 All right, welcome, everyone, to today's Google Webmaster Central Office Hours Hangouts. My name is John Mueller. I am a webmaster trends analyst here at Google in Switzerland. And part of what we do are these Office Hours Hangouts, where webmasters can join us and ask questions, discuss topics around web search websites. As always, if any of you want to get started with the first question, you're welcome to hop on in. I have a question about having multiple domains. If we want to use a secondary domain because it's shorter, it's something we recently acquired, but our current domain is a good domain that has a lot of SEO value, would it be OK to put a canonical from the new domain to the old domain with wanting to keep the old domain as the main ranking one, but have the new domain as a shorter domain in different ads that we run in print and things like that? That's perfectly fine. That's totally up to you to do. So that's something we see every now and then that people will use a different domain or different set of URLs for their offline advertisement, those kind of things. And as long as you combine all of that into your preferred domain, then that should just work. OK. We were concerned because eventually you would lead down to the same endpoint. And we were concerned that it would look, it's a site where you log in eventually. We were concerned that it would seem like a doorway page. Would the canonical take care of that? Yeah, the canonical is the right way to take care of that. OK. OK, awesome. Thanks. Sure. All right. Let me run through some of the submitted questions. Let me just mute you, Danny. There's a little bit of background noise there. And if you have any questions, feel free to unmute and just jump on in. All right. So the first one is an interesting one. We have a longstanding issue with our e-commerce site. For some unknown reason, something in the back end keeps randomly generating URLs. So we have a lot of duplication. They have a rel canonical on those pages and a noindex. Do we need to do anything else? This is something to worry about. Will this harm us with regards to quality? So I guess in general, this is something you probably want to look into and figure out where this is actually happening, where this is coming from. Because with a smaller medium-sized site, it's less of a problem if there is some additional duplication because we can generally still crawl pretty much everything on a website. With larger sites, especially if you're an e-commerce site and you're growing your site and you have more and more products, and suddenly you go from 100 products to 10,000 products. And you have a lot of random URL duplication happening, then that's probably something that could affect how we crawl and index your pages. Because if we have to go through a lot of duplication to actually find your content, then that means we might miss the new and the really important things that change on your website. So from my point of view, this is something I'd try to figure out. It's probably not something that's urgent because probably we can still crawl and index your pages properly. From a quality point of view, this is also not something you need to worry about. The real canonical is the right thing to do there when this happens. But this is probably something that you want to prevent from happening in the future at some point. So I wouldn't completely ignore it. I'd figure out a good time to tackle this and find a way to solve this problem. Our e-commerce site has a lot of image links which take you either to content pages or category. How important is a title attribute for these types of links and do they help with SEO? If we need to mark them up, can you give a suitable example? So in general, we use internal links within a website to better understand the site structure and to better understand the context of the individual pages on your site. So if you have links going to individual products, then those links also give us some information about that product, a little bit like what we expect to find there. So things like having an anchor for those links that has a product name or a brief product description on it is something that's really useful for us. It really kind of makes it extra clear for us when we look at those pages that this is really this product. Not only is the content on this page about this product, but also all of the internal links going to this page say, well, this is this specific product. So from that point of view, having a clean anchor for internal links is a great idea. If you only have images that point to these individual product pages, then I definitely make sure that you have an alt text for the image or use a title attribute for the link so that we can use either one of those as a kind of an anchor for that link. From our point of view, we treat alt tags and alt attributes and title attributes on the links kind of the same in that we can fold them into the anchor for that link. So it's more or less up to you with which one of these you want to use. I believe for accessibility reasons that alt attribute is probably the one that you definitely want to use for cases like this. I don't know if there's any subtle difference with regards to accessibility for the title attribute on a link. If we add links to the branch pages of our, let me just mute you as well, a little bit of background noise. If we add links to the branch pages of our top 20 stores in the footer of our site, would that be OK? On the one hand, we might want to highlight the importance and give them a little SEO boost, but we don't want Google to think that spamming and the rankings for those stores to suffer. So from my point of view, this is something you can definitely do. I generally try to limit the number of kind of random links that you have across your site in the footer to something reasonable. I think 20 is probably about the high limit there. Usually, I recommend something around 10, something around there. So I don't know what the absolute number would be that you'd want to do there. I definitely track to see how these links are actually used. If users don't actually use these links, then I suspect it's kind of you're only doing it for search engines and then probably search engines are already finding those pages anyway. So it's probably not such a big impact overall. But in general, if you're doing something like this with 20 links to individual products or stores or something like that in your footer, then that's, from my point of view, that's probably the high limit. But in general, that wouldn't be a big problem. The one thing we sometimes see as being problematic there is that it starts to look a lot like keyword stuffing in that if you have long anchor text for all of these individual links, then that looks like you're just stuffing a bunch of keywords into your footer of the page. And usually what ends up happening then is that we say, oh, these are just keywords of keywords. We will ignore them completely. So if you have just locations and you just link the city names, then that's probably a better approach than to kind of write out the full description for each 20 of these. John, can I just jump in there for a second? So when you say random links, presumably the usual about us contact us type of stuff in the footer is absolutely fine. So could you just be a bit clearer on random links to me when people are kind of potentially being slightly manipulative and linking off to other sites, other domains where with a clear intention of kind of getting a Google advantage as opposed to genuinely useful standard sort of things you see on a footer? Or do you mean 20 completely overall links in a footer irrespective of what they're for? I don't know. I don't want to draw like a hard line and say there is like, you should have 20 links in your footer and that more. It's just something that starts to look kind of weird, at least from a user's point of view, that when you look at the footer of these pages and they have links to individual products or other domains that they also run, then at some point that just kind of looks overloaded. And that makes it a little bit harder for us to kind of figure out which one of these links are actually relevant. So that's kind of the issue that I see there is that you have all of these individual links down there and at some point our algorithms look at that page and say, there's like so many links in the footer of this page, which one of these are actually useful? Which ones are not? Maybe I can just ignore them all. It's just again, from