 All right, welcome, everyone, to today's Google Webmaster Central Office Hours Hangouts. My name is John Mueller. I'm a Webmaster Trends Analyst here at Google at Switzerland. And part of what we do are these office hours hangouts with people from all over the world and lots of patients that were already submitted. And always, if any of you want to get started with something before we look at the submitted questions, feel free to jump on in now. John, well, the videos won't be replacing you, will they? How do you mean replacing me? No, I mean, the new videos, which are really good and useful, kind of strikes me that they answer a lot of the questions that you continually get asked in our Webmaster Hangouts. You know, you describe them as evergreen questions. But for me, that means that they just constantly get asked. So you won't be getting rid of Webmaster Hangouts for you to replace the video there. I think we're setting up a machine learning system to automatically replay the right video at the right time and then we'll cover all of the grounds, including all of the buzzwords. OK, yeah. Is that OK? No, no. I think these kind of interactive videos are really interesting as well, because it's important to see what people are worried about at the moment, whether they're having problems. And I just always just send them to the cancer. John, can I ask a question? Sure. Actually, I was searching something and I found that in the result page for the same domain, but the different pages are ranking on the position 1, 5th, 7th, and 9th. Is that possible to rank a domain with the different pages for the single query? Sure. With our algorithms, that's always possible that you have multiple results from the same site with the search results page. From our point of view, that's perfectly normal. That can make a lot of sense. Really kind of common example is if you're searching for your company, then you kind of expect to see a bunch of results from your company as well. So it's not something that we would see as a bug or as a problem. Sometimes people do report these kind of pages where a lot of results are very similar from the same site in the same search result page. Maybe that's not so great. What you can do then is use the feedback link on the bottom of the search results pages to let us know about that. And these feedback reports are reviewed regularly. And that's something that is brought up with the search quality team to kind of see where are people having problems now, what they like at the moment, and what might we be able to do to help improve the search results in that review. OK, thanks. Hello, Jim. Hello. Hi. Hi, John Pratik here from Hendaval, India. Yeah, so I have one query. Normally, we generally read in LinkedIn like there is position director of SEO, manager of senior director of SEO, and bigger company like WPP, Omnicom, those are the largest digital marketing agency in the world. So director of SEO, so I would like to say one point, which generally try to get the backing from natural link building. So nowadays, so natural link building, so if we do the website with technical SEO that is done with one activity, but to get the natural link building. So what is the actual meaning of natural link building? I don't quite understand the last part. Normally, we often listen about natural link building. So what is the actual meaning of natural link building? What is the meaning of natural link building? John, you posted as a question in the forum as well, if you want to read it on the chat. Oh, in the chat. OK. Yeah, I know a lot of agencies do link building in really weird ways that generally don't align with our guidelines. And for a large part, I know our algorithms are being worked on quite intensively to kind of help make sure that those kind of links don't play a role in our search results rankings. So that's something where in general, our recommendations are really to make sure that you have fantastic content on your website and to have something that people really like, that people like to share. And that's kind of the way natural link building works, is that the people look at your site, they see something they really like, and they recommend it to other people. Whereas if you come to other people and you say, oh, you need to put this link on your site, or I will pay you for this link, or I will post this link to 5,000 directories, then those are all essentially not really recommendations when we find those kind of links. There are things that you drop there yourself. So that's something that we would not recommend doing. I agree with your point, but actually, the scene is that like, let's take an example, Stone Temple consulting one of the world's largest SEO enterprise agency, Stone Temple Consulting. If you are aware about Stone Temple Consulting, that company. So they do the guest posting. So that guest posting activity, they consider it natural link building. Is this right? Guest posting is natural link building. In general, for guest posts, we recommend having well-known follow on those links so they wouldn't pass any paycheck. I mean, that doesn't mean that guest posts are bad in that sense. It's just that you can use these to kind of drive traffic to your site. And if people like your content, they can link to it as well. But it's not the case that you should go out and write for other blogs and just drop links to your sites. But these are essentially old topics. From my point of view, if you're seeing something where you're kind of worried that people are doing things wrong, then I'd recommend submitting that as a spam report, sending that our way so that the Web 17 can take a look. If you'd like to discuss what specific other sites are doing or what other agencies are doing and kind of wondering like where you should position yourself as an agency, I'd recommend going to the Webmaster Help Forum and really kind of discussing that among peers. Thank you. One of the tricky things, I think, with regards to all of this, is that it's easy to spend a lot of time focusing on things that your competitors are doing, which