 We have a lot to cover here, so I'll do my best to get through it quickly, but certainly slow me down if I go too fast. We'll have questions at the end if we have time, but happy to take some during if we get to them. Much of this has been pulled out of a podcast called Digital Cast that I put out a couple times a week. It's a really short podcast about what Google has going on, so this is basically a summary of what I've covered in there for the last year or so. I don't think many of you have listened to it, so hopefully you haven't spoiled some of that. So really, it's not about everything in those episodes, but things about Gutenberg and SEO and Google and all that kind of stuff, focusing on Google and SEO kind of stuff. How many of you saw Bobby and Jenny's talks? Hands? Yeah, most of you good, because I'll reference a few things they did there. They covered some specific topics. Hey, speak to Jenny. There she is. Look at that. She's on the screen. Yay. Today we're going to cover kind of a wide variety of things. And my big thing with WordCamp in general, and it's proven out again this year, and particularly this talk is just those nuggets of information you can get. A lot of us have been coming for years, and we know most everything we hear, but there's that one thing that's just awesome. Ashley was just telling me in just a few minutes, just a few more little things, like it was a good talk. I knew all that, but he said this one thing that we need to totally do, and so I'm hopeful that something in here will give you a nugget. So I have like 75 different little things Google has done, and most of them say, yeah, okay, that makes sense, but ooh, that one's great. I need to change that, see what's going on. A few other quick thoughts before we start. Google says, people say Google's always changing, and I don't really think that's true. They talk about the Panda updates within content and the Penguin updates. There's have been updates that Google's made over the years to their algorithm, but not many big changes. Most of what they have is forcing their authority. They're saying, hey, these rules are the same since 1998. We haven't changed anything big, other than SSL is now important. Speed's more important. Mobile's more important. But everything else has been the same. Write good content. Don't cheat. Don't buy backlinks. It's not new stuff. They're enforcing it, and a lot of their updates are just about enforcing that. So with that said, we're going to dive in here and get on to that. Really there's kind of three categories of things that I'll have in here. To the extent possible, these are things Google has said. They say a lot on Twitter. They have a couple guys on Twitter that say, from Google's mouth, this is what we've done. I'll share some of those. They have some where the community, the Rand Fishkin and big SEO people will say, hey, we've noticed this with Google. We've tested it. This is true. And then you have some in between where Google says, this is what happened and you have people like Rand that say, no, we don't agree. Our tests have shown different. So I'll share some of those, too. And we can all kind of see what happens. And these are essentially in random order. And again, please stop me as we go. So the first one, Google doesn't care about your fresh content. It's not that fresh content is bad. It's certainly a good thing. But Google doesn't give any kind of bonus for fresh content. They've made that clear over the years. If you produce a ton of fresh content, Google doesn't say, ooh, they produce a lot of content. They're ranking better. Unless you're like a news site, they don't care about that specifically. Now again, in general, more content is better. More quality content is better. So fresh content, by that regard, is better. But being fresh, there's no fresh bonus in Google. The next one, Google judges all of your content. And this is one that seems kind of obvious. But if you have a forum on your site or you take comments on your blog, Google looks at all that. So it's kind of an obvious thing, but something to keep in mind. If you allow blog comments, keep them moderated, Google's going to look at all that and it's going to affect your ranking for the pages where that content appears. All users search near me a ton. And I think we all have kind of seen this coming in the last few years. But according to research, 82% of smartphone owners have performed some kind of search with local intent behind it in the past year. It doesn't mean they've said near me. Jenny talked about this some in her talk. If you do certain kinds of talk, Google knows you have local intent. If I search for used cars, I don't have to say used cars in Atlanta. Google's going to give me the map and know that it's near me. So certainly that is a big thing that Google has said is true. And again, we've all kind of known that. Other and plural keywords don't always rank the same. We look at a keyword, like teddy bears, say teddy bear and teddy bears is the same thing, but does Google see your intent the same? So much of what Google has is what they think you're trying to do. They're really trying to think beyond that. So in the case of teddy bears, if someone searches for teddy bear, it may be more informational trying to learn about the history or what they're made of. Search for teddy bears is probably more shopping intent. And Google will look at it that way. And so just that one little estimate, a big difference in where you're going to show up because Google will think, ah, people want shopping content for his page because of just a few little things can make a big difference. Only 3% of your home page traffic makes it to your blog. And so this sounds like it's bad for blogging. It's really not, but it's important because they're saying people that arrive on the home page of your site, not many will go then look at your blog. And if you look at the analytic stats, that pretty much holds true. But blogs are still vitally important because they're going to be an entrance point. A lot of people arrive on your site on your blog, on specific blog posts. One of the best advantages of blogging is having all these other doorways to your site with different keywords and stuff. So blogging is great, but just keep in mind that in general, people, if they come to your site a different way, they're probably not going to go check out your blog. And that's OK. They're going to look about you. They're going to contact, look at your work, they'll look at other things. But statistically, that was kind of interesting. I would have guessed it was low, but not that low. But that's what the numbers have shown, so. Google treats PDFs essentially as HTML. And this surprised me as well. PDFs generally don't rank as well as their counterpart pages. And that, I think, is still true. But Google says they essentially take, if they see a PDF, they take it apart, treat it as HTML, and do what they can to rank it based on that. The issue with PDFs, of course, is that you can't add title tags, you can't add meta descriptions, you can't put alt text on images. They're not going to rank as well. You're always best to keep PDFs. I would say PDFs are for printing. If it's something you want someone to print, a PDF is a great way. You know it'll be formatted right. If they're not going to print it, then it probably shouldn't be a PDF. You're better off putting it as text on the page or in a blog post or some other format there. Don't link to every page from your homepage. So this is one that gets very tricky. We spend a lot of time with this on our site. We're building sites. But links from the homepage of your site are very valuable. If you look at the way link equity flows, your homepage is usually the most valuable page. And so the links on your homepage are the most valuable links to help rank your internal pages. But if you link to every page from your homepage, you've kind of diluted it down to nothing where none of those links are really worth much anymore. So a lot of what we'll talk about today and stuff is helping Google understand how your site set up. The more Google understands your site, what it's about, what the content's about, the better. You use link to everything from the homepage. You don't really have best pages, big pages, important pages. So take care as you're doing that. Google says you need alt text on your images. This is not anything new. But they've said it a few times this year. John Mueller and a couple other