us, I mean, this is we don't have multiple domains. We don't link off to the shops. We don't do any of the manipulative stuff at all. But if I think about our footer, we probably have four columns of five minor links. And there's one column that would be the contact us, the about us, the whatever it, that kind of stuff. Another column might be brands, designers, that sort of thing. We probably don't have 20, but I can see shops that don't do any of the kind of things that you're perhaps trying to avoid or trying to, as a kind of spammy indication, but that might still have 20 links. So it's just if you meant there was any particular type, or just kind of keep it simple and short if possible. Yeah, I would just try to keep it to something reasonable. I think what you mentioned there is perfectly fine. So from that point of view, I don't know. I really don't want to say there's like a limit to the number of links you can put in your footer and some sites have legal reasons for various links down there. But sometimes we do see sites that link off to a bunch of their other domains, or that link off to individual products where you can kind of tell, oh, this is just for SEO reasons. And probably you're not seeing as much of an advantage from those kind of links as you think. So it's something, I would personally say if it doesn't bring any traffic from a user's point of view, perhaps it's not really that useful to actually keep in the footer of the team. And tracking the traffic on the links is something that's pretty easy for you to do. In most analytics packages, you can kind of see like where people are going within the site. You could tag those links if you wanted to. That's kind of where I would start. Okay, thanks. We're a car rental affiliate site, but we want to show the depot locations of the company we're affiliated with in our branch finder pages. Well, Google will still rank us for search terms in these locations, even though we show the same branch address as the company we're affiliated with. There are a few affiliates doing this. So I was wondering how Google treats this and kind of I guess what would happen there. I suspect from a pure search point of view, we probably wouldn't do anything special with regards to the absolute address that you have listed there. So just purely from a normal organic ranking point of view, we would take those words, we try to figure out is this like in the specific location or not and use that. I don't think we would fold that together and say, oh, it's the same address, therefore it must be the same company, even if it is different companies. Because a lot of times multiple companies can be in the same location. I don't know how Google My Business, Google Local would handle something like this or if that's even something that you would worry about or if you'd even have a listing there. But from a search point of view, I don't see any problem with doing it like this if you think that this makes sense for your website. We've marked up aggregate reviews and these are all showing in the search results. However, we've not added where they come from on our pages so customers can't see the source although we have copied the review text of some of them and put them on the pages. This will be addressed in the future. Is that okay or is this kind of risky? Should we remove it? So it sounds to me like this is something that's not completely compliant with our policies. So I suspect if someone from the web spam team were to run across the site and double check it with regards to the structured data, the rich snippets and the reviews that we have on your pages, then they might come to the decision that you're not doing this correctly. And what would potentially happen in a case like that is that they would submit a manual action for your website, meaning that we would drop all of the rich snippets in the search results for your website. What you would see in a case like that is that this manual action is visible in search console. Now you can see kind of roughly what it's for for the structured data rich snippet side. And you can address that manual action, submit a reconsideration request and then it'll essentially come back. It won't end up with your website being demoted in search. So it's not that it's going to rank less, it's just not going to have any rich snippets shown. So ultimately from my point of view, it sounds like you're not doing this compliant with our policies and it's probably something you want to avoid. On the other hand, kind of that risk of doing one thing before you actually have it completely implemented properly. That's kind of something that's up to you. Maybe you want to take that risk. Maybe this is something that for technical reasons, you need to do this step by step. That's for my point of view kind of up to you. How does Google judge the quality of a page except for backwanks? Does it have any parameters to judge the content quality? Many websites use the same content, but they rank differently. So I guess that last part obviously is true. Many websites have the same content and we have to rank them differently because we can't rank them all at the same position, right? We can't put them like next to each other and say this is exactly the same thing. So obviously we have to make some judgment calls there. With regards to quality, one thing to kind of keep in mind is that we do look at various signals algorithmically to try to figure out what quality is, but it doesn't make sense to target those signals directly as a webmaster because we use those signals as a way to try to figure out like are these relevant with regards to quality and if they're not relevant, we try to find other signals to do. And the best way to actually gain that system is to make your pages really high quality. So that regardless of which signals Google looks at and how they evolve over time, our algorithms will continue to kind of see the high quality content on your site. So that's kind of what I would aim for there. Obviously that's hard. It's not a meta tag that you can put on your pages, but essentially in the end, what Google is trying to do is bring high quality results for users and if you're already in that high quality area, then that's kind of where you want to continue being or even move even higher quality. With regards to some things you can specifically look at, I would look at the old Panda blog post that we did a bunch of years ago about 24 things or so that you can look at with regards to your site and high quality content from Amit Singhal back in the day and go through those factors. And ideally have someone who's not associated with your website go through those factors after trying to complete some tasks on your website and maybe on some competitor's websites as well. And in general with regards to like the comment you have there at the same content, my recommendation would always be not to aim to be just as good as the other people in the search results. So if you see terrible websites ranking then I would not make your website just as bad and say, oh, why does Google rank this site? My site is just as terrible. It can rank this as well. But instead to make sure that your site is really significantly higher than all of the other ones out there. So instead of aiming to be kind of like as good as number five in the search results aim to make sure that the pages that you provide are such that when a Google engineer looks at that and that query and they realize they're not ranking your site number one then for them it's completely obvious that this is a bug on our side that we need to fix to make your site rank number one because your site by far is the best site for this specific type of query. So that's kind of what I would aim for. Obviously it's not easy. So it takes a lot of hard work. We added organization markup showing basic company information. How long should we wait for it to appear in the search results? And if it doesn't show, does that mean it's a trust issue? I don't know for sure how quickly the organization markup should show up in the search results. So I assume this is in the knowledge panel kind of on the side. You can also of course make sure that you have similar information in your Google My Business listing so that we could kind of use that as well or that we can at least match the information and say, oh, this is the same information. Therefore it's a stronger reason for us to actually show this. I don't believe there's any specific timeline where we'd say you have to wait like five days for this to show up. I imagine