 All right. Welcome, everyone, to today's Google Webmaster Central Office Hours Hangouts. My name is John Mueller. I'm a Webmaster Trans Analyst in Switzerland and currently in Mountain View with a bunch of really smart SEOs who managed to make it to the Hangouts here. Do y'all want to introduce yourselves quickly? Sure. I'm actually normally from Colorado where there's a bunch of SEOs drinking beer and watching right now. They do. And I work for a local SEO guide and just came here to hang out. Hi, I'm Michael Kwok. I'm the CEO of ZipWorks. We're based in LA in Santa Monica. We do e-commerce through a lot of the SEO, but just kind of drop down by just to check it out and help. I'm Alberto Molina. I am a part of John's team. I am focused on the content management system on the web and looking at everything for four months that practices and many, many, many people with SEO. Hi, my name is Dennis. I'm an SEO specialist at NACIS. I focus on technical SEO, and I have a great group of people who follow the web right now. Hey, everyone. Hi, my name is Vlad. I'm a known and operator of a website called Haya.com, a consumer review website that serves all of the US. We're based in Seattle in Sacramento. We focus on content and providing a platform for users to voice their opinions. And that's it. My name is Massimo Paolini. I'm the CEO of the Spectrum Group online, where Silicon Valley based digital marketing agency. OK. So many different people. And who's watching live, or who's here in the Hangout Live? Barry, I see you. Barry. Nobody know I'm lurking. Oh, you're lurking. You're not here. OK. All right. So we have a handful of people here. So that's good. Do any of you want to introduce yourself? I guess that's a no. Oh. All right. We work. Can you hear us? Yes. Yes, OK. We're not SEO professionals, so I hope we're in the right place here. We're just the owner of a website that we've had some issues with. We've consulted lots of SEO professionals and can't get to the bottom of our problems. So we thought we'd come to the best people and see if we can ask our question later. So thank you for having us. We're from Australia. Wow. My question is in the post. So I don't want to jump the queue, but my question's in the comments somewhere. Wow. Since you're here already, why not just ask a question? Can I? Thank you. OK. So we have the home page of our website. Suffered a massive drop in rankings about three weeks ago. It had done really well for years and we've worked quite hard on it. And then overnight, it just disappeared. Not being an expert, my first instinct was to try and republish the site to see if there were any issues with it. And we were given a message by our rapid weaver software that there was a PHP and HTML version of the file on the server, which I know is not good. And when I spoke to my husband, he said, you'd also been given that message a few weeks earlier. So we think we had a duplicate version of our home page out there for a few weeks. Straight away, we deleted the PHP version because that was the new one. The original was HTML. And we fetched the site with Google and we resubmitted to be indexed. And the site popped back up within an hour. It was back. But it disappeared again. And nothing we've been able to do has been able to bring it back. We've done all the things I think we're supposed to do to indicate that the HTML is the original version. So we've added a canonical tag, excuse me, if I'm saying these things wrong, to the home page. We've advised Google Webmaster that the W version is the preferred site. We have, we've done so many things with the help of an SEO professional too. We've done a 301 redirect the index or HTML to their domain. Nothing seems to be working. And we've done some on-page optimisation as well. So we added a H1 tag. We've made the page load time better. Checked out our backlinks and we disavowed two that looked quite dodgy from early October. But other than that, we've reached a bit of a dead end and we're not sure what to do next really. So did the site disappear completely or is it just not ranking as well as it used to? So it has been, it is indexed. It is in there if we do the site search. But it won't come up for a search of our business name at all and it won't come up for a search of the, you know, the main keywords, except if I ask for it to include omitted results and then it's on page 13. So it's a massive drop. It was in position two on page one and it's gone to page 13 in omitted results. Right. What would you all do? Now? I mean, I would be looking for the first thing I would do. So go to Google Webmaster Tools. Use that to see if you have a manual penalty or check your links for that. Yeah. There's no manual penalty. The only links that we find that look dodgy and I'll tell, we run an adult party plan business. So sex toy party is the main search term for us. And there were two porn sites that were linking to us which we had never asked them to do. So we've disavowed those two which did look strange but nothing else looks concerning. And there's no manual penalty in the Webmaster Tools. We also looked at your search analytics report in Google Search Console to see when the traffic dropped and for what pages? Yeah, it's just the home page. And it dropped about a week after we originally uploaded the two versions of the home page. On the day that we did that, we uploaded the two versions. It was actually a spike in the crawl rate by about three times the normal crawl rate for our site. It went up three times on that day. And then a week later in the search analytics, there are three days where there's no visibility of that home page. So it's like it maybe was de-indexed for a few days. It is back, it's been indexed but it just won't show. So April nights is a business name and if we type that in, it's nowhere to be seen. Internal pages will show but not the home page. Have you made any changes to your code or content on the page? No, nothing. Sounds like a technical issue for sure. Technical issue, yeah. I feel like when we see something, there's something making it not show but we just cannot figure out what that is. And then we're sort of hoping that, well, if it is some sort of algorithmic penalty, maybe that will just lift when it runs again and we just have to wait. But we don't want to be waiting if we haven't actually fixed the problem. And yeah, that's sort of where we're at. We have contacted a lady called Marie Haynes who I'm sure you probably know. And she's going to try and help us next week. So I'm hoping she will find something technical that we haven't been able to find. But the local SEO company that worked with us, a few weeks ago, they hit a brick wall, really. They just said, no, we're not sure. Just wait. And waiting, obviously, is just killing the business. It's a 10-year-old