 All right, welcome, everyone, to today's Webmaster Central Office Hours Hangouts. My name is John Mueller. I'm a Webmaster Trends Analyst here at Google in Switzerland. And part of what we do are these Office Hour Hangouts. And today, we're trying a fairly different setup because the YouTube Live Hangouts are going away soon. So we'll see how this works out. As always, there are a bunch of questions that were submitted. I can run through some of those. But if any of you want to get started with the first question, feel free to jump on in. If not, it looks like you're all muted. So I don't know if you probably need to unmute to speak up. But otherwise, I'll just get started. And you can jump in whenever something pops up. All right, let's see the questions. So the first one is fairly long. My question contains a little bit of critique on Google's practices recently. And it essentially goes into the general theme of Google showing stuff in the search results. And then Webmaster is not seeing so many clicks through the website. And how far will this lead in the future? Where does Google draw the line? I think, first of all, thank you for this question. I think it's something that is really important for us. It's something that is really something on the top of our mind, essentially every day as we work in search. And we work with different search features. It's something that is critical for us for the long-term survival of the web ecosystem and the search ecosystem in that we need to make sure that when you're providing something for a search that you also get enough back that there is really this kind of almost like a deal between Google and the publishers in the sense that if you work hard to create some good content and we can show that in search and send traffic your way, that the traffic that you get from that is worthwhile your effort. And that's something that comes into play essentially for every search feature that we have, regardless of how much we show in search or how little we show in search. It's something that is always kind of there. And on the other hand, I think this is also something from a publisher side that you can also keep an eye on, where you can think about what do you want to provide in search and which kind of content would you prefer to only provide on your website? There are different mechanisms that you can use to do that. And through those, you can kind of adjust that over time as well. And finally, I think there is one aspect that's also really important in that for most businesses when they're online with a website, the actual important metric for them is not how many clicks they get from search, but more like how many customers they get. How do they convert those customers? So for example, if you're a small business that is active in a local community and someone is searching for your opening hours, they don't need to go to your website to see those opening hours. That's not really the way that you kind of get value back out of search, but rather, if they see those opening hours directly in the search results, they'll be able to come by and visit your business in person when it's open. So a lot of these things are aspects where people don't necessarily need to go to a website directly to bring value back to that business. But anyway, this is something that, from my point of view, I don't think there is an absolute answer. And I suspect there'll be some shifts back and forth over time as things settle down, as new aspects in search become available, as new types of user behavior becomes more prominent, as new types of websites show up and move along. So that's something where I expect this to kind of shift a little bit over time. But in general, it is something that we care about deeply. And it is something that we don't take lightly. It's not that we just go out there and say, well, we can do this in the search results. Therefore, we will do that. But rather, where we think about what does it actually mean? What does this provide? How does this provide value for the user? And how does this provide value for the publishers as well? All right. Presumably, John, Google doesn't make any money if no one ever leaves the search results anyway. So you need people to keep clicking on things. I think that's probably the case. I mean, yeah. There's no one's going to advertise if the answers are always front and center. It will get to the point where people will say, well, that's the end of my budget, which is the end of Google. I think that's kind of the long-term look as well. Anyway, as long as there's kind of this notion of search is useful to give you more detailed information, then I think that's something that keeps people coming back to search. Whereas if they just get all of the answers directly, then they don't even need to look into more details. And then why do we even index more content? But it's always tricky because you're balancing kind of short-term interests and long-term interests. And with any business, it's like you kind of struggle with that as well. My client is a federal medical center, and all content goes through the doctors first before it is published on the website. I think it's a good idea to let our users and Google know that the information on the website is trustworthy. I understand that I might just add, for instance, some info about the doctor who checked the information and some words like the content was checked before publication by Dr. John Mueller and also put a link to their personal web page. But what's the best way to tell Google about this? And should I do it at all? So I think, first of all, should I do it at all? I think that's something that you probably have answered already in that if you're providing information on your web page and it is kind of checked or written created by someone who has a lot of knowledge on that topic, then that's something I would definitely highlight. So there are lots of ways that you can highlight that on your web pages. You can link to those profiles. You can put text on the pages. Anything to really show users when they come to your pages that there's actually something valuable here, that they can trust this information, that this is something that's reliable, that they can forward on to their friends without having to worry that maybe it's not correct or so. So in that regard, anything that you can do