this is something that is more organic and can take a bit longer to actually process and start showing up. Hi, John, regarding the organization structure data. So because I've seen every time with the organization structure data, you will have the Wikipedia information. So in that case, which doesn't mean that we have to have the inform in the Wikipedia first and then implement the organization structure data. And no, we do use Wikipedia information for some of these elements, but it's not a requirement. And a lot of companies are just for normal reasons not listed in Wikipedia, especially the smaller companies. So from that point of view, it's not something where you have to kind of manually create a Wikipedia entry and then quick submit the structure data so that maybe it'll show up. But it's obviously something, from our point of view, what I've commonly seen is that sometimes the data doesn't match. So if the company name is filled in different ways in different places, then that's hard for us to say, well, this is the same entity, we should kind of treat this data with a little bit more weight. Whereas if the data does match, then it's a lot easier for us to say, well, there are obviously multiple signals that all lead to the same bit of information. Therefore, we can probably just show this in search without having to worry too much. I guess another aspect of this question is also, we don't always show the organization markup. So this is something that depending on the company, how well we think it makes sense to actually show this in the search results, we might show it or we might not show it. So if you call your company, I don't know, Best Mobile Phones, and that's your company name, then if someone searches for Best Mobile Phones, it's probably not going to be that we show a kind of a knowledge graph on the side and linking to your website. These are things that from our point of view, they just don't make sense because it's not what the user is looking for. On the other hand, if we can really tell they're looking for this company and they would like to have more information about this company, then that definitely makes sense for us to show kind of this knowledge panel thing on the side. So what if, if company have registered on Google My Business and when you type the company brand name, it will show us the Google Map and what if when we remove it, we want to show us the organization instead of the Google My Business, what should we do? Should we remove from the Google Map or we'll just keep both of the information? I don't think there is kind of an absolute way to force that to switch from one to the other. Probably if you remove the Google My Business listing then we'll revert to other information that we have but there might be other reasons why you want to keep that Google My Business listing. Maybe you do get people looking on the map for your business as well and then for those cases it makes sense to have that Google My Business listing. So it says something we sometimes also see with regards to structured data in general and the search results. Some types of structured data kind of overrule the other types that we show. So maybe you have reviews but you also have a video snippet and you have a recipe on one page. Some of these types of structured data when we would show them in search, we can't combine them. We can't show them all at the same time. So we have to algorithmically make a decision and say, well, for this page, we have this, this and this available but we will pick this one because we think it's the most relevant for this specific case. And that's probably what happens with regards to kind of the organization markup, the knowledge panel on the side as well where sometimes we show more, sometimes we show less, sometimes we show this depending on how the algorithms are kind of aligned at that time. So the better way safety is to keep the both, keep the structured data and keep this Google-like business. Yeah, I think for most businesses, it makes sense to keep both. And yeah. Yeah, thank you. All right, let me run through some of the other questions submitted as well. Let's see, I want to know, having one site with one page and one keyword is better than having multiple, a single page with multiple subheadings and multiple keywords. So from a search point of view, both of these can be relevant variations. It's kind of up to you with regards to how much information you actually have available if it makes sense to have one page on one keyword, another page on another keyword or to have one page that kind of focuses on both of those keywords. It's kind of something you can test. It's something you can test with users. It's kind of up to you. So from my point of view, sometimes one makes sense, sometimes the other one makes sense. Probably you don't want to go too extreme and just say like, this tiny variation of this keyword is for one single page and all other variations have individual pages because then you end up with a site that looks a lot like a doorway site with like individual pages just focusing on one keyword and actually the whole rest of the content is exactly the same. So finding a balance there is something that you have to kind of do on your side. With the recent algorithm updates, putting more emphasis on ads that appear on two page, what's the protocol for having homepage takeover ads or more prominent ads on the top of a page while doing these have negative SEO impact? So I guess there are two aspects there. On the one hand, on mobile, we do try to figure out where there are interstitials, essentially these big homepage takeover ads or I don't know what they're actually called on a page and we do remote sites on mobile that have these kind of blocking elements in front of the actual content. The other thing that you might want to watch out for is the better ad standard that recently came out where we do try to figure out which pages, which sites are using ads in a way that is obnoxious or not compliant with a better ad standard and that's something that Chrome might be able to take action on as well at some point. So those are kind of the two main things that I would watch out for there. Obviously, the biggest impact you will have is with regards to users. So if you have a full page ad on your website when people are landing on your website and they all go and click on that ad because they think, oh, this is the best content, then why would they even go back to your website if they just prefer to click on some random ad on your page instead of actually looking at your content because they can't see the content, it's all hidden behind the page. So you're kind of doing yourself a disfavor by blocking users from actually getting to your content and that kind of indirectly could definitely have an impact with regards to SEO and that users might not recommend your site anymore. So that's probably the primary thing I would watch out for there. It's not a direct SEO effect. It's not something algorithmic that directly happens there, but it is something that users remember and they react to that. I have two websites. I copied a few pages from the first website to the second website. How can I tell Googlebot I don't consider my website to have duplicate content because the same site, I use canonical tag. What should I do on my second website for both URLs to be indexed? So I'm not completely sure what you're trying to achieve here. In general, you can put the same content on two websites. The canonical tag helps us to understand that you are explicitly copying this content and sometimes there are good reasons to do that. Maybe you use one website for offline marketing or ads and the other website is kind of the general website that you use, that's perfectly fine. The rel canonical helps us to understand this connection and to understand that this is the main version that you want to have indexed and these others are available, but you kind of want to forward any signals that you get to your main website. And in a case like that, for the most part, we will try to index your main website. On the other hand, if you want to have two websites and these are different websites and you want to have their content indexed then you really need to make sure that they have unique content of their own, not just copied content from the other website. When it does kind of come down to copied content, we try to recognize that and we will try to fold it together on our side. And without a rel canonical, we'll kind of make a guess and say, well, maybe it's this one, maybe