business. And yeah, even the three weeks it's been gone, we can see the impact. Yeah. Can you put your domain in the chat? So we've got so many people here. Maybe one of us can take a look while I have a question. Yeah, we'll do that. Thank you very much. Can you double check this is an adult content website, or? It is, yeah, adult products we sell. So there's no porn or anything like that. We sell sex toys. So a bit like I think you have pure romance in America. We do the same thing in Australia. OK. OK. I'll put that safe footwork at the beginning just in text. I wonder, maybe that's also something that's kind of playing in there. Yes. That's a little different. We might be assuming something. But we can, I think the link is in the chat. So maybe one of you. Does anyone want to let me their computer? Who wants this on there? So you stumped us with the first question. Oh, yeah. I have also been posting in the forum asking for advice there. So I'm sure people are sick of me by now. I've just been living and breathing it for three weeks. And I just I knew nothing about it. And now I know a little bit, but obviously not enough to fix it. April night. So the only thing I can get, I wonder if she's using the walkie-talkie. Oh, OK. So when we're trying it here, we're just getting paid. Which is, I mean, we're accountable. So I'm going to walkie-talkie. What is it? I don't know. Oh, good choice. Yeah. What's he doing? Oh. Oh. Oh. Right? And then he writes it like, what's your rule? What's your next one to decide? OK. Well, we'll, they're all digging into it. OK. Let's take a quick question and circle back. We'll come back. OK. Brilliant. Thank you. Go to the forum as well. .com. Yeah. I don't know. .com.aea, yeah. That's what I was talking about. Oh, .au. Yeah. Yeah. And nice is spelled, N-I-T-E-S. So it's a bit different. The link's there, though. Awesome. Thank you. I can see you've got it there. I can see it on your screen. Thank you. Thank you so much. It's a relief that even people like you will look at this for me. Because, yeah, it's very stressful. Thank you. All right. So let me just pick one of the questions that was submitted as well. Actually, I have a question if I could ask it real quick. All right. Go for it. I recently did a change of address. And I was wondering how long that takes. Like, roughly how long does a change of address take when you submit it to Google Search Console? So I guess for that to be submitted, you have to have the redirect in place? Yeah, I already did that. With the redirect in place, usually it's a matter of a couple of days. OK, so it's been going on, like, four months now. And so what are you seeing then? I added the new domain and the old domain to Search Console. And when I go to the old domain, it says click here to change address. So I clicked here to change address and went through the process of changing my address from the old domain to the new domain. I already had all the 301s set up to automatically redirect the new domain. But basically now when I go look at the change of address status, it just says the site is undergoing a move. I can either withdraw or wait, but there's no other. Like, I don't know if it's working or not, so. OK, that sounds like it's working. OK, so what you can do is just search for maybe your company name or your business name. You should see the new address shown in here. That's kind of the problem. Like, if I do a site colon and search for the new domain, it comes up with a new domain. But if I do a site colon old domain, it still shows up. But it has the new headings, new descriptions, and it points to the new domain, or, yeah, the new domain. But it's still showing the old domain in Google Search. That's completely normal. That's essentially Google trying to be extra helpful in that it recognizes you're searching for the old one, so it will show you something. But it sounds like we're already picking up the new one with the content. So probably the old one. I guess it doesn't matter about duplicate content because if I search for the page title in Google, both URLs show up, the old one and the new one. But if you click on the old one, it goes to the new one. I think that kind of sounds like it should be working as expected. I mean, it depends on what exactly is happening there, but definitely we're seeing the redirect. Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to do the change of address tool. Right. And so that was all my question. The site is undergoing a move, but it doesn't give me, I don't know if it's actually doing it or if there's a problem somewhere in between and it hasn't completed it yet, or if I should withdraw my application and try it again. I don't know how long this, it doesn't say anywhere about how long it would take for a move to happen. Yeah, so I think the Search Console tool just keeps that setting for 90 days, regardless of whatever is happening behind the scenes. But that's not a sign that something is still stuck. OK. So basically like 90 days and you hope that it would figure it out. Yeah, yeah. So if you have the redirect in place, then it should work out. Yeah, OK. Cool. Thanks, man. Thank you. Maybe, yeah. OK. How do you feel about this? So I was checking validation on the code, and character encoding wasn't declared at the very top, which is strange, but it used Windows 12.52, which I would expect it to be called to GTF 8. It didn't, but then it tried to change the character and coding halfway through and made a fatal error. I don't know. I don't think we care. They don't care. I can. So all right, that's. We also look at the page on the network that says that the HTML has no cache setting. I think that's fine. So that's fine, too. Yeah. So I mean, Google has to deal with a lot of broken HTML, and we've gotten used to it. I was also wondering if she had my name, because she said they had a duplicate version of the page. Did she go in the index and try and remove the version they wanted to remove from the URL remover? That may help. Yeah. If it thinks that there's a duplicate panel, I'm duplicate on that page, which is why I needed something. I don't know. Maybe she should 404 the original. Right. 