 All right, welcome, everyone, to today's Webmaster Central Office Hours Hangouts. My name is John Mueller. I'm a Webmaster Trends Analyst here at Google in Switzerland. And part of what we do are these Office Hours Hangouts, like here, where webmasters and publishers can join in and ask any of their website, web search-related questions that might have come up. As always, there are a bunch of questions that were submitted already. But if any of you want to go ahead and ask a first question, feel free to jump on in. Or if not, we can see what we have. Let's see. Actually, not that many questions today. So we'll see. We probably will make it all through all of these and see how far we can go. The first one is specific to structured data, essentially. What's the correct method for a service-based business to leverage structured data to display ratings for their individual service pages? And the question goes on and talks about someone else's site, where they're currently showing some structured data and seeing a rating in the search results, which sounds wrong to them. So that does look like it's something that probably wouldn't be acceptable by the structured data team, the way that it's set up like that. Essentially, what's important for us is that the rating refers to the primary topic of the page. So for example, if you're a car dealer and you have a car model on your website and that's a page about that car model, then that rating should be about that car model. And it should be something that anyone is able to submit feedback on. So in this case, on the one hand, the rating seems to be about the company, not about anything specific on that page. And the ratings themselves seem to be more testimonials in that they probably are more hand-picked ratings rather than just general ratings that are submitted by users. So both of those would technically be wrong. If that's something that you care about deeply, then that's perhaps something that you could submit to the web spam team through the Structure Data Spam report form, I think, to let them know to take a look at that to see is that OK, is that problematic or not. Personally, what I'd recommend doing is not focusing so much on the way that other sites have it set up, especially if you're thinking that they're probably doing it wrong, but rather try to get it right for your own website. So like I said, make sure that the ratings reflect the primary topic of the page. And make sure that the ratings are things that anyone is able to submit a rating for. All right, then I need some help for our tech news website. We've been working on this website for a while. We publish a lot of articles, but we're kind of seeing a drop in search. What could be the problem? So I took a look at this website a little bit ahead of time to try to see what might be happening there. In general, I don't see anything specifically wrong. Or I'd say you're doing this meta tag wrong or this specific thing on your website wrong. As far as I can tell, the changes that we're seeing in search are just primarily based on where we think your site would be relevant in the search results. And that includes things like the quality overall of the website, things like how you're presenting your website. So ads about the fold, things that generally apply to all kinds of websites. And I sometimes see this happening specifically around tech news websites where there's a tendency to reuse content that they find elsewhere on other websites and to rewrite that. Because how many different ways can you possibly rewrite how to unlock, I don't know, an Android phone, for example? But these kind of things where you're just essentially repeating things that other people have said and you have ads all over the page, then that's something that sometimes comes across as being a bit lower quality. And I can imagine that our algorithms over time, they might try to pick up on that and say, well, there's a lot of good stuff here, but there's also a lot of stuff which we're kind of not that happy about. So those are probably things that I'd recommend taking a look at and maybe getting some feedback from general users as well to see how are they really happy with this website? Where would they see problems? Are there specific aspects that they would recommend improving or changing if they had like a magic wand? What would they change on your website? And collect all of this feedback and then try to implement some of that. I think it's important to get as objective as possible feedback, even if it's kind of harsh, even if you don't agree with it necessarily, so that you have a chance to kind of take things to the next level. It sounds like you also have a lot of followers on Facebook and Twitter and on YouTube channel. And I think all of those different channels are a great way to kind of spread out and to make sure that you're not dependent on a single source of traffic, which probably makes it a little bit easier for you, because if people are still coming to your website through YouTube or following you on YouTube or any of these other channels, then at least you have like multiple legs that are supporting your site. John? Yes? On the example of the Android, unlocking an Android phone, what are some ideas? I mean, I guess I'm trying to understand, is it really because you're not providing any original ideas, or are you saying they're just kind of copying the content verbatim? That's the problem. I think, in a lot of cases, it's not so much a matter of just copying the content one to one, but rather really providing something unique and compelling there. So if you're searching for something like unlocked Android phone, which is probably too generic anyway, because everyone has a different phone and they're all a little bit different. But you kind of want to make sure that the content that