 All right, welcome, everyone, to today's Google Webmaster Central SEO Office Hours. My name is John Mueller. I am a search advocate at Google in Switzerland. And part of what we do are these Office Hours hangouts where people can join in and ask their questions around their website and Google search. And we'll try to find some answers. A bunch of things were submitted on YouTube already, so we can go through some of those. But as always, if any of you want to get started with your first question, feel free to jump on in now. Hey, John, just wanted to ask a quick question. Yeah, so as we see, Google adjusts the crawling according to the server capacity. So does Google set a discover traffic limit? Like, that website received that much of traffic from discover that its server can handle? No, I don't think so. I mean, we generally don't have any kind of search traffic limits, so that applies to discover as well. So it's not that we would say this website gets 1,000 visitors from search, and then we stop showing it. Thanks. Sure. Thank you. Because I mean, the ideal situation is we show a website that is really good for a search query, and we show it to everyone who comes because it's a good website. So it would be kind of weird to say, we think it's a good website, but we're not going to show it to people. OK, thank you. Thank you, John, because the discover traffic is sort of on-off-on-off thing. But we see there is a limit of impression that never achieved that traffic. So I thought there is a limit related to the search server handles. But OK, so thank you for that. I don't think we would tie it to kind of how fast we think the server is. At most, if we see that the server starts getting slower, then we will slow down our crawling. It's not that we will say, oh, we will slow down how much we show the website in search or in discover. So the crawling side might slow down, but the rest should remain normal. Thank you. Sure. All right. Any other questions before we jump on in? So quiet today. OK. Sure, go for it, Alberto. I think you're on mute. So can you hear me now? Yes. Yes, perfect. Here, Italy. Excuse me for my very bad English, OK? No problem. I have only two questions. I am a new buyer, OK? So the fourth question is how much is important the speed of a website? Because I make a test with the Lighthouse from Chrome and with the Geometrics, OK, and other tools. I discovered that if I have 100 points on Lighthouse, it's not always better than have a speeder website with the Geometrics. It's better how many times to load the first painful content, OK, another thing. First question, the second, the last question. I don't know why. I find a problem with the sitemap XML. On the Google Search Console, I have always a message, couldn't fetch, couldn't fetch, couldn't do it. But the file is OK. You can discover the file XML without any problem. Other tool says it's OK. From my point of view, can be a bug of Google that is a standing review, pending review, instead of couldn't fetch, OK? Thank you. Thank you for being here. Sure. So with speed, I think the confusing part in the beginning when you start looking at this is that all tools say something different. And it's not the case that there is one number that represents everything that users do on your website. So all tools that look at different metrics, they try to say, well, I think this number is very important for users, or this number is very important for users. And they will highlight that in the tools. And because of that, when you use different tools, you will see different results. And it's not the case that one tool is better than the other. It's just they look at your website in slightly different ways. So my recommendation there would be to use these tools to find the bigger problems within your website where you see your website is very slow and to focus on those. And at some point, you're going to have a fairly fast website, and it's going to be hard to find more problems. So that's something where you probably can't move on to other things. But I would not take these kind of speed testing tools as, I don't know, it's not a law or a speed limit that you have to reach or something like that, but rather use them to improve your website overall. With on Google side in search, we plan to use the core web vitals for speed. And those include, I think, three metrics that you can focus on. Some of the tools also include those three metrics now. But that's something that we plan to use, I think, in May, we said, starting in May. And it's something where I think, especially for a new website, it's useful to focus on it. But it's also important that you don't lose track of the bigger picture. You can make a very, very fast website if it's empty. But it's not very useful for users. So that's something where, especially with a new website, I would almost recommend make sure you have a really fantastic website and then work slowly to improve the speed so that it's something that is fantastic and also useful. I would not use speed as the first thing to focus on. I would really focus on your website and the content first. OK, thank you. And with the sitemap file, it's hard to say. If you want, you can copy the URL of the sitemap file into the chat here. And I can take a look afterwards. Or another idea might be to post in the Search Central Help Forum where other people can take a look. And oftentimes, there's something that they can find there which is useful to point out. But I always get a copy of the chat messages afterwards. So that's something where I can look that up afterwards and see internally if there's something on our side that's maybe stuck or something that you can change there. Usually, these kind of couldn't fetch errors are things that go away on