folks have said a couple times, you need alt text on your images. Using WordPress, that's pretty easy to do. But just take a few minutes to do that. We'll talk about image names in a minute, because that's a little bit different and a little trickier. But alt text, you can just click on it in the media library, add your alt text there, describe your image. Best practice is to make sure to describe the image and not stuff it with keywords. But there's other talks more about that. But do at least pay attention to that, because Google's been stressing that more and more the last year or two. Go ahead, put reviews from Google Maps on your website. So people have had concerns about this, saying, hey, if I get a review on Google Maps and I copy and paste that review on my site, that's duplicate content. And yes, it is, but Google can recognize it. And they say clearly, John Mueller and some of them from Google have said, go ahead, put them on your site with one caveat, though. There are ways, I don't know if anyone would talk about structured markup in this regard this weekend. But you can do structured markup on reviews to tell Google, this is a review. They say not to do that on Google Reviews, because then you're kind of competing. It's structured on Google Maps. But if you want to pull that text, it says, hey, this is a great experience. I had a wonderful time. Five stars from John. Cool, put it on your site. Don't worry about the duplicate content. It's still a good thing. Google's all right with that. White space is not an SEO issue. And this one seems obvious, but it kind of comes from somewhere else. Back in 2012, there was what they called the top heavy penalty, where sites had a lot of ads at the top, kind of above the fold, and pushed the content down. You would not rank as well. Google would penalize you for that a bit. But Google said if you have a lot of white space at the top, a big slider, big images, that's OK. They'll understand that. The top heavy penalty is more about ads. So if you have a lot of white space, don't worry about, oh, it's below the fold. Google's going to count less. They say that's OK. White space is a good thing. They recognize it's a good thing. I hope most of you do as well. And Google's OK with that. Google cannot index pages that require cookies. And this one's coming up more and more. It seems logical. Of course they can't, but there's a dragging hiding here. If you, for some reason, require cookies for people to access your site, that's big trouble. And if you have a little cookie thing at the bottom, they have to hit OK. They don't have to hit OK. They can still see the site. But if it comes up, it says, hey, you have to accept cookies to view the site. Google does not accept cookies. Google, therefore, won't see your site. And you're in big, big trouble. So cookie policies and stuff are getting bigger. And most sites handle it well. Just be careful of that, though. Make sure if cookies aren't able to be caught, they can still see your site because you'll just plummet if you do that pretty quick, because Google will not see anything. Aim for pages that download less than 100 milliseconds, which is super fast. I don't know that most of us have that. We don't usually hit that. We go as fast as we can. But Google's, that's their guideline, said you should be aiming for 100 milliseconds. So I guess that's kind of a good goal. If you're a marathon runner, you should aim for two hours, and you're going to end in three and a half or four, and that's OK. You still aim for something good. Google says, really, though, if you're a bit slower than that, we'll talk more about page speed. Page speed matters, but not as much as people think. This really, where it matters more, if you get that fast, is Google's crawl depth. So Google crawls your site for as many pages they can get. The faster they can download them, the more pages they'll get from your site, the more pages from your site, the better chance you'll have to rank well. So this will affect crawling, but not rankings as much unless things get really slow. Google search results aren't personalized as much as you think, and this surprised me as well. This is something I always believed, like, I can't do the same search and see where I rank, because it's so different for everyone else. And it is personalized, but not nearly the extent you think. There's some research that shows it's really pretty much the same. The only personalized results Google really shows apply to location, of course. I mean, that's big. If I search for used cars here versus in Seattle, that's vastly different. Or immediate context from a prior search. So if I search for used cars, and then I search for forward, it may say, well, OK, maybe he's looking for used boards. It'll kind of do from a recent search. But just in general, if we all search for the same thing, it's going to be pretty similar. More than, I think, we've been led to believe. And you can do some tests and see that. But I thought that was interesting, because I've always sort of been thinking it's wildly different these days for us. And it's not as much as we would think. So your results should be a bit more indicative of what others will see, at least more than we thought it was. Let's see. Google indexes and ranks everything inside of recordings and tabs. So this is one that Google said, yes. If you have a tab, something on your site with like five different things, the first one's open, and there's stuff hiding behind the others. They say they index and rank it just fine. This is one where SEO people kind of disagree. And I'm sort of in the disagree camp as well, because it seems foolish to me. If someone searches for something and the text they search for is buried in a tab, that's not a very good user experience. But Google has said clearly that that doesn't matter. If they're looking at the text on the page as a whole, and if it's in an accordion or tab, it counts just as much. So play that as you will. But certainly don't be scared of recordings and tabs to break up content on your site, if that makes sense for your user. But I would take that with a bit of a grain of salt. You see, again, the SEO folks that, Jenny, you have thoughts there? Have you ever looked at that? Right. Yeah, that's kind of where Google is. Google can see it in the source code, so they see it and rank it. I'm concerned that humans can't see it right away. But Google says it's OK. And again, this is kind of sharing what Google has said. So we'll go with that. Google's looking for ways to handle GDPR blocking. So a lot of you dealt with this last year, the general data protection regulations in Europe and how that affects some of our sites here. The interesting thing that Google's facing, I didn't realize, is almost all of Google's crawlers are in the US. So when they visit the other sites, they're OK. But then when a European user goes to that site, they may be blocked. A lot of US newspapers just blocked everyone from Europe just to keep themselves safe. So someone in Europe will do a site. Google's like, oh, yeah, this New York Times article is perfect. Go to it. And they go to it, and they're blocked. So Google's working in ways to fix that, but certainly be careful of the just block everyone from Europe, because it can have unintended consequences. But I think Google's plan is to have more crawlers coming from different countries so they can get a better sense of what's going on. But that's something they're working on and they're struggling with. And I think a lot of us are struggling with, as well, how to handle that kind of stuff. Google is using more neural matching to understand synonyms. So this is interesting, too, where what you search for, the keywords may not even be on the page that it lands on, but it still answers the question. So the example I saw is someone search for, why does my TV look strange? And people are looking for the soap opera effect, the motion smoothing you see in those. So if you search for something, why does my TV look strange, I think you could search that now. The first result is the soap opera effect and how that matters. Google's getting really smart about, again, understanding intent, not just trying to match up why does my TV look strange, but what is someone really asking for and what is a good page that answers it, even if they don't match up exactly. And so I don't understand their algorithms fully and how that works. But again, helping Google understand what you're