 All right, welcome, everyone, to today's Webmaster Central Office Hours Hangouts. My name is John Mueller. I am a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google here in Switzerland. And part of what we do are these Webmaster Office Hours Hangouts where people can join in and ask their questions around their website and web search. And we try to find some answers or make sure that we pass some feedback on to the team here as well. I hope you're all doing well and that you're enjoying summer if you're in an area where you have summer at the moment or I guess fall or winter if you're in the southern hemisphere. I hope you all find some time to take off in between as well despite all of the crazy situations around coronavirus. A bunch of stuff was submitted already. But if any of you want to get started with the first question, you're welcome to join in and jump in now. Hi, John. Hi. Maybe you remember that in the last Webmaster, I asked you about the problem of a favicon that disappeared since now it's three months. And I was suspecting that was related to the site not being in the root because subdomain for each language. And you told me to wait still a couple of weeks to see if something changed. And I waited, but nothing happened. So still a favicon not showing. Now it's about three months. So maybe there is something weird. Maybe I can drop the site in the chat. Yeah, if you can drop it into the chat, I'm happy to pass that on to the team to double check. Here it is. Because I don't know if it can be related because I double check that the guidelines of Google should be followed, the dimension of the icon. I think it's fine. And so after so long, it's strange. Because I think that the favicon can input the click to rate. I imagine it because people maybe it's more likely to click on an icon instead of the generic word icon, maybe. I don't know. I think that would be hard to see if that's directly the case. I think it probably helps people, especially those that understand the site already. But I don't think it would change much in behavior for generic users that don't know your site yet. But still, regardless of what exactly it would change, it seems like this is something that we should be able to fix on our side. OK, I put it on the chat. Cool. Thanks. Yeah, I saw you also mentioned what the problem is. That makes it a lot easier because I get the chat transcript afterwards. And sometimes I have to puzzle which site was what. But that's perfect. OK, thanks. Hey, John, how are you? Hi. OK, my question is regarding something which is called entity corrosion. Like if you search for something like mobile games or video games, Google shows a corrosion at the top in CRP. So what we can do or how we can optimize to be there or how Google picked these entities? And is there something that we can do to optimize our website or to improve our chances being in there? It essentially tries to understand the entities on the page directly. So it's not that you have to do any special kind of markup or do anything specific on your pages, but more that we understand that this is kind of an entity that is talked about on the web in general and is not something that's just limited to your specific website. So in practice, that means when we crawl and index the whole web, we find a lot of these items. We can recognize that they're talking about the same entity. They have same information. And then based on that, we can try to figure out where this entity fits in with the rest of the web. But it's not that you need to do any special kind of markup or kind of code to your pages for that. OK, so it's basically about the signals that Google collects from different sources. Yeah, yeah, it's from information that we recognize from across the web. Because it's important to us to understand that this is not something that's unique to one particular site, but rather like other people understand that this is an entity. And based on that, we can say, well, we should treat it as an entity as well. OK, thank you. Hey, John. Hi. How's it going? Pretty good. How are you? I'm doing great. Thank you very much. John, I have a question regarding the URL inspection tool. Are there any sort of crawling issues at the current time, especially with new sites? Not that I'm aware of. I know that sometimes we have fluctuations in our pipelines that things get a little bit slow, and sometimes that ends up being visible in the URL inspection tool. But I'm not aware of anything broader that's kind of blocked there. Are you seeing specific problems at the moment, or? Yeah, I mean, that's the thing, the new sites that we're working on. We've seen it 10 times. OK, so you're submitting the home page for indexing, essentially, or? It's not getting in there. Yeah. Hard to say. Yeah, it's hard to say. But I think the important part also with these tools, especially when you're submitting things to indexing, is that we just don't index all content that we see. And sometimes we see things in the URL inspection tool, and our system's like, ah, we don't know if we need to index this right away. But the more signals that we have about content, the more likely we end up going there and trying to get it indexed as well. So especially if you're seeing things like new sites not being indexed immediately, then I would tend to give it a little bit more time and maybe try to work on other ways to make that site known, which could be a variety of different things, I guess, like working with the sitemap file, making sure that everything is lined up properly from a technical point of view, those kind of things. Thank you. Boy, it's like a crawling issue or an indexing issue. You submit it. Nothing happens in the search response, so