 Welcome, everyone, back to the next episode of Search Off the Record, a podcast that we're trying out. Our plan is to talk a bit about what's happening at Google Search, how things are handled behind the scenes, and I don't know, maybe have some fun along the way. My name is John Mueller. I am a webmaster trends analyst or search advocate on the Search Relations team here at Google. I'm joined here today by Martin and Gary, who are also on the Search Relations team. Hi, everyone. Good day. Good day, Gary. Good day to you, too. So Gary, do you want to take us off and see where we go? Not really. Come on. I guess I was thrown in the water, so I will do it because I'm such a charming person. So what do we do every day? We go to Twitter, and I make lots of jokes that I think are funny on Twitter. John and Martin do lots of thoughtful things, on the other hand, but what we all do is observing what people are doing on Twitter and what their problems are, sometimes answering questions. One thing that I noticed when this COVID-19 thing started is that some people started to post much less than other people started to post much more. Did you find out why? Well, thanks, Martin. That's exactly where I was going. I wanted to figure out why or how is this happening. And I set up a survey. Our title previously was Trans Analysts, so a survey is actually quite fitting for us. And I was very surprised by the results. I was surprised because SEO's workload actually increased instead of decreasing, which I can't yet explain. We have some theories why this would happen, and it could be, for example, that more businesses moved online, and then they needed the extra help from SEOs. The second poll shows that people are not quite, SEOs are not quite pitching more for businesses. That roughly stayed the same. That's also an interesting fact because I would have expected that people have to pitch more to stay afloat, to have more business, to have more income, or to maintain their income. But I would have been wrong if I said that. The poll shows that it stayed roughly the same for them. And one thing that I would have expected that got better is that they can work more easily with developers because you have an online setting. Developers are more comfortable with online setting in general. There are various studies that confirm that. And I would have expected that it got easier to work with developers. And that was actually not the case. Most people said that it stayed the same, roughly the same. I guess that's good. But then many people said that it actually got harder. That's kind of surprising to me. Usually, at least on our site at Google, we do lots of video conferences. We work with software engineers quite a lot. And our go-to medium is video conferences. And it works really well, I would say. So I was kind of surprised that for SEOs, it actually got harder to work with developers. As a developer, I'm surprised as well. I mean, Home Office usually helps developers focus a little better and also then cut out specific times to talk to other stakeholders. Did you just say stakeholders? Stakeholders, yeah. Stakeholders. I'm vegetarian, but you can still hold a stake. Interesting. So did you see if there are different kinds of websites that people are working on? Or was this pretty much just across the board? Or I guess it's kind of hard to read too much into a Twitter poll. Yeah, absolutely. This was across the board. So it was basically everyone in my follower base. Well, and your follower base, because you retweeted it. I don't think that we have a good grasp on what kind of sites these people manage. I know for certain that we have big news outlets or SEOs from big news outlets that follow us. We know that there are WordPress plugin developers who follow us. We know that there are a few small businesses that follow us. But we don't have concrete numbers about the kinds of sites that our followers manage. It would be interesting to see if we can see similar changes in the usage of search consoles. At some point, we should check up with them or check up with Daniel, who's always on top of the metrics there, to see if that's kind of similar there as well, if people are using it more or more sites or just in general. Oh yeah, that's interesting. Also, if more people are moving from, how do I put this nicely, kind of neglecting the website to becoming an online-only thing, like brick-and-mortar stores moving to e-commerce, I would not be surprised if we would see an uptick in verified sites in Google Search Console. So we should definitely talk to Daniel, I think. That sounds cool. I guess another thing that has also taken place with all of the coronavirus changes now is that a lot of the events are also moving to an online environment, away from kind of the personal meetups, which obviously, in a lot of locations, you can't really do anymore or you shouldn't be doing, I guess, and more towards more online environments there. Martin, you've been to a bunch of these online events now. What kind of things do you find work well or what kind of things don't work as well in an online event? I've been to a bunch of events these days and I have to say, generally, they work pretty well. I am really, really surprised. I mean, if you ever try to do a video call with more than one other person, then you know that that usually is really, really hard. But somehow, events pull it off. So I think either the event platforms got a lot better or people are just, like, more clever when they do these things. A few of these events are actually pre-recording the talks so that you can avoid, like, connectivity issues and stuff. So I think that's generally a good idea. So that works generally well and you get lots of people together and a bunch of these events are free now. So it is more accessible to a lot of people. At the same time, the issue or the challenge seems to be to actually keep people focused on the event, right? So people may run into the kitchen to grab something or might answer a phone call or something like that and then people miss out on what you're saying. Whereas if they are in a crowd, then they are less likely to direct their focus elsewhere, I would say. So that's a challenge, I guess. And the other thing that I observed and noticed and also Gary and I discussed