 Well, well, well, isn't that lovely? Hello, and welcome to the very first virtual Search Central Live event that we are doing. My name is Martin Splitt. I am working for Search Relations at Google. And I am kind of the reason why this event is happening. And I hope that this pilot event is going to go well for you as well as it is going to go for us. And I'm super, super excited to have you all here with me. And I hope that you are making lots of use of the ask a question feature. You can actually also just let us know with random remarks. It doesn't necessarily have to be a question here in this specific session because this is a fireside chat. And so I'd like to introduce and welcome our host for this lovely chat, which is Cherry. Hi, Cherry. How's it going? Hi, Martin. It's all good. And hello, everyone. Welcome to the Search Central Live fireside chat. Shall we introduce our guests? Yes, we should. So I'll bring them in. OK, but thank you for joining us today and maybe tonight for some of you. Yeah. So I will be your host for this fireside chat for the next half an hour. My name is Cherry. Hi, how are you? I am a search advocate at Google. And joining me here today, we have three exciting guests. So Martin, you already met him. We have Ashley, Berman Hale. And we have Danny Sullivan here as well. And I think we're going to introduce them one by one. Let's welcome them one by one. So let's start with Ashley. She is the director of technical SEO consulting at Deep Crawl. Welcome, Ashley. We're so glad that you are here. Thank you for joining us. Do you want to give a little introduction about yourself? Sure. Thank you for having me. I will try to be appropriate on this call. And not blow any kisses as I hang out. Been doing that. Yes, I lead a great technical SEO team at Deep Crawl. And I'm also on the board for United Search and Inclusion and Diversity Search Incubator or Speaking Incubator for Search. Wonderful. Thank you. We have Danny here as well. Danny is a search liaison at Google. Hi, Danny. How are you doing? Good. I probably have the best of all the time zones of all of you. I feel bad. What time is it for you now? It's only around 4 o'clock. For me, everybody else is in non-social, non-normal hours. I'm totally bad. I'll make up for it in the future, I'm sure. Thank you. Thank you for making time for us. And Martin, are you still there? Is it 3 a.m. for you? Are you publishing? It's actually 1 a.m. So it's not too bad yet. But your time will only progress, so it can only get better. Hang in there, Martin. So Martin is the man behind the Search Central Live event today as well. So he probably hasn't slept for the past nights just to bring us all here. Yeah, I have been a little nervous about this. Yes, that is very, very true. OK, do you want to tell us more about why we are running this fireside chat, Martin? And why are we running this Glitch Central Live? Yes, very much. So as you know, Search Central or Google Webmasters in the past, one part of what we really care about is the community. And we know that you all out there had a wild ride last year, as probably we had as well. And especially for us, last year has been weird because we couldn't run any in-person events. We really, really love to have what used to be the Google Jans and then the Webmaster Conferences where we could just meet and hang out and talk about all sorts of things and have fun together and laugh and discuss different things and challenges and ideas. And that has been a little hard last year. And we had a bunch of events that were us sharing information with you all. We started a bunch of new video series like the Sustain Monetized Websites from Aurora. But we didn't really have that much in terms of the dialogue. We had the Webmaster Conference, the Virtual Webmaster Unconference last year. There was also a pilot that we're going to repeat this year again where we had a dialogue and a discussion. But discussions are usually very limited to a small amount of people. So we had 100-something participants there. It was awesome. But I wanted to have something where everyone can participate. And so we chose to run this virtual event where everyone can sign up. And a bunch of people, a bunch of you did, we have 2,600 sign ups, actually over 2,600 sign ups. And a bunch of people are already saying hi in the Q&A system here, which is cool. Because we hope that in this fireside chat we can discuss a little bit what happened last year at Google and also in the community. That's why we have Ashley here to talk a bit from the perspective of the community. And then we want to look into what's coming this year. And also we want to discuss what people are wanting to discuss out there. So if you have any questions or if you have any remarks to the things that we discussed here, please put them into the question form and let us know. I'm really, really looking forward what we'll all come up with, right? Yes, that's great. And before we get started, let me cover a few housekeeping items. So firstly, like Martin said, we highly recommend that you ask questions. So feel free to drop them in the there should be an ask a question button somewhere below the video. You are welcome to ask questions at any time now and throughout the whole session. And secondly, when submitting questions, just be patient. Don't get angry. So we have someone to moderate the question. Just wait a while. It takes a little bit of time to appear. And it will appear on the screen below the ask a question button. And we will try our very best to address the questions. So OK, since this is a fireside chat, let that be fire and marshmallows as well. So let's get the show going, shall we? Oh my god, that is awesome. Also, I already got a question if I'm drinking espresso. No, I'm drinking good old Coke Zero. So no warm drink for me at this point. But I want marshmallows and the fire pit too. How did you do that? Magic, magic. Wow. And maybe the first question. What was Google up to in 2020? Any brief takers? Danny? 2020? Well, only 2020. So many things. I think one of the big things in 2020 was simply trying to react to the pandemic. The reason we're here virtually. So I know a lot of teams had to really re-evaluate what they were doing. I know, for example, the local teams had to come up with all sorts of ways of supporting new structured data for things like COVID testing. I mean, who thought this would be a thing we would need? Dealing with the fact that businesses are changing in temporary working hours. We did things like with the, I think what did we call it the vitals or the page experience plans. Really, there was a look at that thinking, all right, this would have been a 2020 type of thing. But we want to make sure there's longer time for people to prepare for this because they're already having to do so much to begin with. So let's push that out and make sure there's a lot more time for that. So I would say there was a bit of 2020 reacting and trying to help people as best as you could to the things that we're developing in ways nobody would have really expected. I also love, personally, because so many folks, e-commerce sites and brick and mortars were having trouble. So the free shopping ads was, I think, something that Google was able to get to us in short order that made a big difference. It was helpful. And I remember when COVID became more of a concern in the beginning early middle of the year. A lot of teams at Google Search were like, OK, what can we do to help highlight trustworthy, useful information more in the search results, which, at some point, led to a proliferation of COVID-specific features. I remember that there was this one feature that somehow popped out on the right-hand side, and then there was this other feature that popped out on the left-hand side of the SERPs. And we're like, ooh, OK, OK. All of this is useful. But ooh, OK, let's calm down a little bit. But what really struck me is how quickly lots of teams at Google jumped to provide useful and helpful information and trustworthy information to people around the topic. And that was going really fast. That was impressive to me, at least. And they were doing this, and everybody's had the struggle to adjust. But just like everybody else, they were all doing this remotely. Literally, one day suddenly you couldn't go back into the office and everyone's figuring out how do we do this. And we had been on many, many internal calls where you have the children coming by or all the sorts of things that you've seen and still trying to keep going with that. And for us specifically, we had a lot of recordings planned in studio that didn't go through. We had to deal with conferences that requested us physically at their events, which we couldn't go to anymore. Yeah, the year has been wild, hasn't it? I know. It's been tough for many of us, if not all of us. I think it's also exciting in a way. Yeah, it has proven that there are challenges that we could have addressed earlier, I guess, as a society. And also, infrastructure-wise, I never really realized how much of the benefit and value that comes from in person events is actually the hallway track, right? It's like, oh, yeah, we just record the things from home, the talks, and then we just share them with everyone. And it's like, nah, it feels like a really boring version of Netflix binge watching, I think. So yeah, we learned a bunch, I guess. I know. After all, I was also getting really weird to keep talking to the webcam all the time, doing the same old thing. But yeah, oh, well, well, let's move on a little bit. So a big part of Search ecosystem is not just people working in Google, I believe. And it's also all of you who contributed in so many different ways. So among those awesome stuff, are there any particular things from the community that you would like to highlight, maybe, Ashley? Yes, I get very excited about this. So there are a few things that really filled my cup this year