I think we need to set it there ourselves. I think we've tried multiple sites, but it's not working out. No, I don't know. It's hard to say. I'm not aware of anything that would mean that that's blocked completely. I think if that were the case, then we would see a lot of complaints on Twitter and in the forums. So it might just be something temporary that you should try it again a little bit later. If you're seeing this regularly happening, then I just recommend starting a thread in the forum together with your URL so that folks there can double-check to see if things are kind of aligned with regards to crawling and try with their own tools, or maybe they have general feedback for the site overall. Sure, thank you very much. All right. Any last questions before we jump into the submitted ones? I have a question, John. Hi. Sure. So actually, I have two questions, actually. So my first question is, recently when I start, when I Google my brand name, on the first or second page of the results, there's a site review website that pops up, and it has a rich result snippet with the rating and stuff, and it's just a lot of user-submitted reviews about the website. And I'm not sure what impact this actually has, whether directly or I suppose there would be an indirect impact if a user sees the reviews and they are looking for reviews about the website. So I know there is that aspect of it, but I was wondering if there is any other aspects or any other impact on my site based on links that I may have shared in the reviews, or I know Bert can sometimes be used to understand context of a page. So if there's a negative sentiment generally on the page, could that have any sort of impact on the performance or ranking of my website? I don't think you'd see any effect on the ranking of your website from that. I think, at most, what might happen is that people stumble across that in the search results for your company name. They're like, oh, what does this mean? And then they get lost in that website, kind of. But it's not that the existence of such a page would negatively affect your site. Even if there are some negative reviews on there, I mean, on the internet, there are all kinds of things. That's something where I wouldn't directly assume that that would have a negative impact. Sometimes it makes sense to try to create other kinds of content that go up, especially for things like a query for your company name. But it's always a question of where you invest your time. If people are already searching for your company name, they kind of know where to go anyway. So it's, I don't know, it's not always straightforward to say, like, oh, you should create more pages with your company name on it just so that you can cover the whole search results with your favorable content. Right, OK. So basically, don't need to worry about that too much. Yeah, I wouldn't worry about it. OK, good. And then I had another question. It was, yeah, OK. So my website has a forum. It's located on a subdomain of the main property. So it's not part of the same domain. And it's a really old forum. So there's, I think, over 100,000 users. And I'm realizing recently that a lot of these users, maybe more than 90% of them, are very new. And they're using the user profiles for link building schemes, essentially. And I'm wondering what this could do to my subdomain the forum, or whether it could affect my main site at all. And I know the subdomain is sort of seen differently from the main site, but it links, I would say, it links pretty well to the main site. Like, we have the nav menu that goes to all the main categories on the main site. And it's a lot of the user-submitted content, a lot of the posts and stuff will also include links to the main site. So there's a lot of pages. So I'm wondering, should I go in and clean up all those links, remove all those user profiles? And if so, what's the best way to handle that? No follow, no? Yeah. I think no follow is definitely the first step I would take there, especially if you're unsure about those profiles. And people are using them for link building, then making sure that those pages have no follow on them sometimes makes it less interesting for people to kind of abuse the forum for that. So that's kind of the first thing I would take there, but I would also try to see if you can find ways to kind of algorithmically recognize this kind of abuse and spammy content and no index it by default. So that might be something where if you can tell that a user has been around for a certain period of time or they've contributed positively to the forum, then make their profile indexable and otherwise keep it no index, these kind of things. Because it's, on the one hand, the links can have an effect there that our algorithms might look at this and say, if we can isolate those profiles, then we can just ignore those links. If we can't isolate the profiles, which is often the case, then maybe we'll be ignoring all of the links from the forum. And if this is on a subdomain, then it might be that our algorithms are not able to completely understand the relationship between the subdomain and the main domain. And they ignore all of the links across the whole domain. So that's something where I try to clean that up as much as possible. It's probably something where you don't see an urgent or critical change if you make that cleanup, but it would have kind of a longer term effect. If we can really understand this is good content and this is what you want to have published and it's tied to your other website, which is also really good content, then that helps us a lot more versus if we understand, well, this website is OK and this one is filled with spam. And it's like they're connected. So should