Author: LION Digital

Internal Relative URLs pointing to absolute canonical URLs

Q. When we have internal relative URLs pointing to the canonical absolute URLs, is that fine for Google?

• (0:33) Relative URLs are perfectly fine as well as a mix of relative and absolute urls on the site. Pay attention to the relative urls to ensure there are no mistakes in the path.

Other questions from the floor:

MUM and BERT

Q. So a couple of years ago Google noted that when it came to ranking results, BERT would better understand and impact about ten percent of searches in the US. So has that percentage changed for BERT and what percentage is MUM expected to better understand and impact searches?

• (02:15) John is pretty sure that the percentage has changed since then because everything is changing but he’s not sure if they have a fixed number that goes for BERT or that goes for MUM. MUM is more like a multi-purpose machine-learning library anyway so it’s something that can be applied in lots of different parts of the search. So, it’s not so much that you would like isolated to just ranking but rather you might be able to use it for understanding things like on the level of very fine grain and then that’s kind of interwoven in a lot of different kinds of search results but he doesn’t think they have any fixed numbers. In his opinion, it’s always tricky to look at the marketing around machine learning algorithms because it’s very easy to find very exceptional examples but that doesn’t mean that everything is as flashy. He was talking with some of these search quality folks they’re really happy with the way that these kinds of machine learning models are working cool.

Pages blocked by robots.txt

Q. A question is about a message in the search console indexed though blocked by robots.txt, so of a certain page type, a person asking has about 20,000 valid indexed pages which look about right. However, he’s alarmed that there’s a warning for about 40,000 pages that say indexed though blocked by robots when he inspected these it turned out they are auxiliary pages that are linked from the main page. These URLs are either not accessible by users who are not logged in or they’re just kind of thin informational pages so he did indeed add a disallow for these on robots. He guesses that Google must have hit these a while back before he got a chance to disallow them and because it knows about them and what’s alarming is that console says that they’re “indexed” right. Does this actually mean that they are and more importantly, are they counted toward his site’s quality because when he is pulling them up using a site colon query, about one in five show up?

• (04:22) John says that mostly as something of a warning for a situation where they were not aware of what’s happening. So, if they’re certain that these should be blocked by robots.txt text then that’s pretty much fine but if they weren’t aware that pages were blocked by robots.txt text and they actually wanted to have them indexed and ranking well, then that’s something where they could take action on. So from that point of view, he wouldn’t see this as something that’s alarming it’s mostly just Google found these pages, and they’re blocked by robots.txt. By the way, if you care about these pages you might want to take some action if you don’t care about them just leave them the way they are. And it’s not going to count against your website. It can happen that they appear in the search results but usually, that’s only for very artificial queries like a site query.
  And the main reason it’s mostly those kinds of queries is that for all of your normal queries that are going to your pages you almost certainly have reasonable content that is actually indexable and crawlable and that will rank instead so if we have the choice between a robot page that we don’t know about kind of what’s on there and a reasonable page on your website and that reasonable page has those keywords on it then we’ll just show your normal pages. So, from that point of view, it’s probably extremely rare that they would show up in search and it’s more a warning in case they weren’t aware of that.

Indexing pages

Q. Let’s say you consider a site with 100 million pages and there may be 10 million pages that we believe are low-quality maybe 5 million of those are actually indexed and let’s suppose that we want to add a noindex tag to these 10 million as well as reduce the number of internal links that they received. So over a hypothetical four months let’s say google crawls and removes two million from the index while the other three million remain. And maybe a few months down the road, we determined that a few hundred thousand are actually of decent quality and we want to reinstate them essentially so we remove the noindex tag and we start adding meaningful internal links back do you foresee or think the history here of being indexed and applying a noindex tag and then trying to get it indexed again at a later time would be detrimental you know would google be reluctant to crawl these URLs again knowing that they previously were not indexed and you know do you think that there would be any issues with getting they indexed again after they were crawled.

• (10:24) John thinks like in the long run there definitely wouldn’t be any kind of long-term effect from that I think what you might see initially is that if we’ve seen a noindex for a longer period of time that we might not crawl that URL as frequently as otherwise but if you’re saying this is kind of in the process of we added a noindex it dropped out and then we changed our mind we added or we removed it again then that’s not going to be like along the term noindex situation that’s probably going to be something where we still, crawl that URL with the kind of the normal crawl rate anyway and when you’re talking about millions of pages we have to spread that out anyway. So, that’s something where you’ll probably see depending on these pages. You might see every couple of weeks or every month trying to crawl those pages individually. John doesn’t see that kind of crawl rate dropping off to completely zero, maybe it’ll go from one month to two months if we see in noindex for a longer period of time. He doesn’t see it going completely to zero so that kind of like we added noindex and they changed their mind at some point later on usually, that’s perfectly fine and this is especially the case if you’re working on internal linking at the same time where you add more internal links to those pages then, of course, we’re going to crawl those pages a little bit more because they see like oh it’s like freshly linked from this and this place within your website therefore maybe there’s something we actually do need to index. He says if you’re talking about a website with millions of pages then any optimisation you do there is such a small level that you actually can’t measure it.

Hiding internal links with CSS

Q. The person asking says that he found in his research that they(client) were cloaking internal links but then he checked the way back machine and found out they made a certain template change and it’s about footer links and these photo links were there back in January. When he checked their Google Search Console he didn’t really see a penalty. So, he wonders how long does it take as he wants to advise his client before they do get a penalty as they’ve been doing this for approximately 9 months. 

• (17:03) John doesn’t see the webspam team taking action on that because especially when it comes to internal linking like that, it’s something that has quite a subtle effect within the website and you’re essentially just shuffling things around within your own website. He thinks it would be trickier if they were buying links somewhere else and then hiding them that would be problematic that might be something that our algorithms pick up on or that even the webspam team at some point might manually look at it but if it’s within the same website if it’s set to display “none”.
  John doesn’t think it’s a great practice. If you think it’s an important link then look to make it visible to people but it’s not going to be something where the webspam team is going to take action and remove the site or do anything crazy.

Question oriented title tags

Q. A person asked about the effect of ‘question oriented titles’ such as what, how, which and who are in the content in terms of being comparable with a semantic search engine?

• (28:44) John doesn’t know exactly what direction headed with this question so it’s hard to say generally. He would recommend to focus on things like keyword research to try to understand what people are actually searching for and if it is need to match that one-to-one he always find it a little bit risky to try to match these queries one-to-one because those queries can change fairly quickly so that’s something where he wouldn’t focus so much on.

How does Google handle interactive content

Q. A person asks how does Google evaluate interactively content like a quiz or questionnaire that helps users figure out which product or thing that they need would rankings still be based on the static content that appears on the page?

• (29:57) Yes. The ranking essentially is based on the static content on these pages so if have something like a full page of questions and rank that page based on those questions and that means if have products that are kind of findable after going through those questions should also make sure that you have internal linking to those products without needing to go through that questionnaire so it’s something along the lines of having a normal category set up on the website as well as something like a product wizard or whatever you have to help the users make those decisions John thinks that’s really important, the questionnaire pages can still be useful in search if recognise that people are searching in a way that not sure which particular product matches their needs and kind of address that in the questionnaire in the text on the questionnaire than those questionnaires can also appear in search as well but it’s not the case that Googlebot goes in and tries to fill out a questionnaire and sees what’s kind of happening there.