their own. So it's not something where, if your website is working normally, sometimes we just can't fetch it. And then at some point, it works again. And we don't show you anything when it works. And then later, maybe we can't fetch it again. And then we say, oh, it's couldn't fetch again. But if we can pick the sitemap file up in between every now and then, then that's perfectly fine for us. OK. Thank you. Thank you, Tom. Thank you. OK. Let me run through some of the submitted questions. And if you have any comments or questions along the way, feel free to jump on in. And we'll probably have time for other questions towards the end, too. My question is, on my blog, I have added tags at the end of each internal link. For example, question mark footer, question mark home, question mark menu, question mark side mark, to better analyze and know from where they have clicked on an article. I think Google could consider duplicate content. And I've added in Search Console the crawl URL parameters footer, home, and sidebar to indicate that they are canonical. Is this the correct way? Or maybe not necessary, because Google knows that there is only one original page. So this is something that, theoretically, what would happen here is we would see these as separate URLs, and we would try to crawl these individually. So instead of one page, one URL that goes to an article, we suddenly have all of these different variations. And our systems would crawl these versions and recognize that they're the same and then essentially fold them together into one page. So that's something where, theoretically, it's not a great way to do this. For the most part, I think, especially with smaller websites, it's less of an issue, because we can crawl more than enough from a website to keep all of the content index. And that's perfectly fine. There are, however, two better approaches that you can do here to make it so that Google doesn't have to figure out which page is the right one. One is to use the internal anchor notation, like with a number sign, a hash sign, in the URL. And then the part, let me just maybe mute you, Alberto. So to use a number sign in the URL, and with the number sign in the URL, we will ignore everything that comes afterwards. And we will focus on the part in the beginning. So if you link to your article and then the hash sign or number sign and then footer, then you will still see that in your analytics when you track that. But search will focus on the first part of the URL. So that's one option you can do. The other is if you're using Google Analytics, or probably all of the other analytics platforms as well, you can also tag links individually and let the analytics side know that these are specific locations, for example. And then you can track that individually like that without it actually being visible to search. So those are the two approaches that I would take there. In general, I think it's fantastic to better understand how users navigate through your website. So I would recommend keeping this kind of tracking going, especially if it helps you to understand your website and which parts you can improve. And instead of using question marks, use a different mechanism that lets us focus on the main URL and you still get that data. Is brand search a ranking factor? How does Google measure website authority? We don't really have something specific like brand search as something that we would call a ranking factor. One of the reasons I tend to mention it every now and then as something that you can focus on is that if someone is searching for your brand, then essentially your website is the primary one that is relevant. If someone is explicitly looking for, I don't know, the website that you've been working on and it has a fairly unique name, then we can understand that this user is exactly looking for that website. And then your website will definitely be ranking there. Or I mean, as long as nothing goes wrong. And as long as your brand is something that we can clearly recognize. So the clearly recognized part sometimes comes into play in the questions here in that people will say, oh, my brand is Best Insurance Company. And then they assume that if someone searches for Best Insurance Company, we will show their website automatically. And that's not the case, because those words are essentially normal words as well. But if you have a brand that is fairly unique, that people can search for specifically and we can understand that they're really looking for your website, they will find your website. So it's not something where I would say it's a ranking factor per se. But if you can build up that awareness for your brand, then you have this kind of almost guaranteed amount of traffic in that people explicitly search for your website and then they go to your website, which otherwise would be people search for your general topic. And maybe your website will rank there and they'll be able to go to your website. So that's something where I think it's almost like a parallel track of getting traffic to your website. So that's kind of why I suggest looking into this every now and then. How does Google measure website authority? We don't have any kind of public documentation and there's probably no simple way to just measure authority. I don't think that would be that trivial. What's the best approach when creating a new site? Getting the buzz out and focusing on acquiring a loyal user base, finding an intent behind a query that is not served well by the top result and creating the best content for that, any other tips? I think those are all good approaches that you can take. I think, especially if you're in the situation where you don't exactly know what you want to make your website about, then it is always worth the time