Category: Webmaster Hangouts

Changing Page Title and Descriptions

Q.  (1:01) A few days ago we optimised a page title and description, after that we saw the title and description changed when using the site to search in Google. After a long while, the title and description have been the one in the first place. In this case, does Google think the formal title and description are better than the one we optimised and would there be any other possible reasons that may cause this?

• (1:36) I would not necessarily assume that if Google changes it to something that Google thinks it’s better, then you should use that title too. It is more than our systems have selected a different title. And usually, the title is picked on a per-page basis.

Best Practice to Have Content Display

Q. (4:29) Every franchisee has a microsite after the domain, like domain/branch1 and their corresponding URLs. What would be the best practice to have content displayed well? It is really hard to have 100 branches and 100 different contents. Is there a problem from the perspective of Google? What does Google think about it?

• (05:48) Guidelines, usually doorway pages are more about swapping out one word on a page essentially, where the rest of the content is the same. If you have a specific service you create pages for every city nearby or every street or every region nearby, and you create hundreds of these pages that are essentially just driving traffic to the same business. I think franchises probably that’s a lesser issue because these are essentially separate businesses. It is essential to separate the businesses.

Decrease in Getting Articles Indexed

Q. (09:25) I work in a content creation agency. And we work with different blogs. And the agency has been running for more than 10 years. And we’ve never had problems with getting our articles indexed. But for the last six months, all of the new blogs especially are having big problems getting their articles indexed. So recently, we’re working on organic traffic. And if we’re not getting our articles indexed, then we can’t work on that or optimise any content. I was just wondering if there’s any specific reason, maybe there’s been some sort of change, or if we just have to wait and see what happens? Because we have done a lot of technical revisions of the site amps and everything. But we have just noticed a decrease in articles getting indexed.

• (10:14) It is hard to say in general without being able to kinda look at some of these example sites. If you have examples of pages that you have that are not super fresh, a couple of weeks old that are still not getting indexed I would love to get some of those examples. In general, though, I think what I see with a lot of these questions that tend to come up around my content not being indexed is that from a technical point of view, a lot of these sites are really good, that they’re doing the right things about site maps, the internal linking is set up well. It is more than on our side from a quality point of view, it is something where it feels like the bar is slowly going up and that more people are creating content that is technically okay but not from a quality point of view.

SEO Tool in Duplicate Content

Q. (15:40) We have had a news publishing website since 2009. We post articles related to recipes, health, fitness and stuff like that. We have articles that are considered personal SEO tools as duplicate content. We tend to recreate another version of this recipe or tweak it around maybe sugar-free or salt-free everything related to that. What the SEO tool suggested is to remove it because none of the duplicate content is being ranked or indexed by Google. What is the solution for this?

• (16:53) To make assumptions with regards to what Google will do and what will happen. And sometimes those assumptions are okay and sometimes they are not correct. This kind of feedback from SEO tools is useful because it is still something that you can take a look at it and make a judgment call. You might choose to say, I’m ignoring the tool in this case and I’m kind of following the guidance in a different case. If you are seeing something even from a very popular SEO tool that tells you, you should disavow these links and delete this content. Always use your judgment first before blindly following that.

Ranking Service Pages to Get More Leads

Q.  (23:16) I’m currently working on a website that is based in India and we get leads from all over India. We can provide services all over the world, but first I want to rank my service pages to get more leads from the USA. Can you help me know what things I can do so that I can rank top of my competitors?

• (24:16) If you’re going from a country-specific website to something more global then it helps to make sure that from a technical point of view, your website is available for that. Using a generic top-level domain instead of a country-specific top-level domain can help. Any time when you go from a country-level website to a global-level website, the competition changes completely.

Getting the Best Approach for Client Credits

Q. (27:18) We are working with an eCommerce client, and it is an open-source online store management system. Their blog is WordPress. The main URL is example.com, whereas the blog is blog.example.com. What would be the best approach for this client to get credit from the blogs?

•  (28:06) Some SEOs have very strong opinions about subdomains and subdirectories and would probably want to put this all on the same domain, from our point of view you could do it like this as well. This setup would be fine. If you did want to move it into the same domain, then practically speaking, that usually means you have to do some technical tricks, where essentially you proxy one subdomain as a subdirectory somewhere else. You have to make sure that all of the links work.

Describing Products Using Alt Text

Q. (37:22) Should I write alt text for products for an e-Commerce site since there is already text beneath that describes the product?

• (37:35) The alt text is meant as a replacement or description of the image. That is particularly useful for people who cannot look at individual images, who use things like screen readers. It also helps search engines to understand what this image is about

Using Alt Tags for Longer Text With Decoration

Q.  (40:07) Would you use alt tags for images that use only decoration within the longer text? How would you treat those mostly stock images?

• (40:28) From an SEO point of view, the alt text helps us to understand the image better for image search. If you do not care about this image for image search then that is fine. You would focus more on the accessibility aspect there rather than the pure SEO aspect. It is not the case that we would say a textual webpage has more value. It is just well, we see the alt text and we apply it to the image.

Added Links in an Underscore Cell

Q.  (44:09) So one of my technical members has added the links in the form of an underscore target or underscore equally to blank. How are Google bots able to crawl these things? Do they understand that there are links added to this particular node that typed something over there?

• (46:15) I think we just ignore it. Because it makes more sense from a browser point of view what happens. The target attribute refers to how that link should be open. If you have a frame on a page then it will open that link in a frame. What we focus on is if there is a href value given there, then essentially that link goes to the same page and we ignore that.

Home Page Disappearance and Ranking

Q.  (50:33) For every query there is only the — know my home page is getting ranked, and all of the other pages are ignored, suddenly disappear from this. How’s Google treating it?

• (51:19) Sometimes we think the home page is a better match for that specific query and it could be that some of the information is on the home page itself. The more detailed page is seen as not such a good page from our point of view. It is something where you can experiment with removing some of that information from the home page.

Sign up for our Webmaster Hangouts today!

Page Disappearing From Top Results

Q.  (0:35) It is related to the pages which are 8 at 10 or 12 and suddenly they disappear from the sub. Is it really like Google is still trying to understand the overall website quality? Or there could be some other technical issues? Because when the pages are live, they are in the sublinks. When they get indexed they are placed at like 8th position, 10 or 12 or 15., so being very close or near to the first page.

• (01:12) If you’re creating something new or if you are just updating something existing like if you have a page where you’re just updating the prices then you don’t need to make a new page for every price change that you make. You just update those prices. On the other hand, if you’re providing information then that feels like something that should live on a separate URL where people can go directly to that specific place of information. The advantage of keeping the same URL is that over time it builds a little bit more value and then people understand that it’s actually the place to go for this piece of information. For example, every day for a new price you would create a new page then if people search for, what is the current price for this product, then they’re going to find some of these, but it’s going to be unclear to us which one of them they should show. On the other hand, if you have one page, where you just update the current price, then we know, for the price, this is the page.

Traffic and Engagement and Its Impact on Rankings

Q. (6:57) We recently added a page for our site that is consistently driving significant traffic at levels we’ve never seen before. So it’s really through the roof. Can a single page with extremely high engagement and traffic have an influence on the domains as a whole? Do these signals trickle to other pages on the site and play a positive role at that domain level?

• (07:23)  I don’t think we would use engagement as a factor. But it is the case that, usually, pages within a website are interlinked with the rest of the website. And through those internal links, across the website, we do forward some of the signals. So if we see that a page is a really good page and we would like to show it in search a lot, maybe it also has various external links going there, then that gives us a lot of additional contexts about that page. And we can kind of forward some of that to the rest of the website. So usually that’s a good thing.

Core Web Vitals for Lower Value Pages Drag the Site Down?

Q. (8:37) We prioritise our high-search pages for product improvements like anyone else would do. We prioritise our high-search pages for product improvements like anyone else would do. Can a subset of pages with poor LCP or CLS, say only the video page on the site that aren’t the main or secondary or even tertiary search-traffic-driving pages on the site, impact the rest of the site’s overall Core Web Vitals score? So what I mean by this is, can a group of bad pages with little search traffic in the grand scheme of things actually impact—drag the overall score of the site down? And do we need to prioritise those bad pages even though they aren’t high-traffic pages?

• (09:14) Usually, that wouldn’t be the problem. There are two aspects there. On the one hand for the Core Web Vitals, we look at a sample of the traffic to those pages, which is done through, I don’t know, the Chrome User Experience Report functionality. I believe that’s documented on the Chrome side somewhere. It’s essentially a portion of the traffic to your website. That means that, for the most part, the things that we will look at the most are the pages that get the most visits. So if you have random pages on the side that nobody ever looks at and they are slow, then those wouldn’t be dragging your site down.

Internal Links Will Play a Role in Indexing Priority

Q. (16:39) We found that many category pages didn’t get indexed faster than other specific pages like product pages. And these category pages are in a formal place like they are close to the home page. Wondering if the theory is correct?

• (17:09) I think a difficult part there is also that kind of linked closer from their home page is a general rule of thumb. But it doesn’t have to be the case. Because we have a lot of systems also in play to try to figure out how often we should recrawl a page. And that depends on various factors. It also depends on how well it’s linked within the website, but also based on what we expect will happen with this page, how often do we think it will change, or how often do we think it will change significantly enough that it’s worthwhile to recrawl and re-index it.

Flat Hierarchy vs. URL Hierarchy

Q.  (18:13) Can you comment on the flat hierarchy versus a strict kind of URL? Because there is no such thing as a closer flat structure.

• (18:58) We don’t care so much about the folder structure. We essentially focus on the internal link. And it also kind of links from the home page, not links to the home page. So from that point of view, if you have a URL structure that doesn’t have any subdirectories at all, we still see that structure based on the internal linking. And a lot of times, the architecture of the website is visible in the URL structure, but it doesn’t have to be the case.

Website Quality

Q. (22:28) How do you improve the perceived quality of a whole website at Google side?

•  (22:53) I think we’ve given some types of things that you can focus on with the reviews updates think we’ve given some types of things that you can focus on with the reviews updates. that we’ve done for product reviews. Some of that might apply. But I don’t think there is one solution to improving the overall quality of any larger website. And especially on an e-commerce site, I imagine that’s quite tricky. There are sometimes things like working  to improve the quality of the reviews that people leave if it’s user-generated reviews, for example, making sure that you’re highlighting the user reviews, for example.

Crawl Statistics Report

Q. (25:47) We have looked at the crawl stats reports on the Search Console and have been trying to identify if there might be some issue on the technical side with Google crawling our website. What are some of the signals or things to identify that will point us to if Google is struggling to crawl something or if Googlebot is distracted by irrelevant files and things that it’s trying to index that are irrelevant to us?

• (26:34) Crawl reports will not be useful in that case. You are looking at an aggregate view of the crawling of your website. And usually, that makes more sense if you have something like, I don’t know, a couple hundred thousand pages. Then you can look at that and say, on average, the crawling is slow. Whereas if you have a website that’s maybe around 100 pages or so, then essentially, even if the crawling is slow, then those 100 pages, we can still get that, like once a day, worst case, maybe once a week. It’s not going to be a technical issue with regards to crawling. It’s essentially more a matter of understanding that the website offers something unique and valuable that we need to have indexed. So less of an issue about the crawling side, and more about the indexing side.

Google Search Console Not Matching Up to Real Time Search

Q. (30:09) On 1st March, my website home page, was gone from the search results, completely gone from there. OK, it’s a kind of Google thing. The home page was not in the search results. But the interesting thing, in the Google Search Console, for every keyword, Search Console is saying I’m still ranking in the first position for every keyword that was ranking before 1st March. But the significant amount of impressions and clicks had gone. About 90% had gone. Rankings and the CTR are the same. For about one week, I tried everything, but nothing works out for me. Google Search Console is saying I am ranking in the first position still.