at a time when it was really easy to empty your cup. 2020 was hard. But I want to call out a few great things that I've done, a few great communities I'm going to shout out to that I think everyone should go and either learn about become a part of our support. So a big thing was just recognizing in a community that things are not normal. So being able to have a safe place to talk about that, I think what it's done is it's pushed us to get to know each other more as humans and to create different spaces where we can essentially just lean on each other. There are a couple of spaces I want to call out. There are many more than this, but these have been really important to me. So Mary Davies had put together a group on Facebook, just SEO buddies. People aren't talking about SEO. We're just there to talk about our lives and whenever things get really hard. But there are things like women in tech SEO that Arish put together that has only been around for a year and a half and goodness gracious, like the impact that Arish has made with the community. I mean, they have, you know, over 2,000 people on their Facebook community or I think around 2,000 in their Slack. But I mean, Arish is putting together events that are selling out that have all women speakers. She's putting together workshops, lecture series. She has folks like Carolyn Linden talking about how to negotiate a salary, which is really scary at this point. I think we all feel a little disempowered. So her being able to do things like that and bringing in folks that can really help build the community while building confidence is, I mean, it's really tricky because what we're dealing with is just everything was searched. The uncertainties with our jobs, us as human beings, but then folks are pushing for diversity in new ways. And the fact that we're making changes there is like pure magic to me. There's been some bumps, but it's really magical in that way. And I think there are a few folks leading that charge that I am super impressed by and look up to. Feelings corner. Ashley always has a lot of feelings I can go on. Oh, that's wonderful. That's lovely. No, there have been a lot of challenges out there too. So challenges not just in doing it, but what I like seeing are folks who are common speakers speaking up and saying, hey, what can we do to get a more diverse lineup? So I can say, hey, Search Central Live is an amazing idea. Martin, what can I do so that the next time we're here we get more folks of color? Can I help you do that? Can I give up my spot? And so there are uncomfortable conversations happening but with really great and genuine results. So I don't know if you all are feeling any heat from that or if you have thoughts about how that's evolving, how Google can help push that. I wouldn't say heat, but I'm definitely very happy to see a lot more support and openness from pretty much everywhere in terms of opening up and elevating the community. So one of our goals in Search Relations this year is to not just bring out our message, but also to highlight good things happening in the community and good actors in the community who are beneficial and benevolent towards the community. And that's one of the reasons why you are here and why we are doing these kinds of things. I am starting a new video series later this year probably. We are already starting recordings. I have a fantastic phenomenal list of guests. Unfortunately a few people had to drop out because Corona makes things a little more fluid these years, but yeah, we are definitely looking into these things. And I think it's good that these conversations are happening and I see change on the large scale. And I think that's a really good thing. Also actually, Cherry, you were involved in a big thing that happened actually earlier this year, but it started last year when we relaunched into Google Search Central. That's not like a name change, but there was also something happening on our documentation website, right? So it's like the whole thing behind there, like documentation change as like a move of like documents in many different languages, a lot of like things on like rebranding and also fun things like our new mascot and everything as well. So a lot of work going on there. I'm so unhappy that we couldn't have the name for the mascot that we wanted because of training. I know, I know. I'm still sad over it, but that's okay. We'll get over it. We'll leave on. Eventually, eventually. Eventually, yeah. The documentation is great though. Like Google's added so much documentation, both technical and accessible, and I'll say that is really empowering for folks that are trying to be in the career, especially learning from home. Like this is solid gold. This is really great support. I think this helps us do a better job in search is to have this kind of documentation. So I think it's fabulous. And I'm a very big fan check. Thank you. That's not just my work. Like mostly like Lizzie and also like everybody else in the team as well. And I think one of the things probably, one of the good things that come around like during COVID is that we have more time to focus on documentations because like we're not, you know, like going around traveling for events. Unfortunately, we can't see you in person but we also realize that it's a good time to reach out to people like in terms of like documents, like better translations and all these things. And we hope those things have been helpful during this time. Definitely. Yeah. Ah, let's move on a little bit. So COVID response for, I think for Asia has been a little bit different. And life here has been coming back to normal at a faster rate in probably in some countries. So what are our plans for 2021 and beyond? Like to help people, you know, get back to normal. We also got a question from the audience asking what will search look like in like five years? Oh my, what will search like? I know difficult questions. That's like 612 internet years. That's a long time. I know. Okay, let's look at 2021. Like what do you think such will look like? Anything exciting that we can expect? Page experience, maybe. That's one thing that we definitely confirmed. And I don't know how much of this we have been talking about publicly, but there is this, there's a question that comes up and that was actually asked from the audience as well. It was Brian O'Connor, if I remember correctly, who asked a lot is being said about the introduction of COVID vitals as a ranking factor. What are everyone's thoughts about the readiness of the SEO community for this? I can't really judge the readiness of the community. I know that it has been on people's minds. Would you say people are ready, Ashley? So here's my take, hot take. No, I think SEO professionals are getting much better understanding and explaining it. There's some really good resources. Like we've played around with a lot of different data sets just trying to really get to the, I was gonna say to the crux of it, Jesus, I'm your father now. But I think that a lot of clients that need to compete still may not have resources segmented in that way. Cause even though we talk to folks that have developer resources, having a developer that's versed in performance and an SEO who's versed in performance and making that argument to business is tough. So what I'm resting on or what I'm leaning on is that we're really looking across different verticals. And maybe this is it, right? So maybe I don't have an A, but all my neighbors have a C minus. So if I have a C plus, am I in a pretty good space? And as it goes up, we're all gonna rise together. But good Lord, don't make me have an A yet and not ready. That's the pulse that I get. I live in a pretty small world considering how big search is. But that's what I'm hearing. I'll add to something also. So periodically we announced that we've had various updates. We've had various changing. We had the passage ranking had come out recently and it's not uncommon that people, when we say some of these things, they really go, well, what should I be doing? And typically if there's something that you should be doing that you're not already doing, we'll try to tell you that. That's the whole point. We want to make sure people have actionable information so that they're doing all the things that they should be doing because we want to help creators. But we'll have some of these things happen and then people just start speculating about what they should be doing or doing. It's like spend less time on that in 2021 and make sure you're investing the time in the things where we're actually giving the actionable thing and the page experience is an example of that. That is the reason it's been out there since last year to say this is coming and that's the reason there's this long runway and to say this is an important thing to be thinking about and keep in mind. This is the actionable thing. We really think you should be paying attention to, so. Yeah, and actually that's a kind of follow-up question that comes as part of that previous question that I posed as well. Do we expect the impact on the metrics to be significant or more subtle? I don't know. That's a tricky one. How do you expect the impact to be from the page experience update? From what I know is it depends. I thought we were gonna get through this. So without that, I thought. I mean, I think if you go back and look at how we've had these sorts of things over time, it really isn't that okay, then the next day everything completely changes. There's no intent to try to do that, even though we might say we start using this as a factor. First of all, it remains one of many things. Secondly, it's always the case that we're going to try to return the best content based on this basket or bucket of things. So maybe you don't have the best page experience, but if you're still the most relevant content, that is gonna overall on various things we're looking at. So I think it's not a case of start