you're providing is really the best by far. So it's not just as good as the first 10 or 20 results. So it's like, well, you might as well show my site because you're showing all these others that are just as good, but really have something on there that's significantly better. So maybe for something like unlock Android phone, make it easy to figure out which specific device you have, or what operating system, what specifics, and kind of guide the user through the whole process. So being generic is kind of the problem? I think the main problem with a lot of these websites that I see is that they're kind of as good as the other websites out there. And if they're kind of as good as the others, then it's like, why should we show your website instead of the others? Because we already have the others that are just as good as yours, like you said. So you really want to make sure that you're really significantly a leg up from all of these others. You're not referring to the shareability aspect. You're referring to purely just the content, right? Yeah, yeah. And with a website, everything comes together. So if you have really great content, and you have it hidden away behind five layers of ads that you have to click through, then obviously that's a bad user experience as well. So it's really kind of the whole thing that you're providing there where someone is specifically looking to find help for this one problem, and you're presenting your website as a whole, which has a lot of good text on it, maybe images, but also the whole layout, the whole setup that you have there. Hi, John. Hi. A few days ago, one of our clients asked this question, and I was confused what I should tell them. The question was like, is there any ratio between external link and internal link of a site? I mean, if my internal link is more than external link, is the bad thing for SEO? No. There's no specific ratio that you'd need to look for there. That's something that essentially kind of falls in place naturally. Usually you have a good internal linking so that we can crawl anywhere from within your website to find all of this content. And the external side is kind of not something that you could really control. Yeah. So I wouldn't worry about any ratio between those two. OK, thank you. Sure. All right, another question was specifically with regards to an expert Q&A website that was losing traffic. We don't do any cloaking, link building, or anything that might be considered bad. We managed to improve session duration, conversion rates, page speed, and other engagement metrics. But the site is going down on a regular basis. I was wondering if there's anything broken or any fundamental issue. So I also took a look at that website. And from my point of view, it's also something where I'd say there's nothing obviously technically wrong with the website, in the sense that there is something broken or some meta tag or some simple technical thing that you can fix on your website. In general, I think it's set up fairly well. The things that would worry me a little bit about this is kind of the clear focus on user-generated content where you're not necessarily sure what specifically will actually show up for some of these questions that are submitted there. And the other thing, I just forgot, but with a strong focus on user-generated content, I think one of the tricky aspects there is that it's sometimes really hard to make sure that the quality of the website overall really remains as high as you want it to be. Oh, yeah. The other thing that I noticed is a lot of the content that's getting, I don't know, a lot of visibility in search seems to be fairly basic and simple content, where I'd kind of be worried that essentially the information that you're providing on your website could be provided by anyone. So for example, what I noticed is one of the top pages of ranking for your website is how to convert, I don't know, four ounces into some other unit, which essentially you have this one word answer, which is that other number. And that's great content to have, obviously. But on the one hand, it's not going to keep people coming to your website. It's not something that's going to engage people and say, well, great, I was able to convert four ounces on this website. Therefore, let me browse all of the other hundreds of thousands of questions that were submitted here, or let me try to help answer other questions. That seems like something that's like people come and they go and they're done. And it's not necessarily something that's kind of building up your website. And I can imagine from a search point of view, that's also something that can change and shift fairly quickly in that maybe some other website will also have how to convert four ounces into another unit. And technically, the answers are the same. There's one simple answer for this. So why would we necessarily need to show your website for something like this? And sometimes it's good to have a lot of really, I don't know, basic content out there. But it feels like it's something where you're trying to build up something really strong and large. And by focusing on these small, basic type things, you're kind of losing track of that vision of really, I don't know, strong, unique question-answer type website. So that's obviously kind of tricky to work around, because you answer the questions that people submit and other people's answers to questions that were submitted. But I think it's something worth thinking about, by trying to find ways where you can actually provide more long-form content, more in-depth content in a sense that people will go there and say, well, this was really useful and insightful. I learned a lot from reading this. I'm going to come back to this website over time again and again, or I'm going to look specifically for this website when I have