JOHN MUELLER: All right. Welcome, everyone, to today's
Google Search Central SEO Office Hours Hangouts. My name is John Mueller. I'm a Search Advocate at
Google in Switzerland, and part of what we do are
these office hour sessions where people can join in and
ask their questions around web search and the website. We have a bunch of things
submitted on YouTube which we can go through, but if
any of you want to get started, feel free to jump in. Oh man, so quiet today. Fine, OK. I hope I don't-- ROBB YOUNG: I don't
have a question. I just didn't want to go first
and dominate anyone's time. JOHN MUELLER: Go for it. OK. ROBB YOUNG: Do you mind taking
a look at our new site, John, theexperiencegifs.com? My question is that
we have a landing page now for-- because
that's a global site. So we have, on the
main home landing page, you have links to the US, UK,
South Africa, Germany soon. And in the US, it seems
to be being picked up as our main home landing page
rather than the forward slash US. And so what tags or what
kind of indexing would you suggest on that main
experience guess landing page. So that Google starts to learn
that it's really just a doorway to the other countries? There's nothing on there
really other than the links to the other countries. We've set up the country
tags in Webmaster Tools for the other individual
country sites. So I'm not sure what
more we could do. JOHN MUELLER: The
hreflang would probably be the right approach there. And what is important
is that default page is set as an x default. ROBB YOUNG: X default. JOHN MUELLER: Yeah, so the idea
being there that we understand that it's a part of
your set of pages whereas if you don't specify
an x default there because you say, oh, it's like different
from these other pages because the other
pages have content and this one is just
kind of like a doorway, then we'll treat it as a
separate page, and we'll say, oh, it's like, we could show a
content page or this main page thing. And then we might show
the main page thing. ROBB YOUNG: So we
put the x default tag on the kind of directory landing
page or on the US home page? JOHN MUELLER: On the directory
page, kind of that default page that applies if none of the
specific country versions apply. AUDIENCE: OK. All right, fine. Thanks. Cool. JOHN MUELLER: All right. If there are no other
questions before we start, I'll just go through
the YouTube questions, and feel free to jump
in if anything pops up. And of course raise
your hands if you'd like to ask questions
later on as well. All right, let's see. First question I have here is
about the podcast knowledge panels. I would love to know more
about the podcast knowledge panels and the move
behind making them happen. Are Google Podcasts
going to be one of the focuses moving forward? So I don't actually
know anything specific about the podcast
knowledge panels, but usually what happens
with these kind of things is we recognize
that there's maybe a type of content or specific
type of entities that are getting more
and more popular or that have been popular, I
guess, in the case of podcasts, and we recognize it makes
sense to kind of package these in a special way. And because of that,
we might take something and create something like
a knowledge panel for it and try to put it
together like that. With regards to Google Podcasts
and these knowledge panels, in general, we try not to treat
any Google products or service as special in this regard. But rather, if we see
that this matches really well to something like a
knowledge panel that we have, then we'll try to
integrate that there. But that's similar to any
other product or services that we find outside. So I don't think there's-- at least as far
as I know, I don't think there is any
secret strategy to try to get Google
Podcasts listed in all of these different places. But it's something that
sometimes is just a good fit. Let's see, next question-- can no index pages affect
Google's evaluation of quality website at a site level? That is, as it's
used in core updates. And 99% of the pages
of this website are relatively lower
quality and not indexed. So 300,000 no index
and 3,000 index pages. So I think, first of all, the
amount of low quality pages that you're kind of like saying
to yourself are low quality pages, that feels kind of
tricky or problematic to me just independently of
anything with regards to Google core updates. If you find that you have so
many pages on your website that are really low
quality in the sense that they're not
good pages, they don't have any useful
content on them, then it feels like an
opportunity for something to clean up there because even
if we don't index these pages, users might go to those pages. And if that's what they build
the perception of your site on and you know that
these are bad pages, then that feels like
a recipe for people just not coming back. So kind of outside of
anything specific to SEO, it feels like something that
would be worth cleaning up. Sometimes people see things
as being lower quality just because of technical reasons. For example, if you
have category pages and you can filter them and
sort them in different ways, you might say, well, this is
lower quality because it's not actual content. From my point of
view, that's more a matter of just technically
not interesting content. It doesn't mean that
it's actually a bad page. So that might be kind of
a misunderstanding there. But going back to
the question itself, with regards to the
core updates and kind of Google's understanding of
quality of a website overall, we don't take these
pages into account. So we really focus
on the content that we have indexed
for our website, and that's kind of the basis
that we have with regards to all of our quality updates
and all of our quality algorithms and understanding
of the website itself. On the one hand,
because that's what we're showing in
search-- so if there's something on your website that
we're not showing in search and we're not using it to
promise anything to users who are searching, then
from our point of view, it's kind of up to you
what you do with that. The other point I think is
a little bit more practical in the sense that if we don't
have these pages indexed, then we don't have any
data for these pages. Then we can't aggregate any
of that data for our systems across your website. So from that point of view,
if these pages are no indexed, we don't take them into account. Then a question about authors,
a question regarding author.url and structured data-- on our About Us page, we
have different paragraphs for every author. Would it be OK to
make anchor links for each author on
this page and use these anchor links for
the author URL property, or does it have