about is not as much about direct keywords. It is just Google knows what you're about, what your content's about, and they can match the appropriate visitors to you. Low traffic doesn't always mean low quality. Google doesn't look at page views. That's not a factor they don't say. This site gets a lot more traffic than this one. That's not a ranking factor at all. And really, a niche topic that could be a great answer for a question may get very low traffic, because it's a niche topic. Google's fine with that. Low page views doesn't matter. So Google's not looking at your traffic, and low traffic doesn't mean it's a bad quality site. And you could have things about a sub-niche of knitting that's a very small group, but it could be a great resource for that. So low quality doesn't necessarily mean low quality. Making links to your site violates Google's guideline. So this is a quote from John Mueller here who works for Google and tweets a lot. If you've ever followed him on Twitter, he's a voice of Google, which is awesome. He says, so the word make is kind of the key here. If you're making quality links to your site, that would be considered against our webmaster guidelines. And by that, those links would definitely not be considered quality. So the idea with links, of course, is to get people to link to your site, because you write great stuff and they want to share it with you. And if you go to our blog, every post produced, we link to other great resources we found. Those are good links. But we found a way to go make links by adding directories and whatever. That's just not going to be as good. And Google says that's not what we're trying to do. And again, this is not new. This is something I've kind of said from day one, but they're just getting better and enforcing that kind of thing as time goes on. Word count and other metrics can't measure quality. So another quote from John Mueller here. He said, quote, total word count does not indicate suitability to answer a question, and often shorter is better. So this is kind of what Jenny was talking about today where people ask a question. Google's going to say, what is the answer to that question? It could be a thousand word post explaining the ins and outs of it, but it could be, here's the answer to that question. So Google's not super worried about word count. Again, longer can be better, but it's not measuring the quality. Google says, hey, people are getting the answer they want here, and it's a short post. But it gives the answer, great. That's good quality. That's what they're looking for. That's what the users are looking for. Google wants the best things for their users. So word count doesn't necessarily matter that much. Search ranking changes are unrelated to Google's new mobile-first indexing. So you've probably heard about Google doing a mobile-first indexing over the past few years, where really what it means is they look at your full site versus look at your mobile site. And lately, they're looking more and more at your mobile site for indexing, not for ranking. And that's kind of the key there, is Google's going to look at your mobile site to get the content off of it, and then rankings still factor a whole bunch of different things. So people here, the mobile-first indexing, say, I'm going to be ranked based on my mobile site, and that's not quite true. They're going to get the content from there, but then still figure out with a variety of other things what's going on. So unless your mobile version is really screwed up, it's missing content from your insight or something like that, it's really just an indexing thing. It doesn't affect most of us. You have a WordPress mobile-responsive site. This is really a non-event, even though it's been talked about a ton. Not thanks to WordPress, largely. Does Google use real-life user signals to assist with rankings? And Google said basically no, because they have more things that they can see. How many people, you've probably seen in Google Maps, like, oh, you're going to the restaurant. It's a busy restaurant. It'll show little charts of busyness. That doesn't necessarily mean it's a good search result. Google's main example, it's a great one, is if you're buying something online, how many people go to Amazon store to buy something? Like, no one's going to the store. The real-life user signals don't do it. The online user signals mean a lot more. So further, I think John Mueller said, does a company having a lot of visitors mean it's a good place? Maybe they have free coffee that day. So a whole bunch of people came. It doesn't mean it's a good place. It means they had free coffee. So Google shows real-life user stuff, where people are, doesn't use that to impact rankings too much yet. I suspect it will more, but they make some good points on why maybe it doesn't make sense. Why you should learn JavaScript to help with SEO? This is one WordPress at large that's talked about a lot for the few years. We're trying to work on JavaScript more. And really, Google has said HTML and technical SEO are still top priority, basic stuff that most of us know. But JavaScript is getting more and more prevalent. If you can understand where it works with SEO, where it hinders SEO, that kind of stuff, you're going to be better off for it in the long run. So nothing specific that Google said, but just that JavaScript is being used more and more. It's going to make your pages more complex. And you need to just pay attention to how that might affect things going forward, what might be hidden. And we'll talk about a few more specific examples as we get a little further in. Google says not to use hashtags in your URLs. And this was a little tricky, too, because you'll sometimes have pages where it's one long page. If you click about, it goes to mysite.com, hashtag about, and jumps down the page. That's OK. Google says that's not a problem. But there are some pages where we click on something, it'll add a hashtag, and then sort of create new content. It'll be like a database call and do some weird things. You see it with some map applications. And when you move the map around, it's going to put a hashtag with new coordinates at the top. Google says not to do that, because they're going to assume it's still the same page and could confuse them. Wordpress out of the box doesn't do this. But if you're clicking around your site, and there's sometimes a little hashtag that shows up in the URL, pay attention to why it's there, that could be causing problems. But for most of you, I don't suspect it would. Simply having more content doesn't impress Google. Similar to the fresh content, more content typically is a good thing. But Google's not going to say, oh, he has 10,000 pages. That's awesome. Let's rank them high. They don't really care about that at all. It's more about the quality of the content. Now, if you have 10,000 quality pages, you're going to probably rank pretty well. But if you have 10 quality pages versus a million bad pages, this site's probably going to do better. Because Google is not impressed by big numbers. Again, getting more great quality pages is a good thing. If you can have hundreds and thousands of pages of good quality content, they can all rank for their own thing. And that's great. But Google's not going to say, because you have a lot of content, it's good. Kind of like they're fresh. Because it's fresh doesn't mean it's good. Usually they go together. But in and of itself, Google specifically said, we don't care about how much you have. Google finds new content through links and then through site maps. So most of you, if you've sat through an SEO session, heard about XML site maps, then it's important to do. And it is important to submit those. If you have Yoast and Google Search Console, there's ways to submit those to Google. Certainly a good thing. But Google always looks for links first to help them find new pages because links impact their rankings. Site links to another that helps that page link better. They're always crawling the links first to see what's going on. And then they look at your site map, make sure they have all the pages. And that's good. But if they find a page there that has no links pointing to it, it's not going to make a big difference. So site maps are good for clarity, but don't directly affect the rankings to the extent that links will. So always good to have that, but good to know that's where Google's going to find it. The site maps are really secondary to that. Google has