might be doing right or that they might be doing wrong. And that's all time that you waste, essentially, because you don't really have a chance to work on the things that you want to do. So instead of spending too much time analyzing what your competitors are doing in minute details, maybe it makes sense to kind of think back and think about what you want to do in the long run or what you want to do with your sites or with your clients and how you can kind of work to really improve that situation overall rather than just try to follow what other people are doing or to complain about what other people are doing. John, on that subject, I don't need to put in there, but you just mentioned about guest posting. So for me, is there a difference really between just guest posting and actually contributing? I mean, for instance, if I contributed to Search Engine Land or Search Engine Journal or somewhere and you've put a lot of time, effort, research into something as an individual, and you contribute as a guest author, would that be considered the same as just a guest post on some site where you just got in touch with some random and just said, here you go, can you just put this on? And here's this link, which we want to have this anchor go into this page. I remember Matt Kutz, when he stuck a fork in guest posting. Some years ago, he said, look, if you'd have dinner with the people that you would. Oh, no. I think you got muted. Oh, sorry. Who muted me? Someone that had enough. Wasn't me. Do you get my point? So I think there's a difference between a genuine contribution to the industry that you're in, or the peer group that that is notical is in, and just some naff guest posts. There's just some article that's spun together and just thrown with a link. I think you could probably draw a line somewhere there, but finding that line is really hard. That's something where in talking with people, I also see that they try to kind of overvalue their contributions to some of these things. And essentially, it essentially is this kind of situation where it's like they send out 1,000 emails. Like I would like to write a blog post for your blog, and I am the expert on this topic. And I don't even look at your site. I don't even know what your site is actually about. I will write you a blog post for $5 and include some links in it. And that's kind of between that extreme and the situation where you're actually seen as an expert and the other side comes to you and says, hey, Don, can you write something for us? We would really like to publish something fantastic from you and kind of have your voice on our site. So I think those are kind of two extreme situations. But it's really hard to kind of draw the line in between there. And I would almost go so far as to say, well, even those kind of guest posts where you do contribute significantly to the site, maybe it makes sense just to have those links as no follow and have it such that you kind of profit from the people who actually go to your site because they think that you wrote something fantastic and they're really interested in hearing more from you. But I think that's the kind of situation where I'd be hard pressed to kind of draw the line. And the Web Spam team generally tries to look at the bigger picture. And for them, if they see kind of a bigger pattern and it's like, oh, there are hundreds of guest posts out there. And for each of these blogs, they're like, well, I am the expert and I'm contributing significantly for this other site. And those are the only links going to that site. And you're just placing those links yourself. And it's not really a clean recommendation for your website. So I think the tricky part there is that looking at the bigger picture often makes this a lot clearer. But looking at them individually, it can be kind of tricky to spot the differences there. Yeah, actually, along those same lines, if you guys don't mind if I sneak in, how do those sites get away with it? Like, AVO, AVVO is a resolve any legal issue and you can find any lawyer and super lawyers where they give you a seal and a link. And they're follows. And how do they get away with that? How do they get away with it? I think another tricky part there is that you don't really know if they get away with it. Will you dominate in each one? Well, in the sense that for us, for the Web Spam team as well, we try to recognize those kind of links and just ignore them. And the Web Spam team, when they run across a bigger pattern of links like that, they also apply manual action there. And they essentially neutralize those links. But this is the external link. So you wouldn't see that any of the link tools. And a site might continue to rank fairly well despite all of these links essentially being ignored. So what ends up happening is they spend a lot of time doing all of this stuff to kind of build these unnatural links. And in the end, they don't really have an effect. And they could have spent that time actually doing something useful for the long term for their website. Yeah, no, I agree with you. And we have, obviously, we're in the lawyer space. But a lot of lawyers and their competition will pay or show up on these directory sites. And it's just they still dominate not only just page one, but the top three rankings. And just kind of curious how, first of all, from what you're telling me, it sounds like that they're not supposed to be able to do that. And how does Google handle that? How does Google know if it's like a paid link or not also? Yeah, usually when we look at the bigger picture of what is supporting this website, that becomes a lot clearer. That's something if we see like, I don't know, 90% of the links are coming from various directories, then we might assume that those are kind of the only things out there that are kind of seen as a recommendation that we could just essentially ignore. But I think if you're an expert in one of these areas and you see other sites doing really shady things, I would just submit it as a spam report so that the website and people will know about this and can take a look at that, and can