 Welcome everyone to the next episode of Search Off the Record, a podcast that we're trying out. Our plan is to talk a little bit about what's happening at Google, behind the scenes, and maybe have some fun along the way. My name is John Mueller, a search advocate on the Search Relations team here at Google in Switzerland, and I'm joined by Martin and Gary, who are also on the team. Hi. Hi, Martin. Hi, Gary. Good morning. So we've done a number of episodes now, and I think we're slowly getting a hang of it. It feels a little bit new and exciting every time, though. So that's pretty cool. How's it working for you all? Going pretty well. I'm really enjoying these recordings and these episodes and the responses we get. It's great fun. It's awkward. That's fantastic. Cool. All right. Martin, you had a topic that was kind of on your heart. Oh, yeah. What's happening on your side? I was wondering if it's just me or if it's like a larger thing, but I got a bunch of messages and questions regarding the different kinds of like rendering. And I also observed that whenever people are asking about JavaScript sites, the number one thing that they get as a response is, oh, you need to pre-render this. And I was wondering, do you guys actually know the difference between pre-rendering, server-side rendering, and dynamic rendering, or is that like all a blurry thing? Those are just different names for the same thing, right? Yeah, it's not. So the reason we hired you is to not have to know about these things. Fine. Fine. Okay. You are probably representative of the general population in this case because I think it is seen as being like different names for the same thing, but it's actually slightly different things. So you can pre-render things when you know when the content is changing, then you're basically like creating static content from your dynamic setup with JavaScript and you would like run that on the server-side, but you know when the content is changing. So if you have a normal website, like a blog, for instance, your recipe blog is a fantastic example for that, Gary, because you know when you're updating a recipe or adding a new recipe and then you basically run your JavaScript that, well, if you would use JavaScript, I know you hate JavaScript, you're not going to use JavaScript probably, but you would then run your JavaScript and create the static version of that and then be done until you then make the next change or publish the next recipe. But then there's websites that are a lot more dynamic, like, I don't know, social networks or auctioning platforms or something like that, where things happen dynamically based on user input and then you would have to run your JavaScript every single time someone is visiting the page, either in the browser or on the server. So server-side rendering is doing that whenever the request comes in from a user to your server, the JavaScript runs on the server, generates the HTML there. And then there's dynamic rendering, which is kind of server-side rendering, but you only do server-side rendering for bots, like Googlebot and other search engines and stuff like that. So they're not the same thing. And then people are like, oh, but Martin, if they're not the same thing, which one should we use? And it's the answer we probably always give, which is it depends, and then people are like, but what does it depend on, if you ask me. And it's like, it depends on your site. What kind of site do you have? How often does your content change? I don't know. But yeah, that's a question that I get often. So you said on server-side rendering that the JavaScript runs on the server. So why wouldn't, like, for example, in case of a WordPress blog where things are generated by PHP, would you still run the JavaScript on the server or you just generate the stuff with PHP and forget about JavaScript altogether because life would be so much better? I mean, the thing is, if you have WordPress, which is written in PHP, then, yeah, PHP would generate the content. And then JavaScript adds some fancy bits and pieces of functionality over it. But for instance, if you're using Ghost, which is a blog engine similar to WordPress, not SCMSI, I think, but like, it's pretty much the same thing, but it was written in Node.js, so you would run the JavaScript on the server-side. And then it does the same thing as PHP would do. It takes whatever inputs come from the request, maybe makes a read to the database and then generates the HTML on the server. So basically, in case of server-side rendering, what you're saying is that JavaScript acts as a server-side language. Yeah, and that's it. Pretty much. Interesting. But you can combine those as well, right? Yeah, but why? Because you can. So I'm kind of thinking that one of the CMSs I made, like, a long time ago to kind of go back to the old CMS topic where basically there was a giant database behind it and every time it needed to generate a new page, it could do that on the fly, but it was just really slow. So I cached, like, the whole HTML response. I just cached that. And the next time someone went to that page, I just pulled that page from the cache. And that's kind of like server-side rendering or something kind of, I guess, in between there, right? Well, it pretty much is server-side rendering plus caching, but there's, like, an additional bit on the spectrum, kind of, which is, like, server-side rendering and hydration if you say, like, okay, so here's the thing. I don't know. Let's say, like, I have a blog. And on this blog, I do have comments that work a little bit like a chat, so you should be seeing when people are typing things. But there's nothing stopping me from building this in JavaScript, and then if I do it completely client-side, that's a little bit of a waste, because then basically everyone who comes to my website can download the JavaScript