being all super concerned and understand that we want to make sure that this is coming in in a moderated fashion. But over time, what will happen is, as more and more content is coming up in page experience, and if you're in a situation where things are all relatively equal, the things that are more page experience oriented are likely to start doing better. So it's not, I don't think freak out, but do pay attention to it. Do understand that it's a new thing that you need to keep in mind. That's why we're highlighting it. Hey, I think we have another good question, interesting one from Angie. I think this is for you, Ashley. As a woman in technical SEO, I would love to hear more about how you navigate and thrive in predominantly male dominated profession, both in terms of a leadership position and also technical SEO. Angie, I love this question. Thank you for asking it. Thank you for making Martin throw his hands up. That's my, I'm gonna check that box off for today. I have a few ideas around this. A few, I tend to be fairly tactical and pragmatic. So I'm just gonna break it down as a list. I love bullet pointless. So let's go with this one. So the first one is get a mentor if you can. That can be really difficult to do if you are limited, if you work in house and don't have folks, but if you can find a mentor, I have found that I can lean on them for strength when I need it and don't have it and they can give me new skills. Part of that though is, is if you can't get a mentor, build allies, build a community. There are some really good communities out there. I would love to touch base with you after so I can give you a whole list of them, but essentially work smarter, not harder. There are other women doing this work already that you can build off of. I also said know your worth and take up space. Like we can't do this live right now, but I like using my elbows and getting right into a front seat and trying to be physically there. We can't do that as much now. So sometimes we have to be a little shouty, which is okay too. And if you don't want to do that, don't care to do that, let others advocate for you. Find someone like me who is okay living in social isolation and being such a pain in the ass on Twitter and I would be happy to learn more about what you're doing and speak up for you. So there are folks out there in this community that are seeing a need from that and actually feel really rewarded when you ask them to speak up for you or to advocate or to give you resources. So I'm gonna be one of those people ask me, it would make me feel great if we connected after this, but there are folks out there who are willing to boost you up if you're ready to take up a little more space. Cool. So if you're interested and if you need like mentorship, anything reach out to Ashley, right? Yeah. I can help you get fighty or yelling or have resources or point you to people who are far more professional than I am. I'm also gonna shout. So I'm taking my first, I don't, I would love to know if any of you had did this, but I got professional budget to take a confidence bootcamp with Kirstie Holes who knows a lot of people in our field and it's mostly women in those, but I will say being able to take any of that, any sort of classes as a group or individual to help actually build professional confidence has gone a long way. Martin or Danny, have you ever done that in your career? Have you found the need to? Do you see value in it? So, yeah. Watch right into the job. I love it. I kind of had a mentor in previous jobs where I had kind of managers who were really openly sharing their experiences and the ups and downs of things. And I have done a little bit of mentoring for a few people in the past in terms of both technical mentoring as in like how to evolve your technical skills, being from a developer background that kind of happened automatically, but also career-wise I have helped people get into public speaking. Just recently I mentored and I'm still mentoring someone who is just kicking off their speaker career. So that's quite cool. And I try to do that every now and then because I often get offered a spot even though like people pick you. So it's a tricky thing. If you organize events on one hand, you need to have like large enough names to drive ticket sales because in the end, you need to make ends meet as a conference organizer. Even if you're a nonprofit, you need to pay for things and you very rarely get enough sponsorship to pay for everything just like that. On the other hand, you want to give new people a chance. And then oftentimes conferences where I don't really fit as a speaker, contact me like very marketing heavy conferences. I am more of the on the technical side. So I might not actually be the right choice for your audience and for your conference. So I try to then offer up the space to someone from the community that I happen to know might fit better. And as you said, people are generally more open to open the stage up for people from underrepresented groups. So I try to help people from underrepresented groups be more confident in themselves and get them up to speed to actually start their speaker career. And that's kind of what I do when I mentioned. I think that's very valuable but I am the wrong person to ask. The mentorship that I received from others has been very valuable for me. And I hope that the mentorship I give is also valuable to those who are receiving it. No one has built a complaint site yet. So you're getting hands there. I say the same thing that the idea that if you are feeling confident or if you have that experience the more that you can encourage other people and ensure them that they totally belong to be there and not have imposter syndrome or whatever which I didn't even realize was the thing that I'm like, oh, that's what that means. And I understand and I felt that at times but to do that reassurance. And I think like for me, another thing I've worked on is not so much the confidence aspect but is the shutting up aspect. I can't wait to talk and I can't wait to be involved and share an opinion. And I've really had to learn over my time to sit back, make sure that everyone's having a chance to talk and everyone's sort of being heard. And I think that if you do have that confidence part of that confidence is understanding that other people need to make sure that they have their time and they may not have the confidence to go unless you shut up. Yeah, so I have a few thoughts on these on this real quick and what I would say is confidence is really easy to say go get it. It's really tough to come by. And when we're talking about folks who are women or people of color folks that are generally just less represented on stage, there are even more challenges. So what I would love to throw out there as a really impactful idea for both of you is that when you get called to talk, I get it, you sell tickets. Like people wanna hear from you, have great things to say. If you can't give up that spot or doesn't make sense, bring someone else on stage with you, right? So it's, I feel like I'm finally getting to the point where it makes sense or where I feel like I can't I'm privileged enough to turn around and bring someone up with me. So for folks like you two and others that have huge visibility and a great draw, there's a lot of power and opportunities that can come with that. All right, all the great stuff. Well, thank you so much. I think we're gonna wrap it up here as we're running out time. We recognize that we didn't get through all the questions that you have submitted in this live session. So the team will try our best to answer them on the platform itself. And you can also continue to leave questions on Search Central online help community. That's where there's always someone to answer your questions. We have quite a packed schedule with an exciting session on technical SEO coming right up followed by an exclusive search of the record life. So you will continue to see Martin over there in both of the sessions too. So make sure you stay tuned. Ashley, Danny and Martin, thank you very much for spending time with us today. Thank you everyone else for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed the fireside chat as well as the rest of the Search Central live event. Stay well. Thank you so much. Thanks everybody. Take care everybody. See you later. Bye. Bye. Back in action, I see that was fantastic. Ah, isn't this lovely? How is it going? I have a fantastic guest with me tonight. I hope that you all out there are, and I say tonight, but it depends on which time zone you are in. But for me it's tonight. For you it's evening I think. With me today is Christina Azarenko, who I met in Toronto 2019, if I remember correctly. It feels like so long ago now. And she is the founder and lead consultant more or less of marketing syrup. And with me here to discuss a technical case of the high Christina, how's it going? Hi, hi, Martin. And hi everybody. Yeah, you're right. It was 2019 and Martin went to Toronto to speak at some deaf conference. And I was like, oh my God, we need to have a meet up about JavaScript SEO. Like really needed. So I organized one. It was so much fun. Yeah, yeah. So I'm Christina Azarenko and we're in Toronto, Canada. And as Martin said, I'm a commerce consultant and a commerce and technical SEO consultant and founder of marketing syrup. And I can't wait to share something really interesting with you. This is based on the thing that I found with one of my clients. So yeah, it's going to be interesting. Shall we get started? Shall I pull up your screen and then we look into it? Yes, please. Okay, excellent. Here we go. Whoop. Oh, inception, inception style. Too many, too many of Martin. I know, I know. Too many Martin's and Christina's. And by the way, by the way, I already told you everyone, like thanks for joining but I want you to really appreciate that for Martin it's just like 