double check to see if things are working right on our site as well. And if you have something more complicated that's hard to kind of fit into a spam report, you can also send that to me. And I can forward that on to the team as well to kind of double check. Thank you. All right, let me grab some of the questions that were submitted and then we'll get more to interesting discussions with you all. OK, the first one is from Mark. I'm curious how Google would handle duplicate content consideration for two brands that want to partner and display an identical landing page on each of their sites. Neither party is willing to give up the canonical and the microsite is out of the question. Is there a generally acceptable workaround for a scenario like this? So I guess this is somewhat of a unique situation in that neither side wants to kind of allow the other side to be canonical. What generally would happen here is we would look at both of these pages and we would look at both of these pages and see that they're different in the sense that if these are two brands and maybe they're selling the same product, then at least part of the page will be subtly different with the branding or the addresses or something like that. So we would index both of these pages. We would recognize that part of this page is actually duplicated across the other side as well. And what would happen then is when someone searches for something within this duplicated block, we would try to just show one of these pages in the search results. And it kind of depends on which one matches best what we think maybe the user's intention might be or their location or other personalization factors. Sometimes we might even show both of these in the search results pages. And we try to show it like that. So it's not the case that we would demote your website or say this is spam and kind of take it out of the index completely. It's just that we would have both of these and we would try to rank them essentially against each other and try to figure out which one of these is the best one. And if there's like a really clear match within the duplicated content that we'd say this is really the right content to show, then that's usually less of a problem because one of these two will be more or less visible on the first page of the search results. If it's really a competitive area, though, where people are looking at a lot of different competitors and also your content, then that might be a bit trickier in the sense that we have two of these pages that are essentially competing against each other and we have to rank them individually. So the alternative might be to have one page that is kind of stronger that would actually have a better chance against all of the other competition. But instead, you're stuck with two pages that are not that strong because they have to stand on their own each. And that might be a situation where actually having the content on two pages is less useful than having everything on one page, where you could have one stronger page versus two less stronger pages. From my point of view, it really depends on the competitive landscape there. If it's a really competitive area, then maybe it makes sense to rethink that partnership and rethink how you want to strengthen your product versus just sticking to your brand as an ego thing. On the other hand, if it's the less competitive area, then maybe that's perfectly fine. Let's see. What else do we have here? After hearing about the mobile first index and how AMP is a ranking signal, we recently created an AMP version of our e-commerce store. So just first off, AMP is not a ranking signal. So maybe this clears something up in the rest of the question. Let me read through the rest. Our e-commerce website is fully responsive and the same content is shown on desktop, tablet, and mobile. Our AMP pages, however, are very minimalistic and show just the product name, description, image, prices, and a few options. Promotions that would normally be shown on the product page won't be shown on the AMP. I'm curious as to how Google will index our website. We have a fully responsive mobile site with more content and an AMP site with the same amount of information almost but not quite. So is this a problem or not? So from our point of view, an AMP page should be equivalent in with regards to functionality and content as your normal mobile page. We want to be able to show the AMP page to users in every situation where we would otherwise show your mobile page. So if your AMP page doesn't have the full functionality, the full content on it, then that would be something that the AMP team might take action. Well, technically, this is a valid AMP page, but we don't want to show it in the search results because we know users will have a worse experience on these AMP pages than on your other mobile pages. So we'll just show your other mobile pages. So that's something that's probably suboptimal for you because you spent a lot of time creating these AMP pages and you probably want them shown in search. So my recommendation there would be to think about what you can do to actually make your AMP pages on par with your normal mobile pages or maybe to think about where it makes sense to use AMP pages where you can provide the full functionality and the full content and maybe where you can't. So AMP pages can be done on a per URL basis. You can do this for individual products. You can do it for individual parts of your website. For example, you could put all of your informational content in AMP and maybe leave all of your product pages as mobile-friendly and a responsive site until you've worked out how to make those product pages like full-fledged AMP pages as well. I think we did a blog post on this topic recently where we talked about the various ways that we really want to make sure that AMP pages are equivalent to the normal mobile pages. And in the end, it really comes down to we want to recommend your website. We know what is on your mobile pages. And we want to make sure that users have the same experience when we send them to the AMP version of the