it should be indexed under that one. On the other hand, if it's different content, then we can easily just say, we'll just index both versions and that's fine too. Hi. Hi. I just have two questions, actually, about one of my clients. We are actually able to see that they are able to rank on tags, that their tags and archived pages are ranking and their main pages are not ranking. So how can we avoid that and how can we make their main pages rank? This was just the first question. If you can answer that, I have one more, if you would mind. Tag and archive pages versus main pages. So one kind of common trick that people do is to make sure that the tag and the archive pages have more of a snippet, a teaser link to the individual pages rather than the complete content. If it's a complete content, then there's no reason for us to send people to the kind of the detailed pages because they already have the full content on the tag and the archive page. So that's one thing to kind of watch out for there. The other thing is essentially this is kind of an organic ranking that is happening from our side where we think these tag and archive pages are the most important part for those individual keywords. And that's not something that you can easily force. So what helps is to have a clean internal site structure that you link cleanly to the detailed pages. Maybe that you also link to some of these detailed pages from the homepage. But just generally telling us that these detailed pages are actually important as well. Okay, perfect. Thank you so much. Just one last question. We've noticed that if we tag geotag an image these days, like it really helps in local rankings. Is that something that is true or is it just a myth? We don't think we use the location for images at all. So the metadata for images, I believe we sometimes look at some of that for some of the filters in image search but it's not the case that we would use that for ranking. So it doesn't make sense to put like a bunch of keywords in your exit data or the location, those kind of things in images. As far as I know, we don't use that. Thank you so much. All right, I see a question in the chat as well about the mobile first index. Why is it running behind schedule? Is the scale of the transition bigger than originally anticipated? Have Google bitten off more than they can chew? I don't know. So I wouldn't say it's running behind schedule. It's something that we do want to do various analysis on and our goal with the original announcement was not to say this is happening like next week but kind of to let webmasters know that this is a general direction that we're heading and to let webmasters know that if they see us crawling their mobile pages a little bit more, that's not a bug. That's kind of what we're trying to aim for. So instead of freaking everyone out by announcing a change that is happening next week we wanted to kind of give this whole thing a bit more time and to let those who want to kind of take the first steps and make their sites work really well on mobile actually do that and to otherwise give people enough time to actually make this transition. So I suspect you'll hear more from us over time around this but the general goal from our side here is not to say there's one cutoff date and everyone will have to switch and there will be mass panic everywhere among webmasters but rather for us to kind of figure out which sites actually work well on mobile first indexing already and then to switch those over step by step. So that's essentially our game plan at the moment. So it's not that there's like this one cutoff date that we have to announce and then everyone has to scramble but more that we're going to try to do this step by step to really make sure that it works well for the web and that it works well for search as well. My website is based on a JavaScript platform. I created a site map and submitted it in search console but URLs are not getting indexed. It's been more than 10 days. What can I do? What can you do? In general, we can crawl and index JavaScript sites. We render them like, essentially like a normal browser would do. We have recently published in the developer documentation some guides on how to kind of debug rendering when it comes to search. We mentioned which Chrome browser version we roughly use, which functionality we've kind of taken out for rendering. So based on that, you can usually test individual pages on your website to kind of see are these pages working for Google, for Google rendering or are they not working? Where are some of the errors that I need to watch out for? So that's kind of what I would aim for there. The other thing, if nothing at all is getting indexed from your website, then potentially there's something even more basic kind of not working as expected on your website. So in general, even if we can't render a page properly, we should at least have something like the homepage index in the search results, even if we don't have any of the additional content on that page. And if that's not happening, then probably there's something more basic technical that's wrong there. Could be something as simple as the wrong response code that your server is sending. Maybe there's a no index on those pages. Maybe there's a removal request for your website still pending. Those are kind of the common issues. It might also be that from a web standpoint of you, there's something really old on that domain that needs to be resolved first. And these are all things you can find in Search Console. If you have trouble figuring out how to double check those in Search Console, I'd recommend posting in the Webmaster Health forums. These are issues that happen to everyone. So it's not something specific to your website or specific to your specific use case. This can happen to anyone who puts a website out there that some of these kind of basic technical things, if you don't know what to watch out for, they can be kind of tricky to figure out and to result. But once you have that kind of basic technical thing resolved and I will take it to the next step and figure out what needs to be done with regards to rendering or if anything needs to be done. Hey, John. Hi. Hi. I have two questions to ask you. One is regarding pagination and the other is for deep linking. So pagination, so we are in a real estate. We are a real estate website where for today we may get a lot of properties on our website. On the next day, the property count may be reduced. So for that, what we have done is to get crawl all this property. We have implemented pagination on our website. The thing is that if today we are having 100 properties on our website, we will have 10 paginations, means a main canonical, then next page one, page two, page three like this. But what is happening in some cases? Suppose next day we are having 90 properties. In this scenario, we will be having only nine pages. But the 10th page yesterday we have created is indexed by Google. So what we should do regarding this? So should we add a no index tag or how we should? Handle this scenario. You can work with no index there. That's probably an option. I think in general, what happens in cases like this is we crawl those pages, we might index them. But if they're like several steps back and kind of far away from your website's route, then probably we don't give them a lot of weight. So this is something where probably there are some technical tweaks that you can do to simplify this with regards to crawling and indexing, but it's probably almost more effort than it's actually worth. And I will just kind of do the basic work that you need to kind of get the old pagination pages out and kind of let it settle down naturally rather than kind of force something specific to happen there. But the scenario is on the third day we may get 200 properties. In that scenario also, should we increase the pagination count or should we restrict ourselves to certain pagination? That's kind of up to you. So the thing I would kind of watch out for there is that we can reach all of those individual property pages through some variations of links within your website. So if they're only through a single listing page and that pagination has to go through, I don't know, 20 different pages to actually get to the link to the property page, then that's always going to be tricky. Whereas if you have multiple categories, if you kind of have a drill down by location, by building type, by type of, I don't know, type of property, all of that, then chances are that property will be listed in multiple of these