Do-follow links to trusted authoritative sites

Q. A person asks if they give a do-follow link to a trusted authoritative site is that good for SEO?

• (31:28) John thinks that this is something that people used to do way, at the beginning, where they would create a spammy website and on the bottom, they’d have a link to Wikipedia and CNN and then hope that search engines look at that and say like this must be a legitimate website but like John said people did this way in the beginning and it was a really kind of traditional spam technique almost and John doesn’t know if this ever actually worked so from that point of view, John would say no this doesn’t make any sense obviously if have good content within website and part of that references existing other content then kind of that whole structure that makes a little bit more sense and means that website overall is a good thing but just having a link to some authoritative page that doesn’t change anything from our of point of view.

Relevant keyword research on Taiwanese culture

Q. Person is going to do basic research regarding what do foreigners Google the most with Taiwanese culture what are the most relevant keywords with Taiwan, on Google search, he asked if it would be great if he could generate a ranking list of it to acquire that information he could further designate a campaign for certain products

• (32:32) John doesn’t have that information so he can’t give that to him but essentially what he is looking for is probably everything around the lines of keyword research and there’s lots of content written up on how to do keyword research there are some tools from Google that he can use to help you figure that out there are a lot of third-party tools as well and John has no insight into what all is involved there so John couldn’t really help with that and he definitely can’t like give you a list of the queries that people in Taiwan do.

Two languages on the one landing page

Q. A person was having two languages like Hindi and English on the same page and he was ranking good on Google but after the December core update he lost ranking for Hindi keywords mostly he asks what he should do to get it back?

• (33:31) John doesn’t know. So, on the one hand, he doesn’t recommend having multiple languages per page because it makes it really hard for us to understand which language is the primary language for this page so from that point of view I think that configuration of having Hindi on one side English on the other side on a single page is something that can be problematic on its own so John would try to avoid that setup and instead make pages that are clearly in Hindi and clearly in English and by having separate pages like that it’s a lot easier for us to say “someone is searching in Hindi for this keyword here’s a page on the specific topic” whereas if we can’t recognise the language properly then we might say well we have an English page but the user is searching in Hindi so we probably shouldn’t show it to the user and if we’re not sure about the language of a page then that’s also kind of tricky especially when there are other comparative pages out there that are clearly in Hindi so that’s kind of the one thing the other thing is with regards to core updates we have a lot of blog posts around core updates and John would go through those as well because if you’re seeing this kind of a change happening together with a core update it might be due to kind of two languages on the page but probably it’s more likely due to just general core update changes that we’ve made so John would take a look at those blog posts and think about what you might want to do to kind of make sure that your site is still very relevant to modern users.

Doorway page creation

Q. Person asks if it’s okay from an SEO perspective to create doorway pages when they actually help users, for example, this page leads users who have searched for a non-scientific name of a cactus to the original page?

• (35:34) John doesn’t know about this specific situation and usually we would call things doorway pages if they essentially lead to the same funnel afterward where essentially you’re taking a lot of different keywords and you’re guiding people to exactly the same content in the end in the case of something like an the encyclopedia isn’t the same content it’s essentially very unique pieces of content on there and just because it covers a lot of keywords doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a doorway page, so without digging into this specific site in detail my guess is that that would not be considered a doorway page but a doorway the page might be something where if you have a cactus page on your website and you’re saying like cactuses in all cities nearby you make individual city pages where all of the traffic is essentially funneled to the same direction on your website then that would be considered a doorway page where you’re kind of like creating all of these small doorways but they lead all to the same house.

Classified websites

Q. A question related to classified websites have add listings on search results person allow to crawl in the index if he has no add listings for some time should I disallow to index or should he let Google decide if search results don’t have ad listings and excluding those pages from the sitemap would also be a good practice? 

• (37:14) John thinks just for sake of clarity he thinks the search results that this person means are the search results within their own website so if someone is searching for a specific kind of content then the website pulls together all the ads that it knows and it’s those search results not Google search results and John essentially the direction here is if like what you should do with empty internal search results pages and our preference is essentially to be able to recognise these empty internal search results pages which could be by just adding noindex to those pages that’s kind of the ideal situation because what we want to avoid is to have a page like that in our index where it’s basically like saying oh someone is searching for a blue car of this model and make and you have this page on your website but it says like he doesn’t know of any people selling this kind of a car then sending people to your website for that kind of a query would be a really bad user experience so we would try to recognise those pages and say like these are either soft 404 in that we recognise they’re an empty search results page or you put a noindex on them and you tell us that it’s an empty search results page so essentially that’s kind of the direction to go there if you can recognise it ahead of time John would generally prefer having a noindex directly from your side if you can’t recognise it ahead of time then using javascript to add a noindex might be an option with regards to sitemap or not the sitemap file only helps us with additional crawling within a website it doesn’t prevent us from crawling these pages so removing these pages from the sitemap file would not result in us dropping them from search or and would not result in us recognising that actually, they don’t have any content there so removing something in a cycle file wouldn’t negatively affect the natural crawling and indexing that we do for individual pages so I think those are kind of the two aspects if you can recognise it’s an empty search results page put a noindex on it removing it from a sitemap file is not going to remove it from our index.

Not updating data in Google Search Console

Q. Person’s question is that Google is not indexing websites, even fresh sites and also not updating data and in Google Search Console. Is there any hidden update going on?

• (42:35) There are always updates going on so that’s kind of hard to say John doesn’t think there’s anything explicitly hidden going on what John does sometimes see is that because it’s so much easier to create websites nowadays people create websites with a large number of pages and then they focus more on the technical aspect of getting millions of pages up and they disregard a lot of the quality aspects and then because of the way that search console tries to provide more and more information about the indexing process, it’s a lot easier to recognise that Google is not actually indexing everything from this website and then the assumption is often there that well perhaps this is a technical issue that John just need to tweak and usually, it’s more of a quality issue where when we look at the website overall and we’re not convinced about the quality of this website then our systems are not going to take the time to kind of invest in more crawling and indexing of a website so if you give us a million pages and the pages that we end up showing initially don’t convince us then we’re not going to spend time to actually get all of those millions of pages indexed we’re going to kind of hold off and keep a small subset and if over time we see that the subset is doing really well and has all the signs that we look at with regards to quality then we will go off and try to crawl more but just because there are a lot of pages on a website does not mean that we’re going to crawl and index a lot of pages from that website.

Password protect and Google Penalties

Q. A person created a small website for their mom’s business using a CMS tool called Squarespace he knows that they automatically submit a sitemap once you create a new page and now we’ve decided to add the e-commerce functionality like about two weeks ago and the site was password protected so his first question would be if Google penalises you in a way if the user can’t access the page if it’s basically just password protected and the second would be yeah the site was basically indexed and shown really nicely and the pages before but after editing all those products and different pages he looked it up on Google Search Console for crawling but basically, his mom was giving him a hard time now when these pages are going to be shown again.