• (32:06) Try to figure out whether it’s a technical issue or not. And one way you could try to find out more there is to use the URL inspection tool. it’s indexed but it’s not ranking, at least when you search. And the thing with, I think, the performance report in Search Console, especially the position number there, that is based on what people saw. 

Service and Recipe Website

Q.  (41:12) So on the service website, I have different FAQs based on different city pages for my services. Do I have to create separate pages for FAQs, or can I just add them to the same city pages? And from our point of view, you can do whatever you want?

• (41:35) If you make a separate page with the FAQ markup on it and that separate page is shown in the search results, then we can show it. If that separate page is not shown, then we wouldn’t be able to show it. And let’s see, I think the same applies to the recipe website example there. We’ve seen that most recipe websites are not providing very useful information in my country, and we try to change that by providing more useful information and going to the point of adding FAQs to every recipe.

Shortcut Handlings

Q.  (48:42) On our website, we have a lot of shortcuts like the English version will be EG, for example. How does Google handle that?

• (48:58) We don’t do anything special with those kinds of things. We essentially treat them as tokens on a page. And a token is essentially a kind of like a word or a phrase on a page. And we would probably recognise that there are known synonyms for some of these and understand that a little bit, but we wouldn’t do anything specific there in that we’d have a glossary of what this abbreviation means and handle that in a specific way. Sometimes plays a role with regards to elements that do have a visible effect on schema.org the requirements are sometimes not the same as in Google Search. So it will have some required properties and some optional properties and it kind of validates based on those Google Search sometimes we have a stricter set of requirements that we have documented in our Help Center as well. So from our point of view, if Google doesn’t show it in the search results then we would not show it in the testing tool and if the requirements are different, Google’s requirements are stricter and you don’t follow these guidelines then we would also flag that as I don’t know.

Sign up for our Webmaster Hangouts today!

Content Project

Q. If I have content that is updated daily, like the rates of cryptocurrency or similar. What is the best way to do it? Is it to create a new article every day? Or is it to update existing articles daily, so the URL stays the same?

• (01:12) If you’re creating something new or if you are just updating something existing like if you have a page where you’re just updating the prices then you don’t need to make a new page for every price change that you make. You just update those prices. On the other hand, if you’re providing information then that feels like something that should live on a separate URL where people can go directly to that specific place of information. The advantage of keeping the same URL is that over time it builds a little bit more value and then people understand that it’s actually the place to go for this piece of information. For example, every day for a new price you would create a new page then if people search for, what is the current price for this product, then they’re going to find some of these, but it’s going to be unclear to us which one of them they should show. On the other hand, if you have one page, where you just update the current price, then we know, for the price, this is the page.

Heading Hierarchy

Q. Can Google separate the heading from the main content?

• (05:44) Usually, that should just work now. In HTML 5 there’s also an element that you can use for the header and footer. Within those elements, you can have your headings again essentially. Even from a semantic point of view, you could set that up properly. It should be possible and I don’t think it would cause any problem on Google’s side either way. What usually happens with these kinds of common elements is we can recognise them across the site because they’re more or less repeated across the site. Then we can try to de-emphasise them when it comes to Search because we realise it’s the same text on all of these pages. We will just pick one of these pages to rank essentially for the text in their footer section.

Testing Tools

Q. Google Search Console is throwing an error with this error in a required structured data element. But when I check the same on validator.schema.org, it does not show any warnings or any errors. So the first question is, is it the right site to check the AMP implementation of a web page? And if so, there is a contradiction. What should be the step over?

• (08:12) Testing tools are for slightly different purposes. That’s probably why you’re seeing that difference. The testing tool in schema.org is more about understanding schema.org markup in general.

Internal Links in the Footer Section

Q. Is it likely to be seen as problematic by Google because the links are not contextual?

• (09:49) Most parts that wouldn’t cause any problems. I would see this more as these are links on these pages. They’re normal internal links. For example, if you have a larger website and essentially every page is linked with every other page, there’s no real context there. So it’s hard for us to understand what the overall structure is, and which of these pages is more important. Because if you’re linking to everything, then it’s like everything is not important. So that’s the kind of element that I would watch out for. Whether or not they’re in the footer from my point of view is irrelevant. If they’re generated by a plug-in or added manually, I don’t think that matters either. I would just kind of watch out, from a structural overall, based on the requirements that schema.org has. And the testing tool in Search Console is focused purely on what we can pull out of the structured data and use to show in a search feature. It is really focused on the Search part of that story. And within Search, we only use a small part of the schema.org markup. And sometimes we have slightly different requirements that maybe we require a specific element more than the base schema.org markup would require.

Page Speed

Q. We did one experiment on our website, wherein we improved the page speed of our website like we moved from somewhere close to 30, and we are now at 45, 50 on our [INAUDIBLE] PageSpeed Insights score. And in the next couple of days, we saw a massive improvement in our ranks. So I just wonder, can this be like– this correlation, is there a possibility that it is true or there could be other external factors that can also be impacting so quickly in two days and we are seeing a jump?

• (11:05) The speed aspect is something that we have to pick up through the Chrome User Experience Report data and that takes a while to collect and to be aggregated. That’s not something you would see within a couple of days.

Sitemap

Q. When Googlebot crawls the site map in the server address, does it first crawl the submitted sitemaps in the backend, or does it go directly to our server?

• (12:11) We don’t crawl them at the same time. It’s not that there’s a specific order form. It’s more that for individual sitemap files we try to figure out how often they change and how often they give us useful information. And based on that, for individual files, we will crawl them at different rates. So it can happen that one in your Search Console account is crawled very frequently, but also one that you submit directly is crawled frequently, and maybe another in Search Console is crawled very infrequently. So it doesn’t depend on where you submit it.

Not Showing Up for Branded Keyword

Q. We’ve got two sites. One’s a global site and one’s Australia’s site. Suddenly we were the Australia site ranking for our branded term for our number one position for two, three months. And suddenly, in the last one week, it was replaced by the global website, .com website, for a couple of days. And I just wanted to understand why that could be the case?

• (18:50)  It’s hard to know without looking at the sites. But, I mean, if these are two sites that are essentially part of the same bigger group, we can switch between which one we would show for a ranking like that. With annotations, you can give us a little bit more information on how you want us to treat that pair of pages. Geotargeting can help a little bit. But then, it can happen that we show a global version of a page in a country where you actually also have a local version of the page, perhaps just because the global version is so much stronger than the local version.

Category Pages Update

Q. We run an eCommerce website and we are now in a stage where we want to make major updates to our category pages. One draft wants—or in one draft we want to get rid of the product listings. So you have the product listing with the faceted search where you can filter for the products you are looking for. My question is when we remove the whole products listing of category pages would we have a disadvantage in the ranking because first of all the other competitors have these kinds of product listings? Second, my guess is this is such an established element like for eCommerce pages that the users expect something like this.

• (23:05) From an SEO point of view. I think there are different things you would want to watch out for, which probably you will so that we can still find all of the individual products that we have clean links to there. But if you’re just kind of redesigning this kind of a category page and making it look more like an informational page, I wouldn’t expect my problems with that. From Google’s point of view, you’re just changing the design.

Breadcrumb Setup

Q.  If you have structured data for a breadcrumb is internal linking still important for SEO?

• (25:27) It’s something where internal linking is supercritical for SEO. I think it’s one of the biggest things that you can do on a website to kind of guide Google and guide visitors to the pages that you think are important. And what you think is important is totally up to you. You can decide to make things important where you earn the most money, or you can make things important where you’re the strongest competitor, or maybe you’re the weakest competitor. With internal linking, you can kind of focus things on those directions and those parts of your site. And that’s not something that you can just replace with structured data.

Multiple Product Schemas

Q. For product listing can we implement multiple product schemas on the product listing page?

• (30:01) From Google’s point of view I don’t think you should be doing that, at least the last time I checked the policies around structured data because for product structured data, we really want that to apply to the primary element of the page. And if you have multiple products on a page, it’s not that one of them is the primary element of the page. You should not use multiple products structured data elements on a category page or something like that.

Sitemap Renovate

Q. If we have a really huge website with millions of URLs, and, right now, we are currently—the sitemaps are being renovated. And our IT team is considering storing the new files, as in the new sitemap files, in our cloud service. That means from example.com/sitemaps to cloud.com/sitemaps, we are wondering, is that a problem if we store the sitemaps in the cloud? And if that’s not a problem, shall we also create a permanent redirect for the old URL for this example.com/sitemap, or how should we plan the move?

(47:13) It’s definitely possible to host the sitemap file somewhere also. There are two ways that you can do that. One is if you have both of those domains verified in Search Console, then that works. The other way is if you submit it with the robots.txt file, where you 

specify the sitemap colon and then the URL of the sitemap. That can also go to a different domain. if you have a separate server where you’re creating sitemap files, or if you have a staging setup where it crawls and checks the files and then creates a sitemap file somewhere else, that would all work. I would also redirect the old sitemap file to the new location just to be clean, but probably even if you just delete the old sitemap URL and make sure to submit the new one properly, then that should just work. What might be a little bit tricky.

Sign up for our Webmaster Hangouts today!

Sub-Feature Which Is Present in Google

Q. If a link for any of [Big Query] if a particular URL has been ranked at People Also Ask,  is it counted as a click or impression? And how that feature has been added to the Search Console part is it tracked or monitored? If the users click on some other questions then your query gets added to that particular list? How is this thing monitored or calculated?

• (01:39) Whenever there is a URL shown in the search results, we do try to show that in the Search Console. With the People Also Ask sections, if you expand it then it shows a link to your site with that question and the snippet there. That means whenever someone expands that People Also Ask section and sees the URL for your site, then that is counted as an impression and it doesn’t matter if you’re kind of the first one in the People Also Ask, or if people clicked 15 different ones and then suddenly yours shows up that would be counted as an impression. And also, when a click happens, that gets counted as a click. The ranking, the position is based on the overall position of that group of elements. The Search Console — the only thing to watch out for so the performance reports shows the ranking of the topmost items. So if different URLs are listed multiple times in a search page results, it tracks the position of the first one.

Sub-Domain for Google Search

Q. When you have subdomains it could be a blog or a help forum or resources, how good is Google to recognize this subdomain it’s not a different one but it’s a subsidiary of this particular domain?

• (04:34) Specifically around the links there, I don’t think we would differentiate that much. It’s not that we would say, this is an internal link or an external link. It’s essentially just we found this link from this one page. From our point of view, those are just pages essentially. We don’t say this is a home page or this is kind of a product page or category page. We essentially say just this is a page and this is what it’s relevant for.

Search Console for New Website

Q. In the Search Console I do see at least one link from the former owner that’s still there. Does that mean that this link would actually still count as Search Console does show it?

• (06:27) I don’t know if it counts. But the important part  with Search Console and the link report there’s we try to show all the links that we know of to that site. It’s not a sign that we think these are important links or that they count. So, in particular things like no follow links they would still be listed. Disavowed links would still be listed. Links that we just ignite for other reasons they could still be listed as well. So just because it’s listed doesn’t mean it’s actually a relevant or helpful link on the site.

Building Mobile Site on Amp

Q. Will it be still cached by Google the same way as a site with an AMP version would be and it would appear in search results in the Google Cache Viewer? What happens if there is an error that invalidates the page? Will it just not be shown at all in the search results?