to be a dedicated page for every author? I don't think we have any
guidelines specifically around that. So this is something where
it's less a matter of there are technical requirements
for how you link your authors and more a matter of, well,
it has to work well for users. So that's kind of the focus
that I would use there. So if this is a page that
works well where it makes sense that authors can or people
can find information about the authors on your
website, then that seems fine. One thing I might
caution here a little bit is that sometimes for individual
authors, it makes sense for us to understand a
little bit better how that author fits in overall. And for that,
often these authors link their different
profiles together, or they take one author
profile that they use across the whole web. And for that kind
of scenario, I think it does make sense to have
individual URLs for each other. But if this is purely
within your website and purely for informational
reasons for users, then probably that would be
perfectly fine like that. Is the country code top level
domain a ranking factor, especially for local businesses? I would say-- on a very
rough basis, I would say yes. We do use the country
code top level domain as a factor in geotargeting. So in particular, if someone
is looking for something local and we know that the website is
focused on that local market, then we will try to promote that
website in the search results? And we use the top level
domain if it's a country code top level domain. And if it's not a country
code top level domain, then we'll check the
Search Console settings to see if there's any
country specified there for international targeting. And if you have a generic
top level domain like that, then setting that
in Search Console if you want to focus
on a specific country definitely makes sense. And like I mentioned,
we use this for queries where we can
tell that the user is looking for something local. So an example that
I've used in the past is if you're searching
for something like washing machine repair
manual, then you're probably not looking for something
local whereas if you're just searching for washing
machine repair, then you probably are
looking for something local. So those are kind of the
different scenarios there. And from that
point of view, it's something where
sometimes, it makes sense to look at your website
and think about, well, do I need to target
these local queries, or am I more looking
for something kind of like to cover
the broad range of people who are searching globally? And both of those can
be useful strategies. It's more a matter
of picking a strategy and then executing on that. It's been a while since the
product review update launched in the US, but I haven't heard
anything about other regions. Can updates like this be
part of the core updates and therefore be
live theoretically? I think changes
like this that we tend to announce
individually tend not to be part of
the core updates, so I wouldn't tie that to
any particular core update. But it's very possible
that this has rolled out in other regions. Usually, we tend to
announce bigger updates when they launch, and
when they launch in just individual
regions, we'll try to mention that just
to make sure that people are aware of where they launch. But usually, the goal is really
to roll this out globally as much as possible for pretty
much any update that we do. And with that in
mind, it's something where my estimation is
that these kind of updates have started rolling out
in other regions as well, other languages as well. So I would not assume that
just because you haven't heard any specific
announcements saying, oh, this is also live
in Switzerland, that it's not live
in Switzerland. Usually, we just
start somewhere, and we let you know
where we started. But it expands over time. There are very few changes
where we explicitly call out individual
countries and languages when they launch as well. In the summer, Google released
an update in title generation for web pages. Could you tell us what
factors this new algorithm decides which titles
should be changed? We tried using the new
documentation on this, but nothing seems to work. The update affected
some of our pages. Most of the time,
it's a category page. Its title is cut, and the
brand domain name is added. We've noticed some other
sites in the search results have this problem. At the same time, we see that
our main rival in the search results has the same titles
they've been using since before the update. Yeah, so I think we have some
information in the last blog post that we did about
these titles changes. So I would definitely
check that out. One of the, I think, bigger
changes here that happened is that the titles are no longer
tied to the individual query. So it's something that is
really on a per page basis. On the one hand,
this means it doesn't adapt kind of dynamically. So it's a little
bit easier to test. And on the other hand, it also
means that it's easier for you to try different
things out in the sense that you can change
things on your pages, and then you could use like
the submit to indexing tool and see what happens in
Google Search results. What does it look like now? And because of
that, it's something where I would
recommend if you're seeing weird titles
on your pages just to try different
approaches out and see what works best for your website
for your kind of content. And based on that,
then expand that to the rest of your website. So that's kind of
the direction I would take there to essentially
just try it out and try different approaches out. And because it's really
static on a per page basis, it is something that is a lot
easier to kind of experiment with a little bit
and to see, well, what are the different
options that I can do here? How can I show maybe my company
name or my website's name? How can I show the title
that is relevant here and all of those
different things. And from that point of
view, I just try things out. It's definitely not the case
that we have any manual lists on our side, where we say,
oh, well, your competitor is on the good list for titles. We'll show nice titles
for them, and you'll get the messy titles. It's all algorithmic. So it's not something
that is kind of manually held back for individual
sites or pushed into individual sites. How does it affect the search
rankings when page and search titles don't match? Often we experience that the
page title has been shortened and our company name added
to the search results title. We do add our company
name to the end sometimes, but the concern is that this
is to all our page titles and will limit how much
we can write in the title. So the question is
really, is it better to have shortened titles that