404, which we probably already did, but she said she removed it. Which means by doing the URL remover. OK. Here. Can I sit in the edge? That's a discussion. I don't think we have the burning gun. Yeah. OK. The smoking gun. What is a good search term to see how they rank in the results? Like, what should I search for, like, sex toys and then play? What's the search term, sorry? Is that what you said? It's really nice, and you come up first. When you search for nights, we come up first. Yeah. Yeah. But I want to see, because you're saying that you're not being ranked properly. Yeah. For the search term sex toy party is the main one. But for us, when we search April Nights, we only see the about us page or other internal pages. We don't see that home page anywhere. Yeah. You'll remind us. I think we have to look a bit more into detail. Yes, question in the first one. Good start. That's good. OK. Hey, guys. How you doing? Hi. I actually have a question. Hi. I think everyone's trying to talk at once too much. OK. Maybe go ahead, ask a question. Jump on in. OK, cool. Thanks. Kind of a good transition was, how do webmasters do manual checks for rankings? Because last night, I opened an incognito. I use your ad preview tool. And Google still loves to believe that I'm a robot. And obviously, putting that on my time sheet, my boss doesn't get too excited when I'm having to click through signs and storefronts and he's paying for it. And then actually last night, I got a try again later saying that your computer network may be sending automatic queries. We can't process your request. And I just couldn't search at all through Google last night. And I was wondering, really, what webmasters, basically, I would love to see what's on all of your laptop screens right now. How do you guys check rankings? What's the best way to do it? Nutrally, organically, without any sort of behavioral things taking effect. Yeah, I don't know. What do I use? Google Search Console. Google Search Console, that's what I use. Yeah. Inclusively for rankings. So I think the advantage of the questions, if the question is dumb, but no, it's perfect. I mean, lots of people have this question. I think the advantage of Search Console is you see what people actually saw when they searched for your site, where when you manually search, you might be searching for a term that people aren't using, actually, or maybe you're searching in one location and your users are in different locations. All of those things kind of come together. So I just put a link in the chat that you guys are familiar with, the ad preview and diagnostics tool? Yeah. No? Yeah. OK, yeah. So that's basically what I use. That's the only thing I've been, because I can choose a location. I can choose a geo. And that seemed to get fairly easy. But that's specific, I think, primarily for the ad side. I don't know if that would be so useful for normal ranking checking. And if you use something like that quite a bit, then we will show the capture and all of that. And especially if you use a rank checking tool on the site, then it's even more likely that we show captures and maybe even block access for a while completely. OK, so you guys go into Search Console and you put the website in and then you see what people see? Yeah. OK. That's what I recommend. I mean, there are other tools that use various ways to track rankings as well. Like what? Like what? I can't really recommend them, because they mostly scrape the search results and that's against our terms of service. There is one tool that lately has changed that. It is Majestic. They concentrate on links. They use the Google Search Console API to give you rankings on keepers. Same as the Spotify. They're also using the API. OK, so yeah, you can check there. Spotify? Yeah. Spotify and Majestic. Thank you guys so much. All right. More questions from any of you who are live or any of you here? Yeah, actually, I have a question. All right, go for it. Again, mobile first, going forward. So what does it take on Google? Because you're suggesting two different ways to have a responsive or adaptive website. Will it anyways affect what companies are using responsive or adaptive in the mobile first world? How do you mean? Will you give any extra benefits if people are using responsive or is there any benefit with adaptive? Not really. So we try to be kind of as accepted as possible of these different variations. So if it's one of the variations that works for Google, it should just work. I think responsive is really useful because you can save yourself a lot of hassle. You don't have to maintain multiple sites, multiple URLs. So that makes a lot of sense. But it's not that we will give a ranking boost to responsive or these. Did you all hear that? I don't really know if it works like around the corner with the microphone. Thank you for announcing. I'll ask another question on top of what you asked. So sites that have identical content on desktop and mobile have nothing to worry about. Identical content on desktop and mobile. It kind of depends on how you mean identical content. Like if it's just the text that is the same, then the text is already like a big part of what we use for ranking. But things like structured data are important. If you have international site with hreflang, those links need to be there. If you have an AMP version, that link needs to be there. So all of the hidden aspects need to be equivalent as well. So not just the visible text, but everything kind of beneath the scenes too. But in the end of the day, it's all about making the users happy. That's the bottom line, right, John? Well, it's about making the user happy. But if we don't have the information for indexing, Googlebot won't be happy. So let's connect it, please. That's why SEO has two augments, right? The human and the box. I mean, ideally, a lot of these things would just focus on the user and just would work. But from a technical point of view, there's a lot of work that needs to be done to make it so that we can index it for search. And I think that's a large part of the reason why people do SEO is not to trick the search engines, but to make it so that its content is actually understandable. But I really spoke today to a lot of people, and they're coming from different providers, SEO providers. And the number one problem is that they're not ranking on the first page. And this is the biggest problem that us, I never said number one. I said first page. So and they're having issues. And I think that's another article today appeared in the Canadian news where this is the biggest thing that we are dealing with. Every agency is dealing with. And I think that if you guys make some sort of video, I mean, Miley already did a video, but it takes a certain period of time to rank. And this is something that I'm dealing with and everybody else is dealing with. Do you have anything, any answer for this that we can kind of, how do we reply to someone that came from another provider, answered the same question? Another provider might have provided the answer and not providing the same answer again. What do we do, you know what I mean? You're sitting in a very, very tough spot. Yeah, I don't have a perfect answer for that. I mean, that's something where as an experienced SEO, at some point you'll kind of see where the general problems are and maybe be able to guide people that come to you and say, well, these are the expectations. This is what I can help with. And it will