• (07:37) So I think you need to watch out for the difference between having pages that are purely on AMP and pages that are kind of this paired setup. And if a page is purely on AMP from our point of view it’s essentially a normal HTML page. It can also be a valid AMP page. And if it is a valid AMP page, then we can use the AMP cache and all of the AMP functionality in search as well.

Internal Links in Footer Section

Q. Is it likely to be seen as problematic by Google because the links are not contextual?

• (09:49) Most parts that wouldn’t cause any problems. I would see this more as these are links on these pages. They’re normal internal links. For example if you have a larger website and essentially every page is linked with every other page, there’s no real context there. So it’s hard for us to understand what the overall structure is, which of these pages is more important. Because if you’re linking to everything, then it’s like everything is not important. So that’s the kind of element that I would watch out for. Whether or not they’re in the footer from my point of view it is irrelevant. If they’re generated by a plug-in or added manually, I don’t think that matters either. I would just kind of watch out, from a structural point.

Hidden and Invisible Text

Q. The support doc about the topic addresses the intent to deceive or trick bots by including excessive keywords to establish tropical relevance. Is all hidden text against webmaster guidelines?

• (14:36) I don’t think that would be problematic. Hidden text, from our point of view, is more problematic when it’s really about deceiving the search engines with regards to what is actually on a page. So the extreme example would be that, you have a page about shoes and there’s a lot of hidden text there that is about Olympics or something like that. Then suddenly your shoe page starts ranking for these Olympic terms but when a user goes there there’s nothing about the Olympics and that would be kind of problematic from our point of view. We do a reasonable job in recognizing hidden text and trying to avoid that from happening but that’s kind of the reason we have this kind of element in the webmaster guidelines.

Page Performance

Q. We want to improve page performance with some metrics like LCP,FID. We want to change the way of loading description and some reviews content from synchronous to asynchronous on user guide. But for the Googlebot side this content will still be synchronous. Do you think when we’re doing this, it will have any impact to the site from the SEO side?

• (24:16) That’s essentially similar to the dynamic rendering setup that we used to recommend, where you use JavaScript for the client side and you statically render the content for Googlebot and other search engines from our Google it is the same content you’re just delivering it in a slightly different way that’s perfectly fine.

Indexing, Image File Names & Ranking

Q. Do you care about image search? Will image alt text and captions be sufficient for Google to understand without an appropriate image, file name and title?

• (24:59) We’re using an intelligent CDN provider which has been replacing the image file names with unique numbers and noticed that all the images are 404s in the Search Console. Disabling the CDN would significantly degrade overall site performance. There are also two things that I would look at, one hand if these are images that you need to have indexed in image search then you should definitely make sure that you have a stable file name for your images. Kind of the most important element here you don’t mention that these numbers or URLs change but sometimes these CDNs essentially provide a kind of session-based ID for each image. If the image URL changes every time we crawl then essentially we’ll never be able to index those images properly. Mostly because for images we tend to be a little bit slower with regards to crawling and indexing. So if we see an image once and we say we will just drop that image from our search results from the image ranking and essentially we’ll this image that we thought was here is actually no longer here anymore. For web search, we don’t need to be able to crawl and index the images because we essentially just look at the web pages. If all of the images were 404 all the time or blocked by robots.txt we would still treat that page exactly the same as if we were able to index all those images.

Search Results

Q. We’re still getting flagged for explicit content. Is there a way to get reconciled via Google? How do we go about this?

• (28:22) Most part, this kind of understanding of which content we would filter by SafeSearch is handled automatically. If we recognize that a site has changed significantly then we will treat it differently in search results as well. We will remove that SafeSearch bit for the site or for those pages depending on when you made this change. It might be that you just need to be a little bit more patient and it’ll settle down properly.

Same Keyword on Two Different Pages

Q. Is it okay to target the same main keyboard on those two different pages?

• (29:51) Whatever keywords that you want from our point of view we’re not going to hold you back. There are guidelines that you should not do this but it’s more that if you have multiple pieces of content that are ranking for the same query with the same intent then you’re essentially kind of diluting the value of the content that you’re providing across multiple pages. That could mean that these individual pages are not that strong when it comes to competing with other people’s websites. If you have two pages and they’re both targeting the same keyword and they have different intents then that seems kind of reasonable because people might be searching for that keyword with extra text added for one intent and extra text added for other intent. They’re essentially unique pages.

SEO Rankings, Filtering & Sorting

Q. How does Google treat these pages within the website? How do the search results affect the overall ranking? Is it enough to submit sitemaps for ranking? Or we should take additional consideration to help Googlebot to gather all of the returnable URLs?

• (37:58) The last question, I would not rely on sitemaps to find all of the pages of your website. Sitemaps should be a way to give additional information about your website. Internal linking is super important and something you should definitely watch out for. Make sure that you set things up when someone crawls your website. They’re able to find your content and not rely on the sitemap.

Poor Core Web Vitals

Q. My website had a drop in visitors due to poor Core Web Vitals. What page experience ranking to desktop? How important is it compared to the other ranking factors?

• (42:40) The Page Experience ranking factor is essentially something that gives us a little bit of extra information about these different pages that could show up in the search results in situations where we have strong, clear kind of intent from the query where we can understand that they really want to go to this website then from that point of view we kind of can ease off using Page Experience as a ranking factor. If all of the content is very similar in the search results page then probably using Page Experience helps a little bit to understand which of these are fast pages or reasonable pages with regards to the user experience. Less reasonable pages to show in the search results. With that kind of situation helps us with the desktop rollout, I believe this is going to be a slower rollout over the course of something like a month which means you would not be seeing a strong effect from one day to the next but rather you would see that effect over a period of time.

Ranking Signals

Q. How important is it compared to other ranking signals?

• (44:52) Websites would not see a big visible change when it comes to the Core Web Vitals. Even if your website goes from being kind of reasonable to being in that poor bucket in the Core Web Vitals from one day to the next I would not expect to see that as a kind of a giant change in the search results. Maybe changing a few positions seems kind of the right change there. But I would not see it as a page going from ranking number 2 to ranking number 50. If you are seeing a drastic change like that I would not focus on purely Core Web Vitals. I would step back and look at the overall picture and see what else could be involved and try to figure out what you can do to improve things overall.

Validating & Building Schema

Q. I’m building out schema and doing it exactly like it should be done.But when I go over the Rich Results Test for Google it doesn’t validate. When I go to Google Search Console it’s not showing up. What should I do to actually get this to validate?

• (49:00) There are two main things that play a role. ONe hand the validator schema.org is set up to validate theoretical schemes that you can provide with schema.org The validator in Search Console is based purely on functionality that has visible changes in Google Search and that’s usually very small subset of the bigger scheme.org set of things that you can mark up. Example you are making things up that don’t have a visible effect in the search results in terms of maybe it starts, shows video or something like that then that would be something where Search Console would say I don’t see anything here which might fall into that category that you’re seeing there. Sometimes plays a role with regards to elements that do have a visible effect on schema.org the requirements are sometimes not the same as in Google Search. So it will have some required properties and some optional properties and it kind of validates based on those Google Search sometimes we have stricter set of requirements that we have documented in our Help Center as well. So from point of view, if Google doesn’t show it in the search results then we would not show in the testing tool and if the requirements are different, Google’s requirements are stricter and you don’t follow these guidelines then we would laso flag that as I don’t know.

Sign up for our Webmaster Hangouts today!

Indexing API

Q. Using API for things other than job posting and broadcasting events doesn’t bring any benefits.

• (06:49) The person asking the question is interested whether he can use API for pages different than job posting and broadcasting events, like, for example, news articles and blogs. John says that people try doing that, but essentially what Google has documented is what it uses the API for. If there isn’t content that falls into those categories, then the API isn’t really going to help. But trying that won’t negatively affect the content.

Unlinked Brand Mention

Q. Unlinked brand mention doesn’t really affect SEO.

• (12:01) When there is an article, that mentions the website without linking to it, it is not a bad thing. It is only a little inconvenient for users, because they have to search for the website being mentioned. But, otherwise, John says he wouldn’t assume there’s some SEO factor that is trying to figure out where someone is mentioning the website’s name. 

User Reviews and Comments

Q. Non-spammy comments help Google understand the page a little better.

• (12:58) A really useful thing about the user comments is that oftentimes people will write about the page in their own words, and that gives Google a little bit more information on how it can show this page in the search results. From that point of view, comments are a good thing on a page. Obviously, finding a way to maintain them in a reasonable way is something tricky, because people also spam those comments, and all kinds of crazy stuff happens in them. But overall once a way to maintain comments on a web page is found, that gives the page a little bit more context and helps people who are searching in different ways to also find this content. 

SSL Certificates

Q. Any kind of valid SSL certificate works fine for Google.

• (14:03) Different types of SSL certificates are not important for SEO, and just free SSL certificates are perfectly fine. The different types of certificates is more a matter of what is wanted with this certificate. From Google point of view, it just watches out for whether the certificate is valid or not.

Multiple Job Postings

Q. Posting the same job posting in different subdomains from the same root domain is fine.

• (14:47) John assumes that posting the same job posting in different subdomains with the same job posting data structure is perfectly fine, because it’s very common to have the same job posted on different websites, and those different websites could have structured data on them as well. From that point of view, just having it posted different times on the same website or in different subdomains should be perfectly fine as well. However, John mentions that he doesn’t know all the details of all the guidelines around job postings, so it might be that there’s some obscure mention that it should be only listed once on each website. 

• John also says that usually Google tries to de-dupe different listings, and that is done for all kinds of listings. So if it’s an image or if it’s a web page, or anything else, if Google can recognise that it’s the same primary content, it will try to just show it once. He assumes the same rule applies for Google Jobs.

Internal Duplicate Content

Q. Having the same content as a PDF on the website and as a block article is not viewed as duplicate content.

• (17:10) The person asking the question has a situation where she has put a piece of content as PDF file on her website and wants to use the same content to present it as an HTML block article on the same website and is worried that it might be viewed as duplicate content. John assures her that Google wouldn’t see it as duplicate content, because it’s different content. One is an HTML page, on is a PDF. Even if the primary piece of content on there is the same, the whole thing around it is different. From that level, Google wouldn’t see it as duplicate content. At most, the difficulty might be that in the search results it can happen that both of these show up at the same time. From SEO point of view, it is not necessarily a bad things, but maybe there’s a personal strategic reasons to have either the PDF or the HTML page more visible.

Paginated Content

Q. In paginated content Google views first pages of content as more important than pages that come after.

• (19:39) The person asking the question has a website with discussions, where a thread can have too many comments to have them all in one long page. He wants to make it a paginated content but is not sure whether the newest comments should appear on the first page or on the last pages. John says that that is something that is ultimately up to the person asking the question and which comments he wants to prioritise. John assumes that if something is on page four, then Google would have to crawl page one, tow, three first to find that, and usually that would mean that it’s longer away from the main part of the website. From Google’s point of view, what would probably happen there is Google wouldn’t give it that much weight, and probably Google wouldn’t recrawl that page as often. Whereas if the newest comments should be the most visible ones, then maybe it makes sense to reverse that order and show them differently. Because if the news comments are right on the main page, then it’s a lot easier for Google to recrawl that more often and to give it a little bit more weight in the search results. That’s up to the website owner how he wants to balance that.