some more details about how 301 redirects work. So if you're not familiar with that, that's basically just a redirect. They call it a 301 redirect, meaning it's permanent. But hey, if you get rid of a page, so you have an about page and a history page, and you decide to combine them, maybe you have your history pages redirect to the about one. Google's changed that a bit, and they clarified a few things. So it used to be if you had a redirect from one page to another, about 80% of the value went to it. Google kind of dilute things a bit. It wouldn't rank as well. In 2016, they said, no, 100%. If you redirect from one to another, we're going to pass all the signals, all the links. It's all good. Could be kind of good for spammers then to do more tricky things. They said, we're going to watch that. But for an average user, we want to pass 100% of the signals on, because you're doing your site the right way. No need to artificially decay some of that traffic. And really, what Google does now is they create what's called a canonical, where if you have multiple pages, you can say, these pages are the same, maybe things sort differently or something. This is the real one, Google. Don't worry about this other one. They're really the same page. They said that's how they treat redirects. If you redirect one to another, Google says, OK, we know about both pages, but we're going to set a canonical. This is the main one we need to worry about. This is the main one we need. So nothing new, nothing you need to change there, per se. But it's just a good thing. If you need to do a redirect from one page to another, Google says, that's cool. That's great. We're going to pass all the juice across. Everything should work well. And again, WordPress has some great tools to do that for you. There's a plugin called Redirection that does a great job. It's probably the most popular one, if you ever need to fix that. Google wants you to fill in your own meta descriptions. So there are tools that can help automatically generate meta descriptions. And we probably all recognize when we see meta descriptions written by those tools, because they're awful. If you don't supply one at all, Google will go ahead and write one for you. And we've all seen those as well. They're not very good. John Mueller said, quote, I generally recommend specifying one. You know your content best. So again, it's one of those easy things to do in your pages. Take just 30 seconds to write a little meta description. It doesn't affect your rankings directly, but it does affect how well you show up in search. And Google said, again, from Google's mouth, please write your own. Take care of it. Do it right. And again, stuff we've all known, but we don't necessarily always do. I know I don't always do it. But we should. Human trust isn't the same as Google trust. So we talk about how trusted sites are important. What a human might trust is not necessarily what Google might trust. A good example is the Better Business Bureau. You have a great score there, and that can help. I'll trust your business more if you're a great BBB score. Google doesn't count that kind of stuff at all. It's too easy to cheat and make it different at. So the things that will help people trust your site are good to have on there, good social proof. You might get more sales. Google's not going to count that. If you have an A plus BBB ranking, it's going to impact your search results zero. Again, could help other people. Still a good thing to do. But things that are easy to gain like that are things that Google tries not to trust as much. This one is interesting to me. So NoFollow gives publishers a way to focus on content. So NoFollow links are a way you can set up a link on your site. Say, I'm going to link over to Ashley's site. But Google don't count that as a link to her. She paid for promotion or whatever. There's reasons you might do that. And in the past few years, a lot of big publications huffing the post and some of those just NoFollowed everything on their site, which I thought that was stupid. This is lazy. These are the right good content. They're sharing good resources. Give the link love out. And I still think it's kind of dumb. But Google made a good point about why that might be. So a user named David wrote, he said, quote, I've always felt publications that NoFollow all their links are waving the white flag. As if to say, read at your own risk, we have no quality control. I was like, yes, I'm with you. That's it. But John Neeler made a good response. He said, quote, either that or they just had it with folks asking for or sneaking in links and want to have a way of just focusing on their primary content without having to worry about that part. So that makes sense. It discourages spammers that can focus just a good content, not worry about, is this link legit? Or is that a spammer? And it's just all NoFollowed. We're going to write just good content and get it out. So I still think it's lazy. But at least I kind of understand why these big companies would do that. Wikipedia is the same. They NoFollow everything. So I understand why I still don't like it. But I wouldn't encourage any of you to do it. It's worth taking the time. Again, we linked other sites. We'd check them out and say, that's a great resource. We want to link to it. We want them to get credit for the link and rank better. I guess maybe if we had a huge company, it'd be too much work. But at least I kind of now understand why they might do it. It's not just laziness. It's just partially laziness. Google doesn't index pages that have been redirected. This is something they made just a point to share. But it kind of makes sense. If you have a page that's not there anymore, you redirect it somewhere else. This page will not show up in the search results. That's OK. Nothing magic there. The one good thing, if people link to that page you even redirect, those links will count toward the new one. So it all works out. But this is not a good thing. What would they index? Anyway, there's nothing there to index. If they get redirected, they can't even see it. So just something Google shared. Again, trying to share things that Google has said this year. And that was one that was interesting. This one, yeah, kind of talks to Jenny's Talks when you went there. If you didn't see Jenny's Talks this morning, look on WordPress.tv because this is nice. But position zero, you have the main 10 results and some ads. But the quick answers at the top are becoming a much, much bigger deal. And some searches now result. There's even some I've seen where there are no answers, like no results. Here's your answer to what you wanted, and that's it. This really could be trouble. An example I saw was if you search for a date in London, like I wanted to find a date. I want to go out on a date in London. Google's like, no, no, I know the date in London. It's May 5th. I got that. And so if you have the right kind of keywords that Google doesn't quite get, it could be a big trouble. So this is theoretically where that neural matching and all that stuff Google does should help. If they know you've been looking at Tinder and stuff first, they're always looking for a date, not that kind of thing. But we'll see. It'd be interesting to watch. And Jenny gave some good tools this morning on how to watch that stuff on your site. And it's worth keeping an eye on because more and more Google's giving the answer and saying, all right, if you want more, here's more stuff down here. But you want to make sure it's not hosing you too bad. Because that's only going to get bigger because that position zero stuff is what they answer with the Google Assistant. We say, how tall is Tom Cruise? They pull that position zero because it has the answer in it. So that's only going to become more widespread as the voice stuff gets bigger. So again, check out Jenny's talk and her slides and stuff for more on that one. Google's tips for dealing with seasonal content. So seasonal content can be tricky in a site. If you have your Christmas hours that come and then they go and they don't matter so much, Google gave a few good suggestions for that. One is one I'd used before and one I thought was new. One suggestion they have is you have a page called Special Hours. And just update that throughout the year with, hey, here's our Thanksgiving hours. And now here's our Christmas hours, that kind of thing. So you don't have a page that you create, wait for Google to index it, hope it