a question in the future. So those are kind of the things that I would aim for there. Another thing that I've sometimes seen with some of these question-and-answer websites that are based on user-generated content is that because the quality of the content varies so much, it might make sense to actually go in there and say, well, I have some actual experts, not just random people from the internet, who were able to answer some really important questions with really good, insightful, in-depth content. And instead of creating it as a Q&A-style thing for these experts, maybe have more of a platform where they can actually publish their content directly. So something kind of like, I don't know, ever-gain content more rather than just Q&A. Yes? What about justanswer.com? I think that's one of the bigger QA ones where the experts are answering questions generally in depth. Yeah, that's the one that was submitted here. Okay, I didn't see it. And then you say about these short answers, the other one that comes to mind on that was one called cha-cha.com. I don't know if you remember that. I don't know. You could text them a question and they would answer it and the answer would get published. They've answered billions of questions so far, but they don't appear in search at all anymore. I don't know about cha-cha, yeah. I mean, I think that's an interesting model in the sense that you're able to provide a quick answer, but it's really hard to say that this is something that will be sustainable when it comes to search. Because if the answer is essentially, I don't know, a short sentence or a couple of words, then that's something that's visible in the search results automatically in the snippet. It's like anyone could be providing that answer. It's really hard to say you're differentiating yourself significantly from everyone else by providing something there. So it's kind of the, in a case like that, you're providing that unique service of people are able to kind of send you a short question and you have an answer fairly quickly, but it's really hard to turn that into something that remains sustainable in the search results. All right, so question regarding a drop down on our website, tourist visa online. Here we have like a two country selection that looks like this. So you have your website.com slash one country name and then slash another country and then slash another country name. So essentially three country names and we have around 240 countries. So we automatically generate all of these URLs based from our database. Is that okay? So I took a quick look at the website at how this was happening. And in general, my fear here is also kind of similar to the previous ones is that you're going to end up with a lot of really, really thin content, especially if you're just pulling in content from a database and creating URLs for that. That's something where it's really hard to say that what you're providing on those pages is actually unique and compelling for that kind of pair of countries that you have there. So that's kind of what I would worry about there in that you're automatically generating content for all of these different variations. People might be looking for some of those variations specifically, but because all of your content is essentially the same, our systems are going to look at that and say, well, all of these pages are pretty much the same. Maybe we can even fold them together into one page and just show that in a search results. So I think what's probably going to happen here is that you're, on the one hand, you're competing in a very tough niche where there are lots of really strong competitors. And on the other hand, you're diluting the value of your content significantly by having those 240 countries times 240 variations, essentially, you have like a ton of different URLs that all provide the same content pretty much. And it will make it much, much harder for your site to actually compete with some of the stronger competitors out there. So just because you have those countries in the URL and you have them mentioned on the page when they're selected in the URL doesn't necessarily mean that we'll see your site as being the most relevant one for that variation. So what I'd recommend doing there instead is to try to find ways to reduce the number of URLs and to make sure that the content that you're providing on these URLs is really unique and really useful and obviously also correct. So for example, I can select Antarctica in your dropdowns and I don't think people actually have a, I don't know, a passport from Antarctica. So it's really hard to kind of actually say, well, for citizens of Antarctica, I can provide you with a visa when that's probably not even possible. So these are kind of the basic things where it's like your database is generating all of these variations, but actually the content itself that you're providing there is all the same. So you really need to kind of take a step back and go from this massive content that you're creating to actually create something that's more specific, that's correct, that's valuable, and that's unique on its own, that can stand on its own. Could you just provide a single page that lists all the countries? I think that might be an option or if there are like different types of visas, for example, with individual pairs of countries, I think that would be an option as well. If you're working in specific languages, it might be an option to have content in those languages, for example, but just taking the same content and by database, kind of swapping out the titles, that really doesn't help much. John? Yes. I will ask you about WebWite. WebWite, yeah. Okay. Yeah. John, how will we show WebWite in search results? Automatically, will it identify the page who needs with WebWite function or... In the search results, I don't know