to really take a lot of time to figure out what topics would really be relevant. And on the one hand, that's kind of based on what topics you have a lot of knowledge on, where you can bring kind of your existing experience and knowledge in. And on the other hand, it can be based on things like where are some holes that I can fill? Where can I tell that people are really keen to find information, but there isn't really great information out there yet. And with my background, my experience, maybe I can bring in some insights there. So those are definitely some approaches. In general, I would also consider making sure that you have something that you can build out for the long run, not something where you say, well, I can write about, I don't know, sparkly running shoes because nobody else is writing about it. But then kind of expanding from there is very hard. And the next topic might be, I don't know, private jets or something like that. And kind of connecting those things is really hard. Whereas if you can find a topic where you know you can bring a lot of information in and that you can grow out over time, then that gives you a little bit of a more stable base to work on. So that's kind of the direction I would take there. With regards to getting the buzz out and getting a loyal user base, always. I think that's a really fantastic approach. I think having users who love to go to your website, who recommend your website to other people, be it through links on their blogs or just recommending them in social media or whatever, I think that's always a fantastic thing to build on. And it's also a way of quickly getting feedback from people in that if you know these people are coming back regularly, then you can ask them, what am I doing well? What am I not doing so well? So those are definitely good approaches. I don't think there's one simple approach to making a website that will just work for everyone. And with that, it's something like, there are lots of different ways to do it, and you can find the angle that works well for you. The difficult part, I think, with new websites nowadays is that there are just so many websites out there already. So really finding that niche where you can provide something unique and valuable can sometimes be a bit challenging. And also for the more commercial topics, there are a lot of very well-established, well-monetized websites out there already, where it will be hard to get it. So if you want to put together a bookstore and you say, oh, I will make it online because, I don't know, I have the best science fiction book collection of anyone else, then opening a bookstore online, that's going to be really challenging because there are some really strong competitors out there already. Let's see. I want to start a new website. Oh, I think it's the same person. But I want to move some of the best content from my previous site that was hit by a core update in the past. How do I do that in a safe way? I don't want to transfer the bad website historic signals to the content from the old website. So I think there are generally two approaches here that you can take. For the most part, if the content is good content, then I would just take that content and move it to a new website. If you think that that's really what you want to do and moving it to a new website would be real one redirecting from the old URLs to the new ones so that we can pass some of those signals over. Whereas if you don't want to be associated with the old website, then you essentially need to create new content. So if you just copy and paste the whole content and put it on a new website, then we will see that and recognize, oh, this is the same content as the other website here has. So we will try to pick a canonical between these two, or we will say these pages are kind of equivalent and pass those signals anyway. So if you want to be associated with the old website, you might as well just redirect. If you don't want to be associated with the old website, then you really need to create something new. I was wondering if Google is going to penalize us for using a pop-up for a limited time, say for a week or so. The brand team wants to run a survey on site. I don't think we would penalize a website for anything like this. So in particular, the web spam team has other things to do than to penalize a website for having a pop-up. There are two aspects that could come into play. On the one hand, we have the un-mobile, the policy of the intrusive interstitials. So that might be something to kind of watch out for that you don't keep it too long, or kind of like you show it to everyone all the time. And with that policy, it's more of a kind of like a subtle ranking factor that we can use that to adjust the ranking slightly if we see that there is actually no useful content on this page when we load it. So that's something that could come into play, but that's more something which would be like a temporary thing. If you have this survey on your site for a week or so, then during that time, we might pick up on that signal, we might respond to that signal, and then if you have removed it, we can essentially move on as well. So it's not that there's going to be a lasting effect there. The other thing I think, I don't know, I forgot, I think another aspect that you probably want to watch out for is if you're showing the pop-up instead of your normal content, then we will index the contents of the pop-up. If you're showing the pop-up in addition to the existing content, which sounds like the case, if it's really a pop-up, then we would still have the existing content to index, and that would kind of be OK. So I ask to follow up on that because there is actually like one American paper that literally every day a pop-up comes to sign