page. We don't want it to be that just because it's fast, it doesn't have the full functionality. So then it's OK for a website to have both mobile and AMP together and not going to hurt in rankings, basically. Yeah. So with regards to mobile-force indexing or not, I think that's kind of secondary there. But you can have a responsive site or a mobile site and an AMP site as well. This is essentially per URL. And some people have both of these because they know users go to either one of these. Or maybe there are other things that you can do on your mobile site that you can't quite do on the AMP site completely, such as maybe personalization where you recognize the user and you log them in automatically and you give them this one-click-by options, those kind of things. I believe one or more of that is possible with AMP. There are things you can do with the iFrame elements. There are lots of dynamic elements that are happening in AMP as well. So this is something where if you want to stay on the bleeding edge, I'm sure there are lots of cool things you can do there with AMP. But you also have to kind of realize that you might be spending a bit of time getting all of this to work at the moment if you're doing it all manually. Whereas if you give it a little bit of time, maybe it goes down to just a checkbox on your CMS and you just put that checkbox on and all of the AMP content just essentially flows automatically. John, do you know on the subject of mobile design? I know everybody's keen to get, you know, that people are searching more on mobile than desktop now. So I was reading a guide actually in the thing with Google that was around guide to mobile web design here. One of the first things it said was make sure that you have your call to action right up at the very top of the page. So my concern with that, I've not actually thrown a master call to action at the top of the page because my concern is also that, for instance, in informational rather than transactional queries, most the call to action is obviously still important because they're not just to provide information. I'm just concerned actually that would be considered main content and actually that needs to be all informational stuff any kind of call to action. Are you not mobile? I don't know. I suspect that depends quite a bit on the type of content that you have and what your call to action would be. So I think for a lot of informational content, maybe the call to action is just we want to give you information on how to solve this problem. It's not like you need to sign up or you need to buy something specifically. But obviously, that depends a lot on the website itself. So for example, if you have support content for a product that you've already sold and people are like, how do I do this with this product? And they come to your site, then there's no real call to action essentially that they need to do, apart from reading the content, solving the problem that they have, and potentially some kind of a rating system maybe on the bottom that says, was this useful or was it not useful? But that really, I think it depends quite a bit on the type of website. But I would definitely test these things and consider that maybe they're different from mobile and from desktop. And where it makes sense to make changes in the design, to put maybe buttons higher on top or with different colors or higher contrast or whatever and see what the difference makes when you do things like A-B testing. Okay, fine. Yeah, and actually maybe even kind of along those lines, like, are there any real advantages using a popular WordPress theme that's been used by many sites? With regards to SEO, do you mean? Or I guess, yeah. So to use it, it's pretty popular and a lot of sites have used it. And those sites are doing well, as opposed to maybe some of the outliers that may or may not, let's say they have like equal user experience. Yeah. As far as I know, we don't have any kind of kind of inherent advantage for site layouts that are common. So it's not that we would look at a website and say, oh, this theme is this really popular theme here. And these important websites here are using the same theme. Therefore, this website might also be really good. It's more that we try to understand all of these sites individually and figure out how we should be ranking them. And sometimes a lot of sites have similar themes and that's perfectly fine. But it's not the case that we would say one theme because it's popular is better for SEO than others. I think if you're using a common CMS like WordPress, then a lot of the common themes will be pretty optimized already. People have a lot of experience creating these themes and with regards to kind of the basic SEO elements. And these things are pretty well worked out and they just kind of work. The only thing that I've noticed in talking with people here, specifically around WordPress themes or bigger CMSs, is that the more features a theme has, the slower it tends to be. I know because the more... It's going to sound like a site that's really, really bad. You know, the builder themes, those have lots of features, but they are really, really slow to... I just want to throw that in there. Yeah. Yeah. They don't have any names and sites, but some of these big builder ones are just drag and drop. The code, they're full of big blots. It's just terrific and all the functionality, very slow. Anyway, sorry. Yeah, I think sometimes it makes sense to have a lot of functionality on a website because you actually use that. But if you're creating a fairly simple content type website and you have a theme that provides all of this functionality, then suddenly the JavaScript behind the theme and all of the embedded files are just so complicated that it really bugs the site now. So that's something maybe to keep in mind. It's less of an issue with regards to SEO, but more with regards to user experience and there are a bunch of kind of speed testing tools that you can use to try these out. I'm also kind of curious if maybe the Googlebot is more comfortable in some of the more common themes, navigating