take this amount of time to actually work this out and for Google to figure out what's what I changed. So that's something where I don't see it as being a pure yes, no simple answer. Right. Yeah, I mean, I direct them to the Miley video and other videos and then they come back and they're like, oh, OK, yeah, that made that a lot of sense. And so it opens up their, because they want a quick fix. And I said, it's just not possible. There's a lot of things behind it and reasons and why. There's no quick fix to that. And then when you get into the technical stuff, they don't really care about that. They really care about the bottom line. That's really what we're dealing. They don't care about, I mean, you show them the 404s and you show them the stuff and you show them the mobile and you show them everything else. In the bottom line, it's their website that they care about their product. They're not interested in all this. So anyways, I just wanted to throw that in. What do you all ready? So they have a little bit of interest, I guess. And if they're paying you money, at least they have some interest there. Yeah, but it's really the goals that we focus on. And in the end of the day, I convert them. Yeah, no issues with that, but it's just, the other providers kind of give them all this, hey, I'll do this for you and I'll make you, you know. Cool. By the end of the day, like they promise you something, you know, you try for two months, you don't see the, you know, any changes, you will go back, you will go to somewhere else, you know. It's, you know, they'll take money and all other providers, but at the end of the day, they will come back to someone who can actually. And in the end of the day, they really know who the good providers are in town. Well, there's, I mean, there's the article on choosing an SEO and how you should engage with them from Google. I would share them there. Yeah, that's right. Because if you're intimately familiar with that and you could use a third party to tell them where to go, then that has more authority than anyone agency. And in our experience anyways, with clients like that, it's more profitable to walk away than to try and get them. Sorry, what was the last part? More or what? It's more profitable often to walk away from a customer like this than to try and get them. And how about letting your client go away? That's the hard part. A big client, a big client. Yeah. I think it's always tricky, but learn through experience. If you guys don't mind, I actually have a question. Okay, go for it. Cool. Internal footer links, do they help with ranking for a keyword? Not really. I mean, they help us with what we call it. But it's not that we would use internal footer links to kind of promote specific content. But it helps us to be able to crawl to those pages and sometimes it helps us to understand the context of individual pages within a website. But if it's a site-wide footer link, then that doesn't provide a lot of context for us. We talked about that. We talked about that stuff, but then transitioning into the same question where if you're providing a server, remember we talked about that. If you designed a website and then you put your name on the bottom, abc.com. And now you've done that in 100 websites. You said that you ignore that, right? You ignore that so-called credits, right? For a large part, yeah. Okay. So, but I still see that as a do-follow in other 100 tools that's really- I think that's kind of normal. We ignore a lot of things that other tools still show as a link. Okay, so you're not taking that to consideration. You're taking signals from somewhere else and applying that to their site, right? Like, but I mean, we see it on the other side, in the other side of the world, outside of the Google algo, we see that in other tools where, wow, I mean, they are getting traffic from this and the client comes to you and says, whoa, 1.3 million, this guy has insane traffic. So he's seeing that somewhere else and I'm coming back and saying, hey, these are stuff that they do ignore, but they're not taking into consideration, but he's like, well, they're getting traffic from there. So, you can't say that that's why they're getting traffic. Like, that's where I would force correct your client is that they could be getting traffic in spite of those. So just point them to best practices and say, hey, we don't know exactly why they're getting traffic, but that's against best practices to make an education. I know, but I mean, he's still wants it. And then he got, you know, somebody else from our industry, okay, gave him the insights on that it is, even though violating the policy. And anyways, sometimes you can't, but it's good to know again, so you are ignoring those little things. And so it doesn't really matter if it's credit from developers or if it's so-called anything else, right? That you're kind of using your clients for traffic. I don't know what you mean with anything else. Well, I'm seeing a lot of people in my industry, okay, in around the world that are using their name and taking traffic from their client's sides. So I mean, if people click on those links and go to the other side, that's, I think that's perfectly legitimate. Like if you're- If you're dropping an anchor text, SCO in a hundred different sites around the world and your client's sites and then you rank for that keyword SCO is that fair? It's not fair, right? Well, you could be ranked despite that. It's not necessarily because of that. So that's one thing to keep in mind. Something I think with a lot of these techniques is that in an ideal world from our point of view, when we recognize something that's kind of going against our guidelines that we can kind of isolate, then we should just ignore that part. So common example is keyword stuffing, where if we can recognize the keyword stuffing, maybe we should just ignore that keyword stuffing on those pages and try to rank the page based on everything else that we have. And that might be happening here. So you ignore that too, like using that anchor text a hundred times in your client's sites and then your name? Even if it's getting traffic, like even if people are clicking on it, you guys are still ignoring it? Well, we don't see what people are clicking on. But if people are clicking on it, then your site is getting traffic from people clicking on it. So- But it doesn't have a ranking on it. I mean, that's something where ultimately if you put a sign out saying, well, I made this website and people are going, this is a nice website, I'm gonna go check that person out who made that website, I'm gonna get one made too, then that's a good thing. That's not necessarily something that has to have an SEO effect, but definitely you don't care where they come from. Right, but if you hide the like as in