gets ranked, and then you delete it. And you just always have that Special Hours page that changes. What I did when I worked at a church, I don't think John is in here. But what we did at a church that made a page for Vacation Bible School and just left it up year round. We kind of tuck it away. It'd be not as obvious in the winter, but that way that one page is always there. And then in the summer, we kind of bring it out, get it updated with info. And Google said, wow, this one page has been here for years. We know what it's about. We're familiar with it. And it would rank very, very well versus creating a page for VBS 2018 and then deleting it, making a new page in 2019. If you have seasonal stuff, you can somehow keep the same page up year round in a way that's good for your users. That can be a very good thing to do. Google says it's good to have unique images on your pages. This is really more about UX than search. Google says this isn't going to impact your search directly. And they were clear that they said, quote, it's not the case that if you have good images that will make your site rank better in web search, but it's good for users. You have unique images on the pages, properly sourced images that you're not stealing from someone. But Google said, yes, to have unique images, it's a good thing for users. Good things for users are good things for them, which is good for you. Don't worry about keywords in your URLs. We've talked about this a bit. They still can matter a bit, but not nearly as much as they used to. And John Mueller said, quote, I wouldn't worry about keywords or words in a URL. In many cases, URLs aren't seen by users anyhow. And it seems like with Chrome, they're kind of taking away more. There's actually some test versions out now where you don't even see the address bar. You just kind of browse around and do what you need. If you want to expose it, you can. But it's being hidden more and more to users, especially on mobile. So Google's saying, why should we care what keywords are in the address of the page? It's more about what's on the page. And that's been coming for years, and it makes sense. And again, Google said specifically with a quote, it doesn't matter that much. So I would listen to that. Not to say keywords are bad in a URL, but having a big, long address isn't that useful. A big, long page name. If you just be to the point and get it done, help people find it. There's no such thing as negative keywords in organic search. This is, again, kind of an obvious one. Once you think about it, it seems kind of weird at first. So if you do Google ads at all, negative keywords are huge. You want to use those a lot to make sure you're not wrong people coming up that you're paying for clicks on. There's no such thing in organic search. You can't say, hey, Google, this page is about blue widgets, but not green ones. You can't tell Google that. What you can do, though, really, is just make it focused on blue widgets. And if someone searches for green ones, it's not going to come up. They're going to find other ones. But there's no way. We had a client ask us this. Like, how do we filter out the negative keywords on this page? And you don't, really. Thankfully, in a roundabout way, it's hard to rank anyhow for Google and a lot of things. So you're unlikely to rank for the wrong things as it is, but no real way to technically do that. There's not a meta tag or something with negative keywords. Stick to them for ads, for sure, though. Google already knows about your shady links. So there's a way to disavow links in Google. Say, hey, Google, I know this spammy site's linking to me. Please don't count it anymore. And there's ways to disavow that. That's a good thing to do. And now there's tools out there. Say, hey, we're going to help you find those shady links and submit disavows to Google. And that's not bad. But John Mueller says, ultimately, if some random tool can tell you which ones to disavow, they're probably already being ignored. So finding those tools are great, but Google's probably already smarter. Probably already saw it and said, yeah, we know they're a spammer. We don't care. Don't worry about it. We don't really do a lot to even deal with disavowing links in our site. It can be a good thing to do. I don't know if Jenny and some of the others do that or not, but it's usually not worth the effort. But if you find a tool that says, hey, we're going to help you find those bad links and help you submit them to Google so they know about it, Google says, come on. We probably already know. Don't waste your time. There are no Google Partner SEO agencies. So there's a lot of Google Partner programs out there. Jenny mentioned this morning she's an ad partner. You should look into them. It's great to get, great to learn, great to advertise. But if you say, hey, I'm a Google SEO partner, it doesn't exist. There's not such a thing. If someone tells you they are, they're lying. That's just something Google's come up against because people say that a lot and there's not such a thing. Your contacts can't require a link to your site. And this was interesting. We were talking to a client and they had another company that we were talking to in their contract said, part of the contract, we will put a link at the bottom of your site that links back to ours. And Google says you cannot do that or you should not. I guess you could do whatever you want. But part of their link schemes, what they define as a link scheme, they say require a link as part of a terms of service contract or similar arrangement without allowing a third-party content owner the choice of using nofollow or other methods of blocking page rank should they wish is a link scheme. So if you say in your contract, hey, if you want to put a link in the bottom of the site to build, that's fine. I don't think we should be doing that as developers. But that's up to you. But if you have it in your contract, Google says that violates our guidelines. They probably never see it. But again, if you should do the right thing because it's the right thing, that's not the right thing. Don't pretend that 404s are 301s. This is one I've been guilty of in the past. So 404s, of course, mean a broken page. Google says 404 not found. An easy solution, people said, hey, any broken page in the site, just redirect to the home page. That way they don't ever see the broken page. Google says not to do that because it confuses them. And again, confusing Google is a bad thing to do. So you should either leave them as 404s, say, hey, sorry, you found this page. Here's a site map. Here's a search box. Help me do it the right way. If you know it's a broken page, you can set up a 301 to the proper new page. Again, we get over the history of our company page. We'll do a redirect to the about page. That's the closest thing to it. Just saying, all the blanket, all the broken ones, just go to the home page. That way, no broken links on our site. That's just going to confuse Google because I thought this page was about that, and now it's linking here, and confusion is a bad thing. And they've said, specifically, please don't do that. So I said I'd talk about image URLs. Google says not to change image URLs. This is tricky because if you upload images to the site, they should be named something other than DSC 1796. You should name it Pretty Green Flower or whatever. But if it's already on the site with a bad name, it's already indexed and already there, changing names, Google basically starts over with that image. It says, OK, the old image is gone. Now I'm going to index the new one. It'll make its way up. It might show up in image search later. So if you get good stuff from image search and you're doing OK, changing image names to be better may not be worth the hit you'll take in the meantime. Again, the image is going to go back to zero. Image search doesn't matter a lot for a lot of us, but it's something to consider. Certainly be careful of that ahead of time. But yeah, oh, cool. But yeah, I wouldn't necessarily change the old ones to make it better because you may cause other problems. Your site needs content to rank well. This kind of makes sense. But a user asked, he said, quote, there are zero issues on our website according to the Search Console. We're providing fast performance in mobile and great UX. I'm not sure what to do to improve next. And so John Mueller gave a really long answer, and I'm going to shorten it to a medium-length answer. He said, quote, this