this for the Webmaster conferences as we can't run in-person events right now is that you have a very limited flow of feedback. You do have Q&A sessions and they work reasonably well and I really enjoyed the Webmaster conference lightning talks Q&A session that I did for the links talk. That was really, really cool. By the way, the Webmaster lightning talks, that's a video series that we have on our YouTube channel where we have pre-recorded small talks with a live Q&A. But I would like to see more discussion formats and I'm going to try that out soon, but this can either be fantastic or terrible and I think we have to try things out now. Yeah, I think it's a good time to try some of the new formats out. But it feels like in general, the interaction with the audience is something that's kind of missing. So maybe there were more ways to pull that in, maybe together with kind of the Q&A things or discussion formats that you mentioned. Maybe there's some things that we could do there to make that a little bit easier. I think one thing that we should think about is how to increase attention span for the talks. One thing, I guess, what I did, I ran another poll because that's what I do. And what I was asking in this poll was whether people take notes in offline events or during offline events and whether they take notes during online events. And the majority takes notes at offline events but not at online events. And there's tons of science behind taking notes and why is that beneficial for registering and storing information. And if people don't do it during online events or typically don't do it during online events, that might be why online events are less efficient. Interesting. Yeah, I mean, retention is then not the same as if you take notes, generally speaking. I guess another thing that I kind of noticed with all of these online events is that the speaker lineup is a lot more diverse. It feels like they're a lot more newer faces that are presenting. Is that something you're seeing as well, Martin? Or am I kind of skewed there? No, I think that's generally true because the threshold is lower. It's more accessible to newer speakers as well because A, there's just more events popping up now. There's events that haven't been there beforehand. You can also, especially if it's prerecorded, you can correct mistakes. You can't really do that when you're on the stage. If you are on stage and say something, then it's said and you can't take it back. Whereas in prerecording, you can just edit it out and then retake the bit that you didn't wanna say the way that you said it. It is probably also less intimidating to just record kind of for yourself in front of your computer instead of being in front of a huge crowd. So I think it is more accessible to new speakers as well. And we are seeing more diverse lineups these days, which is great. That's good. Cool, yeah. I hope that sticks around. It feels like in the past, when I would go to some of the bigger conferences, you'd always see the same names, which is really nice because you get to know people a little bit more, but it would be really nice to just see different viewpoints and kind of see different levels of experience, people who are jumping in, trying new things out and kind of who can feel welcome to step up at an event. Yeah, and I think everyone has something to contribute. So if we figure out ways to keep this vibe up of like people contributing their viewpoints and their perspectives and their experiences, that is amazing. And even if you're a beginner, you might have understood things in a different way than other people have explained it beforehand. So your explanation might actually help others to get into it as well. So it's always fantastic to have new speakers. Cool. Another thing that I've seen come up very rarely, but every now and then it happens is that something in search can sometimes go wrong. What? We have really complicated systems and we have a lot of people who are watching out to make sure that everything's running smoothly and lots of systems that try to flag all possible issues, but every now and then something goes wrong and then I get a lot of emails and I wonder if like maybe those numbers of emails are sometimes correlated with what's happening in search. I don't know. As we know it does. Can you tell us a bit more, Gary? I certainly can. Well, we don't have many outages. That's a very good thing. And when we do have outages, then nowadays at least we try hard to confirm them. This wasn't like this for the longest time. For perhaps 20 years or 19 years, outages were not confirmed typically, especially not for SEOs and for people on Twitter. And we wanted to change that. Last year we had a few bigger outages that were very, what's the right word? Visible, I would say. Yeah, but internally they were very humbling, I would say. Exactly because we don't have many outages and we were just not prepared for communicating about them externally. So we promised back then that we would do better and we started developing a protocol to figure out what to communicate, when to communicate, whom to communicate to and where to communicate. And it took a lot of time. It took lots of, lots of sign-offs. But eventually we got there and we got to test it unfortunately a few weeks ago where indexing was kind of misbehaving and people on Twitter noticed it. And that's an important thing. We have probably hundreds of dashboards. We have thousands of metrics that we are monitoring. Yet sometimes we miss things or on our side it looks different than externally. I would say that's more common. The latter is more common where internally it looks different than externally. So in our protocol we incorporated a clause that if we got many tweets per hour about something going wrong with search or tweets that to us look like an outage then we would escalate that internally and we would get the on-call people, basically those whose job is to monitor the different dashboards to make sure that search is up and running all the time. We would escalate to them. We would chat with them, we would email them and make a decision whether there's an actual outage going on or there is just noise. It's surprisingly accurate how people on Twitter can notice outages. And thanks to reports on Twitter we managed to