California, abc.com, that's like spamming in a way. Well, I mean, if we can isolate that and just ignore it, I think that's a good approach. Okay. But you guys don't hurt us if we're getting traffic from those footer links, from those clients or something like that. If people are clicking on those links and coming to your site, it's like- Yeah. Stop that. Stop it. Is it a link? Yeah, it's a link. That's how a link is supposed to work. Okay. How people click on it? Right, questions about that. Come on. So our site has a lot of categories which can probably look like that content to Google. I don't- We're wondering if Google would look like that to their agent or if we have a lot of those days that someone has like this content like that to Google. Follow up. I might- Okay. I don't know. I think it's something that is to some extent also, some category pages don't have a lot of content. I mean, to some extent, you can go through and try to create more content for those pages or just an index one if you want. I'm sorry, we're- David, I also have trouble hearing him. Okay, that's quieter. Okay. So thin content on category pages. I think to some extent, some of that can be natural and we can pretty much ignore it. It kind of depends on the site overall where if the thin content pages are just like a small part of the site, then whatever. Right. But if the primary part of the site is just thin content pages, then they're missing a lot of value that the site could have. So that's one thing to kind of think about. But I know there are different approaches to handling that. Some people look at their analytics and see like where people are jumping or like low kind of time on site and try to prune those pages out. Others work on improving that content. It really depends on the site and what you can do. I don't know. You guys have any experience? Yeah. We've seen some category pages are doing really well with nothing but product listing. But yeah, we try to write some content but we have so many pages that sometimes it's really hard to keep up. But yeah, I mean- Do you try to know index some of those pages? No, no. We keep them open. Yeah. We try to create content as much as we can. But not creating just the content, creating the unique content. That's the key. Because if you just copy it from somewhere from Wikipedia, you're not gonna get anything. Still that content. Exactly, still that content. But if you create the unique content, then that's it. I use like a three pillar system, educate, value, and ideas. That's it. That's what good content's all about. I think educating, doing things that shocks Google. Right, John? That's not good. How does it shocks Google? No, not shocking. All right. What were you about to say? I was gonna say, I faced a similar question recently. Recently, as our site has a lot of categories and a lot of subcategories, which we're referring to as review topics. The consultant, Glenn Gate, that we hired, advised us that if we don't have any unique content on those particular category pages or review, something that won't add any SEO value, we say, it's better to just no index, but follow them because they're good for the users. Or just make any contact with what Dennis was saying. So we ended up no following, or I'm sorry, no index, but follow. But follow. We would crawl everything. I see. And understand how to approach, right? Yeah, it really did. And that's the same. We have, in our opinion, we use the category pages more for a user, a visitor, item to help them find things, not for SEO. Our individual articles are what will draft what will bring the controls for the proper, I say, research. So our philosophy. Could you say that again? I'm sorry, I couldn't really hear that well. All right. All right, all right. So our philosophy when it comes to category pages is to help the user so we don't, we no index the pages, they have no SEO value for us. However, we make sure that there's enough content on the pages that someone does go to it, they can navigate properly. Okay, cool. So then that kind of flows the next question. Where, you know, on a site, where is a link getting that the most SEO juice? The most SEO juice. That's not the way. Oh my God, he knows the answer. That's why he backed away. I would say the first paragraph. Top of the HTML. Huh? Okay, some votes for top of the page, top of the HTML. And the first paragraph. First paragraph. Link in there, make sure it's a good reputable site that you're linking to. That is, enhances the article. It goes to someone just because it's a good link and it doesn't have that. And anchor text. Pay attention on the anchor text. Okay. Thank you. Good anchor text, good site, top of the page. Okay. That's the content on the page. Okay. Good, good. Hashtag good. I think that's kind of reasonable. I don't know, from Google site, we wouldn't say like where on the page you would need to put stuff to get the most value out of it. I think it really depends a lot on the context. But I think these are good tips. I mean, if it's an important link on a page, then it'll be on top of the page in general. So, but do your crawlbots know what's important? Ooh, I think Googlebot has. No, I was gonna say, you have evolved from that like drunk irritable toddler to a poor girl that's good at ignoring bullshit. So, I think they're better. So I think that's pretty good at understanding the intention both on placement and within the rest of site and how you treat the links in the content. But I am an optimist and get a lot of help for that. So how old is Googlebot? Would you say? 13. Wait, this conversation could get weird real quick. No, I think it would be weird. You're understanding websites and like you were saying taking bullshit, like, you know, like how old would you like, still? Well, see, bots work like dog ears. Yeah. But, I don't know, it doesn't matter if Googlebot evolved a little faster than us anyway. I mean, some of us, Googlebot was faster than myself, I should say, my humor stuck in the 15-year-old face, so. Okay, just leave me alone. Yeah, my name? I think he is already. Okay. Yeah, I don't know what advice to add to that. Okay. Okay. I forgot a question. I don't know you. It was an area where they said the rank brand is like a five-year-old. So that's, I remember there was an article about that, but anyways. Brand Scramble, what do you think? At Google right now, it's kind of like, still like a child that doesn't really understand it. It understands a lot of things, but there's still a long way to go. Of course, yeah. I think that's something where if you work outside of search, you might think that search is pretty much complete and like, what are all these people doing at Google? But when you work on the SEO side or in search, then you realize like there's things happening all the time and things are changing