to make that clear that probably makes sense for users, that's something you can also check with normal A-B testing. And that probably also makes sense for search engines in that regard as well. My question is regarding duplicacy in content. Many students who are studying for a certain degree recognizable worldwide, and they're getting the same questions for their assignments. I am associated with some people who are providing information and solutions to students who are looking for an answer on the internet. My question is that if I publish their assignment questions, which are quite lengthy and the same worldwide and the solutions, which might be different on my website and other competitors do the same, does Google consider all of this content duplicate content? Wow, I wish I had this kind of service as a kid. It would have made my homework so much easier. I don't know if I would have learned as much, but fine. So in general, what happens here is we would probably recognize that certain blocks of text on this page are the same across multiple pages. The whole page themselves are different, of course. So we would index all of these pages because they're unique pages. But there are certain blocks of text that are the same. And in practice, what would happen here is if someone is searching just for one of those blocks of text, we would probably pick one or two, maybe a handful of sites that have this text on them and show those in the search results. Because the other sites where the same text is on there would essentially show the same thing. So for example, if you have a really long question and someone searches for the first sentence in that question, then we would assume that these pages are essentially about the same topic. And we would pick maybe a couple of those that we know and show those in the search results. And it's not that the others would be shown less visibly in search or would be ranked lower, but rather that we would filter them out because we think that essentially this is the same thing, the snippet that we would show in the search results is the same thing across all of those users. So that's essentially what would happen there. With regards to duplicate content, we would consider that block to be duplicate content. But again, the whole page itself, because you have a different answer, that would be something that we would consider to be unique. We would index those separately. So from that point of view, I think it's fine to go down this route. I think from a practical point of view, if you're just starting down this direction and there are already a lot of sites out there that are covering the same questions, especially if you say that the assignment questions are the same worldwide, then there's probably going to be a lot of competition. And I don't know if with a new website, it would be that easy to get in to this bigger group of sites that are providing content essentially on the same thing. The page has FAQ contents, which are written on images in their alt text, but not on the body text. Is that OK with the rich result guidelines to mark that up? I think theoretically, we might be able to pick that up. But practically, I would recommend making sure that the text is actually visible on the page. So what kind of happens with the alt attribute for images is we do pull that into the page. So it's kind of on the page. We can kind of see that. It's obviously not as good as if we have normal real HTML text that we can pull in. So that's one aspect. And on the other hand, for the rich results types, we do check to see if this text that you've marked up, for example, if you're using JSON-LD markup where it's not marking up the HTML itself, we do check to see if that is actually visible on the page. So that's something which is kind of colliding in a weird gray zone area where I would say it's possible that it would work, but it's definitely not guaranteed. And it's probably not something that I would try to rely on. So if you really need to have the FAQ rich results visible for your pages, or if there's some other type of rich result type that you really want to target, then I'd recommend making sure that you're really using text on the page and not putting the text in images. I see that Google does web hosting with a specific web domain. I'm learning every day, and I was wondering if you can use WordPress on a domain hosted by Google. At this time, I'm using WordPress with another company hosting the domain and using Google products like YouTube for my business. Is there any advantage or disadvantage to group everything under Google? So first of all, I don't know exactly how the hosting side at Google works, so that's something kind of on the side. My understanding is you can run normal servers on Google Cloud, for example, and with that, you could run WordPress as well. But my understanding there is you basically have to configure those servers yourself, and you have to get all of that set up and maintain yourself. So probably there's a lot of technical effort involved in running WordPress on Google Cloud. And if you're just getting started, maybe that's kind of too much to really make sense for a smaller website when you're just getting started. I don't know. It's possible there are easier ways to do that on Google Cloud nowadays, but that's kind of how I remember it. There are other setups that you can use that run on Google Cloud as well, which are a lot easier to use. For example, Blogger or Google Sites. However, they're set up completely separately. So if you're currently using WordPress, you'd have to essentially recreate your whole website on those other services. My recommendation in general for this would be to try to find a good, good hoster. If you want to continue using WordPress, maybe you already have a good hoster that's taking care of things like updates and making sure that all of the security patches are installed, all of those things, those are really important. If you're hosting your website with a service like WordPress, so that's kind of what I would aim for there. With regards to hosting everything under Google or not, that's something from a search point of view is totally up to you. You can use everything on one hoster. You can use multiple hosters to host your content. You can even do things like hosting your textual content with one provider and your