can be displayed in the search results, or is it better to keep
the page titles we have already and let Google choose
a different title? I don't think there
is any explicit what is better from our side. One of the things I think is
worthwhile to keep in mind is we do use titles as a tiny
factor in our rankings as well. So it's something where
I wouldn't necessarily make titles on your pages
that are totally irrelevant, but you can try
different things out kind of like I mentioned before. And It's not a critical
issue if the title that we show in the search results-- we call these title
links nowadays-- if that doesn't match
what is on your page. From our point of view,
that's perfectly fine. And we use what you have on your
page when it comes to search. So from that point of
view, it's like, you can put the things in your
title tag on your pages, and maybe we'll show that. Maybe we'll tweak
that a little bit. But essentially, your
page is what we use as a basis for the rankings. And with regards
to the company name or not, I think that's a little
bit up to you and a little bit also in our algorithms
as well in that we do see that
users like to have an understanding of the bigger
picture of where does this page fit. And sometimes, the company name
or brand name for the website makes sense to show there. Some people choose to put it
in the beginning or in the end. Some people have different kinds
of separators that they use. From my point of view,
I think that's more a matter of personal
taste than decoration rather than anything related
to how ranking would work. Let's see. Question on the
Disavow tool-- does using the Disavow tool raise
a flag in the algorithm and trigger a soft
penalty on a website for possibly engaging in
link building in the past? We've used this tool to remove
hundreds of spammy links on our site collapsed
a few days later. Should we remove the Disavow
file, and how long will it take for a site to return to
normal traffic and ranking? Or is there a
permanent black mark against this website for
using the Disavow tool? Good question. No, there is not any kind
of penalty or black flag or mark or anything associated
with using the Disavow tool. From our point of view, this
is purely a technical tool that you can use if
you have any links that are pointing at your website
that you don't want to be taken into account by Google systems. And it doesn't mean that
you created those links. It can be something
that you found where you're really
worried that Google might get the wrong
picture for your website. It's essentially up to you. It's essentially
a technical tool that helps you to kind of
manage the external associations with your website with
regards to Google Search. In most cases, if you're
just seeing random links coming to your website. You don't need to
use the Disavow tool. But if you see something
where you're saying, well I definitely
didn't do this, and if someone from
Google manually were to look at my website, they
might assume that I did this, then it might make sense
to use the Disavow tool. But from that point
of view, it doesn't mean that you did it or
it's not a kind of a sign that, oh, you're
admitting that you were doing link games in the past. From our point of view, it's
really purely a technical tool. And also in general, with
regards to pretty much-- I'd say like most manual
actions in general, if the manual action is resolved
and if the issue is cleaned up, then we're treating
your site as we would treat any other website. It's not that we have kind
of a memory in our systems that would say, oh,
well, this website had a manual action in the past. Therefore, it might be
shady in the future as well. From our point of view, if
you've cleaned up an issue, then you've cleaned
up that issue. With some kinds of issues,
it does take a little bit longer for things
to settle down just because we have to
reprocess everything associated with the website,
and that takes a bit of time. But it's not the
case that there is any kind of like a
grudge in our algorithms that's holding back a site. With regards to this
particular case, where you're saying you submitted a
Disavow file and then the ranking dropped or
the visibility dropped, especially a few days
later, I would assume that that is not related. So in particular with the
Disavow file, what happens is we take that
file into account when we reprocess the links kind
of pointing to your website. And this is a process
that happens incrementally over a period of time
where I would expect it would have an effect over
the course of, I don't know, maybe three, four, five, six
months kind of step by step going in that direction. So if you're saying that you
saw an effect within a couple of days and it was a
really strong effect, then I would assume that
this effect is completely unrelated to the Disavow file. That said, it sounds like
you still haven't figured out what might be causing this. So that might be
worthwhile to maybe jump in on another of these
Hangouts at some point, and maybe we can go through some
of the different options that might be kind of affecting
your website there. It's really hard to say
because it's definitely not based on the Disavow file,
but what else could it be? There's just like so
many different options. I'm working on a
Tanzanian website user search in two languages-- in English and Swahili. We would like to publish the
same content in both languages for better UIX. Would that cause any
duplicate content issues in the search results
in general show a mix of English
and Swahili content? How would we best use the
canonical tag and hreflang? So the good news is
anything that is translated is completely different content. So it's definitely
not something where we would say this is duplicate
content just because it's a translated version
of a piece of content. From our point of
view, duplicate content is really if the words
and everything match and are really duplicates. And then in cases like that, we
might pick one of these pages and show and we might
not show the other one. But if they're
translated, they're completely different words. They're different
pages, essentially. So it's definitely
not something we would consider duplicate content. The ideal configuration
here is to use hreflang between these
pages on a per page basis. And this is something
that I would assume is almost optional
in a case like this. So it's something where I
would, before you go off and do a lot of implementation work
for hreflang, especially for our larger website-- it's a lot of work-- I would double check
if you're actually seeing any issues that users
with the wrong language are going to the wrong page or