if we would show those differently. So WebWite is something that we've been using I think for like four or five years now. It's something that essentially transcodes the page and provides a really fast version of that served from our servers. So that users who are on devices that either have low capabilities or that have a really low connection speed, they're able to get to this content really quickly. And that seems to be working really well, especially in regions where people struggle with connectivity, where you have a really slow device or you have really slow internet connection. Then that makes a lot of sense to actually do that. And we do that with our website as well, with search, where when we recognize that people are coming with like a really slow or low capability device, we'll switch them to lighter version of search. That has a little bit fewer functionalities but is significantly faster. Okay. So the website owner must make some difference on their website or not. They must just wait for somebody who will have slow connection to go to website or they must make some difference of the code for to use WebWite. No. By default, that's something that we would use when we think it makes sense. You can hop out of that. I think it's an HTTP header that you just add to your server response so that we understand you don't want to have this done. If your website is dynamic in the sense that there's a lot of interactive elements on there, then we won't do that anyway because that's something that's really tricky to do. Okay. If we use AMP, what will be happen? I, as far as I understood, we would use the AMP pages but in the WebLite documentation, it also mentioned something about AMP. So I don't know if that's necessarily still the case. I don't know. Okay. And final question. AMP have some icon in SERP, WebWite will be here for not for future? In the future, I don't know. I think at the moment it doesn't show any icon in the search results. Okay. And will be different SERP results with slow connection with WebWite or end with fast if we have check it different versions with connection. Will be different results? So different ranking? Yeah. Yeah. I think no. I think the results are exactly the same. The same. Okay, John, thank you. Sure. I imagine a lot of the users here from India, they might have seen WebLite in the search results. It's something that specifically in some of those regions like I think India, Indonesia, Brazil, we've been doing that for a really long time now. Yeah. Thank you. Sure. All right. Suppose someone has two businesses with two websites. Their main focus is the first business and website and it's keeping them really busy and they want to de-index the second website for six months until they have a bit more time. Should you use a URL removal tool? Or is there a better way to do it? How will this influence the rankings after six months? Will the website be new or will the ranking signals be kept? So the URL removal tool, if you use that through Search Console, then you can remove the whole website. If you use a public URL removal tool, then that only works on a per URL basis and we need to see that the website is actually gone. So through Search Console, if you use that tool, we will trust you blindly. If your website still exists and still serves normal content and you use this tool, we will still remove it from the search results. People will still be able to go to your website directly. They just won't see it in the search results, which I think sounds like what you want to have happen here. And what happens with the URL removal tool is not that we remove the site from our index. So it continues to be crawled and indexed. It's just not shown in the search results. So it's essentially temporarily hidden in the search results. I think we changed the name of these tools within Search Console as well to reflect that a little bit. So practically what would happen here is if you use the URL removal tool and your website continues to exist, we'll continue to crawl and index it. We'll continue to keep all of the signals that are associated with the website. And when that URL removal expires and we show your website again, then essentially it'll be ranking like it normally would at that time. That doesn't mean it'll be exactly the same as before. Obviously things can change over half a year or I think the 90 days or whatever that is that the tool has by default. So things can change, but essentially all of the signals that are otherwise associated with the website, they continue to be there. It's not that we would see this as a new website because in our mind, from an indexing point of view, it has existed the whole time. It's continued to have been crawled. It's continued to have been indexed. It's just not shown in the search results. So what you could do here if you want to keep it out of the search results for half a year is just set a calendar reminder so you don't miss those 90 days when the removal expires and then add another site removal request in there. You can cancel these requests at any time. Usually they take about a little bit less than a day to be processed and a little bit less than a day to be canceled as well. So if you notice after, I don't know, 60 days that actually you do have time for that second website, then you can cancel the request and the site should pop back in fairly quickly. So I think that might be an option here. Obviously, like I mentioned, after half a year, the ranking of a website will be different. It's not going to be exactly the same, but it's not going to start at zero like a completely new website would. How long does it typically take a brand new website to start receiving organic traffic from Google? Let's say it's well-written, not a spammy recipe blog. Just curious what a new blogger should expect. So I don't