, I mean, technically, there's


Search Central LIVE Q&A

a limit, like how long can it be anything in the page.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

But it's not a small number.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

It's not like 160 characters or whatever, or 220 or whatever.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So try to keep it precise to the page.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

But I would not think too much about how long it is


Search Central LIVE Q&A

and whether it's long enough or way too long.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

If it fills up your screen, then probably it's too long.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

But if it's just one sentence that


Search Central LIVE Q&A

fits on one line or two lines, then it's like,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

you're not going to get the manual action for it.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Are you saying it's not the size that matters to you?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I'm so sorry.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

It's 2.28 in the morning, and I'm 12 years old.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Yes, you are.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Yeah.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

If it should shape, then I actually look like it as well.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I remember that our ex-teammate, Maria, she


Search Central LIVE Q&A

was always saying that I'm like a six-year-old.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Well, now we have a 12-year-old.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Surprises good.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Good.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Fair.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Do we want to take one more, or do we want to wrap up?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

OK.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I'm just like grabbing the first one that I have on my list


Search Central LIVE Q&A

here.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

In terms of page speed, is it better to exclude tracking code


Search Central LIVE Q&A

like Tag Manager?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Is there a way to include it without affecting page speed?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

No, that's not my question.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I'm muting myself.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So, wow.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I would say reduce the amount of requests


Search Central LIVE Q&A

that you need to make to load the critical content.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I think doing additional bits and pieces that are optional


Search Central LIVE Q&A

and that you consider is optional,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

and if this code doesn't run, I'm fine with it.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I think for those things, Google Tag Manager is really useful.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

For other things, I'll try to grab as much as possible


Search Central LIVE Q&A

into other resources, either in your own JavaScript bundle


Search Central LIVE Q&A

if it's a client-side rendered application


Search Central LIVE Q&A

or into the initial HTML.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

We have been saying that, for instance, around structured


Search Central LIVE Q&A

data, you can use Google Tag Manager


Search Central LIVE Q&A

to inject structured data if that's the easiest and only


Search Central LIVE Q&A

option that you have available.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

If you can do it differently, then do it differently.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And that is pretty much true for not just tracking and Google


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Tag Manager, but pretty much any third-party script,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

because any JavaScript holds the keys to your content


Search Central LIVE Q&A

on the page and also, technically,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

potentially the keys to your loading performance


Search Central LIVE Q&A

for your users.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And you give that away to a third party,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

you need to trust them.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Google Tag Manager, I'm sure the Google Tag Manager team is doing


Search Central LIVE Q&A

its best to make it lightweight and fast.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

That being said, at the same time,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Google Ads, I know, is a big offender in terms of page speed.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And that's something that we need to work on.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

No, I'm just being honest here.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

This is something that you can objectively observe out there


Search Central LIVE Q&A

and that we are being confronted with on a relatively


Search Central LIVE Q&A

frequent basis.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

But I think now that COVID vitals are so visible


Search Central LIVE Q&A

and so publicly discussed, all the teams have an incentive,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

including teams at Google, have an incentive


Search Central LIVE Q&A

to really look at the performance


Search Central LIVE Q&A

impact of the things that they build and improve that.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And I think that's generally a good thing.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Yeah, definitely.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

It's like, use what you really need on your pages


Search Central LIVE Q&A

and focus on your priorities, I guess.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And there's one more host on the Core Web Vitals


Search Central LIVE Q&A

while we're at speed.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And I'm guessing this might be one for you, John.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

On Core Web Vitals, it was reported


Search Central LIVE Q&A

that you need three greens in Google Search Console


Search Central LIVE Q&A

for Core Web Vitals.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

But there was some confusion.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

If three greens were required for any boost with the Core Web


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Vitals or just for the potentially coming batch?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I don't think we have an answer for that yet.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Ah, do you?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I mean, we've been working on expanding the FAQ


Search Central LIVE Q&A

that we have in the forum for Core Web Vitals.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And lots and lots of questions are coming up.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And I don't want to kind of detract from the FAQ


Search Central LIVE Q&A

by preempting anything there.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

But that's something that I believe


Search Central LIVE Q&A

will be covered there and a little bit clearer.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So it should be fine.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

So basically, just hang in there.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

It'll be fine.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Well, I don't know about it'll be fine.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

But it'll be clearer, hopefully.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Yeah.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

OK, fair enough.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

The optimist in me is coming through.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Everything will be fine.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Everything's awesome.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

No, stop it.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Oh, come on.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

It's too early, Martin.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

At most, we can do C shanties, right, Gary?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I'm not doing it.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Oh, oh.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

They sent us questions.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

It's fine.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

It's fair.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Cool.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Excellent.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Shall we take a break here, Martin?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Yes.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

I think that's a good moment.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Can I go to sleep now?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

What do you think?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

What's the time?