onto its newsletter. You can see like a little of the text below and under, but you have to click it every time. And I've also actually wondered about like, first of all, I wonder, are they really getting that many people on a daily basis to sign up to this newsletter compared to what this might be doing negatively to them? Is that something that would be a negative? Because it is actually extremely annoying. Yeah, yeah. That sounds like something that we would pick up on. One of the things there is that we focus on the mobile version of the site, and we only use that in the mobile search results. So that's something where if they're not showing it on mobile, then maybe we wouldn't be picking up on that. But if it's on mobile as well, then that would definitely fall into the category of intrusive interstitials. And we'd say this is kind of like something where we would slightly demote the website in search. Sometimes the tricky part there is with these slight demotions. It's not the case that we'll remove the site from search or we'll kind of like move it to page 100 or something like that. But if it's really relevant content, then maybe we'll still show it on the first page of the search results just not as highly as it could be. Um, yeah. Alberto? OK, can you hear me? Yes. Excuse me for my English always because, OK. I have a question. With the website, my website is first in the Google search in the first page. But I discover that it's made in WordPress that if I raise the final S of HTTP, OK, I can reach two versions of the same page with SS secure and without. I found that there is a solution changing the HTTP access with a permanent 301 redirection, OK. But I am a little afraid to lose ranking with the permanent redirection. So it's better to let them think like it is with the two versions of URL that Google decide, which is the canonical and which is not, OK, without making any redirection, OK, or for better authority of canonical URL is better make the permanent redirection 301 to access, OK. I know it's my excuse me, but OK, thank you. Yeah, yeah, it's clear. I would definitely do the redirect. So you will not lose any value if you do the redirect there because it's within the same website. So I would do the redirect because it's the clean approach to setting up the HTTPS version of a website. So I would just set that up. I think with a redirect, the one place where I would watch out for is if you're doing a site move, moving from one domain to another domain, then that's something where we have to process that and it can get complicated and things like that. But with HTTP and HTTPS, it's perfectly fine. There is nothing fancy or tricky for us about that. So I would just do the redirect. OK, thank you. Thank you, John. John, may I add something? Sure. Alberto, also, keep in mind and be careful not to generate any redirect chains. Choose a specific version with or without WWW so you can use this version as an official URL of your website and make sure that all of the other versions with WWW, without WWW or with WWW, the HTTP version, including the HTTPS with or without, depends on what you decide to go with, are pointing to the final URL you have decided to go with. Sorry for this a little bit difficult explanation, but it's usually hard to explain this without any examples. OK, thank you. I will provide you some examples actually over the chat. Sorry about this, but Alberto, I find another information from the official page of the Pugin and they give you a recommendation to change this option of the Pugin, to stop it and to change with another one. This is from the official page of the Pugin, so you can follow my last comment. Arilano, there are some books with this plugin. In case to the set map, you're talking about set map, right? Yep. Yeah, OK. Sorry about that, John. Yeah, sorry for that. So it's already parallel discussion. OK, cool. Fantastic. OK, let me jump to the next question. I have a YouTube channel with 9,000 subscribers, and I also have a blog. Sometimes I write a blog post and use the same text I create YouTube videos for. Is this content duplication because Google search can understand videos? I'm saying that because my two blog posts are crawled, but they're not ranking on Google. Even when you put that link of the blog post in Google search, it's not there. It's crawled two months ago. My other blog posts where I didn't create a video, they're ranking without a problem. Could you recommend what to do in this case? Should I use a canonical tag or delete the blog post or the video? So first of all, we don't do kind of text analysis of the videos and then map them to web pages. So if your video has the same content as your blog post, it's still something different. People sometimes go to Google with the intent to read something, and sometimes they go to Google with the intent to watch something or to listen to something. And those are very different things. We would not say the text in this video is exactly the same as a blog post. Therefore, we don't show either of them, or we only show one of them. So if you have a video that matches your blog post, I think that's perfectly fine. That's a great way, I think, to kind of like spread your information in different channels. So I would definitely not stop doing that. I would not take the video down or take the blog post down. If the blog post is not ranking in Google, then that would be very specific to the blog post and not specific to the video blog post combination. Also, with regards to duplicate content, if you had the same content in textual form on your website where it's clearly duplicate content, then what would happen there is we would just pick one of those versions to show in Google Search. It's not the case that we would