Page Number

Q. Google doesn’t have a specific ratio on how many pages or how many indexable pages a website should have.

• (28:48) From Google’s point of view, there’s no specific ratio that Google would call out for how many pages a website should have or how many indexable pages a website should have. That’s ultimately up to a website owner. What John says he tends to see is that fewer pages tend to perform better in the sense that if the value of the content is concentrated on fewer pages, then, in general, those few pages tend to be a lot stronger than if the content was to be diluted across a lot of different pages. That plays across the board, in the sense that, from a ranking point of view, Google can give these pages a little bit more weight. From a crawling point of view, it’s easier for Google to keep up with these. So especially if it’s a new website, John recommends starting off small focusing on something specific and then expanding from there, and not just going in and creating 500,000 pages that Google needs to index. Because especially for a new website, when it starts off with a big number of pages, then chances are, Google will just pick up a small sample of those pages, and whether or not that small sample is the pages most important to the website is questionable.

Referring Pages

Q. If URLs referring to the pages of the website are long-retired microsite domains, it is perfectly fine.

• (30:36) John says that URLs from long-retired microsite domains referring to the important pages on the website are not bothersome at all. So in particular, the referring page in the Inspection Tool is where Google first sees the mention of the pages, and if it first sees them on some random website, then that’s just where it saw them. That is what is listed there, it doesn’t mean that there’s anything bad with those pages. From Google’s point of view, that’s purely a technical thing. It’s not a sign that there is a need to make sure that the pages were first found on some very important part of the website. If the pages are indexed, that’s the important part there. Referring page is useful when there’s a question on how Google even found the page, or where it comes from. If there are weird URL parameters in there, or if there’s something really weird in the URL that Google should never have found in the first place, then looking at the referring URL is something that helps to figure out where this actually comes from. 

A Drop In Crawl Stats

Q. There are several things that Google takes into account when deciding on the amount of crawling it does on a website.

• (35:09) On the one hand, Google tries to figure out how much it needs to crawl from a website to keep things fresh and useful in its search results. That relies on understanding the quality of the website, how things change on the website. Google calls it the crawl demand. On the other hand, there are the limitations that Google sees from the server, from the website, from the network infrastructure with regard to how much can be crawled on a website. Google tries to balance these two.

• The restrictions tend to be tied to two main things – the overall response time to requests to the website and the number of errors, specifically, server errors, that can be seen during crawling. If Google sees a lot of server errors, then it will slow down crawling, because it doesn’t want to cause more problems. If it sees that the server is getting slower, then it will also slow down crawling. So those are the two main things that come into play there. The difficulty with the speed aspect is that there are two ways of looking at speed. Sometimes that gets confusing when looking at the crawl rate.

• Specifically for the crawl rate, Google just looks at how quickly it can request a URL from the server. The other aspect of speed is everything around Core Web Vitals and how quickly a page loads in a browser. The speed that it takes in a browser tends not to be related directly to the speed that it takes for Google to fetch an individual URL on a website, because in a browser the JavaScript needs to be processed, external files need to be pulled in, content needs to be rendered, and all of the positions of the elements on the page need to be recalculated. That takes a different amount of time than just fetching that URL. That’s one thing to watch out for.

• When trying to diagnose a change in crawl rate there’s no need to look at how long it takes for a page to render, instead, it’s better to look at just purely how long it takes to fetch that URL from the server.

• The other thing that comes in here as well – is that, from time to time – depending on what is done on the website, Google tries to understand where the website is actually hosted. If Google recognises that a website is changing hosting from one server to a different server – that could be to a different hosting provider, that could be moving to a CDN, or changing CDNs, anything like that – Google’s systems will automatically go back to some safe rate where it knows that it won’t cause any problems, and then, step by step, increase again.

Link Juice

Q. Link Juice is a great way to tell Google which pages on the website are important.

• (46:01) “Link Juice” is always one of those terms where people have very conflicting feelings about it because it’s not really how Google’s systems look at it. With regard to internal linking, this is one of the most important elements of a website because it is a great way to tell Google what is considered to be important on the pages. Most websites have a home page that is seen as the most important part of the website, and especially links that can be provided from those important pages to other pages that are thought to be important – that’s really useful for Google. It can be that these are temporary links too. For example, if there’s an e-commerce site, and a new product is linked to from the home page, then that’s a really fast way for Google to recognise those new products, to crawl and index them as quickly as possible, and to give them a little bit of extra weight. But of course, if those links are removed, then that internal connection is gone as well. With regard to how quickly that is picked up, that’s essentially picked up immediately as soon as Google recrawls and reindexes those pages.

Crawling

Q. There are a couple of ways to go around “discovered, not indexed” URLs.

• (58:21) John says Google finds all kinds of URLs across the web, and a lot of those URLs don’t need to be crawled and indexed, because maybe they’re just variations of URLs Google already knows, or maybe they’re just some random forum or scraper script that has copied URLs from the website and included them in a broken way. Google finds all of these linked all the time on the web. So it’s very normal to have a lot of these URLs that are either crawled and not indexed or discovered and not crawled, just because there are so many different sources of URLs across the web. John suggests to first of all download a list of a sample of those so that it is possible to look at individual examples and try to classify which of those URLs are actually ones that are important and which of these are ones that can be ignored. Anything that looks really weird as a URL is better to be ignored. Regarding the ones that are important, that’s something where it would be useful to try to figure out what can be done to better tie these to the website with regard to tying them to things like internal linking.

Sign up for our Webmaster Hangouts today!

Often changing title tags

Q. The problem with changing title tags very often lies in the fact that Google won’t be able to recrawl them that often.

• (01:02) The person asking the question talks about his website in the mutual fund industry, where it is necessary that the title tag changes every day depending on the number representing the stock prices. John says that it’s something where Google wouldn’t give any special weight if the title tag keeps changing. But the thing is that if the website owner is to change the titles on a daily basis, Google might not re-crawl that page on a daily basis. So it might be the case that the titles are changed every day, but in the search results, the title that Google shows is a few days old just because that’s the last version that it picked up from that page. It’s more like a practical effect rather than a strategic effect.

Reusing a domain

Q. There’s no strict time frame within which Google catches up with a domain being reused for different purposes.

• (04:04) Google catching up with the fact that a domain is being used for a different purpose is something that happens over time organically. If an existing domain is being reused, and there is new content that is different from the one before, then over time, Google will learn that it’s a new website and treat it accordingly. But there’s no specific time frame for that. 

• There are two things to watch out for in situations like this. The first one is whether the website was involved in some shady practices before, like, for example, around external links. That might be something that needs to be cleaned up.

• The other aspect is if there’s any webspam manual action, then, that’s something that needs to be cleaned up, so that the website starts from a clean slate. 

• Its’ never going to be completely clean if something else was already hosted on the website before, but at least it puts the website in some sort of reasonable state where it doesn’t have to drag that baggage along.

Robots.txt and traffic

Q. Failure in traffic might not be necessarily linked to technical failures, for example, robots.txt failure.

• (10:20) The person asking the question is concerned with lower traffic on his website and links it to several days of robots.txt failure and connectivity issues. John says there are two things to watch out for in situations like this. On the one hand, if there are server connectivity issues, Google wouldn’t see it as a quality problem. So it wouldn’t be that the ranking for the pages would drop. That’s the first step. So if there’s a drop in the ranking of the pages, then that would not be from the technical issue.

• On the other hand, what does happen with these kinds of server connectivity problems is that if Google can’t reach the robots.txt file for a while, then it will assume that it can’t crawl anything on the website, and that can result in some of the pages from the website being dropped from the index. That’s kind of a simple way to figure out whether it’s from a technical problem or not. Are the pages gone from the index, and if so, that’s probably from a technical problem. If it is from a technical problem, if these pages are gone, then usually Google will retry those missing pages after a couple of days maybe and try to index them again.

• If the problem has happened a while ago and there were steps taken in an attempt to fix that, and the problem keeps recurring, it is worthy to double-check with the Crawl Error section in Search Console to see if there is still, perhaps, a technical issue where sometimes maybe Googlebot is blocked.

Indexing the comment section

Q. It’s important to make sure that the way the comment section is technically handled on the page makes it easy for Google to index comments.

• (16:47) John says that it is up to a website owner whether he wants the comments to show in SERPs or not, but comments are essentially a technical element on the page. So it’s not that there’s a setting in Search Console to turn it on or off. It’s basically there are different ways of integrating comments on web pages, and some of those ways are blocked from indexing and some of those ways are easy to index. So if there’s a need to have the comments indexed, then it’s important to make sure to implement them in a way that’s easy to index. The Inspect URL tool in Search Console will show a little bit of what Google finds on the page, so it can be seen whether Google can index the comments.

URL not indexed

Q. If Google crawls the URL, it doesn’t automatically mean it will index it.

• (21:10) The person asking the question is concerned by the fact that even though his URLs get crawled, he gets the “URL discovered, not indexed”, or “URL crawled, not indexed” messages – he thinks that maybe the content is not good enough for Google to index it. John says that it is kind of an early easy assumption to say “Oh, Google looked at it but decided not to index it”. Most of the time Google crawls something, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it will automatically index it. John says these two categories of not indexed can be treated as a similar thing. It’s tricky because Google doesn’t index everything, so that can happen.

CDN

Q. Whenever a website moves to CDN or changes its current one, it affects crawling but doesn’t really affect rankings.

• (26:28) From a ranking point of view, moving to a CDN or changing the current one wouldn’t change anything. If the hosting is changed significantly, what will happen on Google’s side is the crawling rate will move into a more conservative area first, where Google will crawl a little bit less first because it saw a bigger change in hosting. Then, over time, in, probably, a couple of weeks, maybe a month or so, Google will increase the crawl rate again to see where it thinks it will settle down. Essentially that drop and craw rate overall for the move to a CDN or change of a CDN that can be normal.

• The crawl rate itself doesn’t necessarily mean that there is a problem, because if Google was crawling two million pages of the website before, it’s unlikely that these 2 million pages would be changing every day. So it’s not necessarily the case that Google would miss all of the new content on the website. It would just try to prioritise again and figure out which of these pages it actually needs to re-crawl on a day-to-day basis. So just because the crawl rate drops, it’s not necessarily a sign for concern.

• Some other indicators, like, for example, the change in average response time would be of more priority. Because the crawl rate that Google chooses is based on the average response time. It’s also based on server errors etc. if the average response time goes up significantly, Google will stick to a lower crawl rate.

Changing the rendering and ranking

Q. There might be a couple of reasons why after changing the client-side rendering to a server-side rendering the website doesn’t recover from a drop in rankings.

• (36:22) John says there might be two things at play whenever a website sees a drop in rankings. On the one hand, it might be that with the change of the infrastructure, the website layout and structure has changed as well. That could include things like internal linking, maybe even the URLs that are findable on the website. Those kind of things can affect ranking. The other thing could be that maybe there were just changes in ranking overall that were happening, and they just happened to coincide with when the technical changes were made.

HREF tag

Q. The image doesn’t matter as much as the Alt text, and Alt texts are treated the same way as an anchor text associated directly with the link.

• (40:33) With regards to an image itself, Google would probably not find a lot of value in that as an anchor text. If there is an anchor text associated with the image, then Google would treat that, essentially, the same as any anchor text that has been associated with the link directly. So from Google’s point of view, the Alt text would, essentially, be converted into a text on the page and be treated in the same way. It’s not that one or the other would have more value or not. They’re basically equivalent from Google’s side, and the order doesn’t matter as much. John says that it probably doesn’t matter at all. It’s essentially just both on the page. However, one thing he advises against doing is removing the visible text purely for usability reasons, since the visible text doesn’t matter as much or the same as Alt text. Because other search engines might not see it that way, and it might also be for accessibility reasons that it actually makes sense to have a visible text as well.

• So it’s not about blindly removing it to a minimum, but rather knowing that there’s no loss in having both of them there.

Moving Domains

Q. There are a couple of things that can be done to ensure that moving from one domain to another takes the value of the old domain with it.