know, recipe blogs are not necessarily spammy. Sometimes they're really good. In general, if you use the URL submission tool, then we could pick up that URL from your website within a day and have it shown in our search results right away. So that's something where theoretically, we can go very quickly with that. When it comes to a more competitive niche, then obviously that's a lot harder in the sense that if we start with a website that we haven't seen before and you're competing against a lot of people who have been around for a really long time, who have collected a lot of really strong signals, then it's going to take a while for your website to be known as actually one of the better websites out there and we can show it competitively within that niche. So that's something that may take a bit longer. What I usually recommend there is if you're starting out with a new website, is find a niche where you can be like the real expert, where you're not competing with gigantic other websites that have been around for tens of years, but rather you're really seen as someone who is doing something that's really unique and compelling, that's interesting to people and where there's not a ton of competition and then kind of grow organically from there. So as you see that you're able to work really well in this smaller area, kind of expand out a little bit, build on your strength and grow from there, rather than trying to be everything in the beginning and always being stuck on page, I don't know, 10 or 20 in the search results, find a topic where you can be like the expert in the best possible search result out there. John? Yes. Two questions on that. One, something that I've noticed over the years as a site gets more popular in the search, it's more likely to gain more citations because kind of that self-reinforced effect. Is there anything that you guys do to offset that kind of, if you're number one, then more people, you're gonna get more popular because you are number one. I think that's kind of a natural, I don't know, kind of a natural process on the web in that if your people really know you, they'll talk about you more, but that doesn't mean that it'll stick around forever. So you can be really popular for a long period of time and if you don't keep up with the times and you're out, then other people are more popular. So just because they've been around for a really long period of time doesn't mean they'll automatically always be on top in the search results. So that's something that I'd say changes over time. It's not impossible to outrank someone who's been around for a really long time, but obviously it's a lot harder if you're starting completely fresh and you're competing against someone who's been around and who's really strong and kind of keeps maintaining that strong position for a really long time. Funny you say that, I could mention some examples, but I don't know, I don't wanna bring too much attention. But the other question is recipe sites. So I frequently look for recipes and I get to this where like 5,000 words for a recipe, and I just wanna get the recipe and they always stick it at the bottom. Do you know what I'm referring to? Yeah. They go into this huge life history of the recipe and is that really helping them rank by making all this additional content and having it more compelling or having the recipe at the bottom? Is that somehow kind of helping them out, I guess, by having it really in detail? I don't actually know. So that's something I wanted to look into a little bit because that always bothers me as well. You're looking for a recipe and then you land on this giant article where you're like wondering is there actually a recipe on this page or not? So that's something where my general guess is that it doesn't really help them, but maybe there are some situations where they have seen more traffic because of that. I don't know if that results in actually more longer-term traffic for the website or if it's essentially just attracting kind of blog readers who happen to also like recipes. It's really hard to say, but I haven't looked into it specifically. I guess you just hit the N button on your keyboard and that solves that. I don't know. I mean, on a phone, you just have to swipe and swipe and swipe and like, where is the actual content? Yeah. But some people might like to read all of that as well. So for them, maybe the textual part is the actual content and the recipe is kind of like, oh, I'll save this when I actually feel like doing something. Sure. I don't know. What if the same product is on different landing pages? Do you need to place all the goods on one page or can you make filter pages for different requests? So I think the general situation where you have the same product on different landing pages, often that's the case when you have one product in multiple categories, for example. And you could perhaps pick the categories by color and then another set of categories might be by, I don't know, brand, for example. And theoretically, what we recommend doing there is to say, well, the product is really the primary item here. And for the product, you would pick one canonical page and you would use something like the rel canonical tag on these pages to say, this is actually the product page I want to have shown in the search results. So within your website, you might have multiple ways to get to this product page. And that product page might have multiple things like different breadcrumbs on top, depending on how you got there. But for indexing, we recommend picking one of these versions and saying, this is the version that I want to have used for indexing. That helps us by being able to concentrate all the signals that we get for any of these variations of product pages into one stronger page. So instead of having three or four or five different