user with a specific language are going to the wrong page. And you can kind of see
that in Search Console in the performance
report when you look at the queries
that reach your website, especially if you're
looking at the top queries. You can kind of, based
on your knowledge, estimate which language
that query is in and then look at the pages that were
shown in the search results or that were visited from there. And based on that,
you can kind of make an estimation of is
Google showing the right pages in the search results. And if Google is already showing
the right pages in the search results, then I think you
can probably save yourself the effort with hreflang. But if we're showing the wrong
pages in the search results, then definitely the hreflang
annotations would help here. Usually, this is something that
is more an issue on almost, I'd say, generic queries
where people are searching for your company, for example. Then, just based on someone
searching for a company name we might not really know which
language this user is searching for, and then we might show
the wrong version of the page. So it might make
sense, especially if you're setting these
annotations manually, to first of all double check
is it a problem at all. And if it is a problem, does it
just affect individual pages? And if it does just affect
individual pages, then put the hreflang annotations
there, which might be, like for your home page or
your main category page, you add those annotations. And for everything
else, probably it might be working well. So in particular, if someone is
looking for something somewhat broad or generic,
like, I don't know, for example, blue running shoes,
then obviously in English, they'll be typing in
blue running shoes. And then we can match that to
your blue running shoes pages in English. If they're searching in Swahili,
I don't know what the term is, but I imagine it's
a different term. And because it's
a different term, we can automatically match that
to your existing Swahili pages. So for many cases,
you might not need to do anything special here, but
I would kind of double check. Let's see. Does writing
comprehensive articles covering a specific subject
build trust with Google? I don't think we have any
measure or metric or anything like that where we'd say you
have built trust with Google, and you've built that based on
writing comprehensive articles. I would see this kind
of, I don't know, work as being focused a little
bit more on the user side. So does this build
trust with your users? Do users appreciate
this kind of content? That kind of thing. And probably users appreciate
that kind of content if you're actually
writing something comprehensive and
useful for them. The important
part, I think, here is really to figure
out which users you want to target and to make
sure that your content actually speaks in their language. So for example, if you
have technical content and you write a really detailed
technical article about that, if your users are looking
for something that is more general or
more, I don't know, simplified that explains the
basic topics a little bit better, then maybe that highly
specialized technical article is not the best thing for
them whereas if your users are really kind of the
specialized technical people and they want to find all
of this kind of highly technical content, then maybe
that is the right match. So that's something
where you almost need to think about which
users do I want to target and what kind of content
are they looking for, how can I write it in a way that
matches what they search for and what they
would like to find. And then based on that, you can
kind of build out your website. So don't just blindly
go in and say, oh, I would like to have my website
ranked for rental cars. Therefore, I will write
long comprehensive content on rental cars because
probably, that's not what users are looking for. You almost need to figure
out your users first and then work on your content. Let's see. We keep coming across sites
that scrape our content and republish it on
their websites, sometimes including a link to the original
article and sometimes not. How does Google handle this? Is DMCA takedown
necessary for every case? What happens if Google indexes
the scraped content first? Would this then be
seen as the original? Yeah, I think this is always
a bit tricky because it's kind of a mix of search and
almost legal topics here, and it's something that
just happens quite a lot in that some sites don't care
about things like copyright, and they just take
content from other people and republish that. So kind of the way we
handle it is kind of nuanced and includes lots
of different things. The first thing I would
consider as a site owner if you're seeing this
with your content is to think about
whether or not this is a critical issue for your
website at the moment and kind of on a case by case basis. And if it is a
critical issue, then I would recommend trying to
see if there are legal things that you can do to
kind of help resolve this even outside of
anything SEO-related. And that could be the DMCA. I can't give you
advice on legal topics, so that makes it a
little bit trickier for me to say, like, you
should use a DMCA or not. But in many cases,
the DMCA process would be appropriate here
and could be something that you could use here. So I would, on the one hand,
read up on that process, on the other hand, get
local legal advice as well so that you're sure that you're
doing the right things when it comes to the
legal side of things. On Google side, in
the search results, I think there are a few things
that come into play here. On the one hand, sometimes
copies are also relevant in the sense that,
like, say if I'm-- let me see. How can I frame this? In the sense that
especially when it's not a pure one to one
copy of something, but rather you're taking
a section of a page and writing about this
content, we see that sometimes, for example, when we publish
blog posts that other sites will take our blog posts and
include either the whole blog post or large sections of it. But they'll also add lots of
commentary and kind of try to explain, well, what does
Google actually mean here, or what is Google saying
between the lines, or maybe giving some more
simple examples of how this could apply here and essentially
building out a bigger picture. And on the one hand,
they're taking our content and copying it. But on the other hand, they're
creating something newer, bigger, based on that content. So in the search
results, if someone were to search for
that content, I would expect to see these
kind of other pages ranking as well because
they're providing a slightly different value
than just what our pages are providing. And we do see this happening.