they kind of be forwarding signals back and forth or should they be completely separated from our side? It's hard to say. OK. But so just to confirm, so you're saying there is a risk that the main site's links could be seen as spammy as well because of the sort of a lot of spam on the subdomain? Yeah, it's not so much that we would see them as spammy, but our algorithms could learn to ignore those links. And essentially, that's something that automatically happens. We see a lot of user-generated links on a site and we think, well, probably the webmaster isn't aware of what's actually happening here. We will just ignore these to kind of be on the safe side. And that might end up with us ignoring the other links on your site as well, which is probably not what you want. Right, yeah. OK, and then the other thing is a lot of these profiles, I notice that there are amongst our most backlinked pages. So they're getting hundreds of thousands of, on top of hundreds of thousands of backlinks from very low quality, more spammy type of sites from the people who put the links in the user profiles clearly buying the links or something. So is that something to be worried about? Should I disavow those links? Should I just leave them? I don't think you really need to do anything there. If you noindex those profile pages in the end, then that all kind of disappears anyway. But that's really popular tactic. And a lot of times, that's just completely automated that people will drop links here and they see they're not nofollowed. Therefore, they'll start building links to those profile pages. And a lot of times, that's just some scripts that keep running forever. So it's not, I wouldn't say it's something that you need to urgently worry about, because we see that all the time as well. And we can usually deal with that fairly well. OK, so adding nofollow and noindex to those pages, I wouldn't then need to disavow the backlinks themselves. No, no. And they will, if I noindex them, those backlinks are just disappear on their own over time, or will they kind of always be there? I imagine they will remain for a while, even after they drop out of the index. But essentially, they wouldn't have any effect there, especially if the pages are nofollowed and they essentially stay there and they don't get forward to the rest of the site. And it's also something where I don't think you would be seeing any positive effect from those backlinks. So it's not that you have to worry about causing a problem by cleaning up the spam. OK. OK, thank you. But John, it sounds like a lot of work. Yeah. Yeah, Sparuk? John, follow up to that, because you also mentioned there were some low quality sites that are good. Like, I don't know, people have this whole DA thing and this thing, there are sites that low quality ones that you were mentioning in a Twitter feed that are OK, right? Like startups, for instance. Oh, OK. Oh, I see what you mean. So if it's just like random sites linking to your site, yeah, that's usually less of a problem. So just because it's a site that is less known doesn't necessarily mean that it's a problematic site. But in the case of these kind of profile links, that's something where these automated tools essentially build link networks across all of these user-generated sites and try to promote their stuff that way. And that's something where I'd say it's not like low quality links. It's just pure spam that we can essentially ignore. But in her case, if she wants to really clean it up, she can build like an AI tool and then kind of filter out the explicit words or give a way back maybe to users that are making a difference. I think it's possible to do a lot of things, but probably just taking a really rough approach and saying using something really simple like has this user contributed multiple times to the forum over a course of maybe a couple of months that automatically catches all of those really basic spam bots. So that's something where I don't think you need to do anything really fancy, magical. It's something that's probably fairly easy to implement. So moving forward, disavowing pretty much, that's it. Like, there's no need because your algorithm just is very good at it. I think for these kind of things, I definitely wouldn't worry about disavowing because these are all similarly kind of affected user generated content sites. And that's something we've seen since, I don't know. Before I joined Google, it's like those bots have been around. Those scripts have been around, dropping links in forums and profile pages. We have a lot of practice with that. But it's something where we can try to get it as much as possible. But if you can take care of it by cleaning it up on your side and preventing it in the first place, that's always a much better solution. So, John, follow up on the backlink quality things. We know that if there's a page with this highest authority that have a lot of backlink to link that page and that link to my website's pages, they will pass link juice in a page authority. So my question here is that you know that how page link work is largely based on what those source pages backlink, that passing link juice to me. But in the situation that, let's say that there is a page, let's say the other website, and they have very great content. And they write, for example, they talk about breast cancer and write a very good content about that. They have thorough backlink. And they rank very well, perform very well. And that page linked to my article about breast cancer, too. So it's very semantically related. And they rank very well, perform very well, but they don't have any backlink. Would that link benefit my page? I think if people are linking naturally to your site, then I