 It depends, really, is the answer to a lot of things. So what's it depends on? It depends on so many different things. It depends on the question you're asking, what it depends on is the weird meta answer here. It's like, is this a new site? Is this a site that is literally doing a site move? Is it an actual site move? Or are I just changing the URL structure or something? What does your server setup look like? How fast is your website? What is the content looking like? Is there a lot of competition around this piece of content? Is it a duplication of content that is somewhere else? And it depends on so many different things because, as you might figure out, the entire process on our side, the entire infrastructure on our side, is very large and vast and complex. Hello and welcome to another episode of SEO Mythbusting. Today with me is Barry Schwartz. You might know him from Twitter and Search Engine Roundtable. We're happy to have you here. Welcome to SEO Mythbusting. And we're going to talk a little bit about community. Awesome. Thanks for having me in your awesome office. Yeah. All the secret blueprints and stuff. Don't do any of that. They're not that secret anymore. So when I reached out to you to check if you were available to do this, you said you wanted to talk about the relationship between Google and the SEO community. So one thing that does puzzle me a little bit is that we are trying to be as transparent as possible to people. And we are balancing between being transparent and being confusing. But we are oftentimes met with this idea that we are withholding truth or we're having a different intention than what we are saying we do, which is not the case. Where does that come from? We have to understand that these are people building out content in order to get traffic to their websites. And in some examples where either you have feature snippets, where these publishers believe you're taking their content and putting it on your own website, the Google search results, and people don't have to click on from the Google search results to their website because all of the answers that you answered the query right in that on the Google search results page. Because of that, people feel like, why am I doing this? Why should I go ahead and write content that I'm getting zero traffic from, which I'm not going to convert on? But yes, I see that. I see that. I understand that. We hear that a lot. But we already know from studies and from experience reports from the community that you oftentimes get a lot more qualified traffic. You get better traffic to your site from featured snippets. Well, maybe. I mean, there's been studies going both ways on that. Fair enough. And it would be great if you guys could go ahead and publish your own internal data or share in Google search console to show what this specific publisher is getting from featured snippets. A little filter to say, filter my performance reports by featured snippets. And you can see your click-through rate, your impressions, all that data. And I think if it's positive, I think the community will be very happy. All right. Well, I'm not so sure about that because there's always a little bit of agenda behind it. And different people have different angles to this. And I think it's important to understand that fundamentally, if you have content that is really useful for the users and you add more value around it because your site is full of good content, then I think these can drive a lot of traffic. But I think the complaints might be coming from people where the content is maybe not as great. But I mean, there's bits and pieces that we can pull out for the user. But the user has no incentive to actually go there. So it's like a. I mean, a lot of this stems from, I'm in the US. So I've been seeing on the TV a lot of governmental, like the Congress and Senate talking about these studies that were produced by different people in the industry or outside the industry, even data providers, saying Google's taking the lion's share of the clicks, meaning people are going to Google and Google's sending less and less traffic day by day to publishers. And that's a trend that scares the SEO webmaster developer and publishing community. But that's not something that we want to do. I mean, what we want to do is we want to bring people and the content publishers together. That's literally like the fundamental idea of the search engine, and we're trying our best to make that happen. But we also know that sometimes the intention is not to do more on the publisher's side, like if the user wants to follow through, that's great for both of us, for the publisher for us. But if it's traffic that doesn't lead anywhere, if it's like the zombie traffic, then, ha, that's a tricky one to deal with. But I see where you're coming from, and I hope that we can get more transparency and visibility to these issues in the hands of developers. Yeah, and maybe that will backfire if you give more transparency. Maybe it would be better for everybody. Who knows? That's the thing that I find very interesting that you're saying that, because that's something that we keep experiencing, that when we are trying to be as transparent as possible, that sometimes people are taking us out of context or misrepresenting what we were