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Time is 2.33, so we can definitely take a break here.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

All right.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Sayonara.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Cool, cool.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Arigato gozaimashita.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

And that's it for this special episode.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Thank you for joining us here, folks.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

If you're curious about the other parts of Search Central


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Live, the recordings are on our YouTube channel,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

so take a look there.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

We've been having fun with these podcast episodes,


Search Central LIVE Q&A

and I hope you, the listener, have


Search Central LIVE Q&A

found them both entertaining and insightful as well.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

At any rate, let us know how you're liking these


Search Central LIVE Q&A

and if there are topics that we should be including


Search Central LIVE Q&A

in one of the future episodes.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

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


Search Central LIVE Q&A

That's all for today.


Search Central LIVE Q&A

Thank you, and until next time.


Search Central LIVE Q&A


English Google SEO office-hours from August 20, 2021

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


Central 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 Hour Hangouts,


where people can join in and ask their questions


around their websites and web search.


Bunch of questions were submitted on YouTube,


so we can go through some of those.


But as always, maybe we can go through some


of the live questions here to get started.


And let's see, Michael, I think you're on top.


Good morning, John.


Hi.


So we have a site that has a hub and spoke architecture.


So a hub page might be Eric Clapton,


and the spokes are what guitars he uses.


And each of those pages are relatively small.


The value from them is from embedded videos or pictures


with relatively little unique font content.


Over time, those pages have become


the majority of our indexed pages with well over 100,000.


But only a third of those are getting traffic through search.


In the past, I've heard you say that to affect your website's


quality score, we were considering


de-indexing those pages.


But the pages that are not getting traffic, that is.


However, we were also considering


canonicalizing these.


So I was curious how Google would treat that from a quality


score perspective.


So we don't really have a quality score in that sense.


I think that's something that comes from the ad side.


So that's one thing to keep in mind there.


Let's see.


I think there are multiple things to think about here.


On the one hand, I would consider


taking some action if you feel that these pages are


low quality.


And taking action could be something


like removing those pages, improving those pages,


combining those kinds of pages together.


Anything along those lines could be something


that you could do if these are low quality pages.


If these are just pages that tend not to get a lot of traffic


but they're actually useful on their own,


then I wouldn't necessarily see them as low quality.


So that's one thing to keep in mind.


On some websites, pages that get low traffic


are often almost correlated with low quality as well.


But that doesn't have to be the case.


On other websites, it might just be that, well, a lot of traffic


goes through the head pages and the tail pages


are just as useful.


But they're useful for a much smaller audience.


So they get barely any traffic.


And from our point of view, those websites


are still useful.


And it's still high quality content.


I wouldn't remove it just because it doesn't get traffic.


With regards to the different kind of approaches there,


when I ask the search quality teams about this,


usually they say, well, you should just


improve the quality of your pages, which kind of makes


sense.


But at the same time, if you're talking


about hundreds of thousands of pages,


that's really hard to do at scale.


So sometimes people do opt for removing the pages


or combining the pages.


The thing to keep in mind with using a canonical to combine


pages is that we only take into account the canonical page


then.


So if you have one page, for example,


about Eric Clapton's guitars and another page


about Eric Clapton's shoes, and you


say the guitar page is the canonical for the shoes page,


then we wouldn't have that shoe page or any of its content


interindexing anymore.


We would essentially just focus on the guitars.


So if someone were searching for Eric Clapton's shoes,


they wouldn't be able to find those pages at all.


So that's kind of, with the different approaches,


something to keep in mind.


So in a case like that, what I would do


is take the content from the page


that you want to kind of remove or clean up


and include that into kind of a bigger page


and make that bigger page stronger.


And by that, you're also making sure


that you still have that content indexable somewhere.


SPEAKER 1


Hi, John.


Hi.


So we have a situation where we need kind of some clarity


from Google's perspective on our website.


Please don't mind if I feel stupid asking this question,


but this kind of situation we are in.


So we have a site that is creating a lot of user


generated content.