locations and in some it'll be fairly high on the list. So easy to find. And in some it'll be fairly low on the list. So perhaps not as easy to find. So that's what I would like. One more question. And how should we handle the matters of the paginated pages? I would use the normal pagination guidelines that we have. So with the rel next, rel previous, if you can set that up, that's fairly helpful for us. I don't think there's any kind of big magic push by using rel next and rel previous. So it's probably not that critical. It's a good practice, I think, but it's not something where I would lose any sleep over if you can't implement it at all. Okay. And one more, just a question. How should we handle matters of those paginated pages? Means page one, page two, page three, should it be a unique means, or is it okay to have a metas of the main canonical page? So you mean the description meta-tank or? Yeah, title description tanks. Yeah, I would leave that up to you. So I don't think you need to artificially generate something crazy. A lot of sites just have like the main category and then page one, page two, page three as a title and that's perfectly fine. Okay, thank you, thank you very much, John. Sure. John, can I just carry on with a kind of related question to that if that's okay? All right. If you do have that situation, you have an e-commerce site and you have multiple pages of products, let's say, and as you get towards the end, it's gonna be a bit dynamic because as products kind of drop off the catalog and as products kind of come on, that page 10 that was being talked about sometimes has nothing in it, so it kind of wouldn't be there and sometimes does have products in it and that kind of can vary. That page at the end, would you recommend that it's best to have that page, those pages effectively at the end with nothing in, as no index or as 404? Simply because, again, they're pages that people don't keep looking at and if we have them as 404s, I think, at the moment and what happens is in search console when you have your kind of crawl errors, you always get those pages at the end kind of coming up all the time and then they kind of, some products appear and then they disappear and then they come back up again. Does that really matter? I mean, I guess 404 would be the correct response but does it really matter what you use? It probably doesn't matter and again, if it's so far down in the paginated series and probably we don't give it that much weight anyway, so our algorithms are probably like at the stage of saying, oh, we will just double check this page. It's not critical for us but if there's something there, we'll take it. If not, that's fine too. The thing is, it's not always that far down, so if you have a category, you might have normally one page of products but that might happen to extend to two so it might actually be page two that's sometimes there then a new product kind of appears or disappears and your page two effectively isn't there anymore but your view is that in terms of 404 or no index doesn't really matter apart from perhaps you're going to get a few more crawl errors if you 404 it. Yeah, I don't see a big difference there. I suspect if you no index it, we'll see it as a soft 404 at some point. So it's kind of like either we see it as a 404 or as a soft 404 and essentially it's the same for us. Okay, brilliant, thanks. All right, let me see if I can get a bunch of these questions still in and then we should still have some time to chat as well. How closely related is Google's cash page of a site to the ranking of the page itself? So the cash page is something that we kind of do separately from the normal indexing. It's the raw HTML of a page. It's not the rendered version. We use a rendered version for indexing, for ranking. So the cash page that we link there is more of something as a kind of a feature for the user in the search results rather than something that I would use for diagnosing technical issues as a webmaster. So I will worry too much about that. Sometimes the cash page is also a 404 which can also be fine. It doesn't mean that we think your site is lower quality or bad or anything. Are there any SEO benefits to removing old fashioned URL suffixes like .html or .phthtml from the end of URLs? No, there's no advantage from removing those, those kind of endings from URLs on your website. In contrary, I would even say it's probably bad for your website to just randomly remove those because what this essentially means for us is that we have to completely re-index your website because we think all of the URLs on this website have changed. So essentially you're doing kind of a revamp of your website. You're redirecting all of your old URLs to new URLs and we have to kind of relearn that whole structure again and that's something that will result in kind of a dip for a significant period of time until we've actually been able to re-crawl and re-index everything. So if you want to kind of go down the path of removing those endings from your URLs, then my recommendation would be to wait until you're actually doing a real redesign of your website while you really have to change internal URLs and then include that as part of the package. But don't assume that by removing these endings you'll have any kind of SEO benefit from that. We look at URLs mostly as identifiers and if they have parameter tags at the end, if they're .cgi or .html or .asp or PHP or whatever you have, that's totally up to you. That's not something that we would give any way to with regards to SEO. Is it a good idea to know index product pages if they don't have detailed information? Most of our products are uploaded by small sellers and they don't include much information. Totally up to you if you want to do that. If you feel you can use things on your side to recognize lower quality content, essentially is what you're saying here. And you want to know index at lower quality content until you've been able to improve the quality of that content. That's perfectly up to you. That's kind of your opportunity as a webmaster to kind of say I want my website to be known for high quality content to be indexed with high quality content. And perhaps it also encourages those who are posting things on your website to kind of take a step and actually go past the basics. Is it okay to link internal pages which have a canonical to another page? Yes, you can do that. The thing there is that we will find two of these URLs with the same content on them and we'll try to pick one of the URLs to use as a canonical for indexing. And if you have internal links pointing to one version and that page has a rel canonical pointing to another version, then we're kind of getting conflicting signals and that you're saying, well, this is the one you want to have indexed because you're linking to it everywhere. But actually that one has a rel canonical to this one here which might be the one that you want to have indexed. So what would probably happen there is that maybe we'll go this way, maybe we'll go this way for indexing. So if you have really strong feelings on which page you want to have canonical then make sure that everything is aligned. On the other hand, if you don't really care which one of these is actually the canonical that's chosen because from a ranking point of view, ultimately it is the same thing. It's just a different URL that's used. Then maybe you can just leave it like this until whenever you have time to kind of clean up the internal linking or to clean up the canonicals that you specify on the pages. What do you suggest to recover from quality algorithm updates? Yeah, if our algorithms think that your website is of lower quality then the best way to kind of gain that system is to make your website not be lower quality and to really make something significantly higher quality which obviously is not very easy to do sometimes. Do you expect the Google Analytics API to be extended with search console data if connected in the near future? I don't know for sure how this is planned from the Google Analytics side. My understanding was that the search console data is already available in the Google Analytics API. So maybe you just need to double check there. In any case, the search analytics data like the clicks and impressions and the queries go into your site that is available in a search console API. So if you're already kind of pulling data from Google APIs perhaps it's a small step to just pull that data from search console API rather than to try to figure out where it's available in the analytics API. My