saying. And then we are in this weird lose-lose situation. We provide more transparency, we lose. We provide less transparency, we lose. That's a tricky one to deal with. I mean, obviously, you know, I write about this transparency. And it's just funny, because the more transparent you are, it's like how you lose. It's like a lose-lose situation. And I've been covering this for so long. Sometimes over the history, you've pulled back some transparency, and then you've increased it. And now it's like, I think it's the highest it's ever I don't know, I don't know the answer to it. I mean, I think being as transparent as possible is ultimately going to be the best, honesty is the best thing you could do without stabbing yourself in the foot. Yeah, we're not trying to misdirect you or we're not lying to you. So how can we make this into a win-win situation? I think we are doubling down on being transparent. It's definitely the way that we want to go. And we just hope that the community picks that up. And I mean, again, I think what you're doing today at these videos, what you've been doing on the Webmaster YouTube channel for a long time, the activity that you and your whole team at the Webmaster Trends team was putting out on Twitter, on the forums and everywhere. And I think that is what you need to keep doing because otherwise, I mean, it's just proof. It's actual proof and truth. You're on the field doing what you need to do. Even just not so long ago, you held the Google Webmaster conference and you're having them around the world, but you had a big one in Mountain View. And people are Google engineers sitting there taking notes, seeing what they could actually learn from the SEO community and the publishing community and trying to make it, and they're trying to say, oh, that's an interesting point of view that I didn't have. You're taking that feedback. You're gonna hold all of Google Search consoles based on feedback from the community. And there's so many things. I wish more people would use the submit feedback button. Like that is so helpful because if you're reporting it over Twitter, it doesn't really go anywhere. If you're reporting it over our Twitter accounts or talk to us in person, then we're like, okay, sure, I bring that to the Search console team and they're like, that's one opinion out of many opinions that we hear every day. But if you're using the submit button, like the submit feedback button, we actually get like quantitative data of what the people want. And that's actually, I know that we're not like talking back, we can't answer everyone submitting feedback there, but we are taking this in and we're trying to make the things happen that we see are important. That's how the speed report happened. Yeah, I mean constantly, it's amazing how much you push out with Search console. And again, it's not really making you guys a dime, it's just more about transparency. It's about transparency. So let's hope that that gets us all together as one community further in building good stuff for the web. Hope so. And then we have all the people thinking like, hey, oh, you have Chrome, you have Android and you're tracking all these users and you're saying, hey, why aren't you using this data for Search? It's a great way to improve Search. But then you looked at Direct Hit, which was a big search engine back in the day. And they use click data and they were manipulated by a bunch of people clicking on results and so forth. It is very noisy as a data source. Nobody believes you. Why don't people believe you? I wish to know this. I don't understand that either. And I think like it's partly confirmation bias. People like to hear the things that confirm their hypothesis. That's just like psychology. And on the other hand, it is maybe this like feeling or perception that we are trying to hide the truth. I mean, conspiracy theories are quite well off these days. Well, it's easy for people to think that of course because you can't tell the full truth in all situations because potentially people couldn't manipulate the search results. That's one thing. The other thing is also just like, when I say no, we're not using it for ranking, then I mean exactly that. And we might use it for a B testing of different ways of presenting things in the front end or we might be using it for, I don't know why. But people tend to only hear the bits they want to hear and then you get misrepresented. And then we have to clean up that rather than doing other good things for the community. I mean, so one example is with AMP. When you released AMP, when you initially released it, there were people on different sides of the coin, Google Ads team, Google Search team and other teams in the AMP community as well saying different things and communicating different things which confused the larger community. Some were saying it is a ranking factor, some were saying it's not. And AMP, while it is not a ranking factor in the core rankings, the only way to get to that top carousel is to have AMP pages. And people look at that top carousel and say that's the top position. If you want to be over here, you don't need AMP. If you want to be over here, you need AMP. And to be a number one, that's kind of like a ranking factor. I actually don't even know if we still do that. Like