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. right now. So and keep doing it. 1.30. Oh, 1.30. It's stretching into 3 a.m., yeah, yeah. But it's still, but it's still. So yeah, thank you everyone for having me and also thanks for Martin, John and other people for doing this at this time zone so that you all can benefit from it. So, so this is, this is not a real website. It's just a test website that Martin actually did. And it has a really cool photos of Martin and like different photos that he did, but it is actually very connected with what I'm going to talk about. So when you see, like when you see a website for the first time, a page for the first time, what I usually do, I look, okay, so I see that there is a title that's great that there is H1, amazing, cool. But okay, I want to also make sure that everything working correctly in terms of the images. So the situation that I had was with lazy loading and the images not loaded correctly and that's exactly what I'm going to show you today. So yeah, it seems like from the very first side it seems that everything is loading properly but I'm on desktop. And as you might know, as you know, Google is using mobile first indexing. So basically it means that Google mostly looks at the mobile version of your website versus desktop. So if you see that it's okay on mobile but on desktop, you should always check the mobile version as well. So I'm going into inspect mode and I'm seeing, okay, kind of looks good but I need to reload it to make sure that I see how the mobile version is loading. Okay, and now we see something weird because the images here are different. Okay, so these are, the images are completely different and this is something that really triggers my attention. So I can look up the images URLs and see, okay. So basically what I'm seeing here is that in the source of the image there is some placeholder, right? It should be a different image from what I could see from the desktop but I see a placeholder here. And also just to give you a quick overview you need to add images using web centers. And what this means is that the URL to the image should be found in the source. Here it's found in data source which is not the same data source just provides some additional information but it doesn't provide, Google doesn't follow the URL. If you put the URL to the image here, Google won't follow it. Google will pick up the image which is found in the source. Okay, so you see that something weird is happening here and I want to check it again. Is it the same image in the source when I go to desktop? Okay, I go to desktop, reload again and see, okay, cool, the image is different and I see here that clearly the right image is in the source and if I go a little bit further, I can see, okay, so the images seem to be right. It means that something is going on only for the mobile version. Again, for mobile first indexing, this is very critical. So the next thing that, it's an extra step but I feel that it's always great to do. I have this extension that checks rendered HTML. It checks row, rendered and then shows you the difference. So here I'm checking the desktop again, right? And I'm seeing, okay, so if I'm looking at placeholder, okay, if I'm looking at placeholder, I can see that it used to be, the image used to be in the source code placeholder but then it was swept. So that's basically how JavaScript works here with lazy loading. The lazy loading library swaps the images from the wrong source placeholder because we want the images to like load faster with lazy loading to the right image. That's exactly what we need, but that's desktop. So what I can do next, again, I'm going to the mobile version and checking it again. And here I can see that the placeholder stays. What I'm doing this, what I'm checking this tool is just because it gives me the difference between row and rendered HTML. What I do next is I need to go to Google mobile first, Google, just a second, to mobile-friendly test so you can use which results test as well. I can just pull up these and check how Google actually sees the page. It takes some time and also from my experience, it's sometimes worth checking a few times because sometimes you would see that the image is not loaded. It happens because the tool times out, and that's okay. Yeah, so you can try it again. It actually happened when we were testing for margin, but that happens. That's why I suggest you checking it a few times. So, and that's like row HTML, rendered HTML that Google sees. And again, here I see that, okay, I saw it in the testing tools, but I'm also seeing the same in the mobile-friendly test. That Google will suggest image placeholder. It won't see all these great images, and they're really great, right? It won't see all these great images that I'm having here. And it's actually especially crucial for any website that relies a lot on visual search. So for example, you are a travel website and you have really cool photos of different destinations. But if Google can't pick them up, you are missing out on the visual search. So yeah, basically it's not working. I wish we also had a kind of screenshot that we could just scroll and see the whole page like I would see here. But that's okay. At least we'll have this HTML, rendered HTML, and that's exactly what we need to look at. Do you have anything to add at this point, Martin? I actually have a question from the audience, which is what is this tool that you keep using? Like not the mobile-friendly test, but the thing that you pull up with rendered HTML versus the... What is that? It's called view rendered HTML source Chrome extension. And the second tool that I was using was SEO Pro extension by me, by my company. And both those tools are free. You can just Google them. These are Chrome extensions. You can just install and start using. Yeah, like this view rendered source, the only reason that I'm using it is because I love this difference between source code and rendered HTML, because it really shows this. Because mobile-friendly test shows you only rendered page, which is cool, but if you want to see the difference, then I used to use difference checker and copy all the source code and then this rendered page, like rendered code, and then check the difference. But just this tool makes it much easier. I was just showing the URL. It's marketingserve.com slash SEO dash pro dash extension. Yes. Or if you Google SEO Pro, this is going to be the first result. So are you saying you did search engine optimization for the search engine optimization pro extension? Well, it's actually, yeah, exactly. But it's actually Google Chrome, which is ranking first. I can't, like nobody can compete with Google Chrome's store authority. Oh, that's amazing. Sweet. So we figured out that this isn't going so well and it's really cool that you... So the story of the session is that I have watched streams with Christina and sessions that Christina did for other events online and we talked about this kind of stuff in Toronto back in the day. And I have seen this exact case reported so many times. It showed up multiple times from different people running websites in the SEO office hours as well. So I thought this makes a lot of sense and the fact that Christina suggested this case study was like, oh yeah, this is not just my warped feeling that this is a problem, but this really is something that people might miss and testing different site versions and making sure that your JavaScript works is definitely not unimportant. And it makes a lot of sense to keep track of these things. There is an interesting question coming from even Hall. Sorry, Martin, do you want me to stop hearing my screen? I know if you want to... We might want to look at something specific later on. I don't know. If you want to stop sharing your screen, we can also disable it for the moment so that we... Yes, there we go. Yeah, that's true. Because I don't see you and I don't see myself. That's true, yeah, that's true. Yeah, so there was a question from even Hall asking how important is the non-JavaScript rendered version of a page for ranking? Will Google consider only the JavaScript rendered content if it's available? Yes, generally speaking, we do render all the pages and it's fine to use JavaScript to generate your content. We have to deal with that because that's the reality of the web. Nonetheless, I think it makes sense to... So problems like this, as you saw, as Christina showed, are not trivial to debug, right? I'm pretty sure there are people watching us right now who are like, oh, I didn't know that this is a thing that we actually need to deal with or this is a thing that I need to look into. So I would argue that having as much content as possible in the initial HTML is definitely not going to hurt you. It's going to help you, not just you in terms of the search engine optimization side of things, but also your users, because the website generally renders quicker and probably is more robust if it's in the server rendered HTML. But if you can't do that or don't want to do that, that's fine too. Also reminder, I'm talking about Google search specifically, I can't really vouch for the other search engines. So other search engines might have different trade-offs and might not necessarily render all pages. So that's something. Is that something that you do see in your daily work that other search engines are not necessarily always rendering pages? Or is that something that's less of a concern these days? Well, I'm working mostly with Google. So it's hard to say, but I see that Google is usually the leading. I'm not biased. You can speak freely, you don't need to like, no worries. Yeah, yeah, I'm just kidding. So it's the leading search engine. So it means that in many situations when you are, when you have something with Google, when you just, oh, Google is barren JavaScript, I might not like, I can stop caring about this. Yeah, but I'd say that the best approach would be to