all the time. So basically at Googlebot has a short attention span and we need to keep everything above the fold. Users have a really short attention span. Yeah, users have a shorter attention span than at Googlebot. When is the last time you read a whole article? Very true. 2007 for me. That's only after I have good headers. Yeah, it's full of hoists. Absolutely formatting, so yeah. So you're the goodies for next year that you're going to be adding to a search console, like voice search add-ons or no? Oh, voice search is already in search console, but we just don't. Saying more in depth, like so we can really see. I don't know. So like when it comes to voice search, my feeling is that if you're an SEO and you're focusing on keywords and text on page, then you're not really doing voice search like the right thing. Because on voice, you have a lot more opportunity to do interactive things that you can't really do with just the normal page and focusing on keywords. Yeah, but what do you do when there's obsessive clients that are still wanting those keywords and, you know. We have clients. If you have to fight with them. But let him box you out, for real? The Friday board, you know, there's a meeting and it's like, yes, we still rank for this keyword, you know, seven years and we're still, you know, and then when they don't, they don't care about the other stuff. But anyways, I educate and I show, but definitely I think voice search is more like long tail and yeah, it's more creative and I think it's more fun, but it's something. It's something also that's more forward-looking at least at the moment where creating a voice bot to interact with is not easy. And it's not something that will guarantee business success, but it's something where if you practice with that now, if you try these technologies and tools out, then you have a bit of an understanding of where it might make sense and where it might not. And I think that's a reasonable thing to kind of do. And when talking with clients, obviously, like trying to sell them on a voice bot will be really hard because you have no idea what the business output will be. It feels similar to native app. Gonna make sense in specific cases, but it's not a worthwhile investment probably right now for everyone. I would spend time looking at the research and the data that's out there, like being actually does a good job putting out a lot of research on their voice data and how they're seeing it in search. And I think if you wanna be seen, start asking voice queries yourself that are related to your customers and see what's returning. Sit down and start using it and see what's happening. A lot of it might be coming from surprising sources. Like a lot of structured data is able to give those quick snippets out or really quick answers, but just start there. And if your client's bugging you, ask them to start asking keyword-rich queries to see if their responses are helpful or if they're even an appropriate answer. They have the right information to serve. A lot of them feel that all of it should be on our shoulders. There's things that they don't need to do. I describe the location for you, George. I believe that going into the voice search is the, again, content uniqueness to actually answer exactly what the customer is looking for. Because somebody did the study, I don't remember the company, but they found that some pages will show up on a zero position, even if they are ranking on a seventh page. So Google will realize that this page has the huge click rate. It has a conversion rate and how to meet content. It will just put the position zero answer right away without even ranking that page on the first page. Something like a frequently asked questions page? Well, I mean, it's something where, if it answers the user's question in a short and direct way, then I think that can be valuable, even if it doesn't rank first in a normal organic search results. You can be on page two and the rich snippet showing on page one, yeah. Exactly, but yeah, I mean, that's the, it was John's, it's John, I forgot his last name, but yeah, no, he did a YouTube video on that. But for sure, like, no, I see that. Yeah, but it still doesn't help answering, you know, the... Yeah, I mean, I don't, there's an absolute answer to a lot of people. Is there a way to see what people will be seeing? Cause especially with Siri on iPhones now going to Google, you know, obviously. It's already defaulted on Google. It's already. Yeah, all the iPhones already defaulted to Google, yeah. Cause the... In Siri, wasn't it, didn't it just switch from like Bing to Google? Yeah, yeah. And now, cause obviously Siri displays search results and everything unique. Is there a way to see how we would look or rank or show up there as opposed to the regular browser searching? I have no idea. But if it's a normal search result, you'll see the end result in Search Console. So you wouldn't be able to kind of have that theoretical view of like, if someone searched for this, then we would rank here. But you would see someone actually search for these things and we showed up here. So that's something you see, but you don't see it broken out by type of device for things like voice search. Okay, you guys are smiling too. That's probably coming in the future. Sounds like voice is something everyone is kind of looking for or more information on, trying things out. Yes, and how to. Yeah, I believe it's the next step for Google from going from mobile to voice because that's something that simplifies in life. Can we just ask a question and then we can answer it? So how would you use that for businesses? For businesses? Bring customers, bring clients to the page. Basically answer what they're looking for. So there's the question that voice is just really once it leads to a page. I think the more interesting question is how can a user get their answer satisfying just voice without say Siri directing you to it? Yeah, I don't think that's the most though. I mean, would that be like, I think in your case it's probably easier because people might say, oh, I want to buy this from Macy's and Google could theoretically say, okay, you won't get it tomorrow. Like in an ideal world, but for like a normal general business, how would you kind of see that kind of transactional interaction or like the business value installation of services like apps? Right, so voice query and answer kit, the voice service could recommend an application to install. So that's a good distribution. Okay. I just feel before even people get into voice, like they're going through like 10 Google reviews or whatever other reviews it is. And then they're going to the website and then they might make another voice search. That's from what I see now that's happening. That's going to become more voice search searches. But how