wouldn't worry about if they benefit your page or not. If people are recommending your site as a good resource, that's always a good thing. So I wouldn't worry too much about how much value I'm getting out of this random link that someone has added, because you can't really control that yourself anyway. Yeah, I understand what you're saying. What I want to actually ask about this question is that we know that backlink is highly concentrated on the source pages' backlink. But do source pages' content also participate in the algorithm of the backlink's quality? I don't quite follow. What do you mean? So we know that a backlink is available when the source page has backlink, right? We all know that. But is the source page's quality also pay a role here? I think that always plays a little bit of a role. I think it is very easy to try to isolate links and just focus on PageRank and things like that. But PageRank is just one really small part of the bigger Google algorithm. And when we see recommendations from other websites, we try to understand what that recommendation means. How is that website interacting with the rest of the web? What are the anchor texts involved? What is the text around those links? All of that plays a little bit of a role with regards to understanding how this page should be treated. So it's something where it's easy to go in and say, well, this link counts so much PageRank. And that's what I want. But there is always just so much more than just pure PageRank out there. I see. Thank you so much. Sure. OK, let me run through some of the submitted questions so that we don't lose track of them completely. It's totally awesome to see so many active people here in the Hangout, though. Let's see, is there any impact on COVID-19 on the visibility in event schema-rich results? We have an event discovery platform. We've been getting consistent visibility for events in rich results for many years. In March, it suddenly went to near zero. We were not able to correlate this with any Google public announcements. Tried to post on Webmaster Forum, but that had helped. So I'm not 100% sure if we made any changes with regards to events. But I have heard something similar from other folks as well. Hi, John. I'm here. We are for a trip, but I'm with you. Oh, OK. OK. How are you? OK, your question. Awesome. So I'm not 100% sure if anything particular happened there, but I have heard something similar from other folks. We have implemented online attending mode changes in our rich, I mean, schemas and all. But I don't think there's an effect broadly like this. We consistently got more than one luck with each part through event rich results. So my question is, does this happen suddenly? Is there any reason or something else? My feeling is we shifted, essentially, most events over to the online events, and that's something that we started showing a little bit more. But I don't know what the general plans are here, or if this is something that might be different from region to region. It's really hard to say. I have tried for open event schemas results and type my random all events. So still my events are not showing there. So is there any blocking from your side? I don't know if we have anything specific kind of holding back events at the moment. My feeling is that it's something that we're essentially trying to do organically now. But I don't know if there's anything specific happening there. I haven't heard from other people who run events with regards to event markup recently about this, so it's hard to say. But I think in the Webmaster Forum, you also included your site URL. Is that correct? Yes. And my second question is I'll ask in the Webmaster Forum. So some SEO experts suggest me, workshop events are not actually events. It's business promotion. So is this correct or not? Workshop? Workshop. I don't know, depending on how you frame it. I do see sometimes that people frame things as events that are not actually events. If it's something, for instance, like an online course that you have or a saying that is currently taking place, then that's something we wouldn't see as an event. This type of workshop, we already mark as a block through robots and no index no follow. But still I have a question if there is any genuine workshop. So still this workshop or account as a promotion or something like that? If it's blocked by robots text or no index, then we wouldn't index it. So that would be fine. No, no, no. My question is low quality workshops are no index by oversight. But quality was and quality workshops are counter promotions or not? I think it depends on how you frame the workshop. I don't think like I would make that. Because every competitor are using this workshop, event rack, 10 times, everyone. So I would not focus on what the competitors are doing. And just because especially if you know that this is something that you shouldn't be doing, then I wouldn't just copy what the competitors are doing because it's essentially not really going to help your website in the long run. No, I just ask you. Everybody is doing workshops and all this kind of stuff. That's right. Yeah, OK. Cool. I think for these kind of questions, well, you're not sure if this is the right markup for that, then that's something I would definitely post in the Webmaster Help Forum because the folks there have seen a lot of edge cases where they realize this is maybe problematic, maybe not problematic. So what's your suggestion? What can I do for get my traffic back? I think get your traffic back seems like a different question than the kind of rich results in the search. If you're talking about getting traffic or rankings back, then that feels like something where you need to work on the website