say, oh, this website has some duplicate content. We will not show it at all in Google. But rather, we'll say there are two versions here. We will pick one of these to show, and we will just not show the other one. So that's something where even when we do recognize duplicate content, it's not the end of the world. It's really just a matter of us saying, we don't want to show the same thing to users multiple times in the search results. So we will pick one, and we will show that one. I found these lines in a Google Webmaster Central blog related to AMP. AMP will no longer be necessary for stories to be featured in the top stories on mobile. It will be open to any page. Is this already live in the Google search results for the news section, or when will it be implemented from Google? I'm pretty sure at the moment this is not live. As far as I understand, this is a change that is going to happen when we launch the page experience as a ranking factor, which is planned early for May 1. So that's something where it's not live at the moment. It's still coming. Some noise back here. Let me just mute you for a moment. I'm a newbie, and I don't have any idea how to index my website in Google, how to rank my site, what is a sitemap, how do I submit a sitemap. Yeah, lots of questions here. My recommendation here would be to go off and read a lot of information first. So especially if you're new to the web and you have different ideas that you want to publish and you don't really know about the technical details, I would recommend going through some of the SEO starter guides. So we have an SEO starter guide that is fairly long and comprehensive. Lots of information in there. It can take a while to go through. It also covers sitemap files, how to get indexed, how ranking works a little bit. There are also other SEO beginner guides out there which have a lot of really useful information which give sometimes a little bit of a less Google-focused view, which I think is also great to have in the beginning. And I would go through these different guides to try to figure out what is all involved with going online and being available in search. For the most part, I think the nice aspect is for the most part, you can use any system that is out there that makes websites and it will just work well in search. So all of the platforms that are commonly used, be it something like Blogger from Google or if you're using Wix or Squarespace or whatever you have, then essentially those are fairly well tuned already for Google so that you don't have to do anything special to make them work. There are lots of things you can do additionally if you want to focus a little bit more on search. But for the most part, all of these platforms will just work for you. So that's kind of my approach there is, on the one hand, like dive in and try things out. On the other hand, there are lots of these starter guides that help to give you the basics and some of the starting information there. And just as a word of warning, there is like an endless amount of information that you can go through afterwards. So even if you go through the starter guides, it's not the case that you will have seen everything but there are just so many details that you can focus on if you want to. My M.dot website shows primary caller is desktop, but I want to switch to smartphone. What should I do in this case? It was smartphone before, but it shows desktop recently. Why did it happen? I don't know. So I mean, why it happened? I don't know why you would see that. So in general, our systems automatically switch to mobile-first indexing when we find that a website is ready for that. And if a website currently is still with the desktop crawler, then there would be two reasons for that. On the one hand, it could be a part of an experimental control group, which we always keep for these bigger changes. Usually that's a fairly small group, though. And the other part could be that our systems still think that something on your website is not quite ready for mobile-first indexing. And that could be something like you have more images on your desktop version than you have in your mobile version, something along those lines or structured data. Like we have documented various of these things already. And that's something where kind of towards the date that we have specified for when we would switch everything over, which I think is March or April, I forgot. Then towards that date, we will start probably shifting websites over, even if there are still issues. So my recommendation there would still be to kind of double check to make sure that you have everything covered. And if you're sure that everything is covered, then just let it be, let it shift over on its own. Sometimes our systems are confused by things that you might not care about. So that's an aspect that sometimes comes into play when I look at some of these websites. For example, if you go to a desktop page, you will often have related articles on the bottom. And sometimes these related articles have a thumbnail image associated with them. And on a desktop, you might have, I don't know, maybe five or six of these related articles on the bottom. Whereas on mobile, if you go to the mobile version of the page, you might just have one related article on the bottom with one thumbnail image. And then our systems would look at that and say, well, on desktop, you have six of these images on mobile. You just have one. Clearly, you're not providing the full content on mobile. And as a site owner, it's like, technically, that's correct, but you probably don't really care about that. Maybe those thumbnail images are not the critical part of your website. So it's not something where you'd say this is really a problem for me. And a lot of the cases I