am I going to, is what, is Google Home or Alexa going to read like, 10 Google reviews, which will take, you know, I want it fast. I don't want to have the reviews, you know. Alexa does, they have an open SDK. You can basically create your own app that will just, you know, you will say, Alexa, go to my website and then, you know, search for blah, blah, blah, and Alexa will read an answer for you. So, but this is something that you'll have to train Alexa for. Yeah, API needs to be trained a lot, so. Yeah. I think Google has API.AI, which has a new name that I forgot, which makes it fairly easy to kind of set up this interactive agent type set up. And there are lots of example codes I saw that might be interesting to try out as well. But it's something where I think at the moment, it's still at a stage where you're trying things out and nobody really knows what users will end up doing. So it's not something where you can go to a business and just say, I will set up a voice agent for you and you will make lots of money because yours is like the first peteria that has voice agents set up. Yeah, but you guys are pretty good at predictive. Like business models. They're very good. I have voice action API for Google. And Brooke, it looks like there's some pretty good documentation on the Google developer site and there's some Stack Overflow conversations. You can go check that out. I do, I read more of Yuval Harari's books now. I stopped reading blogs. I don't know who that is. Who's the bad? It is. It is. It is. Okay. Check my Twitter feed more often. Okay, we will check your Twitter. I hope you don't quote the whole book. You only have 280 characters. If they're wanting answers through voice search, is content length still going to be important for voice search? I don't know. So I guess if someone is searching for part of your page, then if you have a lot of content on your page, you have more parts that could be relevant. That's one aspect. But I think it's also one of those things where trying to take the traditional web search approach and just applying it to everything around voice might not be the right red answer. So I don't know. I think it's something where it's probably worth working with your users, maybe doing some user studies even to see how they would even try to find your business through something like a voice search. Or maybe you'll find out like, nobody's actually using voice search to search for my business at the moment. And I can just pause it for a year and look again a bit later. Because looking back at things like around the mobile, when people started using mobile more, in the beginning it was also the case that some people just didn't use mobile phones to do certain type of things. And businesses were kind of in a situation where I can make a mobile friendly site, but nobody's actually searching on mobile for my business. Now it has kind of really shifted in that people use mobile for everything. So if you look back and say, oh, nobody was using mobile, therefore I never make a mobile site, then you might be missing this part. Just like you might be missing that when it comes to voice later on. Makes sense. But now since people are using Facebook, if let's say we drive traffic to our site from Facebook, does that increase our crawl budget? I don't think we care at all. What is that? So if people are going to your site through Facebook, that's awesome for you. But I don't think Googlebot really cares. Doesn't care. Not in the sense that Googlebot doesn't like your site because you're cool on Facebook. It doesn't affect how Googlebot crawls and indexes a site. OK, so they don't really have the page ranking. Sorry, go on. And they're trying on your site, so that's a good thing. And Google likes it. So more people come to your website. Better? Yes? I can tell you that it's coming from a site that, I know you guys don't believe in the domain authority or page authority, but if it comes from a site that might be a little bit more well-established, wouldn't that help us with rankings? Not necessarily. No. OK, then I'll leave it to you. Yeah, I think there's an indirect effect there, of course. If people are going to your website and they like what they find, they might recommend it. And we can see that recommendation. But just by going to a site doesn't necessarily mean that it's a good thing. Otherwise, you would put your ifame on other people's sites and it would load your site all the time. That doesn't really mean anything. But you're taking the 13-year or 14-year consideration just a little bit. Like it's a small signal, though. Now, I've been around for 13, 14 years in the block. I don't think we use that traffic from Facebook at all. I mean, I don't even know how we would be able to track that from web search. Yeah, social means there's no correlation. Yeah. All right, one last question before we close out. What's happening December 31st, 2016, at midnight? What are you planning? 2016. 2016. 2017. What are you planning in the years? Is there any algo coming? I don't know. Champagne and shrimp cocktail, baby. Yes, I understand Cooper and Google Algo all happening at the same time. All right, Massimo, all right, so over to you. First one. And if I have time, I'll do that. We've noticed on a couple of client sites that Google, instead of using the meta title and description, went out and put content on the page. Only happening on a couple of clients, not all. Research says if the description is spammy or other things like that, Google can opt to do that. And we pride ourselves on not writing spammy stuff. So I'm not understanding. I don't understand why, or if that's happening more often now, or are you guys going to take away the meta's? All right, I guess from a general point of view, we try to rewrite the titles and the snippets based on the user's query and the type of device that they have, because the amount of space that we have. So that's kind of one thing that sometimes throws people off in that you do a site query and you see your title there and we think that's what users see. But actually, depending on what users search for, we might show a different title. To try to make it clear that this page is really about what the user is searching for, so they should really go there. So it's not necessarily a sign that we think your titles are bad. It's just that we think for this query, maybe a different title would be more useful. But that's done algorithmically. So sometimes we get it wrong, too. So if you see us getting the titles really wrong, then having the query and the page where you saw this would be useful feedback, and I can pass that on to the team. Now, is that something that you are doing more now than before and trying to judge and adjust that for the query? Has that changed recently? I don't think so. But I'm hearing