• (48:09) John thinks so there’s no penalty for having password protection but it means that we can’t access the content behind the password so probably that is the initial step that happened with regards to the kind of turning on almost like an e-commerce site or shop section on your website we actually have a whole article on that now in our search documentation specifically for e-commerce sites so John would take a look at that there might be some tricks that you missed out on that that can help to speed things up there

The performance measurement of Google discover

Q. Updating and expanding an existing content might take longer to recrawl and re-index, and trying to push that by submitting manually might not be the best strategy

• (50:57) John thinks the only way to measure it is in search console because in particular in analytics the traffic from discover is almost always folded into Google search and then you can’t separate that out so it’s only in the search console do you see kind of the bigger picture.

Internal search pages

Q. A person had a question in regards to the internal search pages so we’re allowing indexation of on-site searches so sometimes someone does a search on our site we create a page for that and now that’s gone out a bit of control so he has hundreds of millions of these pages so how would you recommend we saw that house and if there are actually any benefits to cleaning that up or if he shouldn’t worry about it?

• (52:34) John thinks for the most part it does make sense to clean that up because it makes crawling a lot harder so that’s kind of the direction I would look at it there is to think about which pages you actually, do you want to have crawled and indexed and to help our systems to focus on that not so much that like you should get rid of all internal search pages some of these might be perfectly fine to show in search but really try to avoid the situation where anyone can just go off and create a million new pages on your website by linking to random URLs or words that you might have on your pages so to kind of take it and say well you have control of which pages you want to have crawled in the index rather than like whatever randomly happens on the internet.

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Blog Pages are Ranking, while Product Pages are not

Q. If on a website certain types of pages rank well, while others don’t, it might be about the user query that lands them on the website

• (03:18) The person asking the question talks about the situation when the blog posts on his website get attention, while the product pages don’t really rank. John explains that for some types of queries google tries to understand what the intent is behind the query, and tries to figure out if someone is looking for information about a product or if they’re looking to buy a product. For this particular website from the question it might be that Google is interpreting the queries that are landing on those pages as more information-seeking queries rather than transactional queries. Since it’s Google’s assumption on what the user is asking for, it’s not easy to change that. What John suggests is to try making it as easy as possible for people to get to the products, so that there is a clear call to action in the blog post. In case people landing on the blog pages don’t want to buy products but are searching for information, then that’s really out of SEO’s control.
  John advises to improve the website visibility by making the overall quality good, encouraging people to buy the products, to review them and to recommend the website to other people. With time, this will convert into better visibility, and ensuring there is an easy-to-follow call to action from the blog pages to the product pages will in its turn convert the visibility into valuable results.

Building Visibility

Q. It’s more reasonable to build visibility by first trying to rank for more specific unique keywords rather than general ones

• (10:34) Even with time and continued effort, it might be too hard to rank for general keywords like, for example, “green tea” and get visibility from them. John suggests finding more specific queries, more specific kinds of products where there is less competition, like a specific type of green tea or special leaf type – something unique where you can stand out. That kind of queries don’t get traffic comparable to the general keywords, but usually they get enough for a website that is just starting out. From there, you can start taking up the next specific keyword and keep expanding.

Reviews

Q. Reviews are an indirect factor of website assessment

• (13:54) Reviews gathered over-time on the products sold on the website are not a direct signal that Google takes into account, but seeing people engaging with the products is a good sign, and that means that other signals might be built up over-time.

Page Experience Update

Q. If there is a drop in website traffic right after the Page Experience Update rollout, it might not be due to the update

• (14:39) The Page Experience Update started to roll out in July and was finished at the end of August, and it was on a per-page basis. That means, if Google saw that a website was slow for Core Web Vitals, there would be a gradual change in traffic over-time. So if there happened to be some kind of drastic change, both gains and losses, around those dates, it might mean that there is something else causing it, not the update. 

More Pages or Fewer Pages?

Q. It’s better to create fewer but stronger pages for the areas where there is more competition, and vice versa

• (16:54) Having pages on a website is all about balancing more general and more specific pages. John says, that whenever there are fewer more general pages, those pages tend to be a little bit stronger, whereas if there are a lot of pages, then the value is in a way spread out across those pages. If there is a specific topic, where the competition is stronger, then it’s better to have fewer but very strong pages, and if the targeted area doesn’t have a high competition, having more pages is fine. So, when starting out, it’s generally wiser to have fewer very strong pages so that the website can be as strong as possible in that area, and over-time as the website consolidates itself in that area, those pages could be split off into more niche topics.

Internal Linking

Q. The way to explain Google which pages are more of a priority is by internal linking

• (18:48) There isn’t really a way to give a priority to a certain page over the others but this can be helped by internal linking. So within the website it is possible to highlight certain pages by making sure they’re well linked internally, and maybe it’s also a good idea to have non-priority pages a little bit less well linked internally. John suggests linking to important pages from the homepage, and to the less important ones from category and subcategory pages. Google looks at the website, and it knows the homepage is very important, and the pages the homepage points to are also important. Google doesn’t always follow that, but it’s a way to give that kind of information.

Canonical URL

Q. Setting up canonical URLs for internal linking is not necessary

• (20:39) Canonical URLs are important if there are multiple URLs that show the same content, for example, if there are tracking URLs within a blog – in this case with the canonical URL Google understands what is the primary page there. But for a normal website where there are just links to different things, there is no critical need for canonical URLs – it’s a good practice to have but there are no SEO benefits for that.

New Language Version of Website

Q. If there is a new language version of a website, it’s good to add a JavaScript-based banner to direct users to the right version of the website

• (21:26) John suggests creating a JavaScript-based banner to the pages of the website that have another version to try to recognise if the wrong user is on the wrong version of the page by recognising the browser language or the user’s location, if possible. The banner on the top should say that there is a better version for this user, and that he can follow the link to the right version. Using a banner like that means that Google will still be able to index all of these pages, but it becomes possible to guide users to the appropriate one a little bit faster. If it is to be done on the server side, for example with a redirect, then the problem could be that Googlebot never sees the other version because it always gets redirected, and the banner is like a backup plan where usually hreflang will help and geotargeting is set up. Hreflang and geotargeting don’t guarantee there are only the right users going to these pages, so banner helps them find the right pages.

Wrong Publish Date in the Search Results

Q. There are 2 important things about publish date: date alignment across the page and time zones.

• (27:47) When it comes to dates in the Search Results, Google tries to find dates that essentially align the best across all of the signals that it gets. That means that Google looks at things like the structured data, page text etc. to understand what the date might be. If Google can’t recognise that the same date and time are used across multiple locations, then it tries to figure out which one of these might be the most relevant. In cases, when instead of the date there are things like “10 minutes ago” or “5 hours ago” in the visible part of the article, then that is something that Google wouldn’t be able to match because it doesn’t know what exactly is meant by that. Making the date and the time in a visible in the article together with the structured data is a good way of making Google use that. Also watching out for things like time zones is important, as it’s one of the things that usually go wrong.