• (42:04) There are two things related to moving from one domain to another. On the one hand, if there’s a movement from one website to another, and the redirects are used to move things over, and the various tools such as the Change of Address tool in search Console are used, then that helps Google to really understand that everything from the old domain should just be forwarded to the new one. 

• The other aspect there is on a per-page basis. Google also tries to look at cannonicalisation, and for that, it tries to look at a number of different factors that come in. on the one hand, redirects play a role, things like internal linking play a role, the rel=”canonical” on the pages play a role, but external links also play a role. So what could happen in probably more edge cases is that if Google sees a lot of external links going to the old URL and maybe even some internal links going to the old URL, it actually indeed the old URL instead of the new one. Because from Google’s point of view, it starts to look like the old URL is the right one to show, and the new one is maybe more of a temporary thing. Because of this, what John recommends for a migration from one domain to another is not to only set up the redirect and use the Change of Address tool, but also to go off and try to find the larger websites that were linking to the previous domain, and see if they can update those links to the new domain.

Robots.txt and indexing

Q. If the pages blocked by robots.txt are still indexed, it is not necessary to put a no-index tag on them.

• (44:25) If the URL is blocked by robots.txt, Google doesn’t see any of the meta tags on the page. It doesn’t see the rel=”canonical” on the page because it doesn’t crawl that page at all. So if the rel=”canonical” or a no-index on the page needs to be taken into account, the page needs to be crawlable. 

• The other aspect here is that oftentimes these pages may get indexed if they’re blocked by robots.txt, but they’re indexed without any of the content because Google can’t crawl it. Usually, that means that these pages don’t show up in the search results anyway. So if someone is searching for some kind of product that is sold on the website, then Google is not going to dig and see if there’s also a page that is blocked by robots.txt, which would be relevant because there are already good pages from the website that can be crawled and indexed normally that Google can show. On the other hand, if a suite query is done for that specific URL, then maybe the URL would be seen in the search results without any content. So a lot of times it is more of a theoretical problem rather than a practical problem, and theoretically, these URLs can get indexed without content, but in practice, they’re not going to cause any problems in search. And if they’re being seen showing up for practical queries on the website, then most of the time that’s more a sign that the rest of the website is really hard to understand.

• So if someone searches for one of the product types, and Google shows one of these roboted kinds of categories or facet pages, then that would be a sign that the visible content on the website is not sufficient for Google to understand that the normal pages that could have been indexed are actually relevant here. 

• That would be the first step there is to try and figure out whether normal users see these pages when they search normally. If they don’t see them, then that’s fine. It can be ignored. If they do see these pages when they search normally, then that’s a sign that maybe it is worth focusing on other things, on the rest of the website.

Google Favicon

Q. Google favicon picks up homepage redirects.

• (47:04) If the homepage is redirected or if the Favicon file is redirected to a different part of the website, Google should be able to pick that up. Because practically what would happen here is Google would follow that redirect, but it would probably still index it as the homepage anyway. So from a practical point of view, if the name of the website is searched for, probably Google would show the root URL even though it redirects to a lower=level page.

Product Review Images

Q. To stand out in terms of images in product reviews, using original photos is ideal.

• (52:49) The person asking the question wonders whether to stand out in terms of product review images, it is okay to have photoshopped versions of the images found online or it is better to upload original photos. John says that the guidelines that Google has for reviews recommend focusing on unique photos created of these products and not artificial review photos. He doesn’t think Google systems would automatically recognise that, but it’s something that Google would probably look at, at least on a manual basis from time to time. 

Sign up for our Webmaster Hangouts today!

Paid Links

Q. The way Google decides whether the link is a paid link or not does not just depend on someone reporting the link as a paid link.

• (00:42) Google takes a lot of different things into account when deciding whether the link is a paid link. It does not give every link that it finds full weight. So even if it is not sure, something can be somewhere in between, but it is a number of things that it takes into account there. It’s not just someone reporting this as a paid link, because random people on the internet report lots of things that aren’t necessarily true. At the same time, sometimes it’s useful information. So it’s a lot of things that come together with regards to paid links.

Internal Link Placement

Q. The placement of the internal link doesn’t really matter, but the placement of the content itself matters.

• (02:15) For internal links, on the one hand, Google uses them to understand the context better. So things like anchor text helps it, but another really important part is really just being able to crawl the website. For that, it doesn’t matter where that link is on a page to kind of crawl the rest of the website. Sometimes things are in the footer, sometimes in the header, sometimes in a shared menu or in a sidebar or within a body of content. All of those linked places are all fine from Google’s point of view. Usually what Google differentiates more with regards to location on a page is the content itself to try to figure out what is really relevant for this particular page. For that, it sometimes really makes sense to focus on the central part of the page, the primary piece of content that changes from page to page and not so much the headers and the sidebars and the footers or things like that. Because those are a part of the website itself, but it’s not the primary reason for this page to exist and the primary reason for Google to rank that page. That’s kind of the difference that Google takes when it comes to different parts of the page. As for links, it’s usually more to understand the context of pages and to be able to crawl the website, and for that Google doesn’t really need to differentiate between different parts of the page.

Product Review Websites

Q. There are not really strict guidelines or a checklist for websites to be classified as product page websites.

• (04:34) The person asking the question has a fashion website, from which he started to link products in different stores, as his viewers started asking where they can buy the products from their articles, he now is not sure if his website would classify as a product review website or not. John says that he doesn’t think Google would differentiate that much with these kinds of websites. It’s not that there is a binary decision on which type of website something is. From his point of view, it sounds like there is some kind of review content and informational content on the person’s website, as well as some affiliate content. All of these things are fine. It’s not a case that website owners have to pick one type of website and say that everything on their website fits some kind of criteria exactly. In most cases, on the web, there is a lot of grey room between the different types of websites. From Google’s point of view, that’s fine. That is kind of expected. John says it shouldn’t be really worrisome whether Google would think the website is a product review website. Essentially, it’s good to use the information that Google gives for product review websites, but it’s not something where there is a checklist that one has to fulfill for anything that is classified exactly as a product review website.

Local Directories

Q. Making sure that the information about the business is correct and matching across different websites and tools is important for Google to not get confused.

• (07:41) John is not sure how having the exact same business information across the web plays into Google Business Profile, local listings and that part of things. One place where he has seen a little in that direction, which might not be perfectly relevant for local businesses, but just generally in Google recognizing the entity behind a website or a business. For that, it does sometimes help to really make sure that Google has consistent information, that it can recognise that the information is correct because it found it in multiple places on the web. Usually, this plays more into the knowledge graph, the knowledge panel side of things, where if Google can understand, that this is the entity behind the website. If there are different mentions of that entity in different places, and the information there is kind of consistent, then Google can trust that information. Whereas if Google finds conflicting information across the web, then it’s harder. For example, if there is a situation where there is local business structure data on website pages with local profiles with opening hours or phone numbers, then on the website there is a marked up info conflicting with that. On Google’s side, it has to make a judgment call then and it doesn’t know what is correct. In those kinds of situations, it’s easy for Google’s systems to get confused and use the wrong information. Whereas if website owners find some way to consistently provide the correct information everywhere, then it’s a lot easier for Google to say what the correct information is.

Links

Q. Linking back to a website that has linked to you is not viewed as a linked scheme, as long as all the rules are followed.

• (11:24) The person asking the question is in a situation where there are a few websites that are linking to his website. He doesn’t know whether he is getting any value from that, but assuming he is, he wonders if linking to those websites, following all the rules, not making any illegal link exchanges, would result in him losing some value. John says that it is perfectly fine and natural, especially if this is a local business linking to its neighbours. Or if the website is mentioned in the news somewhere, and the person mentions that on his website that would be okay. Essentially, he is linking back and forth. It’s kind of a reciprocal link, which is a natural kind of link. It’s not something that is there, because there is some crazy linked scheme. If that is done naturally and there isn’t any weird deal behind the scenes, it should be fine.

Cleaning Up Website After Malware Attacks

Q. There are a few things that can be done to make the unwanted links drop out of the index after a hacker attack on a website.

• (24:10) The person asking the question has experienced a malware attack on his website that resulted in lots of pages that he doesn’t want to be indexed being indexed. He has cleaned up after the attack, but the results of the malware are still being shown and he can’t use a temporary removal tool, as there are too many links. John suggests that first of all he needs to double-check that the pages he removed were actually removed. Some types of website hacks are done in a way that if these are checked manually, it looks like the pages are removed. But actually, for Google, they are still there. It can be checked with the Inspect URL tool. Then for the rest, there are two approaches. On the one hand, the best approach is to make sure that the more visible pages are manually removed, that means searching for the company name, for the website name, primary products etc., seeing the pages that show up in the search results and making sure that anything that shouldn’t be shown is not shown. Usually, that results in maybe up to 100 URLs, where the website owner can say that these are hacked and need to be removed as quickly as possible. The removal tool takes those URLs out within about a day.

• The other part is the URLs that are remaining – they will be recrawled over time. But usually, when it comes to lots of URLs on a website, that’s something that takes a couple of months. So on the one hand, those could be just left to be, as they are not visible to people unless they explicitly search for the hacked content or do a site query of the website. These will drop out over time in half a year. Then they can be double-checked afterwards to see if they’re actually completely cleaned up. If that needs to be resolved as quickly as possible, the removal tool with the prefix setting can be used. It is essentially trying to find common prefixes for these pages, which might be a folder name or a filename or something that is in the beginning and filtering those out. The removal tool doesn’t take them out of Google’s index, so it doesn’t change anything for the ranking. But it doesn’t show them in the results anymore.

Emojis

Q. Using emojis in title tags and meta descriptions doesn’t really affect anything.

• (33:04) One can definitely use emojis in titles and descriptions of pages. Google doesn’t show all of these in the search results, especially if it thinks that it kind of disrupts the search results in terms of looking misleading perhaps and these kinds of things. But it’s not that emojis cause any problems, so it’s okay to keep them there. John doesn’t think they would give any significant advantage, because at most what Google tries to figure out is what is the equivalent of that emoji. Maybe Google will use that word as well associated with the page, but it’s not like the website will get an advantage from that. It doesn’t harm or help SEO in any way.

API and Search Console

Q. API and Search Console take their data from the same source but present it a little bit differently.

• (34:15) The data in the API and the data in the UI is built from the exact same database tables. So it’s not that there is any kind of more in-depth or more accurate data in the API than in the UI. The main difference between the API and the URL is that in the API there are more rows of examples that can be retrieved when downloading things. So sometimes that is useful. The other thing that is perhaps a little bit confusing with the API and the data in Search Console is that when looking at a report in Search Console, there will be numbers on top that give the number of clicks and impressions overall. The data that is provided in the API is essentially the individual rows that are visible in the table below the overall data in Search Console. For privacy reasons and various other reasons, Google filters out queries that have very few impressions. So in the UI in Search Console on top with the number Google includes the aggregate full count, but the rows that are shown there don’t include the filtered information. So what can happen is that if one is to look at the overall total in Search Console it’ll be a different number than if the totals are taken from the API, where all of the rows are added up. That’s something where it’s a little bit confusing at first, but essentially it’s the same data presented in a slightly different way in the API.

FAQ In Rich Results

Q. There are three criteria that need to be followed by FAQ schema to have an opportunity to be featured in rich results.

• (36:15) FAQ rich results are essentially similar to other types of rich results in that there are several levels that Google takes into account before it shows them in the search results. On the one hand, they need to be technically correct. On the other hand, they need to be compliant with Google policies. John says he doesn’t think there are any significant policies around FAQ-rich results other than that the content should be visible on the page. The third issue that sometimes comes into play here is that Google needs to be able to understand that the website is trustworthy, in that it can trust the data to be correct. That is sometimes something where kind of from a quality point of view, Google may be not convinced about a website and then it wouldn’t show the results. Those are the three steps to look at FAQ rich results.