and sometimes, these pages rank above ours, and
that's all fine, I think. With regards to indexing the
scraped content first or not, I think that's something that
is kind of tricky to do there because what we've seen in the
past, especially when I was looking at this, I don't
know, maybe like 10 years ago, a little bit more,
what I noticed there is that oftentimes,
spammers or scrapers will be technically very
[INAUDIBLE],, and they'll be able to get
content indexed almost faster than the original source. And then if we were to
purely focus on who got this into Google systems
first, then it can be that we're
accidentally kind of favoring those
who are technically better at publishing
content and sending it into Google versus
those who are publishing the content naturally. So from that point
of view, I think just purely focusing
on the publish date doesn't make much sense. What I've seen in our
systems over the years is that we tend to
look at the bigger picture for a lot of things
when it comes to websites. And if we see that a website
is regularly copying content from other sources, then it's
a lot easier for us to say, well, this website isn't
providing a lot of unique value on its own, and we can treat
it appropriately based on that. So that's something where
usually the ranking side kind of settles down
there a little bit. I feel, though, it's kind
of a confusing answer. I don't know. So I think, like, stepping
back, the first thing with these kind of problems
I think I would always do is first figure out, is it
actually a problem for you. And if you do see that is a
problem for individual pages, then consider if
there's a legal solution that you can apply here
because if you can solve this by having the content
removed, for example, then you don't really have to worry
about the SEO side of things. Then the third one, I think,
is sometimes it's OK for copies to also appear in the
search results or some kinds of copies, I guess. But essentially, it
depends quite a bit on the individual
use cases there. And I think also
maybe as a last step, if you're seeing that this
is really causing problems, then submitting
spam reports to us is also a good
way to let us know about these kind of issues. Maybe that's a
little bit clearer. OK, let's see. Does presence in social
media channels influence SEO? For example, more
followers likes, shares, social media links
equals better page rank. No. So for the most
part, we don't take into account kind of the
social media activity when it comes to rankings. The one exception I think that
could kind of play a role here is that we don't special
case social media sites, but we do sometimes see
them as normal web pages. And if they're normal
web pages and they have actual content on them
and links to other pages, then we can see them as
any other kind of web page. So for example, if you have,
let's say, a social media profile somewhere, and it
links to individual pages from your website, then
we can see that profile as a normal web page. And if those links are normal
HTML links that we can follow, then we can treat those
as normal HTML links that we can follow. Also, that profile page,
if it's a normal HTML page, it can be something that
can be indexed as well. It can rank in
the search results normally like anything else. So it's not a matter of
us doing anything special for social media sites or
those social media profiles but rather, well, in many cases,
these profiles and these pages are normal HTML pages as well. And we can process
those HTML pages just like any other HTML page. But we wouldn't go in there
and say, oh, this profile has so many likes. Therefore, we will
rank the pages that are associated with
this profile, higher. It's more that, well,
this is an HTML page, and it has some content. And maybe it's associated
with other HTML pages and linked together and
based on this kind of better understanding of
this group of pages, we can rank those
pages individually. But it's not based on
the social media metrics. Is the Penguin penalty
still relevant at all or less relevant? Spammy toxic backlinks
are more or less ignored by the ranking
algorithms these days. I'd say it's a mix of both. So for the most part, when we
can recognize that something is problematic and
kind of a spammy link, we will try to ignore it. If our systems recognize that
they can't isolate and ignore these links across a website,
if we see a very strong pattern there, then it can happen
Better algorithms say, well, we really have kind of
lost trust with this website. And at the moment, based on
the bigger picture on the web, we kind of need to be more on
almost a conservative side when it comes to understanding
this website's content and ranking it in
the search results. And then you can see kind of a
drop in the visibility there. But for the most part,
the web is pretty messy, and we recognize that we have
to ignore a lot of the links out there. So for the most part,
I think that's fine. Usually, you would only
see this kind of a drop if it's really a strong
and a clear pattern that's associated with the website. I work for Travel
[INAUDIBLE],, and we're wondering why we don't
appear in the search results, find results on box for
certain search terms. Is there a way to
better our chances for appearing in this box, or
is it settled outside of SEO? Any information on how
the content in this box ends up there or is decided
would be much appreciated. So I think these are the
little links that we sometimes show in the search
results where we recognize that a
website has more content on a specific topic. And then we start to show