and indexing. Usually that's less of a problem. So the more common setups are essentially or pretty much any of the common CMSs and their default themes, they're set up in a way that they just work for search. I think it's been quite a while that you had to explicitly do all of these tweaks and install all of these mods and plugins just to make it work reasonably well. Nowadays, if you take a standard installation of WordPress and you just throw it on a server and you take one of the default themes there, you have a pretty well SEOed site. It's not that you need to do significant work to kind of really bring that up to another level to actually be competitive. Obviously, there are a lot of really good plugins out there that kind of help you to tweak those last 10% out and really make sure that everything is well optimized, but for the most part, you can take a default setup and just run with that. Thank you. Of course, by the way. All right, let's see. Fairly long question here. I think this goes towards like Google News, top stories, issues, how-to stories. I'm aware that Google generally doesn't allow how-to stories, but once in three days, I end up coming across how-to stories in the top stories car. So what might be up with that? So I think, first of all, one of the points of confusion I sometimes see is that the top stories in the search results, they're essentially an organic search feature. It's not the case that they're tied to Google News. So it's not that any kind of Google News-specific guidelines would explicitly apply there. These are essentially normal search results from our point of view, and these are normal pages from the web. They don't have to be from Google News. So it's not that the Google News guidelines would necessarily apply there. If you do end up seeing content in Google News that you think doesn't belong there, I believe within Google News, there's a way to submit feedback. So that might be something you could do there. But with regards to just the top stories carousel, that's something where we sometimes show various things from the rest of the web. And let's see, the question goes on. Top media houses are updating titles and pages and trying to get the content back into the top stories carousel. I think this probably goes into the same theme in the sense that if you're seeing something in the search results in general that you feel doesn't work that well or that isn't useful for you, for your queries that you're doing, I would definitely also submit feedback there. And posting about these kind of things in the help forums is a good way to get feedback from peers into the discuss this kind of issue. But if you want to really make sure it's passed on to the team, I would submit the feedback in the search results page. Is there a way to track traffic, which is coming from AMP pages? For us, it's showing as referral traffic in Google Analytics, but it should be shown as organic traffic. I don't know specifically on how to do this, but I know there are a number of people that have done blog posts on how to set up Google Analytics so that it tracks this properly. So that's one thing I would look into. I think the difficulty is by default, if you just put analytics on both of these versions, since they're technically hosted on different hosts, Google Analytics will treat that as kind of referral traffic from another site rather than search traffic. But there are blog posts out there that show how to set that up in a way that actually tracks a little bit easier for you. What does duplicate content mean? Content copied from another website or original content that repeats on the same page within the same website. Which one is harmful for website ranking? So for us, duplicate content can be either of these. Essentially, the basis for duplicate content is we see the same piece of content on multiple URLs. And we think it probably makes sense to just show one of these. So when it comes to content that is duplicated across websites, if it's a one-to-one copy of the same content, then that's something that's easier for us to recognize as duplicate content. And we'll say, maybe there's a technical reason why this content was duplicated here. Sometimes it's as easy as having the same content on dub-dub-dub and non-dub-dub-dub on the website. And those are kind of the normal situations that every search engine runs across where we have to say, well, this is really the same thing. We will keep one copy of this and kind of ignore the other copy because it's exactly the same thing. There's no additional value in keeping both of these. On the other hand, if there are pieces of the content just copied across different pages or across different websites, then we do try to index both of those copies and show the appropriate one in the search result. And where it gets harmful for website ranking is not when it comes to these kind of technical things or these practical situations where you have the same content on multiple sites, but rather when a website is built up purely from duplicate content. So one case that comes up every now and then is someone that takes an RLSS feed from a popular news website or from other news websites and just publishes it on their own website and says, this is my website and tries to kind of act like this is what they've created when actually all of the content is copied from other websites. So that's the kind of situation where the web spam team and our algorithms will look at that and say, there's no value in actually indexing this website. It's just purely there to copy other people's content. We can drop this completely from our search results and users would not feel any disadvantage. So that's the kind of situation you want to avoid. You really want to make sure that what is published on your website is actually significantly useful, compelling, high-quality content of your own and not just something that you're compiling from other websites. Obviously, sometimes there are situations where you take a snippet from another website and you write about that a little bit more. That's perfectly