looked at kind of fall into that category where people make the website work well on mobile, but it just doesn't have exactly the same setup as on desktop. And then our systems say, oh, it's not ready. And actually, you as a site owner might say, well, it's good enough. It's what I want. And as we move towards the deadline there, then it will shift over anyway. And also, there is no ranking effect associated with the mobile-first indexing change, so it's not that you will rank better or higher if a website is in mobile-first indexing. What will it be the case if it's the opposite, that if it's not mobile index ready? Is that a negative? So we would not see that as a ranking effect, but we would perhaps just not have all of the content. So if the primary images are actually missing on mobile and those are images that you used to get a lot of traffic for from image search, then suddenly we would not have those images anymore and we wouldn't be able to show the website. So it's not a change in ranking. We don't have the full content, so we can't index it or rank it for that content. How would it be when the website is only partly on an MDOT site and on the WWW, there's a part is responsive, a part is not mobile-friendly, but is not covered by the MDOT and the other part is not mobile-friendly on the WWW, but has a MDOT coverage? So the system that we have to switch between or to switch a website to mobile-first indexing would look at the domain overall and we would try to aggregate across the domain to figure is it ready or not. And we would switch it over based on that. But for indexing, we do that on a per-page basis. So if some pages are on the MDOT and they have the full content there, then we will pick that up. If some are responsive on the WWW version, then that's the mobile version that we would use for indexing there. So it's like for the switch over, we might be kind of confused if some things are ready and some things don't look ready. But for the actual indexing afterwards, probably that would be okay. And how do you know or how would we know if we are in this experimental control group? I don't think you would know. Okay. Yeah. I mean, we don't specify that externally and it's not something that is really large. So usually it's something like one-tenth of a percent or something like that where we just hold things back a little bit so that we can make sure that when we compare, it looks correct. And how would the effect be on parts from Google Like Discover or Google News in such a mix-up constellation? I don't think there would be any difference there. So we would also do this on a per-page basis. And as far as I know, Google News and Discover, they both are based on the same indexing that we use for web search. So that should just be fine. The one aspect I don't know about Google News is how when you're within the Google News corpus, I think you have to specify your website or something like that to get registered for Google News. I don't know how they would handle like a mix of WWW and MDOT. My guess is they can deal with that properly because it's been like that for a long time now, but that might be something to check with the Google News folks. Can we some parts check how the Mobile First index is dealing with the page when we are not ready yet? How do you mean? Well, if I'm checking several tools like the live URL testing or also the core web vitals or mobile testing of Google, they always have a reference like the alternate tag for the MDOT site. And it's a bit confusing if they are now dealing with the MDOT site for the check or with the WWW as the desktop version. You know, I don't know. I think in a case like that, I would still check both versions if you can check that manually, but kind of make sure that when you're testing things for indexing to focus on the mobile version. So that's, I think it's always a bit tricky with WWW and MDOT versions because you do have kind of two separate templates that you need to check. But for indexing, we will focus on the MDOT version. For users, you still have to focus on both of those versions. So especially things like speed, that's something where you would test kind of the desktop version and the mobile version separately. I think in Search Console, we also show that information separately with regards to speed. So that's something where doing both is a good idea. But for indexing, I would really focus on the mobile version. Okay, thank you. Sure. Hi, Alberto. Hello. I have a question that is very nice for my point of view. I have disabled, disabled, okay, on my website, analytics, Google Analytics. Why? And I don't know if it's correct or not, okay? Because I am a fanatic of speed website, okay? I love the speed website without making only an HTML website with the WordPress, okay, speed with the WordPress. I found that with analytics, okay, ranking is not better than without because there is a time to transmit data between Google and website. This with the Google Tag Manager, too. It is with the Facebook Pixel Manager, too, okay? So I prefer to don't catch data with analytics but has a more speed website because Google in his metrics doesn't recognize that we have analytics, okay? And so your website is one second and a half lowest because it is analytics. So you are worse than another side that is more speed, do you know? So this is the question, okay? Thank you. Yeah. So I think first of all, we don't do anything special for analytics. It's not the case that we would say, oh, you use Google Analytics, that's fine. It's like we don't care if our website is slow because Google Analytics. If it's slow, it's slow. And that's something where sometimes it makes sense to look at the different embedded things that you have like analytics, like ads, like Tag