this, that you can also search on these websites
for these topics. My understanding is that
this is purely algorithmic, and especially if you're
seeing this happening for certain search
terms, then you're already kind of seeing
that algorithm in play. And this is something
where we try to understand what
kind of content you have on your website
and how we can link to that. Probably if you're already
seeing this for certain terms, we've figured out how we can
link to that on your website. So that's a good thing. That means the structure
of your website is at least understandable
to our systems that we know which parts to
kind of link to if people are looking for more information. But it's not the case that
you can, I don't know, just create more content
or put the keywords more on your pages, and
then we'll start showing these links for
other topics as well. It's really something
that our algorithms have to figure out and
learn over time with regards to these individual websites. At what point should we start
worrying about page speed if it's in the red zone? Faster sites increase
conversion rates, but we can't spend tons of
money on little sites that might not deliver much
in the first place. Yeah, I don't know. At what point should you
start considering page speed? I do think it's something that
pretty much all sides should consider and think about. One of the nice parts of
everything around Core Web Vitals, I think, is that because
of these very public metrics, a lot of the platforms have also
started to think about speed a lot more. That means if you're using a
common CMS or popular themes on a website, then
almost by default, the speed will have
increased as well. And every now and then,
someone will do a study and look at the different
CMSes and the different hosting platforms and say,
oh, and it's like, Wix has done a lot of
work, and their metrics have improved by this overall. And that means if you're
using one of these platforms, then even if you don't do
anything on your website, you're kind of also profiting
from all of the work that people are putting into
the platforms themselves. And we see that across the board
for pretty much all platforms and CMSes. And I would assume
if you kind of have especially smaller
business websites where you tend to use the more
default setups on a website where you tend to use
more default CMSes and hosting platforms that you
would kind of automatically profit from this general
shift to a little bit faster. So from that point of view, it's
something where sometimes, you don't need to do a ton of
work provided you're actually using a commonly used platform. With regards to when you should
start thinking about speed, I do think that's tricky
because while speed is a ranking factor, it's
not the only ranking factor, and relevance is really key
when it comes to ranking. So it's hard to say. It's like, when do you focus
on this particular part of ranking with Google? But I would see it similar
to like a question like when you should you focus on
usability on a website, or when should you focus on
making your images so that they can appear well
in Google Images. All of these things
are individual elements of appearing in search. And when you should focus on
any of these individual items is kind of up to you, and
the nice part about search is you don't have to
do everything perfect you can pick and
choose, and you can say, well, I will focus on
speed at the moment and make sure that
the images appear well and make sure that all of
my headings are aligned, all of these things maybe. And other people will
focus on different aspects. And we still kind of have to
find a way to show those top 10 rankings or whatever,
however many we have at the moment,
in the search results. So I would leave it a
little bit up to you. One of the things also, I think,
to keep in mind, especially for very small websites,
local websites in particular, is that oftentimes,
they don't rank for these competitive
generic terms anyway, which means they tend to rank more for
things where their website is really only relevant. And that could be
for local businesses. Like, if you're searching
for this business type in this city, if we have
20 business websites that are like that, then you're
automatically in those top 20 anyway. So it's not the case
that your website would disappear from there
if your website is slow. Similarly, if someone is
searching for your business name explicitly because
you're a local business and they know you exist and they
just want to check the opening hours or whatever,
then your website will automatically be relevant
for those queries anyway. So it's not something where
suddenly, this website disappears just because
it's not fast enough. And similarly, I would also
be cautious with regards to the positive effects
with regards to speed. If you're focusing on these
kind of local queries, then just by having
a faster website, you're not going to get much
more traffic than you already are if, for example,
most of your traffic is based on people searching
for your business name. If they're not more people
searching for your business name, then they're
not more people that would be able to find
your website like that. So kind of the expectations, I
think, especially for a smaller local businesses is something
that is a bit tricky to manage there. Of course, if you're working on
a larger website that is active globally where
you're trying to rank in more competitive
queries, then that is something where you might
see more visible changes in the search results over time. Oof, I've been