more people talking about it, so maybe some dial somewhere has been twisted a little bit. Thank you. That's what I do. I don't think it's by design. We're messing with everyone's title as well. OK. Perfect. That's a question about our site. All right. It's about 301 redirects. So we did a 301 redirect. We did a rebrand about a couple of years ago. And then the site traffic has kind of consistently been about 50% of what it used to be. And we just haven't been able to get it back up to where it was. Concurrent, when we did the 301, we got a penalty. Because we tried to switch from folders to subdomains concurrent with the 301. I think it was really messy, so we got a penalty after that. So that was third up in a couple of weeks. But the traffic kind of just stayed a little bit. What kind of penalty was that? It was for pure spam. OK. That's pretty harsh. So we had Michael Coddham, an SEO consultant at our site. He said that it's probably something because of that. Because everything on our site looks really good. He said the onsite off. So usually the pure spam manual action is something that is really for like regress spam, not like a technical thing, like subdomains, subdirectories. That was the only thing that we did. We switched from folders to subdomains on the destination site. And then we redirected the old site to that new site. But we did it all at once. So did you get the manual action on the new site? On both. On both. OK. Because these things are done manually from the manual action. And it would mean that someone from the WebSend team was looking at both of your sites and saying, well, there's nothing of value here. We can take them out completely, which sounds a bit at odds with what you're saying. It's kind of a reasonable site. Right. So I don't know what might have been the case. It might also be that there was some kind of hacking going on, if possible. Did you file? User. Yeah, we did the reconsideration. It got lifted pretty quickly. We explained in really good detail exactly what we're doing and what we're adding. We took office of domain to figure that that was the problem. And we looked at when the graphic just kind of has been much lower. Yeah, it's hard to say. I mean, it's always tricky in situations where you're comparing something from before manual action and after, because after you perhaps cleaned up the issues that caused this artificially high ranking. But nothing else changed. It wasn't like back when it started going like that. I don't know. Probably have to look into the site. Action went away. It's been a little over two years, two and a half years. So I don't think from the manual action that would be kind of lingering, because once that's lifted, it's lifted. And everything else is essentially just out of it. So probably the current ranking is more like what we think the site should be ranking for. And maybe before we had that free bonus that the Google algorithm figured it out. So how long does it take Google to rank a new content page? Less than one hour. Sometimes, sometimes, yeah. I mean, we can index it very quickly. But I think a new page within an existing website is a lot easier for us to understand than a completely new website, because a completely new website, we have no idea of the content. What we should be doing there. And we make some assumptions, and we show it in search. And then over time, it kind of settles down into where we think it should be. Negative SEO? No, I don't think so. I mean, Michael and we had another guy, CK Chow, look in, they both said that something is definitely wrong with your site. And the ranking is not, based on everything that we see, it looks like everything else. I don't think you can really say what the ranking should be. I think that's kind of the tricky part. You can look at things like the links and the content on the site, and you're like, oh, this should be here. Well, it's up to the competition, I guess. We use so many factors for quality indexing and ranking, it's really hard to say. I think with the exception of the first question that we had, if you don't rank for your company name and the company name is not a generic word, then that's kind of something a bit different here. But for normal content on your site, it's really hard to say where you should be ranking. Just a close look for the woman who had the April night say, I found the forum post. Oh, thank you. Thank you. I'll still be there, I don't have any later today. Thank you. Can I just ask John a quick question about that? You were just mentioning the fact that we don't rank for our business name is unusual. Does that sound like a penalty of some kind to you? But if it were a penalty, you would definitely see that. That would be manual action, but it might be that our algorithms are getting something confused. Right. Do you know where we could go from here? Would you just advise to speak to somebody like Marie and keep trying to get advice from SEO professionals? I would focus on the forum. And if you don't get a good reply there, I just keep banging at the forum door. It looks like Suzanne already provided you some answers, but I'll hop in there. I think she's got it. Other folks in the forum, other top contributors and other volunteers will come hop on. So I think it's a really good place to get pure retail where. Ashley is pretty good. You're the best. I did something wrong. I didn't really understand forum etiquette. I started a new post and I got into a bit of trouble with the legy who was helping me. So I've been a bit scared to post another question, but it might be the wrong thing to do, but I don't know where else to go. We'll figure it out. Just I'll bump it and we'll figure it out and take a look. John, can you make a small suggestion regarding submitting something to the index? I mean, you can do that now, but just type in submit index and the little search box will show up without having a Google search console on the site. So suppose you want to index something too quickly. Can you create like a page where people can just go in there as opposed to just typing it in, submitting to the index without having a search console? You can just bookmark that search. What? You can just bookmark that search. I know, but it's kind of sometimes. Yeah, I don't know what the plan is to kind of expand on that. It's just a suggestion. That's all. Cool. All right, so let's take a break here. Thank you all for joining. It's been good having people from Australia and the US and from Canada and New York join in. Hope to see you all again in one of the future hangouts or in the help forums or on Twitter or somewhere else. And thanks again. Thank you. This is gonna be just... Thanks for all your help. Thanks for your help. Thank you. No, we really appreciate your time, guys. Bye, everyone. Bye. Thank you. Bye-bye.