And on that site, we have a lot of pages


that we feel are not relevant to the search users.


You can consider them as user profile pages, where


all those pages are kind of blank pages with just


a username and a little bit of details.


So they don't make sense for the search users.


So we want to keep them out of search.


So what we did is we added meta robots tagged


with no index on all search pages.


But the number of search URLs is kind of very high,


like 5,000, 6,000 URLs.


So to kick the process, we just use the removals tool


on Search Console and remove all those URLs from search.


Now, I was advised that since these URLs are out


of search results, why don't we just put


block their crawling from robots.txt also,


so that Google don't crawl them.


But I think here, what's the confusion is,


what happens when we remove those URLs from search?


I mean, they are still part of the search index,


if I'm not wrong.


And so we want to know if those URLs are removed from search,


whether Google still tries to crawl them


during those six months, or if it's not crawling them.


Because if it's crawling them, then it


won't be able to see in a non-index tag


if you block the crawling.


And after six months, what happens?


Whether Google has to regrawl all those URLs to put them


in search back, or they just come back on their own


without even crawling.


So the confusion is around whether we should


block the crawling or not.


OK.


So the removal tool in Search Console


basically just hides the page in the search results.


It doesn't change anything with the indexing or with


the crawling of the page.


So during the time that the removal is active,


essentially, we will recrawl and re-index that page normally.


So if you added a noindex meta tag to those pages,


then we would notice that, usually


within that half year time.


And then we would drop the page from the index naturally.


So that's something where we explicitly also time


the removal tool in a way to make sure


that in the majority of the cases,


we can recrawl the page.


And if it has a noindex tag in the meantime,


or is 404 or whatever, then we would drop it from the index


completely as well.


So it's kind of like a smooth transition to the removal


tool expiring and the page actually being gone as well.


If you block it by robots.txt, for many cases,


we would drop the page from the index as well.


And in the cases where we don't drop it,


it's usually a matter of we might keep the URL index,


but we wouldn't have any of the content index.


So that means that if someone is searching


for a piece of content, which is across the rest of your website


somewhere, and we also know this roboted page has


that piece of content, then we would probably just show


the rest of your website.


Whereas if someone is explicitly looking for that exact URL,


then we would still show that URL in the search results.


So in practice, if you're talking about a bigger website


that has a lot of different kinds of content,


probably we would just have something else to show.


And a robots.txt disallow would be


very similar to kind of a noindex on a page as well.


It's a little bit different if you're


disallowing an important page on your website


and you don't have any equivalent content.


So for example, if you disallow the crawling of your home page


and someone searches for your website by name,


then your home page is still the most important page


that we would show.


So we would show that even if it's roboted.


Whereas if it had a noindex on it, we wouldn't show it.


So those are kind of the subtle differences there.


My feeling is, in your case, it doesn't matter either way.


I would personally try to use a noindex rather than


a robots.txt, especially if you're


talking about a relatively small number of pages,


like a couple thousand pages, because that's


something that can be picked up with normal crawling.


And we can just process that on a per-page basis.


Everything in the robots.txt file


is sometimes really hard to diagnose and debug


what it might be causing.


So because of that, I would try to put it


more into the page level in the robots.net attacks.


SPEAKER 1 OK, thank you.


Just a follow-up question on this one,


which is very similar to this one.


For example, there are a few pages that we


remove through removals tool.


We are not using any noindex meta tag on that.


During those six months, does Google still


use those URLs for quality assessment of the website?


Will it consider even those pages?


Yeah, I mean, from our point of view,


those pages would still be indexed


if they don't have a noindex or any kind of blocked.


We just don't show them in the search results.


So that's something where we would still


take that into account.


Usually, if you're talking about individual pages,


then that's not going to skew your overall kind of assessment


of the quality of your website.


If you're talking about a significant part


of your website, then that's something where it could kind


of affect the understanding of the overall quality


of your website.


SPEAKER 2 Yeah, just wanted to know, basically,


whether they are considered or not.


So they are considered.


Just, yeah.


SPEAKER 1 Yes.


SPEAKER 2 OK, sure.


Thank you.


SPEAKER 1 Sure.


OK, Julian.


SPEAKER 3 Hey, John.


My question is about the value of backlinks pointing


to a page that is noindexed.


Kind of like Praveen was just talking about user profiles.


So in my case, when a user signs up for my site,


they get a user profile page.


And that page can be useful for a user.


So they end up linking to it from around the web,


in some cases.