is always kind of a tricky situation where you're working in your website for a while, then sometimes you focus on a lot of the technical details and forget about the bigger picture. Another thing to keep in mind is that just because something is technically correct doesn't mean that it's relevant to users in the search results. That doesn't mean it will rank high. So if you clean up your website and you fix all the issues, for example, if your website contains a lot of terrible content, then it still won't rank that high. So we all spend a lot of time working on technical stuff on our site. That's important to do. It should load fast, should have SSL, should have the right tags in place. But if it's bad content, you're still done. Google's not going to show that bad content to people. So I mean, that should be the first thing you worry about. Links continue to be a major ranking factor. This is something that Google says, oh, people say, page rank is dead. Links don't matter. Links still do matter quite a lot. It's a trickier thing to do, but it's a good thing to keep in mind. So the folks at Stone Temple Consulting, an SEO firm that has a lot of good things, they had one great, insightful reason they offered why Google's going to think links are important. They said, quote, a non-advertisement link on your site is an indication by you as the publisher of the page that you think the link has enough value to your visitors and will do enough to enhance your relationship with those visitors that you're willing to have people leave your site. So they're saying, Google must respect these outbound links. And again, with our blog, we link out to other sites. We're saying, hey, reader, this is good info. That's worth losing you to that site for it, because it's such a good resource. And hopefully, you'll remember us because of that. I used to write for a site called Google Earth Blog, all about cool stuff in Google Earth. And every day was basically, here's this cool thing. Now go check it out. And every day was just sending people away from us. But Google loved us. They linked to us. And people would come back because they knew we would have good content. So links aren't going anywhere. Google's kind of said that. But I thought that was an interesting quote from Stone Temple Consulting. How long should you keep redirects in place? If you set up a redirect from one patient to another, how long should you leave it there? Google says, quote, a few years is good. But really, leave them up as long as possible. You never know what old links might point to. If you have a redirect, there's no reason to ever take it down. But really, after a couple of weeks, Google knows about it and it's kind of done their job. But I will leave it up just in case there's some old bookmarks or something pointing there. I want to make sure those people always get to the right place. So there's no time limit. But Google says a few years is good. If Google mistakenly thinks all your pages are the same, it could be trouble. So this seems obvious. But it happens more than you think. So even if you have canonical setup in your site to tell Google what's going on, Google could still get confused. Canonicals are great to explain those again. Here's our products. And then we do question sort equals name. And here's our product sort equals color. It's the same content, just sorted different ways. But it's two separate pages. So Canonical says, hey, it's just this one product. We have these different sorting. Here's the main one. But the issue can be if you have JavaScript on your page that's required to see the content and the JavaScript breaks and all the pages look the same or Google can't handle it, Google's going to think they're all the same and you're in big trouble. So if somehow Google thinks all your pages are the same because you got too fancy with something, it's clearly going to be an issue. Google posts can still be valuable in Google My Business. They have a post feature that was huge when they launched it a year or two ago. It's kind of diminished some now, but it's still valuable. We've been doing that a bit more with clients. We had one client that had some issues with his Google My Business page. And one of the reasons, Google is hard to ever talk to directly, so that's why I like pulling this stuff out. I tried to talk to them directly and got different stories on why they had an issue with the page. And one said, because you didn't update the page often enough. Like, well, it was accurate. No, I didn't need to update. So now we're publishing all those blog posts as Google posts. They're doing relatively little to help. But a little could be good. But also, it's keeping the page fresh. And hopefully, we'll keep Google's moderators happy. It's worth a shot. How old content can outrank your fresh content? So people get upset with this. They say, I wrote this great post about this thing in this post from three years ago. It's still outranking it. We talked before. Being fresh doesn't mean it's good. And the old one probably has some links pointing to it and lots of signals. So Google's learned to trust that more. So if you're upset that old content's outranking it, that's not necessarily bad. Again, it's got the history. It's got the links. It could be a good thing there. A few more here. This was interesting. HTTPS is a soft ranking factor, Google said. So John Mueller said, HTTPS is a ranking factor for us, which we all know that SSL is a ranking factor. He said, quote, but it's really kind of a soft ranking factor, a really small ranking factor. So when you hear people say, you need SSL, Google's going to kick you out of the index, you don't. I mean, you should have SSL. There's absolutely no reason not to with most every host. It's free to have. You should do it. But don't expect big changes to your rankings because of it. It's just a little boost. It's going to help. I think it'll help more and more as time progresses. But Google's made it clear, yes, it's a ranking factor. You're all correct, but just a little bit. But again, most things with SEO is just little bits that add up. So let's throw that one in the pie, because it's free. And it makes things look better. People don't see the not secure on your page. There's a lot of good reasons to do it. But as a ranking factor, it's pretty soft. Similarly, HTTPS isn't required to rank on Google. There was an article that said, without an SSL certificate, Google is likely to drop your website in search results. John Mueller replied to that specifically, he said, yeah, that's wrong. HTTPS is not a factor in deciding whether or not to index a page at all. We do use HTTPS as a lightweight ranking factor. And having HTTPS is great for users. So when they're going around indexing pages, they're not looking at all. They're going to index all your pages, whether they're secure or not. And then they'll factor in the rankings a little bit. But they're not going to drop you from the index or do anything bad yet. I mean, in a couple years, that's very likely to change. For now, it's not critical. But again, you still should all do it. There's no time frame for ranking changes after you make improvements. And this is frustrating. I think we've all probably seen this. But you know you have some issues to do, especially after a word came to the ground, and you go, work out all my content. You do it this week. And then nothing really changes for a week or two. John Mueller, quote from him, he says, quote, as with anything related to web search, it's not something where there's a fixed time frame involved. But rather, we crawl and index pages over time. We update the signals we have for those pages over time. So continue working, continue doing your thing, and it'll help over time. There's not wait two weeks. It's going to make a difference, maybe two months. Depends on how much they crawl, what's going on. But there's never a fixed time frame for changes, good or bad. You may make changes that hurt your site, and you won't see that for a while either. And that could be troublesome. Google revealed a bit more about RankBrain. So Gary Isles is the other one. Gary Isles and John Mueller are the two Google people that tweet a lot and actually share stuff with the public. So he said, so you've heard about RankBrain just a bit from what he said it is. RankBrain is a PR sexy machine learning ranking component. They use a historical search data to predict what a user would most likely click on for a