images with another provider. That's something that some sites like to do. There's no advantage or disadvantage from a search engine optimization point of view of hosting everything together. There are sometimes speed effects that play a role, where depending on how you set up your hosting, how you configure it, your website might be faster or be a little bit slower. But those are kind of technical details that apply to any kinds of hosting. So it doesn't matter from our point of view, for search, if you host everything with Google or if you host everything with different providers, that's totally up to you. And from a practical point of view, I would aim for something that is secure, that works well in the long run, and that makes it easy for you to maintain. So you essentially decide what level of effort you want to put in for maintenance. And if you're OK with doing a lot of hands-on work to keep your server running, then maybe you host it yourself. If you prefer to have someone else take care of this and make sure that nothing breaks while you're on vacation, then I would work to find a good hoster that does all of this for you. Wow, all of the people trying to join in kind of keeps pinging up here. And I have to admit them all in individually. So that's kind of weird. I hope you don't hear the ping noise every time. We'll see if I can find a way to avoid that. I'm having a toughest time getting the mobile index to recognize my site's new code. The desktop bot sees an index as the update. But on mobile, Google still sees and displays the old site's code, meta tags, et cetera. I would probably need to know a URL from your website. So it sounds like you've posted this before. If you have a thread in the Webmaster Help Forum that I could take a look at, that might be useful. In general, it's not that we have a separate index for mobile indexing. Essentially, we have one main index. And in that index, we keep either the mobile version or the desktop version, depending on whether or not a site has switched to mobile-first indexing. And that's essentially the version that we use in search. The one aspect that's a little bit, I don't know, different is if you have a separate mobile site, then we will index, again, the same version. So either the mobile or the desktop version. But we'll show the separate mobile site in the search results for users on mobile devices. So that might be something that you're seeing that we're showing the separate mobile URL for users on mobile. Another thing that you might be seeing is that in the mobile search results, the UI is a little bit more limited in the sense that the page isn't as big as on our desktop. So things like titles and descriptions, they have to be a little bit shorter. And that might also be something that you're seeing, that on desktop, we're able to show your full title, for example. And on mobile, we have to shorten it to match what would fit on the screen. And by shortening it, we essentially process it algorithmically to figure out what would be a good title for this search result. And sometimes that can result in our algorithms picking something that's not really what you would want to pick. So it's not so much that we're indexing the wrong version of your pages, but more that we're indexing a version of your page. And the one that we're showing in the search results, that might not be the one that you'd prefer to have shown. But I'm kind of guessing here at this point, because I don't really know what your site is and what that looks like. So if you have a thread in the Webmaster Help Forum where you could point to and where you have some details on what the search will be really useful. Yeah, hi, John. Hi. So regarding this m.n.w.w., I just wanted to know one thing. What happens just reverse wise, what happens if one person does not have content in desktop, but has content in mobile and a smartphone is redirected to m.n.w. In this case, in desktop, that content will be shown. Just reverse to older days. So how do you mean, again, if 1% of the website is desktop only? No, no, no, not like this. But some piece of the content is available in m.version, which is not available in www.version or desktop version. And because it is mobile, first of all, it is redirected to m.n.w. Finds that content. In this case, the truth is that in desktop, that is not available. How Google will assume that in desktop, whether it is available or not? With mobile-first indexing, we would only index the content on the mobile page. So if there's less content on the mobile page, we would be able to index less. And if there's more content on the mobile page, we would be able to index more. We would still show the desktop URL for users on desktop. But we would show those search results based on what we've indexed for the mobile version. So it means that the chances are that in desktop, the content is not available. Still, Google will show in desktop result. That's possible, yeah. I mean, it's probably pretty rare. But theoretically, it's possible. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Obviously, thanks. Sure. All right. Is using display none for text images content bad for SEO? For example, I want to hide some keywords. As I suppose, it doesn't make any sense, but webmasters still do it. So you can hide text on a page. Essentially, from our webmaster guidelines, we do have a guideline that says you should not use hidden text on a page. So that's one thing to watch out for there. From a practical point of view, there's sometimes reasons why you would hide something, for example, on an initial load of the page, where maybe you have a tabbed interface, where if you click on one part of the page, then it switches to a different tab and suddenly makes that content visible. From our point of view, that's perfectly fine. So if someone from the web spam team were to look at a web page like that, then the initial kind of hidden content on the page is clear for the web spam team that actually this content can be made visible. So it's not problematic from that point of view. However, if you're using display none just to hide text to try to put more keywords on a page, then that's something where the web spam team might take action on that. That's also something where our algorithms in general might take action on that and say, well, that looks a lot like keyword stuffing. And in