to generate just the static part of the content, like the article and the comments that have been written beforehand. So I could just use the same code base that I used to make that happen dynamically and flexibly in the browser. I can run that on the server to get all the content that already exists from the database or from a cache. I mean, caching is fine. And then load the JavaScript in the browser kind of again to then also have the dynamic bits and pieces where when people, like, someone is typing a new comment and things like that and have it more chatty-like. So then you get the best of both worlds kind of, and that's why you would do this, because then you have one code base and you get the benefits of server-side rendering, but you also get the benefits of client-side rendering, where server-side rendering gives you speed and stability, and client-side rendering gives you the flexibility and dynamicness of... I think it's just like the dynamic, the dynamic of an application in the browser. So you're kind of saying all of these things are not pure SEO techniques? Like, they were made for other reasons, actually? Yeah. One thing is, it's often quoted developer experience. It's like, as a developer, you don't want to write a bazillion different pieces of code that kind of do the same thing. You obviously try to write, like, one piece of code that is then easier to maintain than three or four pieces of code that are kind of doing the same thing. The other thing is user experience, which I think is even more important because browsers are damn good at parsing HTML as it arrives, whereas JavaScript... I mean, the JavaScript engines get faster and faster, but still they have to get the entire JavaScript blob, then parse that, then execute that, and then that makes network requests to fetch data, and then that creates the HTML that's bound to be slower than making network requests get the HTML start rendering. There's no way that we can speed that up with pure JavaScript, I think. I have an idea. Uh-oh. What? What if we make JavaScript a ranking signal and if you use JavaScript, then your site will rank lower? What if we make you a ranking signal and whenever you're having bad mood or, like, comments like this, then websites just generally rank better, which would lead to everything ranking better and every SEO being happy. How about that? Martin, this is a horrible idea. That's what I was about to say. Oh, that's amazing. So we agree. I love this. So we should put little GIFs of Gary and Martin on pages and if you... It's GIFs. Thanks, Gary. GIFs. No? The inventor says GIFs and the inventor is wrong how his own invention is actually properly named. Okay. So we'll make pings. What about pings? That's good. I like that. I didn't know that people pronounce it like that. We can make weps. Weps are animated, too, right? What are weps? Weps. I only know webbm, or weps. Weps. Ah, yeah, wep, wep, wep. Oh, our pop filter is not helping with this. Our pop filter really isn't helping with this. I have no idea what you two are talking about, by the way. So we have that format, the weppy. Yeah. We are talking about that. Oh, weps. Yeah, if you make multiple weps, you know. I completely forgot that that exists, yes. Well, shame on you. We could make one wep of Martin and one wep of Gary, and if you put them both on the same page, it kind of evens out, and your page will rank equally as before. How about that? Why don't we just create a new meta tag called meta name ranking and then it can have the values good or bad? We already have that. Which one is it? Well, we have meta page rank, and you can assign whatever value to it, and that will be your page rank. Oh, I love that. That's amazing. More people shouldn't use this, I think. Is that shouldn't use it or should use it? Should use it. Oh, okay. Everyone should have it. Just checking. Yeah. No, I'm serious now. And another thing that kind of surprised me while I was at this like entire demystifying the different rendering scenarios and performance of each of them and blah, is that a lot of people are sending me questions via direct messages on Twitter, so some people even guess my email address and then with the emails, I just ignore them because I don't want to encourage that because we can't really, as far as I'm aware, we can't really answer things in private, right? Yeah, that's generally right. Do you get these kind of things and how do you deal with them? Sometimes. Yeah, this is an interesting topic and something that we should talk about perhaps. It's also a hairy topic, so bear with me. Generally. Bears are hairy. Yeah, that's true. Sorry. I want to quit. No, keep talking about it. How do you deal with these things? Teach me your ways. So this is kind of a sensitive topic. In general, we, or I don't. And when I get an email from someone asking for help, then usually I will read the email at least. So I know like, what is it about? But in the vast majority of the cases, I will opt for not answering. And in this case, it's not because I'm mean, but it's because we have an internal policy called honest results. And that policy helps us keep the playing field equal for everyone. So basically it doesn't matter if you are a small publisher or a big publisher or you spend $1 or you spend nothing with Google or you spend millions of dollars with Google Ads or you have your own Google product. You work at Google and you have your product or you have Google acquaintance, an employee working at Google. It doesn't matter. We have to keep the playing field equal for everyone. And based on that policy, I usually opt for not answering. Basically, if someone wants to get an answer, then I would much more prefer if they asked in public. I don't know how John handles these kind of questions, but this is my way and this is my interpretation of the quite clear policy