talking for a while. Let's see. Ritu, you have your hand raised. RITU NAGARKOTI: [INAUDIBLE] JOHN MUELLER: A little bit. RITU NAGARKOTI: Now it is fine? JOHN MUELLER: It's better. Perfect. RITU NAGARKOTI: So I have
a few questions this week related to page experience. My first question related
to page experience-- So I have we have some
paid experience issues coming like in Search Console. Still, we have no [INAUDIBLE]
issues, no mobile usability issue. That is showing page experience
having no [INAUDIBLE].. Europe was in [INAUDIBLE]. I don't know why
it is showing this because still such
concern having no issues, we have resolved all
core [INAUDIBLE] issues, mobile usability issues. But it should not
show like that. [INAUDIBLE] JOHN MUELLER:
Yeah, I don't know. It's hard to say without
kind of seeing more, but I think there might
be two things at play. On the one hand, we don't
have data for all websites. So especially the Core Web
Vitals relies on field data. So what people actually see and
what is reported back through, I think, mobile Chrome that
we can kind of aggregate with regards to speed-- so we need a certain
amount of data before we can say, oh,
like, we understand what the individual metrics
mean for this website. And if you're not
seeing any data at all in Search Console with regards
to the individual Core Web Vitals metrics, then usually
that matches to that. It's like, we just don't have
enough data at the moment. And that means also from
a ranking point of view, we can't really take
that into account. So that might be why you're
seeing this number where it says, like, zero good
URLs But because we just have zero URLs
that we're tracking for Core Web Vitals at the
moment for your website. RITU NAGARKOTI: So
my second question is related to Web Stories. Like, I have seen
some brands having Web Stories on their
Google [? CRP. ?] But I'm not seeing for my brand. So I was exploring how it
will come for my brand. So can user just
be [INAUDIBLE] like to have your Web Stories for
a brand in Google [INAUDIBLE]?? JOHN MUELLER: OK, so I think
there are two aspects here. On the one hand, Web
Stories are normal pages. So they can appear in the
normal search results as well. From a technical point of
view, they're built on AMP, but they're normal HTML
pages, essentially. And that also means that
you can link them normally within your website. So that's really, I
think, critical for us that we understand these
are part of your website. And maybe they're an important
part of your website. And if you think that
they're important, they should be linked
in an important way. That means maybe link
them from your home page or some other pages which are
very important for your website so that we can understand
this is an important page. Then the other aspect
here is because these are normal HTML pages,
we need to find some text on these pages that we
can use to rank them. And especially
with Web Stories, I think that's tricky because
they're very visual in nature, and it's very tempting to just
say, oh, I will show a video, or I will show a large
image in my Web Stories. And if you do that without also
providing some textual content, then we basically
have very little that we can use to
rank these pages. So on the one hand,
they have to be integrated within your website
like a normal HTML page would. And on the other
hand, they also need to have some amount
of textual content so that we can rank
them for queries. And then I think another aspect
here is that in some locations, we show Web Stories slightly
differently in the search results when we can
recognize that there's maybe a block of Web Stories
that we can show. I don't know. I think in India is
one of those places or in the US is also where we
show them slightly differently. And there I think you almost
have an advantage because then we would try to find
more Web Stories to show for your queries. So from that point of view, it's
almost like a good situation to be in, but you still
need to make sure that you have the basics covered. We also have the Google
Creators channel. I don't know if
you've seen that. It's a separate YouTube channel. They also have a
Google creator's blog, and they have a lot of
content on Web Stories. And they also have some
guides for optimizing Web Stories for SEO
that I would recommend kind of going through. RITU NAGARKOTI: OK,
thank you so much sir. Sir, one more question-- actually, I earlier asked
this question with you. You have written blogs on it. Recently, I'm using my brand
name as an author name, and I'm not using real name
[INAUDIBLE] it because that is generic, and we can-- generic names, we
can't use [INAUDIBLE].. That's why I'm [? holding ?] it. So is it appropriate
strategy using brand name as an author name, or we should
leave it as a [? flag? ?] JOHN MUELLER: I
mean, ultimately, you can choose how you want to
do that I think for users for certain topics, it
makes sense to really have names associated with it. And for other kinds
of topics, it's less a matter of having clear
names associated with it. So in particular, if you look
at our quality rater guidelines for things like
medical topics, you want to make sure
that it's actually someone who's qualified,
a qualified medical expert writing this content,
and not just a brand. So for those kind
of topics, I think it definitely makes sense to
have a name associated with it. For a lot of other
topics, if you just need to have an
author link there, then maybe that's OK to
have a brand name there. The one thing I would avoid is
using something like admin or, I don't know, like a