general, I would recommend if there is something important on your page that you want this page to rank for, make sure that it's visible on the page. Don't hide it somewhere, because it's something that search engines do watch out for this. They are able to recognize which parts of a page are visible and not. And it's something that users kind of watch out for as well, where if we show them something and search and they click on it and they go to that page and actually what they were looking for is not there at all, then they will feel misled. They'll go back to search and search for something else. They'll feel that Google did them a mis-service by sending them to a site like this. So from that point of view, if there's something you want to have shown in search and you want to have users find your pages for, then make sure that it's visible. Don't hide it. Don't be shy with that. And at the same time, don't think that you artificially need to stuff words into your page that users wouldn't have any use for. But rather, think about what kind of the long-term goals of your site are. And make sure that if you want to rank for something, that you actually have content for that so that when users come to your web page, that they kind of are all in the mood of, well, this is really fantastic content. I should recommend it to other people as well. I have a client with an online store. It's a custom website. Their products have many variations, like size, different diameters, and so on for a single product. They're listed as separate products, which means that one product is listed multiple times because somehow I got muted. OK. So it means that one product is listed multiple times for different sizes, which is something where the product description is the same on all variations. How much of an issue is that? So this is a fairly common setup and a fairly common question that people bring up every now and then. From our point of view, if you have a product with a lot of different variations, there are essentially two approaches that you can take. One is to make sure that the product and all variations are indexed separately so that you have, for example, I don't know, a piece of pipe and 85 millimeters diameter and a piece of pipe in 100 millimeters diameter and so on. That's one approach. The other approach would be to say that you just have the individual products on the website. And all of the variations are listed on that product page. So you would have one product being a piece of pipe and you have 85 millimeters, 100 millimeters, 150 millimeters, diameter, all of these variations as well. So those are kind of the two approaches that you can take there. And from a practical point of view, I usually recommend that you try to work on having fewer URLs rather than more URLs. So I would tend towards trying to go to having one product and all of those variations listed on that same product page just because it makes it a lot easier for us to kind of crawl the rest of your website because you don't have as many URLs. And because of you only having one main product page for this type of product, it's something where it's a lot easier for us to recognize that this is really the landing page that you want to have shown for queries about this product. So that's kind of the one approach. On the other side, if you're saying that the individual variations of this product are so important that people explicitly search them out, then maybe it would make sense to have individual landing pages for that. For example, if you have different size pipes, maybe that's not so much of an issue. But if you have this one really unique size that is not a standard size that people need for, I don't know, some random purpose, and they explicitly search for that, then that's something where maybe it would make sense to essentially provide that on a separate page as well. So those are kind of the two approaches that I would take there with regards to how much of a problem is it to having all of the variations listed as individual products. That's not really that much of a problem. Like I said, it's really more a matter of, well, we have to crawl all of these different variations. We have to index them all individually. And we have to figure out which one of these pages to show prominently for your site, for queries for that product. So it's something where probably for different sizes, it would make sense to fold them together for things that are really unique variations. I would tend to separate them out into separate products. Good job. Hi. OK, so I have one similar question on that. So we have a hotel website there for our hotel rooms or for the specific hotels. So we do provide our landing pages. And that basically is our tag team, basically, a mentor structure where it's keep on changing, like with the parameter. So how are we going to tackle that part? I mean, we have already added canonical, but I mean, I have seen a lot of kind of the indexing or the crawling is starting happening for all those kind of conditions of the product. So is there kind of only way to comment on if we can handle just by the canonicals or comment? Somehow we can further fix it by comment. So that Google can able to see the way they have a lot of variation for this particular product. But ultimately, we want to rank for one page. I didn't quite understand the whole question. There's a lot of noise in the background. I think what you're saying is you have a lot of different URL variations for the same product page, essentially? Yes. Yeah. OK. So that feels like it's essentially a question of how to encourage Google to pick one canonical URL and focus the crawling and indexing on that one. Is that right? True. Yeah. So for that, there are different things that you could do. If this is something that is really on a large scale for your website, then I would recommend looking at the URL parameter handling tools, especially if these different URL variations are with different parameters attached to it. So everything behind the question mark where you have maybe, I don't know, the affiliate key equals this, or, I don't know, color variations equals this, then that's something with the URL parameter handling tool. You can give us a lot of information on which URL parameters are important and which ones we can skip. That's one thing. The URL parameter handling