Spam Traffic

Q. Google has a fairly good understanding of spam traffic and it doesn’t end up causing problems for websites

• (30:02) Google sees lots of weird spam traffic on the web over-time and has a good understanding of that. There are certain requirements that Google watches out for, and it filters out the usual spam traffic, so that shouldn’t be causing any problems to websites.

E-A-T

Q. E-A-T is not determined by some specific technical factors on a website

• (33:47) E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness, and it’s something that comes from the Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines. Quality Rater Guidelines are not a handbook to Google’s algorithms, but rather something that Google gives to those who review changes that it makes in the algorithms. E-A-T is specific to certain kinds of sites and certain kinds of content – it’s not something where E-A-T score is based on a specific number of links or anything like that. It’s more about Google improving its algorithms and Quality Raters trying to review them, but there aren’t any certain technical moments that are involved into an SEO factor. John suggests looking into the E-A-T if the website maps into the broad area where google has mentioned E-A-T in the Quality Rater Guidelines.

Recognising Sarcasm

Q. Google is not adept at recognising sarcasm, so it’s better to make important messages very clear 

• (36:40) There is always a risk that Google misunderstands things, so it doesn’t understand when there’s sarcasm on a page. Especially if it’s something where it’s really critical to get the right message across to google and all users – making sure the message is as clear as possible is important. It’s generally better to avoid sarcasm, when, for example, talking about medical information, but when writing about some entertainment topic it’s probably less of an issue.

Captcha

Q. If content is visible without the need to fill out the captcha, Google is okay with that, otherwise it might be a problem

• (41:57) Googlebot doesn’t fill out any captchas, even if they’re Google-based captchas. If the captcha needs to be completed in order for the content to be visible, then Google wouldn’t have access to the content, but if the content is available without needing to do anything and the captcha is just shown on top, usually that would be fine with Google crawling and indexing the page. To test that, John suggests using the Inspect URL Tool in Search Console and fetching those pages to see what comes back: on the one hand, the visible page to make sure that matches the visible content, and the HTML that is rendered there to make sure that that includes the content that is to be indexed. He restates that from a policy point of view, the situations where the full content is served, and the captcha is required on the user side – basically if things are done slightly differently for Googlebot or other search engines compared to an average user that would be fine.

One Author Writing for Different Websites

Q. There are no guidelines on one person writing content for different websites, but it’s better to help Google recognise it’s the same person

• (43:41) From Google’s point of view, there are no guidelines on where people can write and what kind of content they can create. People creating content on multiple sites is perfectly fine. From a practical point of view, it’s better if the author creates something like a profile page where he collects all the information about the things that he does. Pointing to something like the author page or profile page is a good way to make sure the Search Engines understand that this is a certain person who writes for certain pages. It’s not something that must be done according to some policies or guidelines, but it’s a good practice.

Recrawling Thin Content

Q. Updating and expanding an existing content might take longer to recrawl and re-index, and trying to push that by submitting manually might not be the best strategy

• (46:10) When publishing thin content, it sometimes takes a little bit longer for Google to recrawl the page and to pick up the new version of the content there, so John suggests trying to avoid doing that on a regular basis. Sometimes updating an article is necessary, and as it expands over-time, Google tries to pick that up over-time.
  An issue for the person asking the question, who is primarily worried about Google not recrawling and re-indexing his recent article updates, John says, might actually be the fact that he manually submits all the links of every article after publishing. That makes Google a little bit nervous and pickier about the content of the website, because usually if there’s fantastic content on a website, Google goes off and crawls the website regularly, so there’s no need to submit everything manually. 

Content Author’s Qualifications

Q. Qualifications of the author is not a direct factor in terms of SEO

• (51:06) The authority of a person writing the content (citations in journals and etc.) doesn’t really play a role as a ranking factor, John says. However, he points out, associating with a strong author might come into play in a bigger picture of the website, so it’s a long term thing, rather than an SEO factor.

Discovered, not Indexed

Q. If a website often runs into the problem of Googlebots discovering the new content but not indexing it, the problem might be the overall quality of the website

• (54:54) Sometimes Google might be not really sure about the quality of the website, and when new things get published on the website, Google understands that new content exists, it discovers the content, but ends up not indexing it. The main approach to solve this problem is to increase the overall quality of the website. Sometimes that means removing some old things and making sure that everything that is being published is fantastic. If the system is convinced of the quality of the website, it will crawl and index more and will try to pick up things as quickly as possible. Whereas, if the system is not 100 percent sure, it works sometimes, and sometimes it doesn’t work.

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Quality of Old Pages

Q. When assessing new pages on a website, the quality of older pages matters too

• (15:38)  When Google tries to understand the quality of a website overall, it’s a process that takes a lot of time and if new 5 pages are added to the website that already has 10000 pages, then the focus will be on most of the site first. Over time Google will see how that settles down with the new content there as well, but the quality of the most of the website matters in the context of new pages.

Link Equity and Backlinks

Q. Links from high value pages are treated with a little bit more weight compared to some random page on the Internet

• (17:02) When assessing a value of the link from another website, Google doesn’t look at the referral traffic or at the propensity to click on that link. John explains that Google doesn’t expect people to click on every link on a page – people don’t follow links because some expert said to do so, look at the website and confirm whether things written are true about the website. People follow the link when they want to find out more information about the product. Therefore, things like the referral traffic or the propensity to click are not taken into account when evaluating the link. 
  When evaluating the link Google looks at the page factors and quality of the website linking. It works almost the same way PageRank works – there is a certain value set up for an individual page, and the fraction of that value is passed on through the links. So if a page is of high value, then the links from the page are treated with more weight compared to random pages on the Internet. It’s not exactly that way now as it was in the beginning, but it’s a good way of thinking about these things.

Other questions from the floor:

Category Page Dropping in the Rankings for One Keyword

Q. If a page tries to cover more than one search intent, it might lead to the page dropping in rankings

• (00:34) The person asking the question talks about a category page on his website that has a huge advisory text, dropping in the rankings for a particular keyword in a plural form. John says that in this particular category page there is so much textual information that it’s hard to tell whether the page is for people who want to buy the products or for those who want to get more info about these products, if the page is for someone looking for one product or for a bigger picture of the whole space. Therefore, John suggests splitting those pages and have two for different purposes instead of one that tries to cover everything.
  As for the singular and plural forms of the keyword, he thinks that probably when someone searches for plural they want different kinds of products, and when searching for singular someone might want a product landing page, and overtime the system tries to figure out the intent behind these queries, and also how this intent changes over time. For example, “Christmas tree” might be an informational query, and around December it becomes more of a transactional intent. And if a category page covers for both, on the one hand, it’s good, because it covers both sides, but at the same time Google might see only the transactional side and ignore the informational one. So having these two intents on a separate page is a reasonable thing to do. There are different ways to do that: some people have completely separate pages, others make informational blogs from which they link to category pages or individual products.