overall, rather than just focusing on the rich results types. OK, cool. Thank you so much. Sure. OK, we added the no-site links search box tag on our home page for over two months, but we still see the site links search box in the search results. What's up with that? I don't know. If you can send me the URL, either dropping it as a comment in the YouTube comments there or send me a note maybe on Twitter, I'm happy to take a look at that with the team. Usually, the site links search box settings do take a little bit longer to be updated, but over two months seems a little bit long. We're planning to launch a microsite, which do you prefer, a subdomain or a subdirectory? If you say subdomain, should I have to create a separate site map, or can I use the same site map of the main domain? And finally, what are some things that we considered when creating a microsite? So from our point of view, you can use either a subdomain or a subdirectory. I realize there is a lot of contention in the SEO sphere about subdirectories and subdomains, but essentially either one of those would work from our side. I think in practice, I would try to use a subdirectory for this kind of thing, because it sounds like you're trying to create a new view of your existing content. It's not that you're trying to create something completely separate, but essentially it's like a landing page or maybe a handful of landing pages that are connected for a specific product that you're already selling or a service that you're providing on your main domain already. Then I would just try to tie that in with your main website. The advantages that you have there is that from a technical point of view, everything is a lot easier. You can use your CMS and just create a bunch of subdirectories and pages, and you're done. Whereas if you create a subdomain, then you suddenly have a separate host name that you have to maintain, or you have to watch out for things like redirects. You have to verify it separately in Search Console. If you're not doing domain verification, you have to watch out for sitemap files. All of these extra hassles that are involved with a subdomain, if you're essentially creating something that's essentially part of your main domain. If this is something that's completely separate from your main domain, then maybe a subdomain is a good approach. Maybe even a separate domain is a good approach. Maybe still a subdirectory is also fine. But like the way you frame it here as a microsite for something that probably you're already doing in some way, I would definitely go for a subdirectory and keep it as easy as possible. Make it easy for you to maintain. Make it easy for you to migrate. Should you need to make changes over time? That's kind of what I would focus on there. Sean, I have a follow up on that if you have time for it. So where would you draw the line between something that is separate from the main site and something that is still similar to the main site? If I'm doing the same thing, so this is for publishing. So if I'm doing the same thing, I'm just publishing more articles. But it is on a topic that may not be the, it's like related, but it's not quite the same thing. And I'm thinking maybe there would be different audiences for the new thing than for the existing content. Like is that kind of where I should do a subdomain instead of a subdirectory? Yeah, I think the situation that you mentioned in the beginning where you had a forum and kind of the main website, I think that's a perfect situation for something like a subdomain. Because those are clearly kind of separate entities or separate items that you're kind of maintaining, the people going to the forum might not be the ones that go to your main site. And similarly, the ones going to your main site might not be the ones that would go to your forum as well. So that's kind of, I think, an optimal situation for something like a subdomain. Also from a technical point of view, it's a lot easier to maintain because they're completely separate backends involved, all of that. If you're just publishing content, I think for the most part, I would just keep it on the main domain. If it's just informational content, just I try to keep it as simple as possible. If you have things like, I don't know, a consumer-facing side of an e-commerce site and then a dealer login, maybe that dealer login section would be a separate login or a separate subdomain. But even there, sometimes from a content point of view, it makes sense to keep it all on one site. But yeah. So I think if it's really just about different types of content and not different functionality, I try to keep it together on one site. OK. Like even if I have sports and then, I don't know, politics, it would still be OK to have it on one site. Yeah. I think that still makes sense. Because then you can kind of build up that combined site overall over time. And that kind of gains value as a bigger group. Whereas if you split things up into subdomains, then you have these small islands that are somewhat connected, but more loosely connected rather than tightly connected to your main site. OK. I'm asking this because I read the How Google News Works document. And there was a line in there about the audience and how an audience that turns to the site for one topic that could pass off like an authority and signal for that site like, I guess, being authoritative or being an expert in that topic. Because so much of the users who are interested in that topic, I guess, rely on the site or trust the site. So that's kind of where I'm getting at. Like if the audience is, if I'm publishing a lot of different topics on one big site and I have kind of audiences very fragmented, like is that something that could