mitigate outages much faster than normally would have. And of course we improved our monitoring based on the feedback as well. But yeah, those are our outages. Cool, can you say a little bit more what happened the last time? Is that something where, I don't know, something just got stuck or was there like a real big problem? I guess I will throw myself under the bus and PR will kill me, but yeah, that's why not. It was actually a crawling issue. Externally this looked like an indexing issue but when we started debugging it eventually it became clear that it was just crawling. It was Googlebot overwhelming indexing so much that indexing was basically drowning in new documents to process. And that was the cause. And then that also prevented because indexing was overwhelmed, caffeine was overwhelmed. It was not able to export new documents to our serving charts, which meant that from the vast majority of the sites we were not picking up new documents. So we were basically making the request to the server, fetching the page content and then between that and actually putting it into the database for serving it to search result pages. There was a hiccup basically. Yeah, essentially yes. Basically indexing became a bottleneck and it was just exporting to the indexing charts to the whatever you call it, database, search database, way too slow. Interesting. So when you say documents, do you mean doc files or is there, like what particular is a document? Holy cow, that's very hard to explain without a wide board or a presentation or something. And we were actually briefly chatting with Anna, our producer about this, basically creating an advanced series of videos where we would go into more detail about how search works and the different components as well as what the document is. If I want to simplify it, I guess, is piece of content that was picked up by Googlebot and processed by caffeine slash indexing. I guess that would be a document. So it doesn't have to be a doc file. It can also be maybe a spreadsheet file. It could be any content that Google search is able to index at the moment. Oh, okay. So HTML pages, blog posts, anything. Yeah, anything. Okay. Eventually they turn into a document on our side. We just call it a document. Okay, cool. Sounds like maybe we should put together a video series on this to explain this in a little bit more detail. Sounds like something to do on our side. Yeah. I mean, it's a fascinating topic. And every now and then we see a need to explain things in more detail. We would perhaps baseball, yes, less. But yeah, we are getting there. Cool. Do you think understanding more about crawling and indexing is something we have to worry about with regards to spam? Or is it just a matter of taking the time to explain things a little bit more detail? I think spam-wise it's not that much of a problem to explain more. I would certainly not explain too much about ranking because we can definitely have factors, spam-ball vectors. But in crawling and indexing, I don't think that spam is a real issue or a big enough issue or big enough concern. Yeah, let's go with concern. I think there we can elaborate a bit more and we would see the benefits of it. Basically the benefits would outweigh the potential negative effects of it. Cool, cool. Another thing that is quite cool is John, you changed, you changed your hairstyle. What, what do you mean? What hair? Oh, you know, I saw a blog post recently about the hair outage. About the hair outage. Hair outage, oh my gosh. What do you mean? What happened? What happened? I don't know. It was just like one of these weekends, everything was weird as everything is weird all the time nowadays, I guess. In some places, harder than others, I'm sure. And at some point, I just decided, well, if I shave my head, it's not going to make it any less weird or any more weird. So it felt like a perfect time to try that out. Fresh new summer look. Summer look. But you promised that you would dye your hair, not cut your hair, well actually shave your hair. I don't know, Gary. There was just no time to dye. There was a, oh my God, he didn't. He did. Oh God, this is brilliant. You could say you made your hair transparent. Yeah, I had to be transparent about my hair. No, it's true. I mean, maybe it's all dyed in green and some green screen filter is just making it disappear. Ooh, yeah. That would be hilarious. Martin. Yeah? I have a challenge for you. Oh my goodness, okay. I think there is a camera program that has like a bald filter where you can do that already, no? Perhaps, but we could do so much fun with your hair if it was green. Anna, our producer, will really definitely not like me do that. She told me off even before I had my hair colored. So it's like, I'm going to the hairdressers. I get color in my hair and she's like, not green. So I'm not sure if that's a good idea. On the other hand, we are recording from home and I do not have a green screen here. Hmm. Or we can take Gary, who's not recording videos at the moment, like me. So what would be the point? Well, you would start recording. No. No, that would not make me start recording. OK. You can pretend you have a twin brother like Blonde Gary. Blonde Gary. I would totally pull off a blonde. OK? Sure you would, but you are not. That's the point. Well, I don't want to. Oh, come on. But I would. I would totally pull it off. Excuses, excuses. Show us. I'm sure he wouldn't be able to do that. That's asking too much. Yeah, those kind of manipulations don't work on me. I'm sorry. Sure. We'll see. I think we're kind of getting off track here. I mean, off track and off the record. So maybe we should take a break here. Thank you all for joining in, for listening in to our podcast. I hope this was interesting, insightful and a little bit entertaining as well. Thank you, Martin and Gary, for joining in and all of the information you brought in. And if you like this podcast, make sure to like and subscribe, I guess, or link to us. Of course, link to us. Yeah, link to us. Link to us. That's more important. Yeah. Yeah. But only no follow links, please. No follow link to us. OK. Cool. And hopefully we'll see or at least hear, well, no, we won't hear from you. I guess you will hear from us in the future in one of the next episodes. So stay tuned. Bye-bye. Good day.