tool is a bit tricky in the sense that if you tell us parameters are meant to be ignored and actually they're important for your website, then probably we will still ignore them. So that's something where you have to make sure that you're not telling us to ignore too much. The other things that can help are essentially the normal things that you would do within a website. So trying to make sure that all of the internal linking goes directly to the URLs that you want to have kept. That's something that helps a lot that ideally you have redirect set up to the URLs that you want to have kept, that you use URL canonical to tell us about the URL that you prefer to have kept for those individual variations and that you put the version that you want to have kept in the sitemap files as well. So with all of those kind of hints that you can give us there, that's something where if we have noticed that there are multiple URLs that they lead to essentially the same product page or the same hotel or same location page, then we'll take all of those URLs and try to figure out which one of those we should focus on the most. And we use all of those different factors to figure out what the best canonical URL for this case would be. And when we pick a canonical URL, we tend to show that more in the search results. Not that it would rank more, but instead of the other variations of that same URL. And we would try to focus our crawling on that variation. So for example, if you have a URL with a parameter and a URL without a parameter, and we pick the one without a parameter as canonical, we'll probably crawl the one without a parameter a lot more frequently than the other ones. So that makes it a little bit so that it's less a technical issue with regards to crawling. But obviously, we still have to discover all of those URL variations first before we can pick a canonical. So if you're creating a lot of new content and at the same time, lots of separate URL variations are available for that new content, then that still means we have to spend a lot of time crawling all of those variations for one time at least and then figuring out, oh, we can pick a canonical and focus on the canonical URL. Thanks, Sean. So it's a lot of things. So basically, I can just tell you the scenario over here. So we have like, I mean, one, the one of parameters that will have a check-in, check-out sort of parameters. The other one with the rooms were ideal, maybe because of the category of the rooms. So usually, for internally as well as more internally, for first, we try to keep it as a without parameters. But for certain cases, let's say, from the JS links or something, it's somehow linked as well from the parameters you want. So that's my question, like, when if I look at the kind of my link profile internally, so the majority of the links are coming through the parameters. It's not with the, you can say, the without parameter. So in that particular case, I'm assuming the Google will give more weightage to the parameter you want, so basically, they are linked more as compared to my other one. I think in a case like that, if you can't kind of change the internal linking, then I would focus on all of the other aspects, especially the URL parameter handling tool, I think that would probably be really useful for you there. And for canonicalization, we don't just focus on one aspect. We look at the bigger picture and we kind of say, well, these factors align with this URL and these factors align with this other URL. And these are more important, so we'll pick that URL. So that's something, sometimes you can't fix the internal linking. Or sometimes you have issues where you can't place a canonical on the page. And it's not that we require all of that to be the same, but the more consistent you can make it, the more likely we'll follow what you prefer to have. Sure, thanks, John. John, can I just have one follow up on the same thing? Sure. So canonical and URL parameter, if we are using both, does it mean that we are telling Google not to crawl that particular page? Therefore, it will never see the canonical. So like in the URL parameter, I am adding no URL to be crawled after this parameter. But all the URLs are there and they are pointing to canonical. So canonical will not be seen by Google. If we can't crawl those URLs, then we don't see the rel canonical link there. That's correct. So with the help of URL parameter, I am telling Google not to crawl, not by robot txt. So with the URL parameter tool, there are different options that you can provide there, including, I think, telling Google to crawl one representative URL instead of these URLs. So I don't know exactly what the phrasing is in the tool of hand. But the specified URL probably. Yeah, yeah. It's something where with the robot's text, for example, you basically say, don't crawl this. But with the URL parameter tool, you can give it a little bit more nuance and say, well, these are sort orders, for example. And this is the default. And just use that one to crawl. But with parameter, then the canonical URL I cannot specify. No, I don't know how the tool works kind of directly. But it's something where, I believe, for some variations, you can say crawl this variation of the URL. And in cases like that, we should be able to. Let me just check. So yeah, John, over here, I mean, Google provides first two options, whether the content is being changed or not. If it is not changing, then it's something we have to pick an option, OK, let the Google decide. And so if the content is changing, then it gives you the option in what manner it is changing. So maybe it is sorting. Is it filter? Or maybe you have a different sort of combination. Or even though if you do not show, maybe you can leave it as blank. And then just select, I mean, whether you want that URL to be crawlable or not. Yeah, yeah. I just opened the help center page. And it has different variations. So it's something where you can tell us which one we should pick. So Ramesh, this is the case for duplicate URL after your query parameter. All the URLs are duplicate content. In this case, I want to tell Google not to crawl any URL after that parameter. So in this case, John, I cannot use canonical. Why? Because canonical is main page, not after any query parameter. I don't quite understand. I feel like it would be really useful to have explicit