maybe disadvantage my site overall? So I don't know about Google News. I don't know if they do something special there. But in general, from a web search point of view, I don't see a big problem there. The one place where I would watch out for this is if you have a mix of adult content and kind of general content, then that's something where our safe search algorithms might have trouble understanding where the separation is. And then putting out on a separate subdomain makes it a lot easier to say, this is the content that can be filtered by safe search. And this is the general content. That's a lot easier. But kind of different themes like sports and politics, I don't think for the most part, it would make sense to separate that out into separate subdomains. OK, perfect. Thank you. John, can I ask another question if you have five questions? All right. So I have a follow-up on that about the safe search part. Let's say in a case that you have from, that you get a lot of spammy links using porn-related anchor text. And we are seeing some scenarios that people are actually coming to our sites and writing down on comment section adulty words. And they're also sending links using. And is there any way that it's going to harm us in a long way? Because we know based on documents, safe search filter is supposed to be on a URL basis. But are they in sort of, I don't know, domain-wide algorithms that might affect the whole site? Now, so in particular, when it comes to things like safe search, we try to be as fine-grained as possible with the way that we deal with this. But it's not always possible. So it's something where if we can't isolate the part of the site fairly easily, automatically, then we quickly end up in a situation where we say, well, safe search applies to the whole domain. So that's something I would definitely watch out for with regards to people writing things as comments on your website. Keep in mind, we do try to understand which parts of the website have comments and which parts of the pages have comments and try to understand that. But ultimately, the content that you're publishing includes these comments. So if you don't want your website to be found for things like that, or if you don't think that these comments are providing value to your website, then that's something I would take action on. Because ultimately, it's your website, and if other people are contributing content to your website and you're saying, oh, this is fine, then you will have to kind of live with the situation that search engines think, well, this is a part of what you want to stand for on the web, and maybe we will send you traffic for these comments, or maybe we will look at this content and say, oh, this is kind of gibberish. We don't know what to do with this website overall. So that's something where I wouldn't completely ignore random user-generated content on your website, kind of the comments that you get like that. Obviously, it's hard to draw a line and say, well, I will approve manually every comment that is made on a website. If you have tons of comments, then that's essentially impossible to do. But you can kind of work to figure out what kind of comments are useful, maybe let users flag comments so that you can manually review those, or maybe have something like a bad word list that you try to use in a simple way to figure out, are these comments actually useful, or is this maybe something I don't want to have published on my site? The no index works in this case. No index works pages. The list works. Sure. I mean, if you no index those pages, that's kind of a big hammer because then the whole page is gone. But if it's no index, then we don't use that for indexing. Thank you. Sure. Okay, some more questions. Most of the important questions answered by Matt are decade old and a lot has changed since then is it possible to have them answered again? Sure. I mean, we've been recording lots and lots of videos, so I'm happy to answer more questions, but let us know what kind of videos you think would profit from a modern take because we have gone through a lot of those older videos from Matt and a lot of the things they still stand. There are lots of timeless answers there with regards to how you can improve things for your website, particularly around search, and a lot of these things don't change that much over time. So just because something is old isn't really a reason for us to say we need to delete it and do it again because having a fresh face on a video makes things so much better. I think Matt did a fantastic job with a lot of these videos. But like I said, if you run across any that you think definitely need to be replaced or definitely need to be taken down because there's no longer relevant, by all means, let us know. Are rich results from the structured data markup always on the first page of the search results or can they be shown beyond the first page? They can definitely be shown beyond the first page. That's something that's not tied to the first page of the search results. Some particular kinds of elements in the search results are sometimes more visible on the first page, but they're like all the different rich results types, as far as I know, can be shown on any page in the search results. Hey, Sean, follow up on that, that's my question. So a lot of time I see that there's a, we go to a GSC, a Google Search Console. They have, I see something like, they have rich results, but it's in like 50 position or something, but they have very high impression. Like an impression looked like it's on the first page. So what does that mean in GSC? I think that's really confusing sometimes. And I don't know what it means in your particular case, but the tricky part with the