generic name as an author because that really doesn't
tell users anything at all. But a brand name at least
says, like, our company stands behind this. RITU NAGARKOTI: OK,
we can use brand name, but we can't use generic
admin, and we should avoid these type of things. JOHN MUELLER: It's not
that you can't use it. It's more that I would
recommend not to. So it's not a
requirement that you have to do it in
any of these ways, but especially from a
usability point of view, if you're going to
have a link that says this was
written by someone, then make it someone
or something. Yeah. RITU NAGARKOTI: Yeah. Sir, one more question-- like, we are posting some
news on third party sites, and that is appearing as the
top stories in Google CRP. And I guess it is appearing
like my search queries. People are using search
queries with the help of that news are coming as
highlights in Google CRP maybe. But we are also
posting news, and maybe what could be the reason
they are not appearing as top stories in Google CRP? Maybe it can be the
quality of content. ROBB YOUNG: Sure, yeah. I mean, the top stories takes
into account various factors. So it's not
automatically anything that is news related that you
publish that will appear there, and it's not automatically
every website's content that appears there. But it sounds like
you're on the right track and that some of these
things are showing up in the top stories. RITU NAGARKOTI: OK. OK, so [INAUDIBLE] speak. Thank you so much
and happy weekend. JOHN MUELLER: Thanks. You too. Let's see. Theresa. TERESA HUNTER: Hello. Hi, John. JOHN MUELLER: Hi. TERESA HUNTER: Hi. So I'm working on a
recruitment website, and they've got these jobs
that they're kind of almost evergreen because they
have a bank of staff, and they have continuous work. And it's like just for
a contract ongoing. And so I've got these
jobs on the website. And the question is, do I-- I can't just leave that
job listing because then it just looks like it's super old. So should I just be creating
a new page like every 30 days? I can't really change
the structure data on there because of the CMS
that they're working with. So what should I do, I guess. JOHN MUELLER: And
it's basically, I guess, like an ongoing
opening position, or-- TERESA HUNTER: Yeah, it's like
just sites for that they've got a contract for a council. And it's like, they have to
keep doing this particular task. And they have a bank of staff,
but they need more people. And so they're always looking
for this particular role. And it's just an ad hoc role
that they can do remotely. So it's always available
in a way at the moment, and it's the same
role in the same area. JOHN MUELLER: Yeah,
I think purely from an SEO point of view,
you could just leave it open. I don't think you
would see any big, I don't know,
effects if you were to delete that
page at some point and just create
a new one kind of on a monthly or yearly basis. I don't think you would
really see any effects there. The one thing I'm
not sure about is how Google Jobs
would deal with this if you have to do anything like
having specific dates on there for the job listings. So if it's something
specific to Google Jobs, it sounds like you probably
would need to double check their guidelines. But purely from an
SEO point of view, I don't see any issues with
keeping this live like that. TERESA HUNTER: OK. JOHN MUELLER: And
from my point of view. I also don't see
any issues if you were to update the dates
on those pages from time to time where you could
say last updated-- TERESA HUNTER: [INAUDIBLE] JOHN MUELLER: Sorry? TERESA HUNTER: I can't
change the dates on. It it's like this custom-- JOHN MUELLER: OK. TERESA HUNTER:
--locked down thing. So when I create a new
job, it creates a new URL, and I've got no-- I can't change the URL. And yeah, so if I leave
it as the same page, then on job listing, it
will come up as like-- JOHN MUELLER: The last one. TERESA HUNTER: --month
Old or something. JOHN MUELLER: Yeah. TERESA HUNTER: I
[INAUDIBLE] just-- JOHN MUELLER: Yeah, I mean,
from that point of view, it sounds like it
might make sense to update this page
from time to time or create a new version of it. I don't think you would see
any SEO effect either way. I could imagine if you created
new pages very regularly, then it would be hard for us to
understand which of these pages to show in search. But if you do
this, I don't know, monthly or quarterly or yearly,
then we would pick that up as a new page, and
we'd have enough time to build signals for those
pages and show those in search. And I think that would be fine. TERESA HUNTER: And
should I just-- [INAUDIBLE] the expert,
but the page that's gone, should I just redirect that
to maybe the new page or-- JOHN MUELLER: If-- TERESA HUNTER: --to the-- JOHN MUELLER: Yeah. TERESA HUNTER: Yeah. JOHN MUELLER: I think if you
can do that, that's optimal. TERESA HUNTER: Yeah. JOHN MUELLER: It
sounds like your CMS is a little bit limited there. So maybe it's not
always possible. But if you can do that,
that definitely makes sense. TERESA HUNTER: OK. OK, thank you. JOHN MUELLER: Sure. Cool. Let me take a break
here with the recording. I still have more time. And [? Neeraj, ?] I see
your hand is up as well. So we can get to you too. If you're watching
this on YouTube, thanks for watching
to the end, I guess. If you'd like to join one of
these Hangouts in the future, feel free to watch
out for the link and jump in when it pops up. So with that, thank
you all for joining in. Thanks for all
the questions that were submitted and hope
to see you all in one of the future episodes.