always think as if it's like 10 years ago. Because I've seen many, some websites doing things like, oh, we'll update our canonical tags with JavaScript. Okay, but what if this script, which updates that the canonical tags will not be available for just like some time while Google checking it or it times out or something like that, right? You don't want to bet on this, especially when it comes to things like canonical tags, title tags. In general, the main content of the page, I would say that it's like, I feel that it's so much better to still use mostly HTML. And with lazy loading, Martin, I think you are going to share a better solution here as well. But yeah, there's also native lazy loading which is supported by most browsers. And that is the intersection observer, yes. Alternatively, if you are okay with not having everyone benefit from lazy loading, you can use native lazy loading as well. So there's like the loading equals lazy attribute on the image tag and the iframe tag that you can use as well. Or you build your own solution around intersection observer or use a library that doesn't do weird things. To be fair, we have to say that the case study was interesting because we don't want to shame anyone's website, obviously. So Christina was like, hey, I have this website I've worked with and they had this problem. We can't show this on the stream. So I had to build a website that specifically exposes the problem of the real website. And the library I chose worked out of the box, which was terrible because we wanted a broken version. So I had to specifically break the code in order to make this work. It took time, it took time to break it. And Martin was like, oh my God, it's still working. It was very robust. That was really annoying because we needed something broken and then I broke it but I broke it the wrong way. And then this has been surprisingly hard. Awesome. Christina, our time is nearing its end. Thank you so, so much for joining and sharing your knowledge and your process with the community. And I think this has been really, really helpful. You get lots of love from the community. Cindy Krum says like, loving the session. Brittany Manning says, Danke, which is thank you. What else do we have in here? I think Alan Blyvice, I'm not sure if you pronounce the name that way. Oh wow, hi. Yeah, Alan was also like, this is awesome. Since when are you so awesome? So I think this has been fantastic. I'm very, very grateful for you coming forward and sharing this. And yeah, this is amazing. I am super, super grateful. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Yeah, awesome. Thank you so much. Have a great time. Thank you. We'll be right back after, bye bye. We'll be right back after a short break and then we'll have a, whoops, sorry for that. That was an accident. I misclicked, I'm so sorry, Gary. We'll be back in a second with the Search Central Lives very own live podcast session of the Search of the Record podcast. See you in a moment. Okay, that was a short break and I accidentally did not mute myself after the break. It is nearly 2 a.m. in the morning. I am doing fantastically well at this point. I wish I could say this is all sugar shock but it's actually just, I don't know. I don't drink caffeine most of the times when I do it kind of hits. Anyway, I would like to introduce two wonderful people to the stage. Number one being John. Hello, John. It depends, Miller. How's it going? And also we have the ever cheerful happiness in person and the friendly house elf of Search, Gary. Who's surprising? He actually turned on his camera and where are you? In your lair. I guess that, why did I even ask? I should have known that this is what's going to happen. So you are in your lair. John is somewhere where the light does change a little bit. This is fantastic. How are you doing? You're wonderful, wonderful people. We're awake, I think. I think that's more than I can ask from you at this ridiculous hour. Also, actually, while I have people in the audience submitting questions, use that, abuse that, ask a question thing and just say where you're from and where you're watching us from. Because I wonder like, where are people located that are watching this at this hour? Which probably to you is a perfectly fine hour. I'm not quite here. You're right there. That's amazing. Becky, thank you so much. Becky was like, Martin, you're doing great. And I'm like, I don't feel like that, but at least I'm away. So that's the best I can offer. Why is Gary's name not hyperlinked? I don't think Gary wants the domain authority. It's very right. Do you not want the domain authority? I don't want domain authority. I don't like domain authority. You have LA, lair authority. Yes, yes. But I calculate that for myself and assign a number for myself arbitrary. This is amazing. I love this so much. Sweet. Shall we begin? Shall we start? Yeah. Let's make start on our recording and let's actually get going. Wait, what are we talking about? We have a bunch of questions that were submitted into John's fantastic form. And we also have audience questions from earlier on that didn't get answered because they didn't really fit the fireside chat. So I'll just be like adding questions here and I'll be happily asking questions. Is that good? Cool. Fantastic. Looking forward to it. Cool. What do you guys actually know? Well, if you say no, I'll try to get a more helpful answer out of you, which I know is a challenge or impossible. I'm guessing you're impossible is the real thing. Right. We'll figure it out. I'll click record now. One, two, three. Ha-cha! Should we clap? Oh, don't do this to us. Whenever... So... The back story is that we always, with every podcast, we tried at the beginning to synchronize our audio tracks by clapping at the same time, which over any sort of internet connection with the video feed and audio feed does not really happen. It just doesn't work. So we just gave up? We just gave up. And every now and then we do clap just to confuse our producer, I think. That's kind of what we do. Yeah, it's not... Who is missing? This will show up on her birth? True. She said like, I'll be here. And then she's not even lurking in the background. Oh, but on the other hand, I think it's my fault. I think I didn't invite her into the... No, I did. No, no, no, no, no. I did. Our producer is awesome. Her name is Anna. And she usually keeps us in check. So the fact that she's not here today will make this a very interesting podcast, I think. I mean, you forgot to invite me as well. So it's fine. That's true. Which gives you a good rundown of the state of my mind. I think I'm very reasonable sane person. Let me operate heavy machinery right now, please. No, no, no. So I found a question. I love to hear your takes on it. What would you say is priority number one when launching a new site and a new domain for local business? I would say good content. So local business, like a bakery? Yeah, maybe describe, maybe definitely say where you located what your opening hours are and what's on offer. These kinds of things, I guess, make a lot of sense. Gary, anything from your end? Yeah, that's an awesome question, actually. I don't think that we go too much into detail about these kinds of things. And perhaps we should. Because when you're launching a new site, then very often it's kind of hard to come up with the content. I have a friend, she lives in Austin and she's a dog instructor. And they launched a new website and she had ideas about what she could put on the website. But when I looked at the website, then to me it felt very minimal or not focused. And of course, the problem is that I can't tell her anything because like we are friends and then it's kind of weird. But eventually, someone pointed out to her that the content is very narrow and very minimal or too minimal. And it was kind of like, it was also not very precise. Like she was not describing well what the business was about or where it was exactly or how someone can get the service. So those are very important, in my opinion. Like tell people what you are doing, exactly what you are doing, what you are capable of and what kind of services you offer. And also where you operate because like, yeah, she's in Austin, Texas. But based on the website, it could have been anywhere in the... Well, in continental U.S. I guess. So perhaps a narrower... I mean, if you pinpoint your service area, that would be useful. And also what service you're offering and what products you are having in your... If it's a shop like that sells products because I have seen so many who said, oh, I wonder if this place has X and then it's like, our family business has been on operation since 1959 and we have since served our local community. And I'm like, but served how with what? Yeah, that's like the recipe sites. My grandma was baking this during the Second World War and it was the best thing ever. And the soldiers were coming and they were eating and they were drinking. And then it just goes on and on and on and on and on. And you're like, but where's the damn cookie recipe? And the best is when that happens in the middle of the recipe, like you have your hands full of stuff and you're like in the kitchen and just like trying to figure out what's next. And then you're like basically scrolling with your elbow or something is like, what is happening here? Because I don't care about the history of your local mill or something. I mean, by then your phone probably locked itself. So you also have to unlock it somehow, which is very hard with the elbow. Face ID, my friend. Which I actually ironically do not have enabled. For like going back to the question like for local businesses, I'm sorry. Like going back to John is trying to keep us focused. That's a nice change. So yeah, I don't know for local business, I think also everything around Google my business is really useful because it kind of forces you to provide all of that metadata for your