search console data is now eight days behind. Do you have any ideas when this will catch up? I don't have any hard kind of deadlines when this is catching up. I know the team is working on decreasing this and fixing this again. So I would expect this to kind of settle down over time. It's definitely not the intention to keep things eight days behind when we could be doing them a little bit faster. John, is that okay if I jump in with the search console question if that's all right? Sure. And it's to do with structured data. We sort of started talking about this a couple of weeks ago and you helped out, I sent you an email. I mean, it's more just to understand a bit more about structured data validation and what it is that search console is actually showing because I imagine that Google would validate structured data in probably two ways. The first way is the obvious way, which is just to check the markups okay in the same way that you could put any page to validate it and make sure that it's okay. And then a second way potentially, and I know Google Shopping does this and I think you've mentioned that organic does it as well, it's simply to make sure that no one is trying to gain the structured data. So structured data matches what's actually showing to the user on the page. So for example, if you're an e-commerce store you have a product, you don't want structured data that has a price of 100 pounds, but you're showing the user a price of 200 pounds. So is there some kind of validation going on there? And so my question is really in terms of what search console shows, if just to give an example, if the site has 10 products on it, if Google has, and those products all have structured data, Google has fully indexed and processed all of that. So there's no latency type of issues of it kind of missing anything. And of those 10 products you have say two where the structured data markup is wrong, there's a kind of fundamental issue with it. And then you have another two where the markup is cracked, but Google has seen that the data and the structured data is fundamentally different to what's being shown to the user on the page. So I guess my question to you is in that example, would search console show six, eight or 10 products as having structured data from them? As in what does it take into account? I don't know for sure, like how that report compiles that. My understanding is we would show the total number that we found. And also kind of show the number of cases where we found errors in the markup. So when it comes to technical mistakes, we would definitely flank that in search console when it comes to kind of logical mistakes in that you're using the wrong markup in the wrong place. And that's probably not something we would show in search console because it's more of a kind of like a quality issue with regards to understanding your markup rather than a pure technical issue that you're doing it wrong. Okay, but I guess the point was more that if the structured data that the actual numbers that you show are different to what you're showing the user which Google can see, would that count towards the structured data count? Again, this obviously relates to the issue that we've had and I think a couple of weeks ago, we report an issue and someone kind of randomly after it's had the same issue where Google was indexing a large number of pages on the site or virtually all the pages on the site would appear. And a large number of those have structured data but Google was showing only a small count of those as structured data. And we obviously at the beginning of the year we noticed that they dropped suddenly from a reporting point of view. It dropped from 5,000 to two and a half and it's just trying to understand some of the reasons for that and to understand is Google showing the structured data that it's found. So if it founds any structured data that validates that's the count that's showing or is Google excluding from that any structured data which it feels isn't matching the actual content that's shown to the user on the page. I believe we would show the full structured data. Right, okay. So even if it... Yeah, even if we wouldn't show that in the search results. So kind of clicking around in Search Console, one thing you might see is the pages listed in Search Analytics. I believe we have like rich results feature filter in Search Analytics. So that's where you could see like how many pages we're actually showing with rich snippets in the search results. That might be a little bit more useful to kind of understand the difference there. But that's kind of tricky because we also limit the number of pages that we show in Search Analytics. So I don't know if that's like a perfect workaround or a case like that. Okay, we'll have a look into that. But yeah, okay, thanks. Okay. Okay, John. Let me just grab two more questions that I saw here that I think came up last week as well. And then I'll catch some time for you too. So one question here is I have an issue with the invalid currency on some of our product pages. So the UK site shows a currency as US dollars but it's marked up as pounds. What could be the problem there? I believe you sent me a tweet with a screenshot. So I need to double check what the actual URLs there are and to see where that is coming from. But one thing that I have seen in some of these cases is that if you have exactly the same content on a site for the US and in a site for the UK, for example, or any other kind of different countries, then what might happen is that our systems think that this is actually the same page. And in a case like that, what could happen is we index one version of this page and maybe we're indexing the version with the other currency. So if you search in the UK, we show the currency as you have it specified in the US and it could also be the other way around. So that's something that might be happening there. Another thing worth mentioning is you added there that you tested it on different devices with IP addresses from the UK. If you're doing something fancy on your website to show different currencies dynamically, depending on the user's location, then keep in mind that Google traditionally crawls from the US and we will index the content as someone from the US would see it. So if you have different content shown to users in the US than you would have to users in the UK, then we probably would just have the content available in search that you actually show to the users in the US. So in a case like that, you'd need to make sure that you have separate URLs for both of these versions and that these two pages are kind of significantly different that our algorithms look at these pages and don't just say, oh, this is exactly the same thing, I can fold them together. So those are kind of two things I would watch out for there. If you're the one who sent me the tweet with the screenshot, I'll double check the URL to make sure that it's actually one of these two and that there's not something even weirder happening there. If you don't hear back from me, feel free to send me another note. Another one from last week with regards to internal search pages. So this is someone who's trying to block the internal search pages from being crawled and indexed because they believe this is kind of leading Googlebot astray and using up all of the crawl budget. And one question that came up is some people are linking externally to the internal search pages. And could that be a problem if you block Googlebot and people are linking to those pages? So I guess there are two aspects there. On the one hand, if the internal search page is blocked by robots.txt, we could still keep that link and show that URL in search results even without crawling that page. So that might be an option. That's probably not optimal, but it might be one way to kind of keep up with this. Another thing you could do is to figure out which of these external links are actually relevant and important. And maybe to redirect those to more of a category page so that when Googlebot follows that link, they get a category page. That can be crawled and indexed normally and the rest of your internal search could be set to no indexed or whatever you'd like to do there. You could also combine this with robots.txt and that you block your internal search pages from being crawled and only allow those specific URLs where you know you have important links going to so that they can be crawled. That might be another option. With regards to robots.txt, we use the most specific directive. So if you block something like slash