examples of what you're looking at there. And for that, it would probably be useful to have something like a help forum post where you have some exact URLs that we can look at. And kind of give some input based on that. So I think that would be useful, because I'm really confusing doing that just live in the Hangout. And I have to double check the settings in Search Console how that actually looks. Yeah, sure. Sure. All right. Yeah, hi, Joe. Hi. Yeah, John, even I have the same doubt in URL structure. So let's say I have an URL in a folder level. So after domain.com and after one folder is there, and after the end of the URL is there, last URL is there. So in case I didn't create anything in a folder level, let's say for cars, www.abc.com slash cars, slash best cars in India. But www.abc.com slash cars, I didn't create any page. If a user go to the page, it will go to 404. So is there any impact we'll create for the final URL? Because there is nothing in a folder level, but still the final URL is there. That's fine. That's perfectly fine. That doesn't matter at all. We see URLs as identifiers of the content. And we don't expect that if you have a directory based structure that all of the folders will work individually, that's essentially something that you can have, but you don't need to have. And it's not something that would change anything from our point of view. Also, if you, for example, remove a lot of content on your website. So will it break the priority of the page? No, no. It's perfectly fine. Cool. All right. Let me run through some of the other. So it is not good, actually. I couldn't be able to hear your voice properly. Oh, OK. Sorry. No, it's perfectly fine to have this setup where you have folders and the individual folder URLs don't. Whoops. Again, it's completely fine to have folders and the folder URLs don't need to have content on their own. That's perfectly fine. All right. Let me see if I can. Sure. Let's run through some of the other questions that were submitted. Is using 302 redirects for affiliate links a bad practice? So you basically have slash vitamins, and it redirects to vitamin shop with your affiliate URL. Is that a problem or not? From our point of view, that's perfectly fine. There is nothing that we would consider bad there. From my point of view, because this is really nothing that provides any additional value for your website in the sense that it looks better by having redirects to your affiliate pages or not, personally, I would recommend using less complexity and not setting up these kind of redirects and just linking to that site directly. I think you just save yourself the effort of trying to maintain all of these things individually. Question about the site link search box? Not about how to implement it, but basically, how do I make it shown or not? So one of the things that I've seen with the site link search box is if you set up the markup for this on your site, then this is something that takes quite a long time to actually be in effect. So it's not like other types of content where we can see maybe crawl that page once or twice, and then we can show that rich result type. In the search results, the site link search box is something that we really need to see for the long run, and sometimes it takes a month, maybe even longer, to be visible in the search results. And also, the markup for the site link search box doesn't mean that we will show a site link search box for your site. But rather, if we show a site link search box for your site, then with that markup, we can pick the one that you prefer. If you have an internal site search, then we can show you and show that one instead. So those are kind of the tricky aspects there in that we don't always show this for most sites. And when you do provide this markup, we need to see it for a longer period of time before it's visible in the search results. Hey, John. So on this site link search box, so we have a main website, plus we have an international website as well. So if this site is so, it was appearing for my main domain, but it is not appearing for my other country website. But they are somehow in prison in support of structure. So how can I enable the same thing for my support of special websites? Yeah, again, we would see those as separate websites. And we don't always show the site link search box. So that's something where I think we might show it for one country version, but not the other country version. We might show it for one brand within a bigger company, but not for another brand. So that's something that, from our point of view, is just individual across different websites. So in that, basically, having a same brand, having a similar kind of practice, say, Google's saying this is one country's available, but not the other one. So what is the kind of idea behind it? Like I'm showing for the one country and not for the other? It's mostly something where we try to provide value for users when they search. And we try to provide it in a way that makes sense for the users. So in that sense, it's not something that we would always show for a website for queries, but rather when we can recognize that it makes sense to show it for users for specific queries, then we'll try to show that. So what you're probably seeing is that for some countries, we've noticed that it makes sense to show it to users. And for other countries, we're not sure yet. Or we see conflicting signals that tell us, well, maybe people just want to go to your home page or want to go to your main page for that brand, or maybe they interact with that website differently, all of those things. So that's something where it can be normal that for one country you see it, for another country you don't. All right. Thanks. Now, I wish there were an easier way to kind of force some of these things, but it is something that we've noticed that sometimes it makes more sense to show it, and sometimes it doesn't make as much sense. Let's see if I can run through some of the remaining questions. Using hreflang on all pages of a multilingual sitemap is that a wait, on all pages or on a multilingual sitemap, which is best. Both of those work. Sitemap or the on-page markup is retrieving images through JSON or jQuery SEO friendly. Sometimes it sounds like you're doing lazy loading, and we have a bunch of guides for lazy loading and search. So I would