Seasonal Pages

Q. Both removing seasonal pages when they are no longer relevant and leaving them be is okay. The thing to remember is to use the same URL every year.

• (37:38) On Google’s side, it’s totally up to the website owner to choose how to deal with seasonal pages. Keeping the pages there is fine, removing them after a while is fine if they’re no longer relevant. Essentially, what would be seen is that traffic to these pages will go down when it’s not seasonal, but no one is missing out on any impressions there. If the pages are made to be no index or 404 for a while and then brought back later, that’s essentially perfectly fine. The one thing to watch out for is to reuse the same URL year after year. So instead of having a page that is called Black Friday 2021 and then Black Friday 2022, it’s better to just have Black Friday. That way, if the page is reused, all of the signals that were associated with that page over the years will continue to work in the website’s favour. That’s the main recommendation there. It’s okay to delete these pages when they’re not needed and just recreate the same URL later and it’s okay to keep those pages for a longer period of time.

CLS Scores

Q. There are no fixed rankings for CLS scores.

• (40:19) There’s nothing like a fixed number with regards to how strong CLS scores work for websites. From Google’s point of view, these metrics are taken into account when it comes to the Core Web Vitals and the page experience ranking factor, and Google tries to look at them overall. Google tries to focus especially on the area where the website is in that reasonable area with regards to these scores. So if a website is not in, let’s call them “poor” or “bad” scores, bad section, then that’s something where Google decides it’s reasonable to take those into account. Google doesn’t have any fixed rankings or algorithmic functions where it would take ½ of FCP and ½ of CLS and take ⅓ of this into account.

• It’s really something where Google needs to look at the bigger picture.

Geo-redirects

Q. Geo-redirects make it hard for Google to find and index content.

• (53:26) Geo-redirects have a negative impact on the content being indexed, and that applies to all kinds of websites. From Google’s point of view, usually, the geo-redirects are more a matter of making it technically hard for Google to crawl the content. Especially if the users from the US are being redirected to a different version of a website, Google will just follow that redirect. Googlebot usually crawls from one location. Then it’s less a matter of quality signals or anything like that, it’s more that if Google can’t see the web pages, then it can’t index them. That’s essentially the primary reason why John says they don’t recommend doing these things. Maybe some big websites do a thing where they redirect some users and don’t redirect others, and maybe Googlebot is not being redirected – it’s possible. From Google’s point of view, it doesn’t do them any favours because it would usually end up in a situation where there are multiple URLs with exactly the same content in the search results. The website is competing with itself. Google sees it as a website duplicating itself with the content in multiple locations, Google doesn’t know which to rank best and makes a guess at that.

Sign up for our Webmaster Hangouts today!

Server Location

Q. Server location doesn’t affect geotargeting, but it can affect the website speed, and, thus, ranking.

• (00:37) There’s nothing around geotargeting with the server location. From that point of view, server location doesn’t matter so much. Sometimes there’s a bit of a speed difference, so it’s better to look for an opportunity to host the server closer to where most of the users are, since then it tends to be a bit of a faster connection. Sometimes that plays a bigger role, sometimes that plays a smaller role. Sometimes it’s worth trying out. Also, if the content delivery network is used, then oftentimes the content delivery network will have nodes in different countries anyway, and it’ll essentially be the same as if the server was in multiple locations. So from an SEO point of view, from a geotargeting point of view, it’s a non-issue. From a speed point of view, maybe. That can be tested as well. If it’s a critical speed issue that affects the Core Web Vitals and the page experience ranking factor on the website’s side, then that could have a ranking effect. But it’s not so much that it’s because the server is in a different location, rather because the website is perceived as being slow by the users.

Not Ranking For Brand Name

Q. When Google tries to adjust to the search intent of the users, some ambiguous brand names might lose their rankings.

• (09:11) The person asking the question is concerned with the fact that the sexual wellness website he works on, Adam and Eve, stopped ranking for the branded “Adam and Eve” keyword in France altogether. John says that if Google’s systems recognise somehow that people are looking for something that is very different kind of from the style, specifically with regards to kind of this adult content, then that’s something where they might see that even though the website is called exactly like this particular term, there are a lot of people who don’t expect this website will be shown in search, and they might be confused. Or they might find something is wrong. For example, if someone is searching for some Disney character and suddenly there is a sex toy store, then that would be kind of unexpected, and the average person who is looking for that character might be confused about why Google would show that.

503 code

Q. If 503 status is removed in less than a day, then Google automatically picks that up, otherwise the page needs to be recrawled again.

• (14:12) If the 503 status code stays on a page for less than a day, then Google will probably automatically pick that up and retry again. If it’s more than a couple of days, then it can happen that the URL drops out of the index, because Google thinks it’s more of a persistent server error. In a case like that, it essentially needs to wait until Google recrawls that URL again, which can happen, depending on the URL, after a couple of days. Maybe it takes a week or so to kind of be recrawled, but essentially that is something where it goes through the normal recrawling process, and then picks up again.

Automated Translation

Q. Google still has the same stance on automatically translated content in the sense that it’s not optimal to have.

• (25:12) Running the content through Google Translate is viewed as automatically translated content, if it’s an automatic translation without any kind of review process around that. Google’s stance on automatically translated content is still the same, and at least from the guidelines, that would remain like that for the moment. One way that could work together with these guidelines is to, for example, for the most important content, do automatic translation and have it reviewed by someone local, and if it’s alright, then make it indexable. That’s still something different than just taking a million pages and running them through Google Translate for 50 languages and then publishing them.

Hreflang

Q. When a website has different country versions, and there is a need for the users to land on the correct version, it’s always good to use hreflang, as well as make sure there is a way to guide the user to the correct version of the website, in case hreflang doesn’t work properly in some cases.

• (29:06) If there are different versions of content and sometimes wrong versions pop up in search, that’s essentially the situation that hreflang tries to solve, in that there is the content available for different locations or in different languages, and sometimes the wrong one is shown. With hreflang Google can guide that to be more the correct version. The other thing to keep in mind is that geotargeting and even hreflang is never perfect. So if the website is very reliant on the right version being shown to the right users, then there always needs to be sort of a backup plan. John’s recommendation for backup is usually having some kind of a JavaScript-powered banner on top or the bottom or somewhere that essentially states that there is a better version of this content for the user, specifically for his location, for his language and linking it from there. That way, Google can still crawl and index all of the different versions, but users, when they end up on the wrong version, can quickly find their way to the correct version.

Language Versions Of A Website

Q. It doesn’t matter for Google whether only a part of the website is translated for another language version of the website, or the whole website is mirrored in another language version.

• (31:27) First of all, when Google looks at language, it looks at that on a per-page basis. So it’s not so much that Google tries to understand that there is a part of the website in a certain language and the other part is in a different language. Google essentially looks at an individual page, and says, for example,  “Well, it looks like this page is in Spanish”, and when someone searches for something Spanish, Google will be able to show that to them. From that point of view, it doesn’t matter if only a part of the website is translated into a different language. Usually, website owners start somewhere and kind of expand from there. John says that the aspect of internal linking could be a bit tricky in that it could provide a bad user experience if the intern linking is all focused on the first language version, but if there are individual pages that are in that language only, and they’re linked to from another language version, that’s fine. That is something that’s pretty common across a lot of different websites. It’s just, for the most part, it’s good to make sure that the other language version is also properly linked.

Similar Keywords With Different Search Volumes

Q. When there is a situation, where there are slightly different versions of the same keyword (for example, brand name) with different search volumes, it is worth trying to use different variations of the keyword on a page and see what it does.

• (33:31) It’s not so much that Google looks at the search volume of similar keywords and treats them differently, but rather what happens in cases like this is, on the one hand, Google tries to figure out what the tokens that are involved in the query and on the page. Google looks at things like a word level and tries to match those. It also takes into account things like synonyms, where if it can tell that this is a common synonym that people use for different versions of a brand name, then it will take that into account as well, and oftentimes, words that always come together. So if there is a brand that is always one word and the next word, then Google will try to treat that as an entity, and then it will be similar to someone searching for things with one word, for example. So all of these are different ways for essentially Google systems to try to look at that situation and recognise the similarity between the keyword versions and rank them in a similar way. Depending on the actual situation, that kind of very similar keywords might still be different enough to tell them apart. John’s recommendation here is to really look at the search results, and based on that, decide whether it makes sense maybe to mention slightly different versions of the brand name. Because a lot of people look for it, for example, without a space in maybe a specific language. Or is Google already figuring out that these things are the same thing and the search results are similar enough that there’s no reason to do that manually? So that’s something where it kind of depends. These kinds of things need to be tested case by case to figure out what applies and works best. The good thing is that Google doesn’t penalise anyone for using slightly different versions of the brand name on the website pages.

Duplicate And Canonical URLs

Q. John is not sure whether the same URL with a question mark in the end and without one would be treated as the same or separate URLs, but there is a quick way to find out.

• (37:06) For the most part, if there are parameters at the end of a URL or no parameters at the end, Google treats them as clearly separate URLs. However, it does have some systems in place that try to do some almost lightweight canonicalisation for a website owner, in that they try to figure out what simpler version of the URL Google could actually be showing even if the website itself doesn’t provide a rel=”canonical”, or it doesn’t redirect to a simpler version of a URL. So a really common one is if there is a page called index.html and it is linked to, then that’s often the same as just linking to a page that’s called “slash”. So if that’s on the home page, if it’s website.com/index.html, if Google is to see a link like that, it could say that index.html essentially is irrelevant here. It can just drop that automatically, and that kind of canonicalisation happens essentially very early in the Google systems. It takes place without things like rel=”canonical” or sitemaps or redirects, all of those other things. John doesn’t know offhand if just a plain question mark at the end would also fall into this category. However, if there is already a setup on the website, then it can be told fairly quickly if that extra question mark at the end is actually being used by Google because when looking at server logs, one can see if that question mark is there or not. When looking at things like Search Console at the URLs that are shown in the performance report, it is possible to see if that question mark is there or not. If Google doesn’t drop it automatically, and it’s important to have the URL cleaner, it’s good to make sure that at least there is a rel=”canonical” setup to remove that for the website owner.

Adult Content

Q. Google doesn’t really penalise adult content, it’s just Google tries to recognise better whether the search intent is actually adult content or something else with similar terms and keywords.

• (39:45) The person asking the question is concerned with the fact that his adult content website alongside with some other websites similar content-wise have dropped from ranking for some major keywords and is wondering whether that has to do with Google penalising certain types of content. John argues that Google doesn’t really penalise adult websites in that regard, but it does have systems in place that try to figure out whether the intent of the query is actually to find something that would fall into the category of maybe adult content. If the intent is clearly not for someone to find adult content with that kind of query or for the most part not to find adult content, then it is something where Google would try to filter those things out. That’s something that usually makes a lot of sense because sometimes there are adult websites that are named very similar or different types of adult content that are named very similarly to things that are maybe children’s toys or things like that. Google wouldn’t want someone who’s looking for a child’s toy to actually run into an adult toy website just because it’s ranking for the same term. That’s the kind of thing where Google systems try to almost silently figure out what the intent is behind certain queries and then to adjust that so that they show something that matches a little bit more with what the perceived intent is. 