I know that the top carousel is an organic feature but I'm not sure if you're still requiring AMP but we'll get it in the description of the video because I don't know at this point. Right, but initially when it was launched that was the only way to get into there and it might not be that way today. But initially when it was first launched the only way to be in the top carousel was to have AMP. Right, okay, fair enough, yeah, right. But as you say, it's not really a ranking factor. The AMP team obviously believes in what they're doing and they're doing a fantastic job at what they're doing. They solve really, really hard problems. They also give developers at publishing companies a leverage to basically say like, oh no, we cannot have this very slow tracking thing here. We cannot have this terrible piece of JavaScript on our side because then it would not be conformed to AMP. So that's a really, really helpful tool. There's a lot of privacy and security implications around the entire distribution of other people's content and we want to catch that and make that quick. You can't preload for many interesting reasons that easily and that's where the signed exchange bundle came from but that's not really being looked at much and that's not really being investigated or considered much so like AMP is being seen as what it was a couple of years ago, I would say. And people are misunderstanding what the idea is. The idea is not to break the web. The idea is not to create a Google-centric web. The idea is to create a web that is fast for the user and successful for the user and the matter of fact simply is in a bunch of countries in what we call the next billion users countries, the web as it is seen is either like a bunch of mobile apps or like a bunch of very proprietary walled gardens and that's what we are trying to alleviate and fix by making the web fast and accessible for these users. And AMP is the vehicle to get there yet people are like, oh, what's happening? I mean, Google is always gonna be held to a higher standard and that gives you guys a lot more responsibility. We understand that, yeah. That's why you guys are producing all the, you have AMP developer conferences all over the world all the time. You have crazy amounts of videos and documentation around that. You're doing these things. So you obviously are stepping up and that's the point of this conversation is in SEO myth busting. So SEO myth busting session is that you wanna make sure that even though you have all these theories out there, all these myths or whatever it might be, you're doing whatever you can because you know of the responsibility Google has to kind of give as much information as you possibly can to the SEO community and the publishing community because of that. Yeah, and we are aware of this responsibility and we're taking very, very seriously. You can also see that by if you look at when we launched the evergreen Googlebot we didn't just like throw it out there. We could have just say like, we've tested production, let's see what happens. We didn't. We made sure that we're not causing adverse effects to other people first. And that's what we're trying to do and I would love the community to understand that we are not an antagonist. We're trying to do what we can to bring good qualified traffic to people and we're trying to put out as much information as possible. That's why we're filming videos like this and that's why we're writing all this documentation. And I would love for people to not have like these snap moments where they just like jump on whatever it is at the time but like be more like considerate and trying to understand what's happening and like getting data for themselves and thinking for themselves while they're just like getting out the pitchforks. Right, I think people don't realize there's real human beings by Google. And it was fun, I was having a conversation with Danny Sullivan who's a search liaison at Google now and he was basically saying, yeah, Googlers don't have skin, we're robots because people just talk to Google like they're a company and there's real people there with real feelings and just because something, you know, agree with something at Google or whatever, it doesn't mean you should really like just yell your head off at whoever you're talking to because people have feelings and they're real people there. Sometimes I have a bad day and then when I read certain things on Twitter, I'm like, why am I doing this? I apologize for those tweets. No, it's fine. Not you. That's okay. Mostly. No, it's fine. That just happens and we have to deal with that, I guess. That's part of the deal of working at Google is also the site of where people are just disgruntled and angry, that's okay. It's just sometimes when it's what I don't like is when it gets unfair, when people are twisting your words and are basically like calling you out for things that you didn't do or didn't say. That's like a really weird one and when I get asked a question, I say no and feel like, oh, so look at the exact wording that he has used that must have like a secret hidden meaning I'm literally, I'm not sitting there in my computer or at my phone thinking 20 minutes about like a sinister way to, I'm not a lawyer. I don't. You have to go through some training, I