In regards to my website, these profiles are pretty thin.


And there are hundreds of thousands of them.


So I end up noindexing all of them.


But by doing that, am I losing the value of backlinks


that are pointing to those pages and to the site as a whole?


Maybe.


It's a bit tricky because kind of from the way


that the indexing systems work on a technical level,


when it comes to links, we have to kind of understand


the link between two canonical pages.


So that's kind of that one external page


where it's linking from, the canonical that's for that,


and the internal page that's canonical on your website.


And when it comes to noindex pages,


there are some situations where we kind of keep them


in our index when we freshly process them.


And we just don't.


We kind of understand there's a noindex on it.


So we don't use them, actually, for anything.


But we can still process them.


However, for the most part, when we recognize that a noindex is


kind of a persistent state on a page,


then we will just say, well, we don't have


to do anything with this page.


We will ignore it completely.


We don't need to keep it in our index.


And in those cases, especially those links


pointing to the noindex page, they go nowhere.


And then we drop them.


So that's something where if it's critical to your website


that you use kind of these noindex pages


to forward signals or page rank or what have you


within your website, then I would see if there's a way


to make them indexable instead, just to make sure


that you don't have this ambiguity of, well,


maybe Google picks it up.


Maybe Google doesn't pick it up.


And that's something I may take into account there.


The one thing I have seen with a lot of profile pages


is they tend to get spammed a lot,


because people also like to use them to drop their links,


or they drop things like titles or names and URLs in there,


all of that.


So that's something where I can see how it makes sense


to noindex them.


But maybe there's a way to figure out


how you can selectively do that, how


you can recognize the high-quality profiles,


keep those indexed, and the lower-quality profiles,


kind of make sure that they're noindexed.


SPEAKER 2


OK, so it's correct to think of them


as pages that will have their quality judged, kind of just


like any other page.


Is that right?


I mean, if they're noindexed, we wouldn't


be taking them into account when understanding


the quality of the page.


But it's kind of uncertain whether the links would forward


from there to the rest of your website.


OK.


OK, cool.


Thank you.


Sure.


OK, Francis.


SPEAKER 3


Hi, John.


Morning.


Hi.


I have four questions for you.


So before I go ahead, I'll just brief you


on the history of the website.


So we are a tech repair service company.


We fixed iPhones, iPads, and Apple products.


So our website, WordPress website,


we launched it back in 2011 with a single-page website.


Then we completed revamping in 2012 with about 150 pages,


that again in 2014 with 500 pages,


this was a major upgrade.


And it has been growing steadily.


So then in 2016, we again refreshed the content


with new pages.


And the growth has been very good, decent growth


since February 2018.


Now, I observed after February 2018


that there was a gradual decline in organic traffic.


So in June 2019, we decided to revamp the whole website again.


And I used the same website agency


who helped me to create new pages


and refresh the content in 2016.


So now, the majority of the responsibility


was given to this outside website agency.


Now, they didn't ever work keeping SEO in mind.


So what they did is they deleted,


like we deleted all the pages, old pages,


and created new pages and new internal links.


So this is a bad sign, yeah?


And without redirecting the old ones.


So I discovered this problem.


So I fixed this within a week.


But I couldn't put the old URLs back.


So instead, I redirected the old URLs to the new ones.


And I finished the contact with the SEO agency.


And I started working on the website on my own


and started learning SEO.


Now, just in the middle of this December 2020 core update,


I discovered a major technical problem with the website.


So Search Console was reporting close to 4,000 URLs,


which were indexed but were not submitted.


So when I looked into those pages, they were all images.


So basically, it was thin content, just one image


with a header and footer.


And in fact, I have only close to 450 pages at that time,


good quality pages.


So I realized, OK, this is a big issue.


So I fixed this problem.


It was an SEO plugin which I was using with my WordPress site.


And there was a bug which was reported back in 2018.


It was called a media attachment bug.


So what happened was when they updated the plugin,


it enabled that option in the plugin, which


creates unique links for every single image on the website,


like icons, images, everything.


So I had close to 4,000 images.


And I used a removal tool in Search Console


to remove all the index pages from the search.


And after that, I've been working hard on the website,


creating new content.


So new content has been there, new pages.


Plus, according to customers' point of view, user friendly.


And I've drastically improved the page speed as well.


Now, my first question, does this six months or more


timeline apply in my case?