business. Like your opening hours is like, give me times. Don't describe when your business is open. Give me a clear address and name the description of your services. I think you can also add products now. So all of that I think is super useful. And from an SEO point of view, the one thing that I think is also important is that you have the reasonable expectations. Like if you're starting off with a new business that you're not gonna rank number one for bookstore in the US. It's like you have a small niche that you work on and you can grow out of that and grow a little bit larger over time but you kind of need to kind of grow with the assumption that first of all, you want people nearby to find you. And partially that's done by people who know your name, who can search for you directly and partially people who just see you in maps and other kind of listings where they can find local businesses. Also think about whether you can adapt to the current situation or to the situation that's in your area and try to advert, well, mention that on the website because for example, I know that in Portland, there was this, I remember it because of the mention of the bookstore. There is this little bookstore that started when this pandemic started, they started delivering books to the doorstep of the people. And then they could exchange the books for some like few cents. Well, probably not a few cents, but actually a few cents to another book. It was a used bookstore. So it was probably just a few cents. So when someone was finished with reading something then they could just basically return the book and get a new one that they chose from the online inventory. And it got really famous locally in that area where they were delivering. And I think that's also something that you can think about which kind of almost goes into the area of link building and Gary is going to give me that look, I'm sure. I am already giving you the look. Okay, but I mean doing things that are kind of magical and kind of out of the ordinary where people start writing about you where local news sites, they mentioned like, oh, this company is doing something fantastic. Maybe, I don't know, on radio even where you don't really get a link but you get mentioned and people can search for you and find you online because of that. So kind of taking a step out of the comfort zone and doing something that people like to see. I think that's also really useful. And that's also the way to compete with the bigger players in your area. Basically, if you can offer something that is more than they can offer because of their sheer size, for example, that can be super helpful for your own business. Yeah, cool. I found another question. Like if you want one more, how often are algorithms adjusted due to SEOs gaming the system? More than five. In my 10 years, I can recall about four or five times that we're not specifically web spam algorithm changes. That is less often than I expected, to be honest. I think sometimes the folks that work on the algorithms work to try to just make them work really well and we get a lot of feedback from lots of places. And my guess is a lot of the SEO gaming type things are things that we try to catch normally already, right? Right. Also, the thing is that we are not going after the SEOs. We are improving the quality of the results. So if we see that there is a systemic problem with the results, then we are going to try to find the solution for that and improve the result quality. But we are not saying that, oh, the SEOs are again doing this and that and we have to solve that. It's really just like, oh, the quality of the results is not that great in this particular vertical or whatever. So we should do something about it. So you're saying if SEOs game the system and provide better sites, more relevant content, that would be fine? That would be horrible. I strongly advise against that. I see what you're doing. Also, someone in the community actually asked a question that I was recently confronted with as well. Oh, no, actually not recently. I was confronted with this like two years ago because it wasn't an in-person event. But I was, it feels- Everything is relative. Everything is relative, Mark. Exactly. Looking at the time scale of like the whole earth that's relatively recently, I would argue. And even is asking that specific question as well and it's how has page rank changed over the years? And like- I don't think that we want to talk about that. No, but no, okay. So let me rephrase. No, no, no. Let me rephrase the question a little bit into something that I think you have been talking about and that we could discuss a little which is are we still using page rank the same way that we did in the beginning or has that changed or has it gone away or what is that? Are we doing something similar still or? So to answer exactly the question that you asked we are still using the same way. Still using it the same way. Oh, okay. I see. Moving on. I think you asked the wrong question, but okay. I asked the wrong question. You're not giving me much here, but I guess that's okay. John, do you have follow up questions or other questions? How long is Google going to continue recommending dynamic rendering? Oh my. Yeah, Martin. Oh my. Oh, come on. So. It was submitted. Really? It's a legitimate question. So first things first, dynamic rendering is when you are serving a pre-rendered non-JavaScript version of your page specifically to bots including Googlebot and other bots and like the full shebang with JavaScript and everything to users. Oftentimes that is followed up by is not looking to which I say no unless you're showing very different content intention wise. We haven't been recommending it. We have been recommending it in 2018, I think and maybe before that. We have stopped recommending it when the Evergreen Googlebot came out in May 2019. So we don't recommend it anymore. It doesn't say that it's going to go away and Redutron is also probably going to stay supported for a while and maintain for a while going on. We don't really have any plans of deprecating that. It's just, we think it no longer is reasonable because it turns out that dynamic rendering requires a lot of tech changes in your infrastructure anyway. It might look like the simpler option if you compare it with server-side rendering or server-side rendering plus hydration but in practice it turns out to be more complicated in most cases. So we don't recommend it. You can still do it. We just think you should probably try to invest in server-side rendering instead. If you can't for some reason or if you need a band-aid until you have server-side rendering implemented, it's still a viable solution but I would consider admit to short-term solution. How would you decide between leaving something client-side rendered and implementing server-side rendering? Is there like some simple guideline that you can tell people or is it mostly it's like if you know what you're doing and you're already doing it, then that's good. Our CTO in the previous company once said to me and that rang very true and I just like the clarity of the sentence, don't fix what isn't broken. So most JavaScript frameworks come as client-side rendered out of the box. So if you use them, you very likely end up with the client-side rendered application. If your stuff gets indexed and can be crawled and indexed and rendered then that's not an issue. Like you shouldn't be trying to fix something that isn't broken. If you are seeing issues in terms of, let's say for instance conversion rate because people are dropping out because the site is flaky because of JavaScript then maybe server-side rendering is a good practice. If you see your site being really slow because of the specific client-side rendering strategy isn't going to go so well with the amount of content you have then maybe server-side rendering is a good strategy. In general server-side rendering is usually making things more robust and faster for users but that doesn't always have to be the case and maybe you have lower hanging fruit elsewhere. So don't apply it as a fixing all solution. It's not a silver bullet. It's not going to take away all the problems but if you see issues that stem from the fact that some content is for some reason inaccessible or really slow or hurts performance and that comes specifically from running all the JavaScript in the browser then yes you can get rid of that or reduce the impact of that by using server-side rendering. So cool, yeah. And since you mentioned performance would using client-side rendered or server-side rendered content affect things like core web vitals or is that kind of separate? No, they're very likely. So the core web vitals are trying to model and quantify the user experience of a page loading on the user's device. And it turns out that if you think about your content you have HTML, you have CSS, you have JavaScript, you have images, maybe videos, maybe sound files. It turns out from all of these the most expensive asset is not images, is not video, is not audio, it is JavaScript. And that's because the JavaScript has to be downloaded that usually is relatively large. It can be multiple megabytes that you have to download before you actually get to even get closer to the content, through seeing the content. Then you have to execute, actually parse the JavaScript into a machine readable format because it's human readable and not necessarily machine readable. It needs to be parsed into something that is, that is or translated into something that is machine readable and then it's being executed. And then if that execution triggers more network requests you have to wait for those network requests and then the content comes in that is never going to be as fast as content coming in through HTML. And then immediately network requests happen for the images. And then immediately, if it's like progressive JPEGs you can even start rendering and showing the