search or disallow slash search in your robots.txt, you can still add an allow slash search slash query, whatever important thing or whatever URL is actually being used for linking to that page. So that Googlebot can crawl those internal search pages that you think are useful or that you see external links going to that you don't want to lose and still block the rest of the internal search from actually being crawled. So those are some options you could do. Another thing I've seen people do is just to say, well, Googlebot can crawl like some subset of my internal search pages anyway, like maybe the top keywords from your website those are things that Googlebot can crawl but anything more specific, so filters or paginated content that might be blocked from Googlebot through the robots.txt or with no index meta tags on those pages. So lots of variations. It kind of depends on how far you want to go, how much information you have with regards to those external links and how far the crawling of the internal search part is actually causing issues with regards to your crawl budget. So I hope that helps out a little bit. All right, more questions from you all. What else is on your mind? Hey, John. Hi. Hi. Actually, my question is regarding the desktop page and the mobile page. So we have a desktop website and now we have also a mobile friendly page for that desktop website. So for crawling purpose, in the footer, we have added few links so that the internal pages of the website get crawled. On the desktop view, we have added but on the mobile view, we don't have such structure. So should we keep a similar fashion on the mobile page also? Yes. The mobile page should be equivalent to the desktop page and it should be so that when we crawl the mobile page we could also crawl the rest of your website accordingly. So when we switch to mobile first indexing, this is one of those things that is important for us that the mobile page is actually internally linked the same way that the desktop pages are. It doesn't have to be exactly the same way. Sometimes some things make more sense on mobile than they make sense on desktop but it should be such that the mobile pages are not completely isolated from the rest of the website. Okay. And it should be 100% or is it okay 90 something kind of? I wouldn't look at the numbers in that sense. I would just make sure that you can on the mobile, click around and find the rest of your website. Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much. Hi. Just one more question. I was searching for a contained length. How important is contained length and read few articles from Moz that have to say that it should be somewhere around 80 hundred. And then there are a few other people in groups and chats from webmasters, different things. They said that it does not matter. The content length can be 300 words as well. So this content length or ranking factor in overall for different pages or does it really depend upon the specific word itself? Or speech, yeah. Sorry. Okay. I think you don't need to worry about the content length for the most part. What you do need to worry about is kind of what users are expecting to find when they come to your website. So if they go to your website and they can get all of the information that they need within one paragraph that's, I don't know, a couple hundred words long, then that's perfectly fine. On the other hand, if users come to your website and they need to find a lot of detailed information because this is a complicated topic or this is a topic that has a lot of variations in it, then maybe you need to put more content on it. So it's not from Google's point of view that we say, oh, 200 words is an optimal and it's like you will demote you if you have more or less, it's more that we try to find pages that match what the user's intent is and if your pages match that, then that's perfect. If they don't match that, that's something that, yeah, we have to deal with as well. Okay. So if I'm right, for example, if we publish an article for 300 words and we see, we check on the analytics and we see that the users are, there's a bounce rate, for example, they're not spending more time on that page. Say they leave up to two minutes or something like that after meeting the post to search for something else. So we can add extra content to it on the same page and hoping that it will get indexed again or initiate a crawl or submit it to Google again with that work or with that infrastructure. I, it's completely normal to keep updating your pages and to keep kind of fine tuning things. Sometimes that means removing things and putting them on separate pages. Sometimes that means making the page longer. That's completely normal. So there's no penalty for updating your content. I think that's essentially the right way to deal with it. I don't know if the bounce rate is really the perfect metric for this. Maybe there are other ways you can kind of track to see are people looking at all of my content? Is it too much content? Are they scrolling? Are they clicking internal links or not? But it's probably one really simple way to kind of get a rough idea of where people are not really that happy with your content. OK. Perfect. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Sure. All right. Let me double check some of the questions that were left from the submissions. How to get the association, the topic to the brand, like for instance, you type Allstate within Google and it suggests an insurance company within Google Trends. I don't know how Google Trends handles that. So hard to say. For US brand, widely officially available in the UK, the UK search results suddenly are dominated by non-UK sites, predominantly US sites, while all relevant UK sites are pushed down to page two. Why is that happening? I don't know. So you're welcome to send me some examples if you see something like this happening. Every now and then, I get reports like this and I forward them on to the team and they're able to figure something out that was quirky. And sometimes it's just the way things are at the moment. But if you have more examples, I'm happy to take a look at that. Just like based on the purely general information that sometimes UK sites are not shown in queries and instead we show US sites, that's something that could be perfectly normal. It's not that we would always show UK sites in the UK on top of all other sites. But specific examples make this a lot easier to kind of figure out. Question regarding 301 redirects. We have two pages with the same product, but for different Joomla versions, I want to add a permanent redirect to the new Joomla version because we don't wanna keep this page on our site. If we do this, will we lose keyword positions? Both product pages have similar details. Folding pages together is perfectly fine. That's not something that from our point of view would be specific to like your CMS. If you want to fold pages together, that's totally up to you. The one thing I kind of just mentioned here is that folding pages together doesn't mean that the new page will have like the sum of the traffic of both of these pages. Sometimes there are reasons why folding things together kind of result in a little bit more than one individually but not like the full sum of both of those pages. So that's kind of something to watch out for. In general, over the long term, if you're folding things together and making one page much stronger, then that's definitely a good thing to do. My site provides educational services for Pakistani students and my service is becoming really familiar among students. The problem is I get a really low CPC. What can I do here to increase the rent for new? I don't know how. So I assume this is with regards to AdSense. I don't know how that works. So that's something I'd recommend posting in the AdSense Help Forum and getting some input from peers or people from AdSense around that. With regards to Google Scholar Indexing, will there be tools rolled out into the help? Like Webmaster is to troubleshoot article indexing in Google Scholar. I don't know of any plans specifically with regards to Google Scholar. As far as I know, we use a normal crawling and indexing setup that we have for normal Web search as well. We just reuse the same URLs and the data there in within Google Scholar. So if it's kind of a technical issue with regards to crawling and indexing, you would see that in normal search console as well. There seems to be some technical bug in the top stories module no matter if you're the source of a story, you won't appear in