• Understanding what the intent behind a query is really hard sometimes, and sometimes Google gets it wrong. So if there are certain queries where Google has totally messed up, because the intent was to find adult content and Google is not showing any of that content at all and it looks really weird, then those are the kind of things that Google’s team would love to have examples of. So it’s not something that Google has something against adult websites.

Sponsored Links

Q. rel=”sponsored” links don’t help with SEO, they’re basically just advertisements.

• (42:26) rel=”sponsored” attribute attached to a link doesn’t help with SEO rankings. The idea here is essential that the website owner pays someone for that specific link, and it’s a kind of advertising where people can click on that link to go to the website if they like it. If they really like it, they can also recommend it to other people. But the reason for that link being on that other website is because there’s some kind of financial exchange that took place or some kind of other exchange that took place, and it’s not a natural link that Google would take into account for things like search. So from that point of view, it’s fine to have sponsored posts and to have links in sponsored posts. If they’re flagged with rel=”sponsored”, that’s essentially the right way to do it. It’s just that these don’t have any effect on SEO initially. And again, if people go to the website, because they found this link and then they recommend it themselves, then that indirect effect is something that can still be valuable. Oftentimes, especially new businesses  will take kind of an approach to using advertising to initially drive traffic to their website. If they have something really good on their website, they kind of hope that by driving all of this traffic to their website they will get some awareness for the cool things that they have. Then those people share that further, and the website gets some value from that.

Brand Mentions

Q. Google doesn’t really take the brand mentions as a clearly positive or negative signal because it’s hard to tell what the subjective context of the mention is.

• (58:12) It’s hard to use brand mentions or anything like that with regards to rankings. Understanding the subjective context of the mention is really hard. Is it a positive mention or a negative mention? Is it a sarcastic positive mention or a sarcastic negative mention? How can one tell? All of that together with the fact that there are lots of spammy sites out there and sometimes they just spin content, sometimes they’re malicious with regards to the content that they create, all of that, makes it really hard to say if Google can use that as the same as a link. From that point of view, it’s something where for the most part, Google doesn’t mention it as something that positively affects the website or negatively affects the website. It’s just too confusing to use as a clear signal.

Sign up for our Webmaster Hangouts today!

Website Is Down Temporarily

Q.  There isn’t really a way to tell Google that the website will be temporarily down without getting dropped out of the index.

• (04:17)Regardless of what is set up on the website, there isn’t really a way to tell Google the website is down only temporarily and will be back live again after some time. For an outage of maybe a day or so, using a 503 results code is a great way to tell Google that it should check back. But after a couple of days, Google thinks it’s a permanent results code, and that the pages are just gone, and they will be dropped from the index. When the pages come back, Google will crawl them again and will try to index them again. But essentially, during that time, Google will probably drop a lot of the pages from the website from the index. There’s a pretty good chance, that it’’ come back in a similar way, but it’s not always guaranteed. So any time there is a longer outage, more than c couple of days, the assumption is that, at least temporarily, there will be really strong fluctuations, and it’s going to take a little bit of time to get back in. it’s not impossible, because these things happen sometimes, but if there’s anything that can be done to avoid this kind of outage, it’s better to try to do that. That could be something like setting up a static version of the website somewhere and just showing that to users for the time being. Especially if it’s being done in a planned way, it’s advised to try to find ways to reduce the outage to less than a day if at all possible.

304 Response Code

Q. Google doesn’t change its crawl rate on the website based on existing 304 pages.

• (11:48) 304 is a response to the “if modified since” requests, where Googlebot tries to see if this page has changed. 304 response code would not apply to the crawl budget side of things. That basically means for Google that it can reuse that request and crawl something else on a website. The other aspect with regard to crawling that specific URL less – that shouldn’t be the case. Google does try to figure out how often pages change and try to recrawl pages based on the assumed page frequency or update frequency that it has. So it’s not so much that particular URL would get crawled less frequently, it’s more that Google understands it’s better how often these pages change. Then based on that. Google can update its refresh crawling a little bit. If most of the pages on the website return 304, Google wouldn’t reduce the crawling rate. It would try to just focus more on the parts where it does see updates happening. So there’s no need to artificially hide the 304s in the hope that it improves the crawling .

301 Redirects

Q. It’s okay to have a lot of 301 redirects on a website.

• (14:57) A huge amount of 301 redirects on a website is perfectly fine and doesn’t do any harm. If there are changes and redirects made on the website it’s fine.

Launching Big Websites

Q. If a huge website for different country version is to be launched, it’s better to start with fewer country and language versions, and expand incrementally from there in case they prove to be working well.

• (15:52) If there’s a huge new website with lots of country and language versions, it’s hard for Google to get through everything. John recommends starting off with a very small number of different countries and language versions and making sure that they’re working well, and then expanding incrementally from there. With regard to international versions, it’s very easy to take a website and, say, just make all English language versions of the website, but it causes so many problems and makes everything in the whole crawling and indexing and ranking cycle so much harder. .

M-dot Website

Q. Even though Google is not supposed to have any problems with M-dot setup, it’s better to go with the responsive setup for mobile versions of websites.

• (30:20) From Google’s point of view, it doesn’t have any problems with M-dot domains in general, in the sense that this is one of the supported formats that it has for mobile websites. John doesn’t recommend the M-dot setup – if there’s a new website being set up, it’s best to avoid that as much as possible and instead use a responsive setup, but it’s something that can work. So if it’s a regular thing on the website that Google is not able to index the mobile content properly, then that would point more at an issue on the website where when mobile Googlebot tries to crawl, it’s not able to access everything as expected. The one thing that throws people off sometimes with M-dot domains is with mobile first indexing, Google switches to the M-dot version as the canonical URL, and it can happen that it shows the M-dot version in the desktop search as well. So there’s also need to watch out for not only redirecting mobile users from the desktop to the mobile version, but also redirecting desktop users from the mobile to the desktop version. That is something that doesn’t happen when having a responsive setup – it’s another reason to go responsive if possible .

rel=”sponsored”, rel=”nofollow

Q. rel=”sponsored” is a recommended setup for affiliate links, but it’s not penalised in case that is not in place

• (31:59) From Google’s point of view, affiliate links fall into that category of something financial attached to the links, so John really strongly recommend to use this setup, But for the most part if it doesn’t come across as selling links, then it’s not going to be the case that Google would manually penalise a website for having affiliate links and not marking them up, he says

CMS Migration

Q. Fluctuations after CMS migration depend on what the migration covered

• (32:45) When moving from one domain to another, it’s very easy for Google to just transfer everything from that domain to the new one. That’s something that can be processed within almost like a week or so in many cases. However, if the internal URLs within the website are changed, then that’s something that does take quite a bit of time, because essentially, Google.can’t just transfer the whole website in one direction. It has to almost reprocess the whole website and understand the context of all of the pages on the website first, and that can take a significant amount of time. During that time, there will almost certainly be fluctuations. The offhand guess is thet there will be at least a month of fluctuations there, perhaps even longer, especially if it’s a bigger change within the website itself. The other thing is that when the CMS is changed, oftentimes things that are associated with the CMS also change, and that includes a lot of things around internal linking, for example, and also the way that the pages are structured in many cases. Changing those things can also result in fluctuations. It can be that the final state is higher or better than it was before, it can also be that the final state is less strong than it was before. So that’s something where changing a CMS and changing all of the internal linking on a website, changing the internal URLs on a website, changing the design of these pages – these are all individual things which can cause fluctuations and can cause drops and perhaps even rises over time. But doing that all together means that it’s going to be messy for a while. Another this to watch out for with this kind of migration is oftentimes there’s embedded content that is not thought about directly because it’s not an HTML page. A really common one is images. If old image URLs are not redirected, then Google has to reprocess them and find them again because it doesn’t have that connection between the old images and the new ones. So if the site was getting a lot of image search traffic, that can also have a significant effect. Setting up those redirects probably still makes sense, even if the website was moved a month ago or so.

Mobile and Desktop Versions

Q. Having the main navigational links a little different on the mobile and desktop versions of the website is a common thing for responsive design and not that big of an issue.

• (39:24) Having the main navigational links on the desktop version of the website different from the mobile version is a fairly common setup for responsive design, in that both variations are visible in the HTML. From that point of view, that is not super problematic, but it’s probably also not very clean because both variations of the UI have to be maintained within the same HTML, rather than there being just one variation in the HTML that is adjusted depending on the viewport size of the device. From that point of view, it should not be penalised, because it’s a very common setup. It’s probably not optimal, but it’s also not something that needs to be fixed right away.

Old Pages

Q. Whether or not some old pages on a website should be deleted is not only a matter of traffic on these pages.

• (41:00) Deleting old blog posts that don’t get any traffic anymore is up to the website’s owner – it’s not something where from an SEO point of view, there would be a significant change unless these are really terrible blog posts. The main thing to watch out for is that just because something doesn’t have a lot of traffic, doesn’t mean that it’s a bad piece of content. It can mean that it’s something that just gets traffic very rarely, maybe once a year. Perhaps it’s something that is very seasonal that overall when looked at from a website point of view, is not very relevant, but it’s relevant, for example, right before Christmas. From that point of view, it’s fine to go through a website and figure out which parts need to be kept and which need to be cleaned out. But just purely looking at traffic for figuring out which parts to clean out is too simplified.

Image URLs

Q. Changing image URLs is fine, as long as it doesn’t interfere with the typically quite long process of Google crawling and indexing it.

• (43:52) Changing image URLs, for example, adding a query string at the end of an image source URL, wouldn’t cause issues with regard to SEO. But with images in general, Google tends to recrawl and reprocess them much less frequently. So that means that if the image URLs linked on the website are changed regularly, Google would have to refind those again and put them in its image index again, and that takes to take a lot longer than with normal HTML pages. From that point of view, if doing that too often can be avoided, it’s recommended to do so. If it’s something that happens very rarely, and where it doesn’t really matter too much how things are processed in image search, because the website doesn’t rely on image search for traffic to the website, in that case, that’s totally fine. The thing to avoid, especially here with the image URLs is embedding something that changes very quickly. So something like a session ID or just always today’s date, because that would probaby change more often than Google would reprocess the image URLs, and then it would never be able to index any of the images for image search.

Google Discover

Q. There are several reasons why a website can suddenly lose traffic coming from Google Discover.

• (45:38) It’s always tricky with Discover because it’s very binary in that either a website gets a lot of traffic or doesn’t get a lot of traffic from Discover. That also means that any changes there tend to be very visible. The main recommendation is not to rely on Google Discover for traffic, but rather to see it as an additional traffic source and not as the main one. When it comes to Discover, there are a few things that play in there. One of them is the core updates. Google recently had a core update, so it’s good to check the blog post that there is about core updates with lots of tips and ideas. The other thing is with Discover in particular – Google has a set of content guidelines that it tries to stick to in an algorithmic way. Depending on the website itself, it might be something where some of these content guidelines are not followed through, and the website is kind of borderline. For example, there is a guideline around clickbait-y titles or clickbait-y content in general, or adult-oriented content. It might be that a website is a kind of borderline with regards to how Google evaluates it. Then it can also happen that the algorithms see that a large part of the website is just clickbait or one or the other categories that Google lists in the content guidelines. Google then will be a lot more conservative with regard to how it shows the website in Discover. .