Q. Even though this drop might happen to only certain keywords, Google doesn’t have a list of keywords for these things

• (04:52) The person asking the question wonders why this happens only to some keywords, and if there is a list of specific keywords that this happens to. John says that it’s doubtful they will manually create a list of keywords for that, as it’s something that the system tries to pick up automatically, and it might pick it up in one way for certain pages and differently for others, and change over time.

Content Word Limit

Q. There is no limit on how many words the content on the category page should be

• (09:05) There needs to be some information about the products on the page, so that Google understands what the topic is, but generally that is very little information and in many cases Google understands that from the products listed on the page if the names of the products are clear enough, for example “running shoes”, “Nike running shoes” and running shoes by other brands. In this case, it’s clear that the page is about running shoes, there is no need to put an extra text there. But sometimes product names are a little hard to understand, and in that situation it makes sense to put some text there, and John suggests that these texts need to be around 2-3 sentences.

Q. The same chunks of text can be used in category pages and blogs posts

• (10:19) Having a small amount of text duplicated is not a problem. For example, using a few sentences of text from a blog post in category pages is fine.

Merging Websites

Q. There is no fixed timeline on when the pages of the merged websites are crawled and the results of that become visible

• (10:56) Pages across a website get crawled at different speeds: some pages are recrawled every day, some are once a month or once in every few months. If the content is on the page that rarely gets recrawled then it’s going to take a long time for that to be reflected whereas if it’s content that is being crawled very actively, then the changes should be seen within a week or so.

Index Coverage Report

Q. After merging websites, if traffic is going to the right pages, if there is a shift in performance report, then there is no need to watch out for the Index Coverage Report

• (13:25) The person asking the question is concerned by the fact that after merging two websites, they’re not getting any difference in the Index Coverage Report results. John says that when pages are merged, their system needs to find a new canonical for this page first, and it takes a little bit of time for that to be reflected in the reporting. Usually, when it’s the case of simply moving everything, it’s just a transfer, there is no need for figuring out the canonicalisation. And when it’s the merging process, it takes more time.

301 Redirect, Validation Error

Q. The Change Address Tool is not necessary for migration, checking the redirects is more priority

• (20:53) John says that although some people use the Change of Address tool when migrating a website, it’s just an extra signal and not a requirement – as long as the redirects are set up properly, Change of Address doesn’t really matter. If there are things like 301 redirect error, redirects need to be re-checked, but it’s hard to tell what the issue might be without looking at it case by case. John suggests that the person asking the question can look at the things like, for example if he has a www version and a non-www version of their website, he might need to look at his redirects step by step through that. For example, he might be redirecting to the non-www version and then redirecting to the new domain, and then submitting the Change of Address in the version of the site that is not a primary version – that’s one of the things to double-check. Basically, whether it’s the version of the website that is or was currently indexed is being submitted or maybe it’s the alternate version in search console.

Several Schemas on a Page

Q. There can be any number of structured data on a page, but it should be noted that only one kind of structured data will be shown on rich results page

• (23:36) There can be any number of schema on one page, but John points out that for most cases when it comes to the rich results that Google shows on the search results, only one kind of structured data will be picked to be shown there. If someone has multiple structured data on their page, then there is a very high chance Google will pick one of these types and show in rich results. So if there is a need for one particular type to be featured, and there is no combined uses in the search results, then it’s better to focus on one structured data that is to be shown in rich results.

Random 404 Pages

Q. Random 404 URLs in a website don’t really affect anything

• (24:39) The person asking the question is concerned with a steady increase of 404 pages on his website that are not part of the website, and them making up for over 40% of the crawl response. John argues that there is nothing to worry about, as these URLs are probably random URLs found on some scraper site that is scraping things in a bad way – that’s a very common thing. When Google tries to crawl them, they return 404, so the crawlers start to ignore those pages. 404 pages don’t really exist. When looking at a website, Google tries to understand which URLs it needs to crawl and how frequently it needs to crawl them. And after working out what needs to be done. Google looks at what it can do additionally and starts trying to crawl a graded set of URLs that sometimes includes URLs from scraper sites. So if these random URLs are being crawled on a website, that means the most important URLs have already been crawled, and there are time and capacity to crawl more. So, in a way, 404 are not an issue, but a sign that there is enough capacity, and if there is more content than what was linked within the website, Google would probably crawl and index that too. It’s a good sign, and these 404 pages don’t need to be blocked by robot.txt or suppress them in any way.

Blocking Traffic from Other Countries

Q. If you’re to block undesired traffic from other countries, don’t block the U.S., since the website are crawled from there

• (27:34) The person asking the question is concerned that they’re getting their Core Web Vital scores go down because they originated in France and there is a lot of traffic from other countries with a bad bandwidth. John advises against blocking traffic from other countries, especially the U.S. as crawlers crawl from the U.S., and if it’s blocked, the website pages wouldn’t be crawled and indexed. So if the website owner is to block other countries, he should at least keep the U.S.

Q. Blocking the content for users and showing it to the Google Bots is against the guidelines

• (28:47) From the guidelines, it’s clear that the website should be showing to the crawlers what it shows the users from that country. John says, one way to not involve undesired traffic from some countries (countries for which the website doesn’t provide service), is to use Paywall Structured Data. After marking the content up with the Paywall, the users that have the access can log in and get the content, and the page can be crawled. 
  Another way for that, John suggests, is providing some level of information that can be provided in the U.S. For example, casino content is illegal in the U.S., so some websites have a simplified version of the content which they can provide for the U.S., which is more like descriptive information about the content. So, if, for instance, there are movies that can’t be provided in the U.S., the description of the movie can be served in the U.S., even if the movie itself can’t.

Page Grouping

Q. When it comes to grouping, there is no exact definition on how Google does grouping, because that evolves over time depending on the amount of data Google has for a website

• (35:36) The first thing John highlights about grouping is that if there is a lot of data for a lot of different pages on a website, it’s easier for Google to say that it will do grouping slightly more fine-grained rather than rough, while if there is not a lot of data, then it might end up taking the whole website as one group.
  The second thing John points out is that the data collected is based on field data that the website owner sees in Search Console, which means that it’s not so much of Google taking the average of an individual page and averaging them by the number of pages, but rather Google will do something like traffic weighed average. Some pages will have a lot more traffic and there will be more data there, some will have less traffic and less data. So if a lot of people go to the home page of the website and not so many on individual products, then it might be that home page weighs a little higher just because it has more data there. Therefore, it’s more reasonable to look at Google Analytics or any other analytics, figure out which pages are getting a lot of traffic, and by optimising those pages improve the user experience that will count towards Core Web Vitals. Essentially, it is less of averaging across the number of pages and more averaging across the traffic of what people actually see when they come to the website.

Subdomains and Folders

Q. Subdomains and subdirectories are almost equivalent in terms of content, but there are differences in other aspects

• (45:25) According to the Search Quality Team, subdomains and subdirectories are essentially equivalent – the content can be put either way. Some people in SEO might think otherwise.
  John argues, there are a few aspects where that plays a role, and it is less with regards to SEO and more about reporting. For example, like if the performance of these sites are to be tracked separately on separate host names or together in one host name. For some websites Google might treat things on a subdomain slightly differently because it thinks it is more like a separate website. John suggests that even though these aspects may come to play a role, it’s more important to focus on the website infrastructure first and see what makes sense for that particular case.