pages for the same product that are essentially just variations of the path that was used to get to that page, and they all compete with each other, you have one page that's kind of a lot stronger than all of these different individual ones. So that's kind of what we recommend doing there. It's fine to have it on multiple categories and to have multiple, essentially, URLs and different breadcrumbs leading to those pages. But I would just pick one of those and say, this is the canonical version of this product. And that's the one that I want to use for indexing. If our client site is focused on creating exceptional content and sharing it on a clean domain, could that be causing ranking problems? I don't know, could you elaborate on that a little bit? Sorry, it's too much for me. Yeah, I just, I sent a link. I'm saying you are building exceptional content. You're sharing it. People like it, besides the most obvious kind of thing. I guess it's more specific to this example here, but, because I know for example, if you try to be too many things to too many people, that can be a problem. I'm not sure what else could be a problem if you're kind of doing just kind of the main things right. So I'm gonna send a link in the chat. I don't know, I'd have to take a look at the site specifically to kind of see what all is happening there. Is that better to do it ahead of time then? Um, it's kind of hard. Is this more like an affiliate site? Um, like... Yes, some degree it is, yes. Okay. Do you know if there are multiple of these sites that are kind of run in parallel or... I don't believe so, I could check. Okay. I don't know, I need to look into it a little bit more. I don't know if I'd have anything specific there. My main worry with a lot of these kind of insurance and money websites is kind of that they often aren't really unique compared to a lot of the other variations. But it's hard to say at first glance. So I don't see anything technically wrong at first glance. Which I think is a good start. But I do see that our algorithms are kind of struggling with, like, is this really the right content that we should be showing for a lot of these queries? So that's something where I could imagine that algorithms might be struggling a little bit there because it looks more like a general, like money insurance affiliate type website rather than something that's actually unique and compelling where we could say, well, actually this is the right content by far to show for some of these queries. So usually what I would try to do in a case like this is either try to find a smaller niche where you can really be strong with this kind of affiliate setup or to find a way to make it like significantly better than a lot of the other sites out there. But again, it's really hard to say, like just like five minutes looking at a website and clicking through some of the results that I see here. So that's kind of like my five minute take on the website. I know much of the content has like, you know, kind of like 5,000 words, you know, it's really in depth. So in some ways I would say it's, you know, it's unique in that regards. But, you know, kind of on the insurance space of years, most of the sites would publish kind of generic information. Then you had one come out. It was, I think it was Value Penguin and then Nerdwall and some of the other ones did the same thing where they were publishing actual rates, you know, sample rates using some offline databases and it really seemed to help them be a lot more unique. So I kind of understand that, I guess, and they... Yeah, I think it's a really hard niche and there are lots of competitors out there who are putting a ton of money into this. It's not easy, I can imagine. All right, here's a question about the search queries in Search Console. I see impressions are 140 for my site for the last 28 days, but the same query average monthly search volume is 10 to 100. So what's happening here? So my guess is that especially when you're looking at the average monthly search volume, that's something that depends quite a lot on how that's compiled. And especially when you're looking into smaller numbers like that, it's something that can vary from what is actually searched for significantly. So if it says 10 to 100, then I wouldn't assume that 100 is the absolute top and not more than 100 people are searching for something like this, because if just a handful of people search more, then it's suddenly 10% more or 20% more. So that's something where I assume that the monthly search volume for these low numbers is something that you need to take with a grain of salt. Also, it depends a lot on how those numbers are compiled. Some tools have different ways of looking at this and they might not realize what the actual search volume is. The number shown in Search Console is really what was actually shown in the search results. So it's not a theoretical number. It's not something that's based on an historical average, but rather, specifically your site for this query was shown 140 times in that time period there. So that's something where from my point of view, I can clearly say that we showed your site this many times in the search results there, which I think is a good start. It's essentially also a matter of thinking about where we would show it in the search results. It might be that we were showing it in the map. One box on top of the search results for local queries if you have a local business website. That's something that sometimes these general monthly search volume tools don't take into account. In a scenario where there's a number of links, external pointing to URLs, which 301 redirect to page A and then to page B is added with no index on those URLs, breaking the 301 but linking to page A. What kind of impact would you expect on page rank? Not really sure how this is