double check those. You can also kind of simply check the page with the mobile-friendly test to see if those images load or not. That's a good way to get a first glance. Let's see. We have a page like this one. There are a lot of areas that you can click on, and you have a pop-up with text. I don't like this design, but the designers do. And I would prefer that all text was visible to the user all the time without any pop-up. So my question is, how will Googlebot read this page? Will Googlebot kind of be able to click on the page or see the content itself? So I didn't have time to double check this particular page. But in general, there are two setups that can be done for this kind of behavior, where you have elements on the page that you can click on or that you hover over to see text. One is that the text itself is actually loaded when the page is loaded. And is just not visible by default. That's usually something that works fine for indexing. The other approach is that when you click on an element or you hover over an element, there's actually JavaScript that goes to the server and pulls that content and then shows that page. That's something that we would miss because we don't know where to click or where to hover with Googlebot's mouse. So those are kind of the two approaches there. One simple way to double check if it works or not is to take a piece of text that is shown in one of those pop-ups and just search for that. And if you can see that your page is being shown for that piece of text, then we can obviously index that content and show it in the search results. A question about paywall markup for subscription websites. There is an example for news article markup in the developer documentation. But how would you mark up a BBS or user reviews? I believe the flexible sampling markup is specific to news article and similar structured data types. So it would probably be stretching it to use that to mark up a BBS or kind of a forum-based setup, so I don't know if that would really be suitable there. I would double check how the type of markup would fit for your particular pages in the sense that I believe this wraps up to creative work in schema.org. And it might be that there is a subtype that fits the type of content that you have. If articles don't have images and the image element is required, is it fine to use a website logo for images in the paywall markup? That feels a bit wrong in the sense that the image would not be specific to that article. So that's something that I would personally try to avoid in a case like that. I also don't know if the image is actually a required property for the article markup. If it is, then that's something that obviously it would make sense to show an image that matches your actual content. You can think of it this way in that we show the image, for example, in the Discover feed together with the article. And if it were just your logo, then that would be kind of weird for users to see there. And it probably wouldn't encourage people to go to your pages if they just see kind of a generic logo instead of the actual content or an image that actually matches the content. I have a say, merge problem. I merged two large sites together six months ago. Tens of thousands of URLs involved. 301 redirects were made for everything. However, I noticed Google is still showing the old merge domain for many product queries that don't include the old site's name. What it is showing in the SERPs is only the old URLs. But with the new title tags, meta descriptions, clicking on the results for the old domain redirects you to the new one, these queries are mostly commonly used model numbers or product names by manufacturers. Why is Google showing my old domain? So I think on the one hand, site mergers always take a little bit longer. So that's something where I would expect it to take a couple of months. You said six months ago. So it seems like it has been up a couple of months. The other aspect there is that if you're seeing the content of the new page in the search results with the URL of the old page, then what is likely happening there is we're able to crawl those different variations of the URLs, like the old URL and the new URL. And we find the content there. So we find the new content. However, it's a matter for us now to figure out which URL we should show in the search results, which is kind of the canonicalization aspect there. So we see the new URL. We see the old URL. We see there's a redirect from the old URL to the new URL. So that's a pretty strong sign for us. However, there might be other signs that point at the old URL for us. So maybe some of the internal links have not been updated. Maybe the site map file has not been updated. Maybe there are other things that you can do to update like the canonical tags on these pages. Maybe you have hreflang annotations on these pages. All of those things essentially add up. And that's something where we will try to pick the appropriate URL to show in the search results. And it sounds like we're picking the old URL at the moment. One thing that might happen here is that this will just settle down over time. Another thing might be that you can kind of go through all of those different aspects and double check to make sure that they're all really pointing out the new URL. On the positive side, switching between the URLs does not change anything from the ranking. So just because we're showing your old URLs in the search results doesn't mean that the ranking lower or the ranking higher or any differently. We're essentially saying, for the slot in the rankings, we have multiple URLs that we can show with the same content. And we're going to show this URL, or we're going to show that URL. So from that point of view, it's not a critical thing that you need to resolve right away, but rather take your time, double check all of the details to make sure that all of the internal linking is correct. You can use some third-party crawler tools to double check the crawling of your website. There's some really good ones out there nowadays. Double check all of the annotations on your site, all of the things that are not visible by default, like the canonical link, any hreflang annotations that you have on there, all of those things, and make sure that they align with the new version. And then, over time, that should settle down again. Hi, John. What