image as it arrives from the network. You can't do that with JavaScript. JavaScript needs to be fully downloaded before it even is translated into machine code. And only then it can actually start doing stuff on your site. So the COVID vitals will very likely be affected by this because the sheer fact that it takes so many extra steps to get to the content means that the largest contentful pain is going to happen later. The fact that every browser tab is basically doing one thing at a time and one thing at a time only means if it's executing JavaScript it can't do anything else. As long as your JavaScript executes you cannot scroll the page. You cannot type into input fields. You cannot click buttons. I mean, you can, it's just nothing happens. So the first input delay might also suffer. If JavaScript injects things or moves things around on the page then also your visual stability might actually suffer. So you might see impact on all three of the core web vital metrics. Okay, so the short version is don't use JavaScript. No, that's not the short version. Use it reasonably. It's saying like, oh, you can cut yourself with a knife. Don't use knives ever. Good luck. Good luck in the kitchen without a knife. Like, I mean, depending on what you, if you're making soup, you'll probably get away with it. But if you're trying to like cut meat or something, how do you do that without a knife? If I become vegetarian. Yesterday I made seitan. I need to probably like ask for recipes then. Be careful, Gary. We'll start telling you about his grandmother. She was a very interesting person. You are a very interesting person. I'm sure the rest of your family is fantastically interesting as well. Cool. Yeah, I don't know. It's like so many other questions are still here. Here's one. I don't know. Maybe there's one works. What's the difference between the label penalty and basically a page not showing up at all because Google chooses to show another site with the same duplicate content? So basically, like, I don't know, penalty, a manual action, or would you show a different site instead? Well, a manual action, you get a manual action or a site gets, site or section of a site gets a manual action when they do something or they attempt to manipulate their rankings with something like with links, with gibberish content, or I don't even know what I'm not very versed with in the web sample, this is. While the ranking is more natural, I wanna say, in that you have full control over what's happening there, at least in most of the cases. And it's not targeted. Manual actions are always targeted. Basically, you did something against our guidelines or that was against our guidelines and you are getting a manual action for that. While an algorithmic change is most likely trying to fix a systemic problem and you just happen to have that problem, I guess, or contribute to that problem, but it's not targeted to your site. Yeah. And I guess the situation where a different page is shown because it's exact duplicate content of your own page, then it's like that's not necessarily a spam thing. With products, for example, if different sites have this exact same product descriptions, like we don't need to show all of the copies in the search results and we tend to just pick one of them. So it's not a sign that you're like a spammy site just because you're using products that other people are selling to. And in most of the cases, it's also not very hard to fix because if you add substantial or good quality content to your page, then it's very easy to break out of those two clusters and be featured on the page on your own and then someone else will have the problem that you had. So go and fix it. Yeah. I guess in both cases, you just go and fix it. Like with manual actions, you get an email telling you to fix it and the other one you kind of figure out on your own. But I, you know. Fantastic. Just go fix it. Just go fix it. Just go fix it. Just go fix it. So I have another go fix it question. Is it better to keep AMP pages with issues or to remove the AMP pages completely? Is this a trick question? I will shut up right now. I think Gary has opinions about AMP. It's a wonderful question. I, yeah, go ahead. I don't know. From my point of view, it's like if you know your pages are broken, it's like fix them or remove them. It's not super complicated. I mean, I don't know what kind of issue it is, but it's like if you know something is broken and you want to make sure that you're putting your best foot forward, then make sure you're putting something that works forward, right? I think that makes sense. And if you want to read the benefits of AMP, I'm pretty sure having a valid AMP page is the first step towards that. So you might get away with it working well enough to be considered as a page, but it's not going to get you much of AMP's benefits. So I would argue that if you can't invest in, especially if you have a non-AMP version that is fine, then having a broken AMP version around is probably inviting more trouble than it's giving you any benefit. So yeah, I would probably remove a broken one or fix it. I will keep another example. Hreflang was, I'm related to Hreflang. It's very close to my heart for reasons. I was about to say, like you're related to Hreflang. Is it your brother or your sister or? That's why it's real Hreflang. Now I get it. Yeah, exactly. But they're the thing, how to put this nicely. There was this big company who at one point decided that they couldn't measure the benefit of Hreflang. So they decided to remove it from their site sites. And their rankings tank just like went away internationally. And suddenly it was very obvious that they need the Hreflang to rank well internationally. And the same goes with AMP as well. Like if it benefits you and it's worth investing in fixing the issue, then yes, go ahead and fix it. But if the ROI is too low for your business, then you might as well just remove it. And I would say the same thing for Hreflang or any other technology that's there's out there. Because it's your business. You have to decide for yourself what benefits it and what doesn't. If Hreflang benefits your business or your business reaps the benefits of Hreflang, then good, if not, try removing it and see what happens. Because it is, you do need to invest in maintaining it. And I think if you're just doing AMP for speed reasons and you have a really fast site, otherwise just have one site and just focus on that instead of kind of trying to maintain both of them. Whereas if you, I don't know, have your AMP version set up in a way that it gets created automatically by a plug-in, then maybe it's just a matter of updating the plug-in and then suddenly everything works again. I have a quick question that is maybe just like a yes or no thing, Gary. Is there value in having title tags that are longer than the displayable space in the search snippet? Yes. Yes. Okay. That's a nice one. That was easy. I'm shocked. I like these kind of answers. Well, like if we can, we should do this more often. Cool. And I don't know, like lots of things still hit in the list. What does Google feel about PWAs to help improve user experience? I will mute myself. Oh, come on, that's just, oh, that's because PWAs include service workers that are built with JavaScript and Gary's so happy about JavaScript. I think in general, they are great. I use a bunch of them actually. So I do use the Progressive Web App for Twitter, for instance. I have been using the YouTube one recently as well because they just take less resources on my phone and they work pretty much just as well as native apps at least on Android. I know that integration on iOS I think is not as great. But for search specifically, it doesn't really matter because as far as we can tell, it's just a website and certain things like offline support, that's something that we don't really experience when we crawl or render the pages. So it doesn't really make a difference to us but a well-built Progressive Web App usually is also a fast website. So a fast website on the other hand will have good metrics on the core web vitals, I would hope. And that is a good thing. And that is part of the upcoming page experience signal. So that'll definitely not be bad. Now, I guess the PWA doesn't necessarily have to be completely JavaScript client-side rendered, right? No, it does not have to be that. Okay. So that's like orthogonal or independent concepts, right? You can take any website, you can make a static HTML page, add a pre-built service worker that allows to cache that so that it's offline capable, serve it over HTTPS and do like a few other things like have a manifest file, which is a JSON file, again, not JavaScript. And then put all that together and you have a PWA even if it's not really running any line of JavaScript besides the service worker. The only thing that you need JavaScript for is the service worker and the service worker allows offline usage of that page. So it's a price I would be okay paying, I think. I know that Gary might think differently. Sounds awful. I mean, it sounds like something people should just be doing is like, like when you describe it like that, it feels like, oh, it just makes everything better and you don't add a ton of JavaScript overhead. It's like, why? It's like. I think he's just hiding something. No. He's good for you. PWA is, okay. PWA is something. Cool. Christine is asking if we can get a reason for the title tag length answer. Gary? No. That was also easy. Okay, I mean, I tried, I tried. So the title length, that's an externally made up metric. And I think at one point we blurted out some number to say that, yeah, it should be like that, like this long just shut up. That might not be true actually. Maybe it was just wishful thinking. If you blurted it out, it would probably be more than seven or at least seven. No, this was before that, before I came or we came up with the seven. Yeah, number