meant. Let me see. I think there's an image or something. Okay. So I'm not really sure how to kind of quantify that in a reasonable way. I think these are kind of two different scenarios. On the one hand, you're redirecting one page to another. When you're redirecting from one page to another, it's easy for us to forward all of those signals that are attached with the old URL to the new one. That's something that makes a lot of sense for us because it's like you're saying this one was replaced with the new URL. So in that case, we would pretty much be able to forward all of the signals that were going to the previous page and pass those on to the new one. In the case where you have one page that is just linking to another page, then obviously that's a little bit different because some of those signals that are associated with the old page, for example, they're still associated with that old page and you're just saying, well, also this new page is also kind of associated here. So we have some signals going to the old page and some signals that are forwarded to the new page as well. So that's something where you're kind of splitting things up a little bit. If you add the no index into that mix, where you're saying, well, actually this old page is a no index and it has a link to this new page, then what happens there in the beginning is that we have this kind of split. We say, well, some things stay with this old page, which happens to be no index, so we don't show it in the search results and some things are forwarded to the new page, which we can show in the search results. So there's already the split happening here as well with one of these pages not being shown in the search results. In the long run, if the page with the no index keeps containing the no index, we might assume that actually this other page here is more like a 404. It doesn't exist. We shouldn't be indexing it at all. And when that happens, we'll usually treat that page as a soft 404. We say, well, it's been no index for a really long time. Maybe they just don't want us to mess with it at all. Maybe we should just ignore it completely. And when that happens, then obviously any links on that page, they get dropped as well. Because you're telling us this page shouldn't be processed, essentially. So we're not going to process it. We're not going to look at the links. We're not going to do anything with what is on that page. Then all of the signals that go to that page, they essentially stay there. Because we're not indexing that page, the signals essentially go to a 404 page. So in that case, the new page would essentially just live from the signals that it collects on its own. So instead of these indirect signals that go through that one page, which happens to be no index, it happens at a link to that new page. So my recommendation here, if you're moving from one page to another, is really to use a redirect from the old page to new page. If you want to keep the old page, you just don't want it to have it shown in the search results. And obviously, no index is fine. But keep in mind that a no index also tells us you don't want to have this page in our index. And when we drop it completely from our index, then all of the signals and everything that was on this page, they're dropped too. All right. Let's see. I think those are all of the submitted questions. There's some more in the chat here. Let me try to scroll up. If I change one parameter or one paragraph, will Google see this as content being refreshed? Not necessarily. So we do try to recognize when content on the page changes because it helps us to understand how quickly we need to recrawl this page over time. It doesn't necessarily mean that we'll treat this page in any better way in the search results. But it certainly helps us to understand that we need to recrawl these pages a little bit more often. So for example, if content on a page changes on a regular basis and we recognize that every time we crawl this page, there's significant new content on here, then probably we'll try to keep that crawling rate up so that we don't miss any of those changes. And we can show your page for that new content in the search results. Can we use any concepts such as YMYL or EAT from the Google Search Evaluator guidelines to persuade decision makers to invest in great content? Sure, you can definitely do that. I think if that also makes sense to you that these types of pages need to be given more attention, then definitely use our guide as something where you can say, Google thinks this is important. I think that's perfectly fine. A question on hreflang. Would you recommend the setup of one language on primary directory, for example, domain.ch in German, and then domain.ch slash fr in French? Or do you advise to use domain.ch slash de and domain.ch slash fr? Both of those would work. When it comes to language content, we look at it on a per-gurl basis. So we don't differentiate by URL pattern, which means you can use the content, the language content, wherever you want. If you want to have the root URL in one language and a sub-directory for another language, that's perfectly fine. If you want to use URL parameters, that works fine as well. When it comes to country targeting, we do want to have a general kind of bigger split when it comes to the website. We want to see things like sub-directories or sub-domains or even separate domains with all of the content in there being targeted for that specific country. We do allow things like having the website in general target one country and a sub-directory targeting a different country. That would work as well. But in your case, if you're just talking about different language content, you can use whatever URL format you want. And we can pick that up. So we try to recognize the language on a per-url basis. The hreflang links