search results page is it's not just like those 10 links below each other anymore. We have all of those one boxes and side bars and different navigational elements on a page where it's easy possible that you have maybe 20, 30, maybe even some paces, 50 links that are shown on one search results page. And they will all see impressions. They will have kind of the position number in Search Console and that can sometimes look a little bit confusing. So sometimes we see it that it looks like something is on the first page, even though it's position, I don't know, 20 or 30 or 40. Sometimes we see things that we say, oh, this is position number two, and you look at the page and it's like, where is my website? It's not showing up at all. And it ends up being maybe one of those images in a thumbnail on top, which for Webmaster is like, well, technically it's a link to my website, but practically it's not as visible as a big text block. So it's sometimes tricky to, I guess, to understand what is shown in that search performance report. And this is something where you also see differences across different kind of ranking checking tools if you use anything like that. Because everyone has a different opinion on how you should count the position on a page. And I don't know what the final answer there will be, but it's also something that we're looking at from time to time to see how can we make that position number a little bit more useful for people so that they understand what this number actually mean. Is my site visible? Is it very visible or just slightly visible on a page? It's sometimes hard to judge. Thank you so much. Do you know if, so sometimes there's a knowledge panel at the top of the, I'm talking about mobile search results where you kind of go through tabs to access the content. And sometimes you, let's say, flip to a news tab or interesting finds or something, and then there is a load more. So if you're in, if you only rank after you hit the load more, does that still count as average position one or whatever the actual knowledge panels position is in Search Console? That's only counted when people see your site in the search results. So it's not, well, not when they see your site, but rather when your site is loaded with a link in that search results page. So if you have to click the load more button in order for kind of the next part of the links to be shown, then that wouldn't count as the first page. That would only count when someone actually clicks on that. OK, so the position would be much lower or would it not? How would that appear, I guess? It would be higher. It's kind of like going to page two. OK. OK, thanks. What are the recommendations from Google for indexing and ranking audio? Nowadays, some publishers produce audio, just have two main ways to index and rank this content, Google Podcast, or embed it in a news article surrounded by text. What are some options? Are there any plans to give more visibility to audio in the search results? So I can't say much about the plans. On the one hand, I'm not aware of anything specific being planned there, but we also generally try not to pre-announce things. With regards to audio in general, I think the best approach is really just to work with transcripts. And especially if you're doing something like a podcast where people are talking, then if you have a transcript, then that's something we can look at and see from a web search point of view. Here's a bunch of text. We can rank this page based on this text. So that's kind of the main approach I would take there. It's something where I imagine at some point in the future we'll be able to go in there and do kind of voice understanding of what is being said and index the audio content based on that. But I don't think that will happen within the next couple of weeks or anything like that. So making sure you have a transcript text together with the links to your audio files, that's probably what I would aim for. The structured data testing tool will be greatly missed. Are there any plans to expand the scope of the rich results testing tool? Yeah, I know lots of people have been very vocal about wanting the structured data testing tool to remain. I think it's something from a technical point of view it makes sense for the team to focus on one tool rather than two tools. And one of the pieces of feedback we've received with structured data in general is that it's sometimes hard for people to understand which types of structured data actually have an effect in search. And that's why we focus on the rich results tool, which focuses on the things that we would show as Google in the search results. So that's kind of the background there. We are planning on expanding the rich results testing tool. We've been looking at all the feedback that we're getting where people are like, oh, this is like terrible Google because this one use case I have only works in the structured data testing tool. And we try to take that kind of feedback, understand what it is that people are trying to do, and to make sure that we can implement that with the rich results testing tool. Also, the structured data is not going away just now. So it's not that you originally have to jump over. But by all means, make sure to send us feedback if there's something specific that you will miss if the structured data testing tool goes away. And try to make that feedback as actionable and as understandable as possible. Sometimes we just get feedback that's like, oh, Google, you're terrible. You shouldn't do this and take away our toys. But you don't tell us what we should change. And we can't really work with that kind of feedback. So make sure that the feedback is something that we can take to the team and say, look