previously unseen query. We'll talk more about that in a little bit. It's basically saying, we're going to look at what you searched for before, what other people have, and use that to kind of influence what's going on with subsequent searches. Because there are a lot of things searched in Google every day that Google's never seen before. They need to have results for it quickly. And RankBrain is one of their algorithms to try to figure out, OK, what kind of stuff you looked for before. And they do a tremendous amount of work in a tenth of a second to pull that back for you. And we'll talk more about this in just a sec, too. Using hreflang won't improve your rankings, but could help bring better traffic. So hreflang is a thing to say, hey, Google, what language is this page? I have an English version, a German version, whatever's going on that says help Google understand your site. Like that. There you go. Gary Isle says, quote, you will not receive a ranking benefit per se, at least not in the internal sense of the term. So he wanted to explain that if you have hreflang, you have multiple languages on your site. But Google works through a two-pass process for every page. First, they look for the page that has the strongest signals, the links, the traditional SEO stuff, title tags, all that kind of stuff, figure out what they're going to rank. And then they look to see if they have a sibling page with the same content but in a proper language and spit that out. So it's not like multiple languages will help a ton. You're still going to be ranked on the stuff you're ranked on. But once they say you're going to rank here, and now you have a better language for that page, it's going to certainly help. It doesn't directly impact your rankings, certainly a good thing to do, though, if you can get well-written foreign content on all your pages. Google's begging you to just stick to the basics. And so they see this a lot in Twitter and stuff with people making all these things. They want to try these weird, wacky things. There's just a few basics you can do that can do a great job. Gary Isle said, quote, I really wish SEOs went back to the basics instead of focusing on silly updates and made-up terms by the rank trackers, and that they talk more with the developers of the website once done with the first part of that sentence. Another user asked Gary about his favorite SEO conspiracy theory, and he said, quote, I don't have a favorite. They generally make me want to crawl into a corner and cry, because we don't do a good enough job getting people to focus on the important things like creating a damn crawlable website. So people are all worried about little things and chips and tricks. Just make it so Google and crawl it, can understand it. You're going to be way ahead of most people at that point, and sticking to the basics. I mean, Google's literally begging, like, please, just get the basics right, because there's so many issues out there. Just work right, and you're in good shape. Porniness is a ranking factor. This was funny when who said it? Gary said it. So when Google CEO Sundar Pachai testified in front of Congress a few months ago, he said that Google uses over 200 ranking signals, but only mentioned three of them. Relevance, freshness, and popularity are big ones that certainly can help in there. So a user asked Gary Isles what other stuff might be. And Gary's quote was, quote, what other ranking factors might be out of the 200. He said, quote, the country the site is local to, rank brain, page rank, links, language, porniness, et cetera. So this is where, I mean, Google looks at porn sites, and they don't want them to come up for things. So if you use the right kind of color for language on your site, you could make Google think you're not the kind of site you really are and could be a factor. So that is one of Google's 200 factors, and that's the word they used to describe it. So I thought that was kind of funny. You can link internally as much as you want with no fear of penalty. So a user asked, quote, is there an internal linking over optimization penalty? I'm not talking about keyword stuffing the anchor text, but using a relevant anchor repeatedly and adding internal links from relevant pages and batches to a specific page. Is it possible that this is interpreted by Google as manipulative, even as just internal ranking, among pages to other pages on your site? Google's Gary answered that one, he was pretty short and simply said, quote, no, you can abuse your internal links as much as you want, as far as I know. So you should be internal linking a lot, and you can't really overdo it. If you're always referencing people to other pages on your site with good info, go for it. You absolutely should be doing it, and Google says you can't really overdo it. Now from a user perspective, you could. You've seen pages that, like, every other word is linked, that just looks dumb to us. Google's not going to penalize you, if you find a place where you have a lot of links and it's okay, Google's good with that. Don't break the rules just because your competition does. A user complained about a competitor breaking the rules and outranking them. John Mueller said, quote, they might be ranking well despite these things, not because of them. No need to copy their bad practices when you know better. So you may see someone outranking you, say, oh, they're outranking me and they're doing the shady thing to do it. That might not be why they're outranking you. They might have more links, different content. Don't copy the shady thing trying to rank better because then it may just hurt you even worse. Fake edits to your Google Maps listing can cause big trouble and I have no good answer for this one because that's becoming a growing issue where people are faking edits and saying this business is closed and they're really not and all that, Google's working on it, but just keep an eye on your local business listings if you do that. We're keeping a much closer eye on the clients we manage for that because there's not a good answer for that. Claim it, control it, but it's still a big problem that Google's working on and one you should be keeping a close eye on. Don't use UTM parameters on internal links. So you've seen these before, where it has like UTM source and that kind of thing. Those are great for tracking what's going on, but if you do it internally, because you're lazy, like here's the one I used to point to Facebook, I'm gonna use it on my site just to point to this other page. Google says don't do that, it's just confusing them. Again, if you confuse Google, it's not good and that's a way to confuse Google. So if you're gonna link to your about page internally, just link to about. If you're gonna post it on Facebook, go for it, use the parameters, but don't do those internally. Once again, click through rate does not affect rankings and this came up again because Matt Cutts who used to kind of be the voice of Google in 2009 was talking about bounce ranks and rankings. He said bounce rates would not only be spammable, but noisy. So saying if we looked at the search results for who clicked on something and came back, should we factor things in? He said no, it would be too hard to factor that stuff in. But Google in another document said, let's see, they said quote, for example, when you click a link in Google search, Google considers your click when ranking that search result in future queries. You think oh, so they are counting that click for a future query. They said no, no, no, they're counting that click for your future queries. If I click on something, they're gonna factor that in when I search again, but having all your friends go click on your sites, gonna make it come up higher for them and not really for anyone else. Don't just stick content at the bottom of your e-commerce category pages. We see an e-commerce category pages, all the products, we need some content on here. Let's just cram a bunch at the bottom and Google said specifically please don't. Target.com is a great example of this. They used to do that. They used to have a bunch of junk at the bottom. Now if you go to most target pages, you'll see hey, welcome to the baby section. Here's a little bit about how great it is and how great our products are. Here's a featured product and now here's a list of all the stuff. They get some good content in a more proper way rather than just cramming it all at the bottom. Jenny mentioned this this morning too, but