fine. But really making sure that overall your website is unique and can stand on its own. That's really the most important part. John, on that, John, can I just chip in on that subject here? It kind of strikes me frequently that people often don't seem to necessarily realize that actually you don't have to have two pages with the same words to not actually be able to rank the two pages. And you can have different words, but they can mean the pages can essentially answer the same questions, meet the same needs, meet the same query cluster. And really you're kind of fighting with yourself, even though the words are not the same. That's true, isn't it? So if you have like 1,000 pages that are all like first dance at a wedding, top-town first dancers at a wedding, this may be slightly different. You could better off adding them together, putting them into one big page, and canonicalizing everything to the superset. I think that makes sense. For a lot of content, if you can combine it into something that's really strong, especially if it's in the competitive area, then that's something that you'll have an advantage from. I mean, it doesn't help you if you have two pages ranking the same search results, they're both ranking on page three. Whereas if you have one page that's ranking on page one, you probably get a lot more traffic to your website overall. But those are kind of the situations that you want to balance it. But that's the point, it's just that it's not necessarily just because, I mean, if they're exactly the same, one's gonna get filtered anyway. Whereas in situations like this, where they actually, you see a lot of people just like throwing out these 500 word blog posts, not so much now. But they're all kind of, they run out of ideas and they're ending up with a lot of content that actually just says the same thing over and over again, because they've got a content calendar to me. And actually they'd not do themselves any favor instead of which they could perhaps be making something really great. And 10 pieces that are rubbish, it'd be better off in one amazing piece. You know what I mean? Now, I think that's kind of an overall human nature problem as well. Where it's like you could be spending time working on something really big, and instead you're going off and doing all of these small things instead. And sometimes it, I don't know, it takes a lot of effort to actually kind of rope yourself together and say, okay, I'm not gonna let myself get distracted by this list of keywords I could be writing for. And instead I'll make sure that the rest of my content is actually really high quality. And that's, I don't know, that's sometimes it's something I run into as well. Not so much that I go off and create content for different keywords, but it's just I have like all of these small things to do, or I could be spending more time building this bigger thing instead. And finding that balance, finding enough time to build that big thing instead is sometimes hard. Let's see, a few from the chat. I have a no follow link from a high authority site. After a few days I see that in Search Console will it affect my ranking? If it's a no follow link, it doesn't pass any signal. So that's something that we essentially don't take into account when it comes to search rankings. We do show it in Search Console because we try to show all of the links, including the no follow ones there. I have the same website structure in another website. So does Google count that in copiescape or not? Just because it's the same structure doesn't mean it's the same website. But on the other hand, if you have different websites all focusing on the same theme, you run into the same situation as we talked about just before in that you're creating all of these small things, they're competing with each other. And instead you could be creating something really big and fantastic that works well for the long run. So that's kind of something where maybe it makes sense to take all of those small websites that are similar in theme and to fold them into one stronger website instead. We have a client with a business primarily run out of a WeWork space where many people share the same address. They're worried Google isn't going to validate their address and give them a rankings map listing is true. I don't know how Google My Business handles this. So this is probably specific to Google My Business. If you're looking at the map listing, the local results listing, I don't know how Google My Business would handle that. My assumption is they have a lot of practice with this and sometimes there are legitimate reasons why people share the same office space so that should kind of work out. I believe Google My Business does the verification with the postcard. So if you get that postcard and that works, maybe that's okay. I would definitely check with the folks in the Google My Business Help Forum though just to make sure that you're not accidentally running into any issues down the road or you work to get this listing set up and the listing works and then suddenly someone says, oh, from a policy point of view, you're not allowed to do this and they take it away from you again. So just to kind of make sure that you're actually complying with the guidelines and if there are specific kind of details that you need to watch out for, then I'm pretty sure that the people in the forum will be able to help you with that. Cool, thank you. With the web search, that's totally not a problem. If you have just a normal website, you have your address there and it's a shared workspace, that's perfectly fine. Okay, and because the Regis Business Centers and then some people that work from home are getting like the UPS addresses not really harmful in Google search. For web search, it's definitely not a problem. For Google My Business, for like the local listings, I don't know what the guidelines there are and what you might need to watch out for. It might be that they want to have something where it's like, we know this is actually your address where people can come there and talk to you if they have any questions. There