One-page website

Q. It’s not always important to be authoritative to provide value with a website. .

• (49:40) The question goes back to one of John’s Reddit posts where he allegedly says that 30-page website can’t be authoritative, and the person asking the question wonders what he would approach one-page websites. John says that it’s possible to make good one-page websites and clarifies that by his post he meant that he actually talked about the reasoning that goes “I created 30 blog posts, and they’re really good, and therefore my website should be authoritative”. From his point of view, going off and creating 30 blog posts doesn’t automatically make the website authoritative. Especially for the higher or the more critical topics, it’s something where it’s not right to just create 30 blog posts on a medical topic and claim to be a doctor. That was the direction he headed there. For a lot of websites, it’s not that the author needs to be seen as an authority. He just puts the content out there. If it’s a small business that sells something, there’s no need to be an authority. Especially things like one-page websites are focused on this one thing, and there’s no need to be an authority to do that one thing, for example, to sell an e-book or to give information about opening hours for a business. From that point of view, having a one-page website is perfectly fine. It’s just useful to think where to go from there at some point – maybe creating more pages and trying to find a way to not paint oneself into a corner by having to put everything on one page all the time, but rather expanding whenever that fits.

Sign up for our Webmaster Hangouts today!

Same Language Content for Different Countries

Q. It’s more reasonable to have one version of the website targeting different countries with the same language, rather than different versions of the same language website.

• (00:47) The person asking the question has a website that has almost the same but separate versions for UK and USA, and he is not sure what the best strategy for managing them is. John says, that having English US and English UK versions means that Google would swap out the URL for the appropriate version depending on the country, So if there is a different content for the two versions, even if that’s something like a contact address or currencies or things like that, then that makes sense to have it on separate URLs. If it’s all the same content, if it’s really just like a text article, then it’s more reasonable to make it one English version. The content can’t be limited to those two countries anyway, so having one version is an easy solution. Another advantage of having one version, apart from having to do less maintenance work, is the fact that for Google it’s a lot easier to rank that one page versus multiple pages with the same content.

Image Formats and Image Search

Q. The way the format of images on the website is changed defines whether or not there might be changes in rankings.

• (06:45) The person asking the question is redesigning her website in AMP pages and is converting all her images to WebP format, and she’s trying to use the same URLs. she is concerned with the fact that converting JPEG images to WebP might affect her rankings. John agrees, that it could potentially affect the rankings. He mentions that he has seen some people use the same image extensions and make them WebP files. If that works, that would help lower the amount of work that needs to be done. Because then the content would just be swapped out, but URLs will be the same and all of that will continue to work. Whereas, if the image URLs are changed, or if the URLs of the landing pages for the images are changed, the image search takes a little bit longer to pick up. The thing to keep in mind here is that not all sites get significant traffic from image search, so sometimes it’s something where theoretically it’s a problem to make these changes that take time.

Deleting JavaScript from the Website

Q. When deleting JavaScript from a page to simplify it for Googlebot, it’s important to not end up giving Googlebot and users a very different page experiences.

• (11:30) If JavaScript is not required for the website pages, for the content and for the internal linking, then probably deleting it doesn’t change anything. John says to be cautious about going down the route of making more simplified pages for Googlebot, because it’s easy to fall into a situation where Googlebot sees something very different than what the users usually see, and that can make it very hard to diagnose issues. So if there’s some bug that’s only affecting the Googlebot version of the site, the website owner wouldn’t see it, if users always see a working website.
  Another thing to watch out for is the fact that in product search, Google sometimes checks to see what happens when users add something to their carts, just to kind of double-check that the pricing and things like that are the same. And if, for example, the Add to Cart functionality is removed completely for crawlers, then maybe that affects kind of those checks that product search does. However, John says that he doesn’t know the details of what exactly product search is looking for.
  In general, Google tries to render the page to see if there’s something missing, but it doesn’t interact with the page, as it would take too much time to crawl the web if it had to click everywhere to see what actually happened. So Googlebot’s experience is different from what users see, and removing JavaScript might affect that.

Featured Snippet

Q. Sometimes it’s hard for Google to determine from the search query whether the user needs local results or the ones in a more global context. The same goes for both the regular search and the Featured Snippets.

• (16:44) The Featured Snippet from Google’s point of view is essentially a normal search result, that has a little bit of a bigger snippet and a little bit more information there. But otherwise it’ a normal search result. And from Google’s point of view, it tries to do two things when it comes to searches. On the one hand, it tries to recognise when a user wants to find something local. And when it recognises that, it uses the geotargeting information that it has from the websites to figure out which are likely the more local results that would be relevant for the user. The local aspect is something that helps to promote local websites, but it doesn’t mean that they will always replace anything that is global. Global in this context might mean bigger websites. So Google sees these global websites, and on the other hand, kind of local results from the same country. And depending on how it understands the query, it might show more local results or more from the global search results. For example, when someone is searching for Switzerland, then, of course, Google recognises that the user wants something from Switzerland, and it can strongly promote local results. But without that addition, sometimes it’s hard for Google to determine whether the local context is critical or not for this particular query. And sometimes it will just take global results in a case like that. And that’s not really something that a website owner can influence.

Website Authority

Q. With the fast-changing dynamics of the Internet, Google doesn’t have a long-term memory of the things that were wrong about the website.

• (22:38) Google pretty much has no memory for technical issues on websites, in the sense that if it can’t crawl a website for a while, or if something goes missing for a while and it comes back, then there is that content again, Google can have that information again, it can show it. And that gets picked up pretty quickly. That is something Google has to have because the Internet is sometimes very flaky, and sometimes sites go offline for a week or even longer, and they come back, and it’s like nothing has changed, but the website owners fixed the servers. And Google has to deal with that since the users are still looking for those websites. 
  It’s a lot trickier when it comes to things around quality in general, where assessing the overall quality and relevance of a website is not very easy, and it takes a lot of time for Google to understand how a website fits in with regards to the rest of the Internet. And that means on the one hand, that it takes a lot of time for Google to recognise that maybe something is not as good as it thought it was. And, similarly, it takes a lot of time for Google to learn the opposite way. And that’s something that can easily take a couple of months, a half a year, sometimes even longer than a half a year. So that’s something where compared to technical issues, it takes a lot longer for things to be refreshed in that regard.
  John also points out that there are these very rare situations, when a website gets stuck in some kind of a weird in-between stage in Google’s systems, in that at some point the algorithms reviewed the website and found it to be absolutely terrible. And for whatever reason, those parts of the algorithms just took a very long time to be updated again, and sometimes that can be several years.
  It happens extremely rarely, especially now, says John. But he suggests that if someone struggles and really sees that he’s doing a lot of things right and nothing seems to be working, it is worthwhile to reach out to Google stuff and see if there is something on the website that might be stuck.

Alt Text and Lazy Load Images

Q. It is not problematic to add alt text to the image that is lazy loaded, even if it’s a placeholder image.

• (26:31) When Google renders the page, it has to or tries to lazy load the images as well, because it tries to load the page in very high viewport, and that triggers lazy loading. And usually, that means Google can pick up the alt text and associate with the right images. If the alt text is already in place, and the placeholder image is currently there, and Google just sees that, then that shouldn’t be a problem per se. It’s kind of like giving information about an image that is unimportant. But it’s not that the rest of the website has kind of like a bad or a worse standing from that point of view. The thing to watch out for here more is that Google can actually load the images that are supposed to be lazy-loaded here. So in particular, Google doesn’t watch out for things like the data source attribute. It essentially needs to see the image URL in the appropriate source attribute for the image tag, so that it can pick it up as an image.

Google Analytics Traffic

Q. Sometimes traffic from Google Discover might create a situation where, when checking the website analytics, lots of traffic comes from direct traffic at random times.

• (32:02) If there is a situation where a huge amount of traffic starts dropping into the direct channel. One of the things that could be playing a role in that case is Google Discover. In particular, Google Discover is mostly seen as direct traffic in Google Analytics. And Google Discover is sometimes very binary, in the sense that it’s either the website gets a lot of traffic or it doesn’t get a lot of traffic from Google Discover. So that could be something where if the website owner is to just look at analytics, there might be these spikes of direct traffic happening there. In Search Console, there’s a separate report for Google Discover, so this kind of thing can be double-checked there.

Shop Ratings

Q. For an e-commerce shop it’ more advised to use product ratings, while for a directory of other e-commerce sites it’s fine to have ratings on those individual sites.

• (34:33) When it comes to shop ratings, Google wouldn’t try to show them if they’re on the shop themselves. So essentially, for local businesses, the idea is that if there is a kind of like a local directory of local businesses, then putting ratings on those local businesses will be fine, and that’s something Google might show and search. But for the local businesses themselves, putting a rating on their own websites is not an objective rating. It can be manipulated to look a little bit more legitimate. And that’s not really something that Google can trust and show in the search results. From that point of view, for an e-commerce shop, it’s better to use products ratings, because the individual products can be reviewed either by the website itself – the shop can clearly specify that it was reviewed by the shop itself. Or aggregate ratings can be used, which would be from users. On the other hand, for a directory of other e-commerce sites, of course, having ratings on those individual sites would be an option.

Search Console

Q. If the number of good pages goes down while the number of bad pages goes up in Search Console, that’s the sign of some kind of problem on the website, if both numbers just go down, it means there’s not enough data for Google to make any conclusion, and that’s perfectly fine.

• (37:35) Essentially, what Google does with regards to the Core Web Vitals and the speed in general – it tracks the data based on what it sees from users, a specific kind of user. That’s documented on the Chrome side. And only when Google has sufficient data from users, will it be able to use that in Search Console, and additionally, in Search Console, it creates groups of pages where it thinks that this set of pages is the same. And if Google has enough data for this set of pages, then it will use that. That also means that if there’s just barely enough data for that set of pages, then there can be a situation where sometimes Google has enough data and it would show it. And sometimes it doesn’t have enough data, and it might show as a drop in the number of good pages. That essentially doesn’t mean that the website is bad, it just means there’s not enough data to tell. So if just the overall number of the pages goes down in Search Console, and over time the overall number goes back up again, then it means there is almost enough data for Google to use. If the number of good pages goes down and the number of the bad ones goes up, that’s a sign that there’s a problem that Google sees there. So if just the overall number goes down, it could be ignored, it’s perfectly fine.

Out Of Stock Pages

Q. How Google will treat out of stock product pages depends on whether it will see them as soft 404 pages or not.

• (44:29) Google tries to understand when a page is no longer relevant based on the content of the page. So, in particular, the common example is a soft 404 page, where there is a page that looks like it could be a normal page, but it’s essentially an error page that says “This page no longer exists”. And Google tries to pick up things like that for e-commerce as well. When out of stock products are seen as soft 404 pages, Google drops them completely from search, if it keeps the page indexed despite being out of stock, the ranking of the page will not change. It essentially will still be ranked normally. It’s also still ranked normally if the structured data is changed to say that something is out of stock. So from that point of view, it’s not that the page would drop in ranking, it’s more that either it’s seen as a soft 404 page or it’s not. If it’s not seen as a soft 404 page, it’s still a normal page.

User Reviews

Q. There are different ways on how to go around showing customers’ reviews about the particular business, but it’s still not possible for the business to show those in the search results.

• (54:03) The customer rating reviews can be put on the homepage. Google would see these more as testimonials because the website owner is kind of picking and choosing what he wants to show. Using structured data for that on the website is something that Google wouldn’t like to see – it would probably ignore that. But sending users to a third-party review site where they can review it is kind of the best approach here. Because what would happen then is if Google shows that listing from that third-party review site, it can show the structured data for the business there. For example, the business is listed on Yelp, and they leave the reviews there. When that Yelp listing is shown in search, Google will know that this is a list of businesses essentially, so it can show the structured data about the business. And then it can use that review and markup and show those stars in the search results. So if Yelp has structured data, then that’s something that Google could pick up there. Showing it on the website as well in a textual form is perfectly fine.
  And testimonials are very common and popular, but it’s just Google wouldn’t show the stars in the search result for that. 

Sign up for our Webmaster Hangouts today!