How long do you think it will take


for Google to re-evaluate the whole website in my case


that there have been no more thin content


pages on the website?


And I have seen a gradual increase in the impression


in Search Console since June 3, which was the last core update,


but nothing significant so far.


I think you also posted this in the comments.


Is that correct?


OK.


Because I took a quick look at the website beforehand.


So I think, first of all, those kind of media pages


would not be seen as a problem from our side.


So that's not something where I would


say that would have triggered any severe issues


on your website.


So kind of just as an aside, I think


cleaning up these kind of pages makes sense.


But it's more a matter of kind of like making sure


that you have a clean and strong website


and less a matter of those pages causing any problems.


Because sometimes we just index a lot of pages


that end up not being that valuable,


but it doesn't drag down the overall quality of the site


because those pages tend not to be shown in search anyway.


So from that point of view, I wouldn't


worry about those old things.


I also took a quick look at your site in our internal tools


just to double check some things.


And it doesn't look like we consider


your site to be low quality or problematic


or anything like that.


So with that kind of in mind, my kind of initial assumption


that this change since 2018 is more


of kind of like a natural change over time,


I think was kind of confirmed.


And I would see this as something where it's like,


well, the web has evolved.


Some user needs might have changed over time.


And with that, it's important that you kind of keep updating


your website, keep working on your website,


keep improving the website to make sure that you kind of


remain relevant.


Because if you don't do anything on a website over time,


then it just becomes less and less relevant.


It's not that your website becomes worse.


It's just it's not as relevant as it


might have been in the past.


So my kind of recommendation there


would be to say, well, let all of those old things


kind of leave them by the side.


Don't worry about them.


And instead, focus on your website as it is now.


And focus kind of on the future.


And keep working to improve things there.


SPEAKER 2 Right, and even I'm writing new blogs


about new topics related to this industry.


So I hope that helps.


Now, but second question, which I'm confused about.


This is about duplicate content on the website.


So I have individual pages for each model and therefore.


For example, we fix iPhone 6 screen and also iPhone 7.


So the content for iPhone 6 and 7 is almost like the same.


Except for that the name is different,


heading is different, the image I use is different,


the prices are different.


All right.


So does this kind of content be considered


as duplicate content?


SPEAKER 1 I don't think we would see it


as being kind of like purely duplicate content.


But what is probably happening is


you're competing with yourself.


And you're going into a situation


where someone is searching for maybe iPhone screen repair


or something like that.


And instead of having one really strong page on this topic,


you have multiple pages on that topic.


And that means all of those multiple pages


have to rank on their own.


Which means if the competition is


very strong for some of those queries,


then your pages will have a hard time.


Whereas if you have one really strong page on this topic


where you say, well, it's like this


is for these five models of iPhones.


And along the way in the page you say, well,


for this iPhone model it looks like this.


For the other iPhone model it looks like that.


Then you kind of have those different variations covered.


But you have one strong page rather than multiple pages


that are kind of medium strong.


So that's usually the direction where I would head and say,


well, try to combine the content into kind of stronger pieces


so that you can compete better in that area,


especially if this is an area where


the competition is very strong.


If it's something where you're by far the only website that


is talking about this, then maybe it makes sense


to have multiple pages on the topic.


But if there's a strong competition,


then it's really important that you have a strong page


to kind of compete in there.


I understand.


I have a strong page.


So for example, I have a page for iPhone screen replacement.


And I have described about the services.


And I've also mentioned screen replacement services


for each particular model on that page itself.


So let's suppose the customer wants


to look into a particular problem


for its particular device.


For example, if customer has iPhone X,


so customer will go to that particular model,


look for his problem, and he can dive deeper


into what is causing this problem, how much it will cost,


how much it will charge, things like that.


So that is why I have this exhaustive description


of each problem.


All right.


So I have a third question.


So is it OK to place a schema markup of Google My Business


reviews on the footer of my site?


Because I'm using a plugin, which I can use this as a widget


and I can place it on the footer for Google My Business reviews.


Is there a problem with this implementation?


Will Google think it's a duplicate content


because the schema is on all the pages?


It's not so much that it's duplicate content.


It's more that the reviews are not collected directly


on your website, and that would be against the review policies.


So that's kind of the angle I would watch out for there.


So with the structured data types and the rich results


that we show in search, I would double check the policies


that we have in our documentation


and really make sure that any plugin that you use


kind of complies with the policies.


I understand.


All right.


So now the fourth question and last question.