six. So the reason why I tried to steer people away from thinking about concrete numbers is not even about how we display titles, but rather how we construct our serving index and how we tokenize the page itself. And there's no, I mean, technically there's a limit like how long can it be anything in the page, but it's not a small number. Like it's not like 160 characters or whatever, or 220 or whatever. So try to keep it precise to the page, but I would not think too much about how long it is and whether it's long enough or a way too long. Like if it fills up your screen, then probably it's too long. But if it's just like one sentence that fits on one line or two lines, and it's like, you're not going to get a manual action for it. Are you saying it's not the size that matters, but the technique? I'm so sorry, it's 2.28 in the morning and I'm 12 years old. Yeah, I should shave then I actually look like it as well. I remember that our ex-teammate, Maria, she was always saying that I'm like a six year old. Well, now we have a 12 year old. Yeah, it was twice as good. Good? Fair, I understand that. Cool. Do you want to take one more or do we want to talk about? Okay, I'm just like grabbing the first one that I have on my list here. In terms of page speed, is it better to exclude tracking code like tag manager? Is there a way to include it without affecting page speed? Oh, that's not my question. I'm muting myself. Okay, so, wow. In terms of face visibility, I would say reduce the amount of requests that you need to make to load the critical content. I think doing additional bits and pieces that are optional and that you consider as optional and like, if this code doesn't run, I'm kind of fine with it. I think for those things, Google tag manager is really useful for other things. I'll try to like grab as much as possible into other resources, so either in your own JavaScript bundle if it's a client-side rendered application or into the initial HTML. We have been saying that for instance, around structured data, you can use Google tag manager to inject structured data if that's the easiest and only option that you have available. If you can do it differently, then do it differently. And that is pretty much true for not just tracking and Google tag manager, but pretty much any third-party script because any JavaScript holds the keys to your content on the page and also technically potentially the keys to your loading performance for your users. And you give that away to a third party, you need to trust them. Google tag manager, I'm sure the Google tag manager team is doing its best to make it lightweight and fast. That being said, at the same time Google ads, I know is a big offender in terms of page speed. And that's something that we need to work on. No, I'm just being honest here. This is something that you can objectively observe out there and that we are being confronted with on a relatively quick or frequent basis. But I think now that COVID vitals are so visible and so publicly discussed, all the teams have an incentive, including teams at Google, have an incentive to really look at the performance impact of the things that they built and improve that. And I think that's generally a good thing, so. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. That's like, you use what you really need on your pages and focus on your priorities, I guess. And there's one more post on the COVID vitals while we're at speed and I'm guessing this might be one for you, John. On COVID vitals, it was reported that you need three greens in Google Search Console for COVID vitals, but there was some confusion. If three greens were required for any boost with the COVID vitals or just for the potentially coming badge. I don't think we have an answer for that yet. I mean, we've been working on expanding the FAQ that we have in the forum for COVID vitals and lots and lots of questions are coming up. And I don't want to kind of detract from the FAQ by preempting anything there, but that's something that I believe will be covered there and a little bit clearer. So it should be fine. So basically just hang in there, it'll be fine. Well, I don't know about it'll be fine, but it'll be clearer, hopefully, yeah. Okay, fair enough. The optimist in me is coming through. Everything will be fine. Everything's awesome. No, stop it. Oh, come on. It's too early, it's too early, Martin. At most we can do C-Shanties, right, Gary? No, I'm not doing it. They sent us questions, it's fine. That's fair, that's fair. Cool, should we take a break here, Martin? What do you think, what's the time? The time is 2.33, so we can definitely take a break here. I'll click stop in the recording. All right. Can I go to sleep now? Yes, after you say goodbye in a language of your choice. I know that at least one person in the audience is waiting for that because I saw that popping up in the questions. Really? Yeah. Sayonara. Oh. Thank you very much. Not too bad, not too bad. I can live with that, I think. In that case, John, Gary, thank you so much for joining me here at this wonderful experiment that we had, and thanks for everyone who was in the audience. I think you two can go sleep if you want. Do you want to go to sleep now? Or do you want to stay with me here while I'm saying goodbye? We will check out and click save. Of course, don't forget to click save, Martin. I am. Oh, God, yes. That's a sting in my direction because we recorded at least one episode where I completely forgot to export the recording and then we had to re-record the episode because I'm a very smart person, not. That was wonderful. That was amazing. I strongly recommend you do that again. Yes, I'll probably not do that. We should do more of these conferences, you know? Like one of us accidentally forgets to... Yeah. Yeah. Hey, hey, hey, I have an idea. We should do it at 3 AM. Yes. Next time 3 AM to be more accommodating to India, for instance, yeah. What? Oh, God. You don't do this with me because I find ways of making that happen as this event kind of demonstrates. Oh, no, that's not my point. Like how is that more accommodating for India? I'm pretty sure that India is still in the early morning or was still in the early morning when we started and oh, no, actually, no, you're right. If we move it and damn, that would be more accommodating to the West Coast then? Maybe Hawaii. Hawaii, yeah. We need to... I know. We should just go to Hawaii and do it live from there. What do you think? That sounds like fun. I will go to PNG, Papua New Guinea. Papua do it from there. That sounds fun. That sounds good. Yeah. That was the diving in Papua New Guinea. Fantastic. But it's one of the least safe places. Least safe. Okay. Okay, that sounds less extreme. Actually, look it up on your favorite search engine. The capital of Papua New Guinea is one of the least tourist friendly places where you can go. Okay. Okay, right. I think that's a fantastic way to wrap up the session. I learned something today and it's scary, I think. Oh my goodness. Everyone who's watching us right now, you have a survey up on your screen as well. Please fill in the post-event survey to tell us how the event went from your perspective, what we can improve, what we liked. The survey will stay up for a while. So if you're watching this on demand, hop over to the events side on eventsonair.withgoogle.com slash event slash search dash central dash live. The link was in the registration. If you signed up for this, you probably know that you're out. So you can fill this out a little later if you want to go to sleep right now or if you're watching this on demand. Gary's taking a picture. I'm trying to not include the chat. And I'll browse your bar. That's going to be interesting. Stay like that, stay like that. Just hold it. Oh God. So this is how it's made for you though. This is how this actually looks behind the scenes. Ah, God. So whenever people see things on social media, they're like, yeah, that was cool. And then in reality, it was just awkward like holding a weird pose for half an hour. So yes, do fill out the post-event survey. Thank you so much for joining us. It has been wild. I have seen people who joined us from India, from Brazil, from the US, from everywhere in Italy, Switzerland. Someone was joining us from Italy. So they are suffering with us. So that's really, really lovely that they like stay up for these situations. Someone is asking if they will be... No, I think that's lovely. Someone is asking me, Randa is asking if there will be press passes available for these events? No. But yeah. How would that work? That's what I'm wondering. I don't know. No, we loved it in New Zealand. Best time. Ha! Fantastic. Yeah, exactly. 530 in India, that was rough for y'all. But I'll try to make something happen. Oh, we could go to New Zealand. It's like they don't have the troubles that we have. I think they have it again. Oh, no. Okay. All right. In that case, thanks everybody for joining the first life virtual search central life event. Thanks to John and Gary for joining me for the SOTR search of the record podcast version. Why did you do search of the record? Search of the record as an... It is search of the record. It's not... It's on the record. It's search of the record. Okay, fine. It's search of the record. But it's on the record. Yeah, exactly. John got it. We should press in vinyl. Richard is asking if there's a recording for those who couldn't watch due to the time zone. Yes, the recordings will go online soon. TM, we'll see how soon they'll be at some point. Jeff Reynolds suggested to you, Gary, that you could have just taken a screenshot. I was pondering that, yes. Jeff, listen, great idea, but it's 2.39 right now. Don't expect great ideas from our end here. All right, with that, I'd like to go to bed. And I wish you all a fantastic day, a lovely time. Thanks for joining us, looking forward to meet you all in future events. And bye-bye, stay safe, stay healthy.