Gambling Website Promotion

Q. From the SEO side, there is no problem in publishing gambling related things

• (48:59) John is not sure about the policies for publishers when it comes to the gambling content, but he says that SEO wise, people can publish whatever they want.

Removing Old Content

Q. Blindly removing old content from a website is not the best strategy

• (49:42) John says that he wouldn’t recommend removing old content from a website just for the sake of removing it – old content might still be useful. He doesn’t see a value in that for SEO side of things, but he points out that archiving the old pages for usability or maintenance reasons should be fine.

Duplicate Content

Q. Duplicate content is not penalised, with a few exceptions to this rule

• (55:05) John says that the only time when Google would have something like a penalty or an algorithmic action or manual action is when the whole website is purely duplicated content – one website scraping the other website. For example, when it’s an ecommerce website that has the same description, but the rest of the website is different, that’s perfectly fine – it doesn’t lead to any kind of demotion or dropping in rankings.
  With duplicate content, there are two things that Google looks at, the first being, if the whole page is the same. That includes everything – the header, the footer, the address of the store and things like that. So if it’s just a description on an ecommerce website matching the manufacturer’s description, but everything around that is different, it’s fine.
  The second thing about the duplicate content plays a role when Google shows a snippet in the search results. Essentially, Google tries to avoid creating search result pages where the snippet is exactly the same as the other websites’. So if someone is searching for something generic, which is only in the description of that product, and the snippet that google would show for the website and for the manufacturer’s website are exactly the same, then Google tries to pick one of the pages. Google will try to pick the best page out of those that have exactly the same description.

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Quote Websites

Q. Websites with the same quotes rank separately and don’t get penalised for having the same quotes

• (00:40) Pages from different websites with quotes rank separately because quotes are usually one or two lines of text, and there is so much more information on a web page that quotes do not define those pages as the same. John also points out that quotes are from authors who have written something long ago and is  public information – it doesn’t matter who said it first or which website posted it first – it’s not like whoever said it first will appear first in the search results, and if it did, it probably wouldn’t have been from an average quote based website. And, subsequently, since quotes are public information, they don’t get penalised as well.

Geotargeting

Q. To target different countries, create subdomains or subdirectories and set geotargeting on Search Console individually

• (05:08) Search Console supports only one country at a time, it’s not possible to make it target different countries at the same time. John suggests that when you want to target several countries at the same time, you should create subdomains or subdirectories of your website for these countries and add them to Search Console separately. Once you have them added, if they’re generic top-level domains, you can set the geotargeting individually. For example, yourwebsite.com and the “/” and “fr” for France, and you can add that to Search Console and in the geotargeting section you can indicate it’s for France. If you have a country code top level domain like .in or .uk and etc, then you can’t do geotargeting.

New CSS Property

Q. New CSS property might have only indirect effect on Core Web Vitals and subsequent ranking

• (06:40) John doubts that the new content-visibility CSS property will come to play a big role in website assessment. He says that there are two points where implementing the new CSS might come into play: the first being the fact that Google uses the modern Chrome browser when rendering the pages. But since HTML is the factor taken into account for indexing, and it is already loaded, implementing the new CSS might be a matter of shifting things around in terms of the layout, but it wouldn’t play a big role in rendering – Google would still index the content normally. The second thing is the speed the users see the content in – that could play a role for Core Web Vitals, because for the Core Web Vitals Google uses field data, the speed that the users see. If for users who access the pages with the modern version of Chrome the pages are loading faster due to the implementation of the new CSS that will be reflected in the field data, and overtime that might be taken into account. To make it more clear whether implementing would actually change anything, John suggests implementing the new CSS on a test page and test the page with the lab testing tools before and after and see if it makes a difference. If the difference is big, then probably it should be implemented, otherwise – not really.

Lead Generation Form

Q. Lead Generation forms affect SEO when they’re located above the fold and treated as ads

• (10:49) John says that in general, lead generation forms don’t affect the SEO side of the page that much. However, he points out that the algorithms look for the ads that appear above the fold and push the main content below the fold, and the lead generation form might be treated as an ad. That might not always be the case, as what the lead gen form is for and what the page is trying to rank for also matter. For example, if the page is about car insurance and the lead gen form signs people up for car insurance then that probably wouldn’t be treated as an ad, but if the page is about something completely different, like oranges, then the car insurance lead gen form on top of the page would be seen as an ad.

Images on the Page

Q. Image placement on the page doesn’t really affect anything

• (12:53) Whether the image at the top of the article or somewhere in the middle doesn’t matter that much for the SEO side of the website. John points out that even for the Image Search it is not really important.

No Follow Links

Q. Google discovers and indexes the pages that no follow link points to

• (13:34) With no follow link, Google essentially tries to stop the passing of signals, but what can happen is that Google still discovers the page to which the link points, crawls and indexes it separately. Sometimes people use internal no follow links to point at a specific page within their website, and they expect that internal page to not show up in search because it’s linked only with no follow link. However, from Google’s point of view, if they can discover the page, crawl it and index it, they might still index it independently.

Link Building

Q. In addition to creating a good content, it’s essential to spread a word about it to pop up in search

• (14:41) Creating a good quality content might not always be enough. To appear in search results, it’s important to spread a word about your content, try to find people interested in that type of content and talk them into writing about it. However, it’s common to buy guest posts, and John argues that it’s not the best strategy, and is potentially damaging to the website. If someone from the website team looks at something on a website, and they see that there is a wide variety of different kinds of links, and even when some of them potentially might have a weird story behind them, overall there are still lots of reasonable links, the website team will let the algorithm handle it. But if the website team sees that all the links look a lot like guest posts, and they’re not labelled as such, that might be something they would take action on. So, it’s important to create good content, find people who might be interested in it, and try to stay away from problematic strategies.

Promoting a Unique Website

Q. There are several things to remember when trying to promote a website with a new type of analytical service

• (18:23) The person asking the question described the situation with his website: they analyse a number of real estate agents, and whenever someone searches for the best realtor in his area, their list of top realtors pops up. He says that 90 percent of their pages is not indexed, and he is not sure what exactly to do to rank in SERPs. John points out that there are several things that need to be considered to make the startup successfully rank. 
  First, before things go too far, John suggests it would be a good idea to check whether the website pages are actually useful for people and are not just a recompilation that come as a result of back end data analysis that spits out some metrics for individual locations. For example, to make sure that when a city has 10 realtors, and someone searches for top realtors the result it’s just those 10 realtors that are in the phone book. Basically, it’s essential to make sure the website is actually providing some unique value for the users. John advises doing user studies to figure out what the best UX for these kinds of pages is, what kind of information people need, and that the content is trustworthy. That’s the first thing to do because if the content is of low quality that is a bigger problem than having a lot of good content and trying to get them indexed.
  As for getting them indexed, it’s something that happens naturally over time.
  Secondly, John says that it’s useful to decide what kind of pages are currently the most important ones on the website and which ones you want Google to focus on through internal linking and making sure that they’re high-quality pages. So even if, currently 90 pages on the website are not indexed, and 10 are, it’s reasonable to make sure those 10 are fantastic pages that a lot of people like and recommend. As a result, over time Google will crawl more pages and more frequently, and crawl a bit deeper.
  John points out that it’s always tricky, especially with a website like this to create an internal linking structure in the beginning that focuses on things that are important, because it’s very easy to just list all the postal codes in numerical order, and Google might end up crawling the pages that have low value for the website overall. So from the beginning it’s good to create a more funnelled web structure and then expand step by step until Google ends up actively indexing all the content on the website.