between those pages help us to understand which version we can swap out when that makes sense. But that's really totally up to you how you want to split that up. Thanks, John. What if the same product is on different language pages? Do you need to place all the goods on one page? Or can you filter the pages for different requests? I think we went through this briefly as well. All right. John, there was another question I had submitted on the main page. It's a site. It's called zipmap.net. It's kind of one of the sites where if you click on it, click a couple of pages deep or whatever, it's just purely a map. There's no content really on it. So we were kind of wondering how this site would rank so well with essentially no content. That's, you know. I don't know. It's an interesting setup. OK. You can kind of click through and see where the zip code is or the countries and the counties and cities. There really isn't any content that I can see. It's a good site. So that's why I wonder sometimes when we were doing image-based kind of infographics and, well, they were more like interactive. We were hoping that we could rely on images. But you said that this might work. And then we see this site that's empty. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe they've just been around for a really long time. They've been kind of built up their value over time. But it does seem like something where you could imagine if they put more effort into it to actually create good content for these individual kind of different layers and levels of information, they could probably get a lot more out of it. But maybe they're OK with the way that the site is currently shown. Hard to say. Seems like someone found the right idea at the right time and put all of this together and managed to get things, I don't know, set up at the right time. I don't know. Looks like there are a bunch of sites that are like that. So if you look for something like that, let's zip code a bunch of sites that have similar information. Right. But they're the only ones that, you know, relatively speaking, do well, I think. You know, it's from my limited view. Yeah. I don't know. Looking at the site, it seems like they've just been doing this for a really long time. They probably have a fast site, good data. I don't know. Do you find that the changes you guys make now are increasingly incremental? Or do you find that they're not so? It's more like a high level theory question, not so much. I think it depends on the different areas. So when it comes to general search, there's, I suspect there are a lot of areas where you could say, well, you could argue which one of these is better, or you could say sometimes the search results, you can't clearly say this is the correct answer for this type of query. But there's still a lot of queries that we get where we essentially focus too much on keywords, for example. And then if we understood the query better, we would be able to figure out which pages actually make sense for this. So that's something where when talking with the search teams, they're like, well, we're always busy. We're not just tweaking knobs and trying to change the number slightly. We're really trying to come up with new algorithms that look at these problems significantly in new ways. And part of that, I think, also comes from the fact that we see so many new queries every day. So I think it's still on the order of 15% queries every day that we get are completely new. We haven't seen them before. It used to be 50%, wasn't it? I mean, a long time ago. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe 20 or something. But still, it's something where at least, I don't know, from a personal point of view, I'd guess, well, how many different ways can you hit a keyboard to enter queries? It's still surprising. But people search in different ways over time. And that's something that you also see when you talk with younger kids when they're searching. When you see how they use Google, they're typing the whole question into Google. And you're like, just enter a bunch of keywords, and then you'll get the answer. But they're typing this whole question into Google. And those are the kind of things where just focusing on the keywords doesn't really make sense. But rather, you need to understand what it is that they're looking for and then provide an answer for that. So those are the things where, sorry? Go ahead. I was going to say maybe in 10 years as machine learning and AI get better, it'll be solved rather easily, I guess. I don't think it'll ever be solved. People will always have unique ways of asking for questions. But it's also something where more and more trying to understand what the content is actually on a page helps us quite a bit. So someone is searching for, I don't know, 10 best places to go fishing in the summer. It's like Google could theoretically understand, well, these are pages about fishing resorts or fishing areas, and these are places that people have really liked over time. So maybe we can pull together 10 places and present those to people or even simple things like, I don't know, 10 deepest lakes. That's something where you would expect, well, there's numbers around the pages. So theoretically, we could be able to do that. But it's still a really hard problem. All right. Always something that keeps us busy. All right, I think we kind of made it through the end. I'll definitely set up the next set of Hangouts. So if anything comes up, feel free to add questions there. Also, feel free to post in the Webmaster Help Forum if there's something that can help with. I have one more question. Whoops. Or, of course, feel free to contact us on Twitter or on Google+, if anything happens to be more urgent. All right, thank you all for joining. And I wish you all a great weekend. Have a great weekend. Bye-bye.