might be some guidelines around that. There might also just be things where they say, well, we realize this is more of a service area business where you kind of go out and visit the customers directly in their activity area. Maybe that's also okay. I really don't know, so I can't speak for the Google My Business people there. Cool, thank you. All right. My website is ranking first place for this keyword software development company, but since the last seven months, and this keyword kind of fell out of the top 100, so I guess you're not ranking first place anymore. I am not finding out what the problem is behind the last ranking. My website is number one on Google India, but not on Google.com. Oh, okay. So, I think that can be completely normal. From our point of view, a website can rank very high in specific countries, but it doesn't mean it'll rank very high in all countries. So, it doesn't mean it'll rank very high on Google.com, which is more kind of international or US focused. So, from my point of view, that's completely normal. Geo-targeting plays into that a little bit where if we can tell that a user is looking for something local, we'll try to bring more local search results in. Which could be results from that country. So, if people in India are searching for this company, and we know that this is a good result for people in India, then maybe we'll show that a little bit higher in the search results. So, that's something from our point of view that is essentially working more closely. A lot of times this is across different countries, and a lot of times it's also like if you're ranking very high in a small country where there's less competition maybe, then that doesn't necessarily mean that you'll rank high internationally where there's a ton of competition. John, you know this past week or so, two weeks, when there's this, I don't know what it's called, maybe there was no update, maybe there was, but I think there was anyway. The point is, there's a lot of US and AU sites again massively since that time showing up in the UK for local service plus location, seems to have kind of correlated with that. And I know that they're doing this switch whereby eventually you'll all be able to see listings or sites that are from within the same country. Could that be impacting this at the moment, while they switch over to that kind of thing where they're trying to work out which sites are from which country, or maybe they're chopping India there because it's an India, if he's in India, then our site's in India, I don't know. I don't know. I wasn't aware of anything kind of geo-targeting or location-based that was happening there in the search results. So I don't know if you have examples where things are getting ranked wrong, especially with local search results, I'd love to see those and pass those on. As far as I know, there wasn't any update specifically around kind of changing the way localization works for search. So might just be an effect that's kind of with some of the changes around. Sorry? Thank you. All right. The non-update, if it didn't have anything to do if it didn't have anything to do with the local, it didn't maybe have to do with. Oh, I mean, we make changes all the time. So that's kind of the thing where sometimes we'll see reports like, oh, everything is changing in search and we go back to the engineers and like, what did you change? And they're like, I don't know, we made like the usual 10 changes last week. None of these are really treating me until the 100% present. Do you know when you mentioned that you maybe need a recorded thing that comes in when there's like common things that you say? That would be one of them when you say, we make changes all the time. I mean, I don't want to like downplay the experience of what webmasters are seeing. And sometimes they do see frustrating changes and they don't know what to do. For a large part that as far as I can tell is essentially just our algorithms are adapting and this might just be the new normal for your website. And it's normal about things around relevance and kind of the evaluation of quality and the user expectations that changes over time. And that can mean that a website that was ranking really well for a long period of time suddenly doesn't rank that well. That other websites which I can't figure out why are suddenly ranking a little bit higher. These kind of algorithmic changes happen all the time. And especially like these last couple of weeks changes where like people are saying, well, I see some changes but I don't really know what they mean. And then you look at the blog post and it's like, oh, well this one has like five keywords on it and this one has three and this one got ranked lower and this one higher. And it's like so many weird anecdotes where when we take them back to the team, they're like, well, these are just normal changes as we always make them. And it's not that we have like one algorithm where it's like we will insert a new random number generator and all of the search results will be jumbled around. That doesn't make any sense for us. We really need to make sure that the quality of our website of our search results essentially is as high as it can be and that it adapts fairly quickly as expectations change as the rest of the web changes. So when you do increase the meta descriptions to 320 characters, so just kind of curious why the increase? Why the increase? I don't know. I know we've been experimenting with that for a long time. That's something where I've seen various blog posts I think over the years where it's like, oh, Google has long descriptions and sometimes some longs, I'm sure it was like these mixes and these are things that we always kind of experiment with and it's almost like one of the, I'd say easier things to experiment with where you're just like tweaking like three lines or four lines and you can test that fairly easily. You can test that across millions of search results pages and see how users react to that. And that's something where maybe the results came out and said, well, this is something we should just