at this smart person here with this smart piece of feedback around their specific use case. Makes total sense. We should make sure that this works. So that's kind of what we would like. Follow up on some schema that Google used, some schema they don't. So we know that a lot of the SEOs just said suggestion to use organization markup. But I know it is not in the market of this in the development guide. So is Google actually use it? Or is that any benefit? And also, generally, if there is some schema marketing, schema.org website, but it's not listing the Google Developer Guide, can it be benefiting me anyway in SEO specifically? Yeah, so that's I think one of the trickier questions with regards to all of the structured data in that we have a lot of things that we use to try to understand the page and the content on the page that we don't necessarily show directly in the search results. So in the rich results test, we focus on the things that actually have direct visible effects or can have direct visible effects. But a lot of things help us to better understand the content and the context of a particular page. And those are things within kind of like this general schema.org markup, which you can do various things. And that's kind of, I'd say, almost a shame that we don't highlight that in the rich results test. But it's also something where it's very easy to go overboard because there are just so many different things you can mark up with schema.org. And you can spend a lot of time marking up all of those individual elements. And there's like an absolutely zero effect on your search results, even if we were to process that. So if there are things where you feel we desperately need to understand the relationships of the items on your page is a little bit better, then go ahead and add that markup to the page. But if it's just like, oh, there are five different types of schema.org that could apply to this page, therefore, I'll mark it up, that's probably not providing any value. So a really common use case is to mark a page as a web page. We do that on the Google.com home page as well. So it's not us making fun of everyone else. But it's something where, as a search engine, you look at that web page and it's like, it's a web page. And it says it's a web page. What else could it be? It doesn't give us any extra value. So finding things that are really high level, important for your pages, and adding the markup for that, even if it's not visible, I think that's perfectly fine. Going overboard and just adding all types of markup that you can find, it's not going to harm your site, but it's kind of a waste of time. OK, thank you so much. Sure. John, I have a quick mobile-first indexing-related question for you to check out a moment. So I manage a lot of sites. They're in the mobile-first index. And generally, they get crawled at about 90% mobile, maybe 10% desktop crawler. One of the sites, and again, it's an adaptive platform rather than fully responsive. So there are some differences. But one site in particular, it's my larger sites, that's getting crawled at about 40% desktop, 60% mobile. Is that a, does that create problems? Is that, I mean, it is, again, it is in the mobile-first index. Is that a bad thing? Is that something I should be working to fix? Is, can you explain a little bit about that? I don't think that would be a sign of a bad thing. My hunch is that it depends a little bit on the type of content that you have on a site. So for example, I'm not sure if for Google Shopping we would use the smartphone Googlebot or if we'd use a desktop Googlebot. So if it's an e-commerce site that's visible in Google Shopping and we crawl kind of shopping results with the desktop Googlebot, then you'll probably see more crawls with the desktop Googlebot in a case like that. I'm not 100% sure if that's the case with Shopping. It might also be similar with kind of the ad spot, the landing page check, those kind of things. But depending on the type of content, we might be using slightly different requests on our side to crawl the site. And that could result in a slightly different skew of desktop versus mobile when it comes to the overall crawling when you look at your log files. Cool. Thank you. Follow up on e-commerce very quick. So a marketing awareness ago, Martin said that Google Merchant Center bots don't render JavaScript. So in that case, if I switch my product page schema markup from HTML-based to JavaScript, will it still be able to show up in rich resulting shopping related term? I don't know. I don't know what specifically Martin said there. I would check with Martin, especially when it comes to rendering, he knows everything there. I see. Thanks. I was already asking, but he don't know anything about Merchant Center. Thanks. Oh, OK. Yeah. So I think everything around shopping is something that is kind of sneaking up on us on the web search side, because a lot of the shopping things are now kind of being merged a little bit within the organic search results. And they're no longer kind of this separate paid experience. So I imagine over time, we'll have a little bit more information to share around that. OK, thank you. Cool. OK, we didn't get through like a ton of questions, but if there's anything in the questions that you really need to have answered, feel free to drop that into the next thing out. I need to jump off to another meeting, so I can't stick around a little bit longer. But maybe on Friday, we'll have a bit more time. Thank you all for joining in. Thanks for all of the fantastic questions from you all. I hope you found this useful. And hopefully, we'll see each other again in one of the future Hangouts. Bye, everyone. Thank you, John. Bye. Thank you. Thanks.