Affiliate Links

Q. It’s enough for Google that most, even if not all, sources that link to the website as affiliates follow the guidelines

• (26:34) It’s hard to make everyone who links to a website as affiliates to follow the guidelines, and for some website owners that might seem problematic. But John points out that they understand the situation, so they just want to make sure that the things that are published or said on the website match the guidelines. Also, it’s okay if only a part of those who link to the website follow the guidelines. 
  Some might suggest that disallowing crawling of the affiliate parameters could be a solution to this, but John argues that that will result in those pages being indexed without any content. He advises focusing on normal canonicalisation, even though that wouldn’t affect how the value of those links are being passed on. 
  He also shares that some websites set up something like an affiliate domain that is separate and that is blocked from crawling and indexing or just blocked from crawling that redirects to the actual website. It works good for a large-scale affiliate sites, but for an average website that might be an overkill.
  In short, he says that as long as the website owner is giving the right recommendation and the significant part of the users are following them, there shouldn’t be any need to do anything past that.

Embedding Videos on Website

Q.It’s not necessary to switch to a different video format on a website just for SEO purposes – there are ways to make everything neat and efficient

• (29:10) The person asking the question is concerned with embedding YouTube videos on his website, as they slow his website loading speed down – he thinks about switching to the mp4 format because it doesn’t create such problems. John argues that might be unreasonable to do just for the SEO purposes – there are different ways of embedding videos, and there are different formats of videos. In particular, when it comes to YouTube, there are ways to embed videos that use a kind of lazy loading where there is an image of a placeholder, and the video is activated by clicking on the placeholder. This way, the page will load pretty quickly. Also, the YouTube team is working on improving the default embed, so that might improve over time.
  Hosting the videos on the website itself might also be reasonable. However, the thing to watch out for is the fact that Google is able to recognize the metadata for these things, and with normal YouTube embed it can pull that out fairly well. When embedding videos manually or with the help of custom players, it’s important to check that the structured data on the page is appropriate as well.

Hosting and Crawling

Q. By default, the type of hosting one has doesn’t affect the efficiency or amount of crawling that the Google can do

• (31:08) The type of hosting that one has doesn’t affect the crawling, however the hosting can be bad or slow – it’s not an attribute to the specific kind of hosting. Shared hosting, VPS or any kind of hosting can be slow or fast regardless of the type, and that’s something that holds the importance.

Crawling

Q. If Google seems to be crawling your website slowly and rarely, make sure the quality of the few important pages is good first, and then grow your website in terms of page quantity

• (35:31) When lots of pages on a website don’t get crawled, that is something that falls into the category of crawl budget. Not that it’s a problem for the website, but there are always two sides when it comes to crawling: capacity for crawling and demand for crawling. Capacity for crawling is about how much Google can crawl: if there is a small website, probably Google can crawl everything. Demand for crawling is something that a website owner can help Google with: it’s the things like internal linking to let Google know about the relative importance of pages, and also it’s something that Google can pick up over time by recognising that there is a lot of good and important content that needs more time and more crawling.
  If a situation arises that there are a lot of pages that haven’t been indexed, it might mean that there were too many pages created, and it’s better to focus on fewer pages to make sure they’re better first, and once they start getting indexed quickly, to create more pages and grow the website step by step.

Changing URLs

Q. If website URLs are not configured according to the best practices, it’s not reasonable to change them unless there is a bigger revamp to be done

• (39:17) When a large portion of URLs across the website is changed, it might create some fluctuations for a couple of months, and by the end of that period the results will most likely be the same as before – so you have a period when everything is worse than before, and then it becomes just the way it was. However, if there is a bigger revamp to come that will make things worse and confusing for a period of time anyway, then it is worth cleaning up URLs. If it’s a completely new website that is to be created, it would be good to make sure URLs are intact from the very beginning.

Homepage Ranks Higher Than Individual Related Pages

Q. When the homepage ranks higher for certain queries than the website pages that fit the query better, it’s good to help Google understand the relative importance of the individual page

• (41:15) If a website’s homepage ranks higher for certain queries than the website pages that actually match the query better, John argues, it’s not always a problem – the homepage ranking high at least means that the SEO side of the website is already quite good. However, he explains that it shows one of the issues with the Google system – that is, Google can’t understand the relative importance of certain pages. What most likely happens is that the homepage is often a strong page that includes the keywords in the search query, and while the individual pages get recognition as well, the system doesn’t understand that it’s a better match for the query and that it is more important. With internal linking, better quality across the pages, more focused information on these pages can help to improve that.

Passage Ranking

Q. Passage ranking is different from the automatic jump to the part of the text relevant to the search query after clicking on a result in SERPs

• (43:20) With passage ranking, Google tries to understand on a longer page which has several unique parts of a page within the same page and rank it (not pulling out a sentence and ranking it or showing differently). So a really long (often not super SEO optimised) page might contain several intents, and Google recognises a certain part of the page being relevant to a search query, so it ranks the whole page in the SERPs, even if there are a lot of irrelevant parts to the page. So passage ranking, which is more about ranking, should not be confused with pointing out a specific part of the page. At the same time, Google is trying to understand things like anchor within a page as well. For example, there can be a hash editorial part at the end of a URL, which could point to a different part of the page, and Google tries to understand it and include in the site links, when they show the page itself. Or sometimes they take things that they show in a featured snippet and link to that directly on the page using some new HTML API, that allows them to add something to the URL so that it goes to that specific text segment of the page. So passage ranking and jumping to a specific part of a page are different things.

Dynamic Menu and Related Posts

Q. Dynamic menu and related posts work well for both users and crawlers.

• (53:35) Creating a dynamic menu on the website that takes into account the action of a user doesn’t create a problem for Google crawlers, as on the Google’s side everything is static, and it can understand the connection between the links. However, if there is something within the navigation that depends on how the user navigates through the website, and that needs to be reflected in search, that is trickier. Since Google crawls without cookies, it can’t keep that trail.
  Linking related content on a content page is also a good approach, since it works well for users, and gives Google more context when it crawls the page.

Flexible Sampling

Q. Flexible Sampling should be used to index the whole page for the pages that have gated content

• (57:34) Flexible Sampling allows the website owners to use a structured data markup on gated pages to let Google know which parts of the pages were gated and which were not. After that, these pages can be dynamically served to Google Bots slightly differently than they would be served to an average user. That means that when something like the URL inspection tool is used the whole content together with markup can be seen and the whole page with these markups would be indexed, and when a user goes to that page he would see gated or limited access set up.
  This feature is also documented in Google as subscription & Paywall Content, and different types of CSS selectors need to be specified for the different types of content.