be doing more of and maybe that'll change again in the future. So my point of view is I wouldn't go off and just change all of your snippets now that they're like we're sometimes showing more because maybe on mobile we're showing less and it's not so much the number of characters but the space that we have available. So I kind of like we've always said, look at your search queries, look at what people are actually searching for because we do adjust the snippets and the titles based on what people are actually searching for. And if you think your listing isn't great then think about what you can do to improve that. Thank you. Let's see, I had a service page link to the brand name instead of related keywords. Does this technique, is this helpful for service pages, for ranking? So internal linking within your website, it's always useful to have good anchor text that describes what the link page is about. Sometimes that makes sense to use branding on it. Sometimes it makes sense to be more descriptive. That's totally up to you, especially internal linking. It's like you need to make it so that users can recognize what this link is about and we'll try to pick up the context from there. Wikipedia provides all nofollow links, but why is it in the first place? So I think you're mixing up two things there. On the one hand, Wikipedia has links to other sites that they generally apply nofollow to because they've had such a problem with spam there, they really want to make sure that people don't just go to Wikipedia to add links in the hope that it helps their website. So this is something that I believe Wikipedia came up with over time and something that's kind of in line with our recommendations in that if you're hosting user-generated content on your website and you can't vouch for all of the links that people are placing there, then using nofollow is a good way to kind of let search engines know that there's a link here but actually we can't vouch for completely. But that doesn't mean that Wikipedia doesn't get links from other sites which don't have a nofollow. So that's something where I think on the one hand, Wikipedia also has a ton of really fantastic content and that's something that's worth showing in the search results. So it's not just the case that our algorithms would only look at links, we do look at a lot of different factors. Wow, we totally didn't get through pretty much most of the questions that were submitted but that's fine with me as well. What else is on your mind that we need to cover before the year is out? I'll ask a question, John. Go for it. Is there any, when we've been looking at our search results recently when we Google some of the things that we ranked for whether it's flying lessons or gifts or all of those things we've noticed that our result has a date next to it whereas nobody else's does. Does that just mean we're using a particular markup and they're not or is there any significance to that fact? So we're being seen as more of a news or blog site or anything along those lines or is it just that we're using the markup? The dates that we show are usually more based on the visible content and that if we can recognize a date in the visible content and we think it might be relevant we might show that in the snippet as well. I know sometimes we get that wrong so if you're seeing us get that wrong, let me know and kind of send me some example queries and you're out or we get it wrong because I know the dates team, they're also based here in Zurich, they do look at this from time to time and think about what they can do to improve their algorithms there but it's not the case that we would look at a website and say, oh, this is a blog or this is a news website, therefore we'll show the date but it's more that we think the state is actually pretty relevant on this page we'll try to highlight that in the snippet so that usually it's normal. It's just a product or a category it's not something like a blog post that would be, we've updated this on or this is our new post for Monday it's just standard category of all flight lessons or just a normal product of a balloon ride so whereas others don't have that. Yeah, that sounds like something to pass on as well. Yeah. Could I share that? Or am I going to share? And so here, if you guys can see that. Oh, okay. Can you see me now, Link? Or post it in the app? Yeah, whereas other people just don't have that. So it doesn't matter if we write number one for it or we're ranking lower down we still have the date whereas others don't. Yeah. So I don't know. Who has one? Yeah. It's not somehow picking up on maybe that it's kind of an event as such. I know it's not an event. I know it's used, it's an experience there but I'm just wondering whether somehow some algorithm, you know, detection is. Yeah, possibly I don't have to check out markups to see if we have it as a... Maybe the developer used an event markup because you can do that. There is an event markup. So maybe it thinks that happens on that date and it's just an open voucher and open certificate for it. I was just thinking of these. Just, I imagine that if there's lots of other trips and things around ballooning, et cetera, that are events somehow get detected as, as you said especially there's an event markup as well. Yeah. I don't know, happy to take a look. All right, thanks for the knowledge. I'll send it to you. Fantastic. John, can I send you some of these ROG like US and AU sites that are invading the UK SERPs for services? Oh my gosh. These Americans taking over the world again. We're invading. Yeah. All right, let's take a break here. If you want to stay on, happy to stick around a little bit longer but maybe we can pause the recording here. Take a break. Thank you all for watching. Thanks for joining in. So many of these hangouts for this year. I think the next one will be next year. So in the meantime, I wish you all happy holidays, good new year and hope to see some of you again next time as well. And like I said, I'll stick around a bit. So if you want to continue chatting, see you soon. Absolutely. Thank you, John.