So my average response time on my website


when I see in Google Search Console,


it's around about 800 milliseconds.


So I want to understand where Googlebot crawls from.


Because my server, it is hosted in Bahrain in Middle East.


And my users are in UAE, which is very close.


And when I check the server response time with the tool,


it shows only 20 milliseconds.


So I want to understand what could be the cause of this slow


response time.


Could it be that the bot is crawling


from faraway locations?


Probably.


So we crawl for the most part from the US.


And that's probably where I would assume we're crawling


your website from as well.


The response time there is purely a matter of us


accessing your server and crawling the data there.


It's not what we would take into account for ranking purposes,


for the Core Web Vitals, the speed ranking factors.


For those factors, we take into account


what users actually see.


So if users are nearby and they have a really fast experience,


that's what we would use for ranking.


I understand.


So will it make a difference?


So it won't make a difference if you deploy my server in US


East Coast, for example.


I think in your case, it wouldn't


make any difference at all.


So if you had a website that had hundreds of millions of pages


and we have trouble crawling because of your server


location, then I would move it.


But if you're talking about, I don't know,


a couple thousand pages, tens, 20, 30, 100,000 pages,


I wouldn't worry about that.


Thank you so much, John.


Appreciate it.


OK, cool.


I see there's still more hands raised,


but let me run through some of the submitted questions


just to make sure that we have that side covered as well.


I'd say the first one is one about content silos, which


is basically like, does it make sense


to create these kind of content silos


with focused internal linking on specific topics


and things like that?


So from my point of view, I would not


see this primarily as an SEO move,


but more as something that you might


do for users in the sense of if it's clear for users


that your site is really strong on a specific topic, that


makes it a lot easier for them to understand


the context of the individual things that you have there.


And kind of indirectly, we understand things


a little bit better for SEO as well.


But it's not something where I would say,


it's like, well, those internal links


are coming from this theme page and going to that theme page


that should match exactly, and then Google


will rank our pages better.


I wouldn't focus on that level.


I would focus really more on creating


a strong part of your website or your whole website


that is focused on a specific area,


because that makes it easier for us to understand


what this website is about.


It's less about kind of like tweaking internal links


and more about actually making it clear


what your content is about.


In terms of page quality, what is better in Google's eyes,


a page that ranks for a single keyword with high traffic


or a page that ranks for lots of keyword


but gets little to no traffic?


I don't think we would care about this at all


when it comes to understanding the quality of a page.


It's really almost more a strategical question


on your side.


So some websites like to focus on kind of very head queries,


where you have few keywords going to these pages,


but it's like a lot of traffic.


Other websites like to focus more


on the long tail side of things, where


you have kind of longer queries going to those pages


and generally less individual traffic per query.


But overall, it might still be interesting to you.


And that's something where you can kind of focus on things


the way that you want.


And sometimes it makes sense also


to think about the competitive environment you're active in.


And if there are lots of other sites


active and focusing on the head queries already,


then it's going to be hard for you to get in there and say,


well, my page is also really relevant for online bookstore,


because there are lots of really strong online bookstores


out there already.


And maybe it makes sense to focus more on long tail queries


first and to kind of build your website up over time.


But it's not that one or the other is better.


It's just a different way of kind of doing things online.


Despite having cleared all possible caches,


the old version of my website, I keep showing in PageSpeed


Insights mobile, very rarely do I get the right mobile updated


version.


I just noticed that the PageSpeed Insights


is pulling the Google cache version of the site


most of the time.


So I think, first of all, the PageSpeed Insights


tool does not have any connection with the Google


cache.


So it's not possible for that tool


to even pull the data from the Google cache to show that.


What my guess is happening here is that, for whatever reason,


something along the line between your server and our server,


where PageSpeed Insights is hosted,


is serving a cached version of those pages.


And especially if you're saying that sometimes it works


and sometimes it doesn't, then that


sounds very much like something kind of temporarily


is serving a cached version.


One thing that I've used in some situations that


has helped to kind of break through this kind of caching


where you don't know what's happening


is just to add some query parameters to the URL.


So instead of just checking your home page,


check your home page plus a question mark


plus some random number.


And in general, servers will ignore kind of everything


after the question mark if they don't need it.


But the networking systems along the way


will recognize this is a unique URL


and will try to request the most recent version of that


from your server.


And by doing that, you kind of circumvent any of the caching


that is happening along the way.


It doesn't work 100% of the time.