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Google’s Removal tool

Q. Removal tool doesn’t interfere with the indexing or the crawling of a page

• (04:41): The removal tool in Google Search Console basically just hides the page in the search results. During the time that the removal is active, Google will recrawl and re-index that page normally.  If you add a no-index meta tag to those pages, we will notice that usually within that half-year time, and then Google will drop the page from the index naturally.

Q. When the removal tool is implemented, Google still uses the removed pages to assess the website, but only to a certain extent

• (09:36): The pages where the removal tool was implemented are still indexed if they don’t have a no-index or any other kind of block. Google just doesn’t show them in the search results. Usually, when talking about individual pages, that’s not going to skew Google’s overall assessment of the quality of the website. But if a removal tool is implemented on a significant part of the website, then that’s something when it could affect the understanding of the overall quality of the website

Internal Link Equity

Q. The value of the links pointing to no-index pages gets lost

• (10:45): There are some situations where Google keeps no-index pages with links in its index when it freshly processes them, and it understands there’s a no-index on it, so it doesn’t use them for anything, but it can process them for sure. However, for the most part, when Google recognises that no-index is a persistent state on a page, then it won’t do anything with this page. Google will ignore it completely, and those links pointing to the no-index page go nowhere, and the links get dropped.

Broken media attachments 

Q. Media attachment bugs don’t really affect Google’s impression of the website. The relevance of the website matters more

• (14:12): Sometimes, media attachment bugs happen, but Google doesn’t see them as a huge problem since they don’t tend to be shown in search anyway. John says that getting rid of these kinds of pages makes sense, but it’s more of a matter of making sure that the website is clean, strong and relevant. Google often indexes a lot of not-so-valuable pages, but it doesn’t worsen the quality of the website.

Duplicate pages 

Q. Having pages that are kind of the same but actually different makes your job harder. Stick to creating one stronger page instead

• (20:10): The example comes from the person asking the question: he has a website that promotes the services of fixing Apple products, and he has multiple pages for different models of iPhone. They talk about almost the same things, but for different iPhone models. John points out that this person is “competing with himself” because if someone types “iPhone screen repair” all his pages related to that will compete with each other and have to rank for this keyword on their own. John suggests that it’s better if all the information about fixing the screens of different iPhone models is on the one really strong page. However, he also mentions that it makes sense in areas where the competition is strong – in a case when the website is one of its kind, it might be better to have all those multiple pages.

Schema Markup Plugin

Q. Before implementing something out of Google’s functionality on your website, it’s always good to check in with the Google policies

• (23:00): The person asking the question uses schema markup of Google My Business Reviews on his website, with a special plug-in that allows him to put that as a widget on the footer. He wants to know whether having that on all pages would be considered a duplicate. John argues that even if it’s not a duplicate per se, the problem lies in the fact that the reviews are not collected directly on the website itself, so it might be against Google policies. Before using any plug-ins outside Google, it’s always better to see if this is not breaking any rules.

Website Speed

Q. The website’s speed, according to Google Search Console, is not an important assessment factor compared to the real experience of people accessing the website from the same country where the website is hosted

• (24:04): There might be a difference in what Google Search Console shows as an average response time of the website and what a tool that measures average response time from the local access displays, as the Google bots do crawling mainly from the US. The good thing is that for ranking purposes, Google pays more attention to what people from where the website is hosted are experiencing in terms of response time and not what the crawlers from the US are getting.

Content Silos

Q. Content silos are a great move to let your users understand your website better

• (26:01): Content silos are not primarily an SEO move, but more of something that might be done for users’ convenience, in the sense of if it’s clear for users that the site is really strong on a specific topic. That makes it a lot easier for them to understand the context of the individual things on the website, and indirectly Google understands things a bit better for SEO as well. John argues that thought like  “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” shouldn’t be the primary focus here. 

Localisation 

Q. There is no clear number on how many localisations a website should optimally have

• (31:16): There is no such thing as “too many localisations”, but having a lot of versions of the same page in a way “dilutes” the website – pages might turn out to be less strong overall, and it makes it harder for Google to understand what the website’s strengths are. As a result, each individual version of the website might rank worse than it could have. Having website versions for every country in the world is not a great idea, neither is having an international website with only one version – every website has its own optimal point depending on the website itself and its users.

Interstitials 

Q. Making interstitials is still not welcomed, but the way they appear on the website makes a difference

• (34:58): Google looks at intrusive interstitials as a factor that would affect rankings because it’s a page element and a part of the page experience. However, John says: “this is essentially focused on that moment when a user comes to your website. So if you’re using interstitials as something in between 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”.

Disavow Files

Q. There is no fixed time for deleting and processing disavow files

• (44:21) Google picks up disavow files immediately, but “unblocking” the links takes time. Over some period of time, as the links are recrawled, Google recognises that there is no disavow file and takes that into account. John suggests that it’s better to update the existing disavow file to what you want and expect Google to pick up on that after some time, rather than to delete the file, wait till it’s gone and then update a new file.

Q. Disavow files that were previously created from one account in the Search Console can be accessed and updated from a new account.

• (45:38) Even if, for some reason, there is a need to set up a new Search Console account for a verified website, the new account still has an option to access, download and update previously created disavow files.

Search Console and Lighthouse

Q. Google Search Console is a field test; Google Lighthouse is a lab test

• (46:45) Google Search Console and Google Light House might show different numbers about a website, and it might seem confusing. John reveals that Google Search Console is basically a field test, and it shows what the website users’ experience is actually like, while Google Lighthouse is a lab text and shows what could be potentially improved: things like iterative debugging and optimisation processes that might not be directly showing up to users. That’s why indicators in these two tools might not match, and it’s good to consider both.

Domains and subdomains

Q. For a website that hosts a lot of user-generated content, it’s always safer to have the users under subdomains or to move the website’s own content to a whole domain

• (52:16) Sometimes a website that hosts a lot of users who create their own blogs, generates content etc., wants to actually rank for some target keywords on its own. However, the content generated by users, which can sometimes be of low quality, spam or some other things that are considered problematic might not let the website rank on its own. If a user’s blog, for example, contains a lot of spam, it is regarded as “the whole website has a lot of spam”. So, it’s always better to have users on subdomains of the website instead of the main domain, or even to move the website’s own original blogs and content to another domain and to isolate it from user-created content.

Uncommon Downloads

Q. The uncommon downloads problem might come from hosting something unique, almost per user type of thing

• (56:17) If a website hosts something like a software tool, that a user can sign up and download, then uncommon download warnings might keep popping up quite often. That’s because in this case, a user gets a zip file or executable specifically for him, so Google can’t scan it and tell if it’s malware or not. But the website owner can ask for the review request, and the file gets double-checked, and the issue might be resolved. 

John points out, that this is one of the reasons why it’s good to have users isolated from the main website domain or have the main website on some other domain: uncommon downloads problem might be happening because of the files uploaded by a user, and it might affect everything that is hosted on the same domain.

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