the module. Let's see, apart from content, is there something which Google considers while selecting the sites for top stories? Top stories is essentially an organic search element. So that ranks content organically. It has some of its own algorithms with regards to which content it chooses there. It's not something that we generally have like a manual list or kind of like a meta tag that you have to include on your pages to be shown there. Yeah, so that's not the rest of the stuff there is also kind of around the same topic like how can we get into the top stories? And that's really essentially an organic feature. It's not something that you can just put a meta tag on a page and it'll work out like that. All right, what else is on your mind? Hey, John, just one more thing. I'm running a website, like a news website about small topics for students like web design and digital marketing topics. We have been doing content curation and sort of content syndication as well. Is that a negative SEO or is it like organic to go for it? Because we mix it up. 60% content is syndicated because it's news. So we get news from different sources and channels and then we mix it up with in-house content writers who write different topics on new topics on digital marketing next year. So I'm really concerned about the syndication part. How is there a percentage or is it too much if we do it completely? Should we stop it or what do you think? I think for the most part, the important thing for us is that when we crawl your website, we are able to understand that there's significant, unique content of your own on this website. So it's not that we're looking for a specific percentage and saying, oh, 60% is good or 50% is good, but rather that overall, when we look at your website, there's a reason for us to show your website in the search results because you do provide a lot of really useful and valuable content. Okay. So that's kind of what I would look there from a bigger picture point of view. And it might be that you decide, well, I want to keep the syndicated content because those that go to my website manually, they want to be able to get like a full picture of the content. But you could also say that I'll put rel canonicals on those pages or I'll put a no index on those pages so that they don't show up in search so that search engines see the valuable, unique content that I provide on my website and not all of this duplication that I provide for my users when they go to my site. So that might be an option that I would aim for there. At any rate, I'd really make sure that overall, your site is unique and compelling on its own and not just the collection of syndicated content. On the one hand, our algorithms try to look for things like that. On the other hand, our web-stream team also sometimes follows these leads and says, well, this website is actually just syndicating content from these other sources. Maybe we don't need this website at all in search because there's nothing really valuable there. Which might be if they look on your website in a bad day or something where you just didn't publish anything for a couple of days, then that could easily have that appearance. So that's kind of what you want to avoid. So that anyone, regardless if it's a search engine or a human, when they go to your website, they see unique value that you provide on your website. Perfect. And a question apart from this totally would be about how we go for, say, off-page SEO is basically going for organic stuff, like content writing, building backlinks from organic sources. Like, you know, they have to go back things at social bookmarking, guest posting is a major, major part of building. Is there something that you can recommend in an organic way, which really works like these days? Because when I read over there, people talk about building a PVN-like public private blogging network or something like that. I'm not sure if that's too organic. I think that's inorganic, you know, because I think that's fake or something. So I really want to understand how, because I read Wikipedia once where it was told that back in, I think, 2008 or something, Google published 168 or 160 parameters, and now they're 200 or something in total. So what are those factors altogether? Like, I'm sorry, you know, that's a secret altogether. No one knows or probably will share, but what do you think for a SEO strategy in an organic way would be, you know, to go for? Yeah, I can't mention all of those factors on YouTube. I'm sorry. So I think some things you need to watch out for when building backlinks or thinking about backlinks is that our algorithms or our engineers, when they think about backlinks, they want to look into the backlinks that are there completely organically. So essentially people going to your website and saying, oh, this is a good website, and then deciding to link to your website naturally. So that's essentially what our algorithms are looking for, what we'd like to see when it comes to links. That means anything like private blog networks, which is obviously kind of seen as black hat fire algorithms and by the Web Stem team, even things like guest posting. So if you go to other people's blogs and you write a post for them and you include links to your website in there which are not no followed, then that would be seen as inorganic because you're placing those links. It's not someone else recommending your website. It's you kind of recommending your own website, which from our point of view, isn't really kind of a recommendation, right? It's like anyone can say that their own content is fantastic. So those are kind of some of the things that we watch out for. Others are obviously just pure paid links is also something that's problematic from our point of view. Advertising is perfectly fine. You can advertise your website, but it should be done in such a way that it doesn't pass any value. Similarly, guest posts can be perfectly fine if you're not passing any pay drain to those links. So if you have a no follow on those links on a guest post and you're using this to drive awareness for a topic, to drive awareness for your business or specific service or product that you're launching, then that's perfectly fine. Those links just shouldn't be passing any pay drain. So that's kind of where we would see that there. Obviously finding ways to encourage other people to link to your content without forcing them or doing it for them, that's sometimes really hard. That's something where you have to consider like what kind of content would people recommend from your website? How can you perhaps recommend that other people link to your site on your pages as well? Maybe there's like a widget you can put on there or a simple way, kind of like saying, recommend my site on social media. And here's also a snippet you can put on your blog. All of those things are some options. I think that the good thing about all of this as well is that we use a lot of factors when it comes to crawling indexing and ranking. So it's not the case that you have to run off and get back links to all of your pages all the time. If you have really fantastic content and we can pick up that from other signals as well, then that's also really good. So it's not the case that you have to kind of constantly be chasing these links. But it's really something where depending on who you talk to, they obviously have sneakier ways of getting links which are probably a bit more problematic for us or they have some really creative ways of getting links which are completely fine. So if you do a big campaign on your website and that's really popular and people think that's really fantastic what you're doing there, then a lot of people might be linking to your site and saying, hey, this really cool stuff this guy is doing, look at this awesome stuff. I really like what they're doing, then those are the kind of links that are completely natural essentially and still something that you might be explicitly working on getting links for that, but you're doing that by creating something that people are naturally linking to rather than by going off and putting that link on other people's websites. Thank you so much. All right, with that, let's take a break here. I'll set up the next batch of Hangouts as well and in the meantime, you're always welcome to post in the Webmaster Help Forum. There are lots of people there who are active as well who can help with various questions and wish you all a great weekend and maybe see you again one of the next times. Thanks everyone. Thank you. Bye, thank you John, bye.