guess. Yeah, I mean, I do go through some training but mostly like to make sure that I'm not confusing people. Right. That's the biggest risk. It's not that we're trying to hide something. It's more like, especially when I don't know something, I'd rather say I don't know. Right. And that doesn't mean that people are like, so you can't say. It's like, no, no, no, it's not that I can't say. I literally don't know. Well, John Mueller said I don't know and I asked him about what does I don't know mean? He's like, either I can't say or I don't know. Okay, so that's John doing it. That's John doing it when I can't say. I'm like, I can't really say or like, like. Or maybe I understood what John said. Who knows, right? But basically I'll, I'll say when I can't say something because I think that's fair to say like, I can't say that. For instance, like if someone's like, so how do you, how do you rate something for spam? And I'm like, I can't say that because if I would give this information away, how we're doing like spam detection stuff, then spammers could use this information to game the system again. So I won't discuss that. I won't discuss rankings simply because I don't know much about it and I deliberately keep it that way. So Martin, why don't you want to know about rankings? I mean, it's a secret sauce. You can go home and just go ahead and like build your own websites and make so much money on the side. So first things first, I think we should not know about ranking because we're trying to like represent the community as much as we can internally as we do externally as well. The other thing is I'm just really bad at keeping secrets. So that's why I don't want to know about like the ranking bits and pieces because if I accidentally blab them, then it's like not very helpful. And also it keeps changing and there's so much going on and we have like hundreds of ranking factors. And I don't think there is that much actionable bits and pieces in there. So I don't feel like we should be talking about it as much. We should be talking about what do our users want? What do our users need? How can we better understand it and how can we better deliver good web experiences? And we have a lot of work to do performance wise, content strategy wise, literally just copywriting wise. Like there's so much that we need to look into that I don't think that that's a fruitful discussion to have really. But when you tell the community just build the best possible website, they go back and start laughing. Yeah, build the best, of course I think I have the best policy website, but what can I do to make it better? Should I add HTTPS? Should I make it 0.5 seconds faster? Should I, there's specific thing like, what should I, where are my priorities? Right, so I think, oh, priorities is a tricky one because as I say, like we keep like changing things a lot. But basically- So just print them on your Google Hub docs. I'm not sure if that's a good idea. But you're right, there are a few technical things that you can influence and they should do like HTTPS, making your website fast. But these stem from, again, thinking user first and I would love to see more companies doing user testing as in like trying to understand who are your users and then actually having a conversation with them. Because what I think is the best content for my users might not be what the users think is the best content for them. And that's a reality that I've seen in all the companies that I worked at. The ones that did user tests learned a bunch from just having a five minute conversation with some of the users. And Google has a product, Google consumer survey feature I think. I remember, I got hit by that Panda update once a long, long time ago. And John's like, why don't you ask your users what they think of your content? And I'm like, okay. So I embedded one of those Google survey things and I published the results and they liked my content. So Google went in there, changed the algorithm, made my website like really high, I don't know what to say. Well, you know, like you don't know how it all works. Yeah, that's interesting. I didn't know that we had that product. That's a good one. Yeah, and it takes literally a second to embed. I don't know if it's exactly called that but it's like a basically a little embed and then it pops up, rate the site and then based on how you rate and what page you're on gives you dynamic information to ask you more questions. Nice. Which goes into a Google spreadsheet which you can use to publish if you want. That's awesome. That's really cool. Awesome. Now, thank you so much for being here, Barry. I think this was a really, really interesting conversation about community and how Google and the SEO community work together or can work together. And I like to thank you all for watching this season two of SEO Mythbusting and listening to us and the other guests talking. And thank you very much. Bye-bye. Yeah. Start again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How am I doing, Lucy? Yeah. It's dangerous, but... I mean... Don't worry, this happens for real. Time! It's worth it. Yeah. It's worth it. No, no, no, no, no. It's me, not you. No. Are you breaking up right now? Oh, my God. Welcome to SEO Mythbusters. Today I have... No. What? SEO Mythbusting.