Manager, whatever, and to figure out which parts you really need for your websites and which parts you can say, well, I don't need them. I prefer to make my website a little bit faster and to kind of say, well, maybe I don't have this data. So that's something which you kind of have to decide. But sometimes there are also ways that you can implement analytics in a way that is very fast. So that might also be worthwhile to check out maybe in the analytics help forum to see what is the fastest way to implement analytics. Another approach that I've seen is that people take a sample of the traffic and they just measure that where they can say, I will measure every 100th visitor with analytics and everyone else, I will not measure like that, which means that on average, you still have a little bit of data with regards to how people go through your website, which parts of your website are useful. But for the most part, your users are able to get through very quickly. So those might be some approaches there. I think there's a lot of value in analytics and in understanding how users interact with your website. So I would try to find a way to keep this data and to be able to use that data to help your website get better, rather than to just say, oh, I will not track anything so that I can be one millisecond faster than everyone else. Because in the end, you need to find things that you can improve on your website and you need to constantly be improving your website and you might be a little bit faster today, but if you keep your website the way that it is, because you don't have data on which parts people find useful, then other people will make websites that maybe are a little bit slower, but are a lot more useful and then maybe we will show those websites. So that's a balance you have to try to find. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right, let me just maybe grab one or two more questions from the list and then we can do some more live as well. I'm having a hard time with Google marking my website URL as noindex. It takes forever to Google to recheck my website and most of the time I'll get back the same report. How can I change the URL mark noindex so that I can finally start selling stuff? Google is making it really hard for my website to be recognized. So I'm not 100% sure how you mean this with regards to Google marking my website noindex. So usually noindex is something that you have within your website, maybe a setting in the website system that you have where you're actively telling us not to index specific pages. And removing that is something you have to remove on your website. And when we recognize that it's gone for individual pages, we will start showing those pages in search. So that's something where you, I suspect you still need to find that setting in your content management system to change that out. I think you're here in the hangout as well, right? Yes, yes I am, right here. Can you give me a little bit more detail on what you're seeing? Well, I just got started. I'm from Switzerland as well. And I just created a second website. I had a lot of problems with the duplicates as well because I needed parts of my first website to be on the second one as well. I was able to change those all up but at the moment I'm having a hard time with the noindex. I'm crawling to websites and I'm still waiting for it. My boss said it usually takes a while. I'm just very impatient and I really want to sell a lot of stuff on my website but I can't really get up there and the ratings at the moment. Okay, I would suggest maybe going to the Search Central Help Forum and specifying your site there and explaining a little bit what issues you're seeing there because my suspicion is that there's just something small that you need to change in your setup and then it will work with regards to suddenly being indexed and showing up in rankings that does take a bit of time and especially with regards to rankings if it's a competitive area where other people are selling similar things then it takes time, it takes a lot of work. You have to find different ways to get the word out as well. That could be maybe doing some advertising in the beginning to drive kind of that initial amount of traffic there and to find maybe there are other creative ways that you can get people to kind of find your website and discover the cool things that you have there but the folks in the Help Forum are very good at spotting a lot of the kind of things that hold the website back and that's probably a good way to start. I think Dito and Nikolai are also active in the Help Forum so I'm sure if you post a link here in the chat then they'll also be like jumping on it as well but I think especially in the beginning it's useful to get feedback from a lot of different people and the Help Farms are a great place for that. It's not the case that everyone will have perfect feedback and you will just rank number one if you follow all of that advice but it gives you some things to think about. Okay, perfect, thank you very much. Sure. All right, I think we're kind of running low on time so maybe I'll just switch to more questions from you all and I'll also stick around a little bit longer after the recording if any of you want to hang around a bit more. I have one question to the m.sites and the mobile first crawling. How important is it for the mobile first crawler that all sites are mobile friendly? Is it a problem still having problems there or issues there? For mobile first indexing we don't care if it's mobile friendly or not. So that's something, if the text is on the page if you have to zoom in and kind of find it, it's on the page. It's for indexing, that's perfectly fine. It's only for ranking afterwards that we would use the mobile friendliness