working on mobile page speed isn't a one-time fix. Speed's gonna degrade over time. You're gonna add new plugins, add more content. Hosting might degrade page attitude regularly. Speed is the great thing, but keep an eye on it and always be tweaking to get a little bit faster or at least not be getting slower. Google explains a bit more about how JavaScript is indexed. So Martin Split from Google has a web series now talking about SEO stuff. It was interesting with JavaScript because JavaScript's coming in a lot more, but JavaScript, you have a page with lots of Java, they index it in two steps. They first look at just all the text and index that and later when they get around to it, they'll look at the JavaScript stuff and index that. He said they've seen 130 trillion pages on the web that they've seen so far. So deferring some of that to later helps them just to get it all done. So if you rely on that JavaScript to rank well because it has some content in it, that could be trouble. You make sure your content shows up in that first pass. JavaScript can do some neat things and help with UX and all that, but it could be trouble with how Google indexes it. There's a redirect linking hack going around that you should all do because it'll make you rank better by cheating, but it really doesn't work. It was kind of weird. People were saying for a while, you buy a new domain name and generate lots of links to that thing and then redirect it over to your main site and all those links will follow it, which is true, but you could just build those links to the site instead of doing all that. Google didn't really understand why people were doing that, how it was supposed to help. It was the hot thing for a few months ago, so if you hear of that, it's dumb. Adding keywords to CSS is meaningless. This is a real CSS file someone submitted. It said fire risk assessment, phone number, like trying to put keywords in CSS. Google said they just don't look at that. They don't care about that at all. And really in general, what they can't see, like what a user can't see, isn't gonna count for anything. So that's an innovative way to try to get keywords in, but no. Your images don't need to be on your domain. This was interesting. Google said first, there's no SEO bonus for having images on your own domain name. So if you have images that pull in from somewhere else, that's fine, they can still rank well. The key is though, if you move them, if you change the location of an image, that can be a killer, because again, it's like a brand new image essentially. We talk about renaming. So they're saying if you use a CDN, there's ways to do it where it's like cdn.yoursitename.com. You can do like a C name record to make it look like it's on your site versus using theirs. So if you ever change CDNs in the future, it's easier. That's getting a little technical, but if you use a CDN and you really program it yourself, we can talk about best ways to do that. But images, if you do pull them in from somewhere else on a CDN or some other network, that's perfectly fine. They don't give you a bonus for keeping them on your own site. Videos are great for SEO. They need tech support. John Mueller said, quote, just purely using a video on a page is something that, at least from a web search point of view, makes it really hard for us to determine what is actually useful on this page and why we should show it in the search results. That's true. If you just stick a video on the page, they need context around that to help it rank better and they probably already had that same video on YouTube. So give some context around videos to help them rank better. There's no limit to the traffic that Google will send to your site. John Mueller said, quote, there's no organic traffic budget. We try to show pages in search when our algorithms think they're relevant, not based on counters. So if you get a bunch of traffic going to anything, well, Google's gonna tire out of sending me stuff. No, if you're the best answer, they're gonna keep sending you traffic all day, which is the problem most of us would love to have, but don't ever worry about that. They're gonna send the best results regardless of how many times they've sent people there before. We're almost out of time and I'm almost done, so this should work out pretty well here. Either use a mobile URL or a responsive design, not both. And so there's ways to have, most of us have a responsive design which kind of bends and flexes with the main thing, or you have an m.yoursite.com, that's a separate one, and that's okay too, not as good, but works. Don't do both. Don't have a separate mobile site and a responsive one because it confuses Google. John Mueller said, quote, we'd probably get confused. Which one should we show when? It's unclear. I'd strongly recommend using a single URL setup, typically responsive design. So he likes that, we like that, WordPress, most themes do that out of the box. It's a good thing to do. There's no ranking bonus for Google partners. Again, Google partner programs are great, but if you're a Google partner, you get zero ranking bonus for that. They're not gonna do that based on you being a partner. They literally give zero ranking bonus to Google partners. Now if you're a partner and you study that stuff, you probably have good techniques, you probably should rank better anyhow, but not because you're a partner. Redirects are treated differently than links, so this is kind of like if you link from one page to another, it's different than if you redirect one page to another. A link kind of gives that page a bonus where a redirector is gonna pass any other links over. They work similarly, but Google said they don't treat them quite the same. But again, you shouldn't ever confuse one for the other, and if you have a case for one, it's different than a case for the other. Google is adding short URLs for Google My Business that they say is rolling out now. I haven't seen it anywhere, but soon it'll be kind of nice. Instead of your stupid, long, like here's my page on Google My Business, it'll be g.page slash your business name, and to leave a review, g.page slash your business name slash reviews. So that's gonna be great. You'll see it in your Google My Business soon, but they say it's rolling out. I haven't seen it. I'm looking forward to it. Text in block quotes is normal text. If you have a block quote on your site pulling something out, Google says great. They're gonna read it just like other texts. They won't necessarily treat it differently because it may be something from your site. It may be from another site. Google doesn't know, so they're just gonna treat it differently. They don't think I'm gonna put this in a block quote to make Google see it more. Like, no, they'll read it, but no bonus. They'll see what's going on. Google Ads and Google Analytics do not affect rankings. We've heard this for years. If you pay for Google Ads, it's gonna help your organic traffic go up. So Danny Sullivan, who recently joined Google, is now sharing some things. Someone asked, do Google Ads impact ads? He said, quote, no, we have ads. Every search you show will show ads, however. As for our search results, they're completely independent of our ads. We don't give advertisers any preference. Google Analytics is also separate from Google Search. We don't make use of that at all. It wouldn't make any sense. It's not all sites use it, and it's not representative. So Google Ads are great to do. Having Analytics is great to do. They have no impact on how you rank in Google. And then the last one, don't focus on specific ranking factors. This kind of ties in with the previous one. Even if you think, I did some ads and now I'm ranking better, ha ha. That shows that it works. There's 200 other things that could have happened. So John said here, quote, you can't really isolate any if, x, then y elements. Everything's kind of related. It can have cross-factor effects. It doesn't have to. All this can change by the minute, by the intent, by the query, location, whatever. And then a good quote to end on from a user named Gareth. He said, a wise old SEO once told me there are two core truths in SEO. One is to do lots of things well and two is to never overreact. So lots of little things to do. If something does happen, just chill and it should get better. So I'd love to take questions, but we gotta, yeah, we're out of time here, I think. Maybe one. Okay. Yeah, anything? Cool. Well, thank you. Awesome. Thank you.