Sometimes the caching along the way


does something smart and breaks that from happening.


But for the most part, that kind of works.


And that should be a way to test individual pages.


Obviously, you can't check the whole website


with random characters attached to the end.


But at least for individual pages,


when you're checking with a tool like PageSpeed Insights,


you can kind of work around that.


Then three questions.


Let's see, localizations.


We use separate websites with brandable domain names


for each language.


Using hreflang, is there something


like too many localizations for this method?


Specifically, 15 languages.


There is nothing like too many localizations.


But what happens here is kind of similar to what


I mentioned before in that you're creating


a lot of different pages.


And essentially, you have all of these pages that are kind of,


maybe perhaps a little bit lower quality.


Well, not lower quality, but kind of lower strength overall.


And then they also end up competing


with each other a little bit.


So if you have, for example, going from a situation


where you have one really strong website


and taking that website and creating 15 different language


versions or 15 different country versions of that website,


then you kind of have everything diluted almost in a sense.


And because of that, it can happen


that the individual versions rank a little bit worse


than before because we kind of don't understand the strength


of the website overall.


So usually, there's a kind of a balance


that you need to find between having


different country or different language versions


and having really strong versions of your website


to kind of make sure that you're not diluting things too much.


So it's sometimes, I mean, it's like technically,


it's possible just to take any website


and say, I will create a version for every country on the world.


And usually, that's overkill and results in us kind of really


having trouble understanding your website at all.


And if you have an international website,


the other alternative is kind of like to say,


I will just have one website.


And probably, that's not that great


because you're not focusing on individual markets.


And somewhere in between there is the sweet spot.


And that sweet spot depends a lot on your website,


on your users.


And so it's not something where there's like one clear number


that we can say it's like you should have three country


versions or 15 country versions because it really


depends on the website.


Webmaster Tools, or I guess Search Console, wow,


still using Webmaster Tools, often


shows clickable elements too close


for some of our mobile pages.


These are HTML5 games.


So the HTML elements are close together on purpose.


Is there any way to signal that the elements are


close on purpose or maybe exclude


the pages from the check?


Users love the game and the usage metrics are great.


Will it offset this warning when the algorithm


decides about mobile ranking?


So there's no way to exclude those pages


from the kind of mobile friendliness check.


So that's kind of the first thing there.


With regards to mobile ranking, I


don't know actually how this would work out


because it's possible that, depending on the setup


that you have, that we would see these pages as not


being mobile friendly anymore.


And then it's possible that we would say,


well, if they're not mobile friendly


and we have other pages on the web that are equivalent


but they are mobile friendly, then maybe on mobile


we should be showing those other pages instead.


So that's something where I don't have


a clear answer for you there.


If you have some examples, I'm happy to take a look


with the team.


If you can send them to me maybe on Twitter or if you're here,


drop them in the chat.


I can pick them up as well.


Then a question about mobile interstitials.


In 2017, interstitials were a big no-no.


And even today, monetizing with AdSense vignettes


is capped to showing only once per hour.


However, for our use case, again, interstitials


are far better solutions than banner ads


because banner ads takes precious screen space.


Interstitial ads is very common in mobile apps.


Is there any change to Google's stance on interstitials?


Will it affect our rank if we do use interstitial ads


on our mobile website?


So there's not really a change in our stance


when it comes to interstitials in that intrusive interstitials


are still something that we would use as a ranking factor.


It's a part of the page experience


and elements as well.


However, this is essentially focused on that moment


when a user comes to your website.


So if you're using interstitials as something in between,


kind of the normal flow of when a user goes to your website,


then from our point of view, that's less of an issue.


But really, if someone comes to your website


and the first thing that they see is this big interstitial


and they can't actually find the content that they were


essentially promised in search, then from our point of view,


that looks bad.


But if people can go to your website,


they can do something on there, they can start to play a game,


and kind of like at the start of the next level,


you show an interstitial ad, then from our point of view,


that's perfectly fine.


That's essentially something between you and the user


and finding that balance of how many ads you show


or how you present those ads during the session on the site,


that's essentially something up to you.


So from that point of view, probably this


is less of an issue to focus on.


I don't know your specific website.


I don't know how it is when users go to it.


But that's something where probably I would guess it's OK.


Can I fully delete my site and start a new site


after x amount of time and republish my old content


without any redirections?


If so, how long?


I don't know.


I'm not quite sure what it is that you're


trying to achieve here.