as a ranking factor but for indexing, for mobile first indexing it doesn't matter at all. So in particular, those very old websites that are built with tables, you can look at them on mobile, you have to zoom in, all of that. But they work perfectly fine on mobile first indexing because they have exactly the same content on mobile as they have on desktop. You have to zoom in, it's hard to find, but it's all there. Great, thank you. Can I add one thing here? Sure. So mobile first indexing is technical thing and mobile friendliness is user behavior thing. This is why you are saying it will not have impact of whether it is zooming out or it's calling down kind of thing. Pretty much, yeah. Mobile first indexing is the HTML page, the text on the page and mobile friendliness is more about usability. Thanks. Hi, John. Hi. Hi. Hi. We have a website and on our website there is a particular section that we would like to use in the news section related to our industry. So I just wanted to know that apart from the normal activities that we do, like putting content, do we need to do something extra so that Google show these news items? In Google news also apart from normal web results, like we need to register a website somewhere for Google news. My understanding is you still need to set up the website in the news publisher center, but I don't have any details on the Google news side. So that's something where for normal web search, for things also like the top stories, those kind of things, we don't need anything special, but particularly for Google news, they do need a little bit more information and I believe that's all in the Google news publisher center. So you need to check that out. Sure, no problem. Thank you. Hi, John. Can I come in? Sure. Okay. So I have two questions related to news publishers, right? So basically number one is the best practices to syndicate content for a news publisher, alerting Google, which one is original content, does actually means there are some tagging rules there, right? With the health support everywhere, right? So does actually this means whenever actual tagging will help original content to rank over the syndicated content that actually works or does it have a different setup or rule? I mean for syndicated content for a news publisher, that's one question. And other part is the Google Discover visibility for the news publishers, right? Against the Google Broadcore series of updates, right? That's two questions. Okay, so for syndicated content, we do have the rel canonical that we recommend, where if you're syndicating content from another website, we recommend using the rel canonical to tell us what the original source is. So that helps us to understand the connection between these two. However, it's not always the case that we will only show the original source. A lot of times it makes sense to show different versions of the same content. So in particular, this is something that you might care about if you have the original source and you syndicate your content out to other websites. Then you have to assume that we will index all of those other versions as well. And it's possible that we will show one of these other versions above your website. I don't know how that is handled in Google News, but at least in web search, it's certainly possible that if you syndicate the content out, then those syndicated content copies could show in the search results. And in some cases, they may show above your content. So that's something where if you're saying this is a critical problem, it should never happen for our website, then you might need to reconsider how you syndicate your content. In many cases, that's less of an issue. And you would say, well, the important part is that the information gets out, that maybe we get mentioned as a source, that that's kind of included there as well. And then the syndicated content might be visible in search, maybe even above your results. But it still attracts attention to your website because you're kind of the primary source of that information. So balancing those two sides is something that is almost on your side. You need to make that choice. Do I want to syndicate or do I not want to syndicate? All right. All right, fair enough. And the second part was about the Discover thing, right? The news publisher and the broadcast series update. Is there any relation? Because we are seeing a lot of fluctuations in Discover traffic, right? Whenever there's a bit or fluctuation or maybe some vulnerabilities around the rankings and others. So is there any relation of it? Yeah, so we do use a number of the same quality algorithms in Discover as we use in web search. So when a broad core update happens in web search, it's very common that you would also see changes in Discover as well. So that's certainly not totally unrelated. I mean, we see Discover as almost a part of Search. So it's not something that we would say is completely independent and uses completely separate algorithms and everything. It does include a lot of similar things. Also, the content, of course, is based on what we call an index for web search. It's not a separate index or anything like that. All right, fair enough. Thank you. OK, let me pause here. I'll pause the recording. And if any of you want to hang around a little bit longer, you're welcome to do so. Thank you all for joining. Thanks for submitting so many questions and asking so many questions along the way. I hope you all found this useful. It's always one of the highlights of the week to kind of get some direct feedback from people and, I don't know, almost see people in person. It's like such a weird thing. So thanks for jumping in and hope to see you all in one of the future Hangouts again. Thank you. Thanks a lot. Bye. Bye-bye.