do you think about the practice of some big publishers tagging all outgoing links with rel nofollow? From what I know, the reasoning behind this is that with follow links, you would leak link juice and then rank worse. So that's definitely wrong. It's definitely not the case that if you use normal links on your website, that you would rank any worse than if you put nofollow links on all outgoing links. I suspect it's even on the contrary that if you have normal linking on your web page, then you would probably rank a little bit better over time, essentially, because we can see that you're part of the normal web ecosystem. So it's definitely not the case that you have any kind of ranking advantage by marking all outgoing links as nofollow. The one reason that I've seen from talking with a lot of publishers is that they're often just not sure which of these outgoing links are kind of paid links or placed there because of some arrangement with the author, or maybe they have paid articles as well in between, and they just don't know how to deal with that. And it's more a matter of they're kind of like trying to stay on a safe side of like, we will put nofollow on these links because we don't know which ones we can trust. And from my point of view, that is also problematic in the sense that I understand not knowing which links you can trust. But essentially, if you're a news publisher, you should trust what you're writing about, or you should be able to understand which part of the content that you write about is actual content that you want to have indexed like that that you want to stand for. And if these are things that you want to stand for, then make sure that you have normal links on there. Make sure that you're kind of referring to that content as something that, yes, I can stand behind this link because I researched this topic and this is the kind of the source. This is maybe some other resources that lead to more information on this topic. This is what I researched from. This is an authority that I'm quoting. All of these things are kind of reasons to place normal links on a page. So from that point of view, I would certainly find a way to make sure that you don't necessarily have to no follow every outbound link. Yeah, so, John? Yes. So you meant to say even we are putting no follow links or no follow links, whatever it is, it will never affect our rankings, right? I think I can never say never, but it definitely is not the case that if you no follow all of the links on your site, you will rank any better. Yeah, even if you put some no follow links on a website also, it doesn't mean that we will rank. Our rank will drop or our link just will pass because we are worrying about our link just only. Like let's say if you are just putting 10 no follow links of other sites and of course, of course as per the theory in deadlines, maybe we just want to know that our link just is getting fast and because of that our authority will get down. So is that true? I don't think you would see any change on your site's page rank with regards to kind of no follow links or normal links. Yeah, because you have tools like HRF, even when we just read about the blogs, even they are saying that if the site's having 70 plus authority sites, then you can just give the link over there, but they didn't mention that whether it's a do follow or no follow. But here we are talking over the same, if you are putting no follow and do follow, it will never affect the rankings. So that's what, of course we know that if you put do follow, the link just will pass, but again some controversial things are happening. I don't quite follow your question, but again it's something where having normal links on a web page for content that you want to stand for, that's perfectly fine, that's totally expected from our point of view. Of course in the U.S. we are seeing some U.S. sites, of course they are just getting links and they are just putting links of other sites also, of course they are ranking on top, but here only we are worrying about putting do follow links or no follow links. So I think first of all I wouldn't focus too much on what other sites are doing and I wouldn't assume that other sites are always just ranking because of the links that they got, but rather I'd really just focus on your own sites and make sure that what you're providing there and what you're linking to matches what you want to stand for with those pages. And it's also not something where you can say, well I will no follow all of these links, but I will link to CNN and Google and Wikipedia because that looks good. That's not something from our point of view that would make your pages look any more important than they are, but rather link to the sources that you want to have linked to, link to the places that you think make sense for your users and if there are things that you're doing where maybe you have an ad on a page or maybe you're working together with a friend who also has a webpage, then of course, those are the kind of things you would like to no follow because it's clear that this is a link that is there kind of for other reasons, but everything else where you're linking between from your site to some other site because you're providing kind of saying this is a reference or this is a source or this is more information that you can look at and definitely just link normally. There's no reason to put a no follow there just kind of because you're afraid that if you like to link out too much that's somehow problematic. Yeah, sure, thanks. Sure. All right, we're a bit over time and wow we still have so many questions left so I don't think I can manage to get through those. I think we'll stop here. What I'll do now is pause the recording and upload that to YouTube and hopefully that just works. As always, thank you all for joining in. Thanks for the many questions. It's cool to see that more people can join here now and I'll set up the dates for the next couple versions as well and we can see if this setup continues to work. Unfortunately, we don't have a live stream for these anymore, at least not at the moment but we do have the recording so that's good. All right, then I wish you all a great weekend and hope to see you all again in one of the future episodes. Bye everyone. Bye. Bye Joe. Bye John. Now if I can figure out how to stop the recording. Ha ha ha.