that doesn't require interpretation. So I get a lot of these emails and direct messages as well, sometimes by Twitter, sometimes through other channels. And for the most part, I do try to funnel them through the public channels. So from my side, that's kind of like publicly on Twitter asking in the public realm there, joining the office hours, saying out, asking there. But I also send a lot of people to the Webmaster Help forums that we have where various experts are active there that can try to help resolve an issue or help look at other ways of looking at an issue. And if they don't see ways to resolve it, then they can also escalate that to Googlers. The main reason why sometimes I look at things that come in privately is to kind of double check to see what's happening there. So in many cases, people will be like, I have this problem in search and my website is not indexing anymore and you're like, well, it's like, okay, but I have no idea what you're talking about. Can you at least give me some examples? And those examples that they send are sometimes useful to figure out, is this more of a systemic issue or is this something that is kind of like a one-off on their website? So that's kind of where I look at those emails. I think that's an important bit. If we notice that there might be something systemic going on, then we generally would start looking into it and escalate because we do want to catch outages as we talked about this in previous episodes and these kind of emails generally can help with that. So for example, during the last outage that was a few weeks ago, I think both John and I noticed that we started getting emails that followed a very specific pattern or pointed in the same general direction and that helped us identify that there was an ongoing issue with search. But in general, we try not to dig too much, I guess. And also the same applies if there's an internal escalation. For example, we have Google employees who talk to external folks. For example, people working on Google Ads, say account managers, obviously they talk to their publishers, their advertisers. And in some cases, those advertisers might face an issue with search, with organic search. And our culture is kind of try to be helpful and the account managers would try to help those publishers and then they would escalate internally or try to escalate internally and we can't take those questions. We can't answer them. We can't even really debug them because that would give an unfair advantage to publisher or advertiser who spends money with Google and it just wouldn't be fair with the wide ecosystem. We do know that this puts the account manager, for example, or whoever took the question from the external party in a tough position, but we do have to, and I stress this a lot, we do want to keep a fair playing field for everyone. Yeah, and that makes it also so tricky. So I do read these emails, I do read the direct messages, but one thing with direct messages is that I think they're inherently unfair, especially on some social media platforms where you can't search in them. It's like Twitter direct messages, for instance. I don't want to point out Twitter specifically, but they are like a fire hose. Either you're lucky and I see them because I happen to be in my direct messages at the time yours comes in, or I don't, and I only recently noticed that there's like two different... So if someone I don't follow writes a direct message, they land on two different lists. Apparently there's like the message request and then there's like whatever they consider a filtered message request and I only recently found out that the second list exists and I'm like, oh my god, I'm so sorry. There's this like message from a week ago in this list that I just learned that exists and it's one that is, after looking into it, a one-off issue and I don't feel like I should respond to them. So I usually then send like a response like, hey, sorry, I can't provide you with private support. Please go to the Webmaster forum or if it's a JavaScript-specific problem to my office hours, if it's a more general problem to John's office hours or if it's a JavaScript-specific issue, you can also go to the mailing list, bit.ly-slash-js-slash-wg and then I hope for understanding and most people are really understanding and some people are just like repeating their questions and I'm like, I'm sorry. I want to be helpful. I want to help you here. I can't. There are the public channels. Please use the public channels. And yeah, if you are unlucky and you send them during the night, for instance, and like 20 other people sent me direct messages, I'm literally just not seeing them. Right. One thing that I sometimes do when someone asks me something in public on Twitter, for example, and then I would ask for a URL because I do want to debug and then they say that well, they can't post a URL in public. Then I would DM them and ask for the URL and then at least with that I can start debugging but I would not continue providing support in private. I would go back on the public Twitter thread and continue there without disclosing anything about the site, of course, because that's how they chose to proceed with the escalation. Yeah. And sometimes if I do see the direct messages and they are asking for something that is documented publicly, I just send them the link to the public docs. I think that's fine too. Yeah. This all sounds like kind of random ranking questions and how do I do this in search kind of thing but what if there's a real bug in search? Like you search for, I don't know, my name and some political scientist shows up instead of a photo of me which is like an obvious bug and if I were an advertiser and went to my account manager and reported that would you say, well, this is a bug. We will fix this immediately or what would you do there? Here's the thing, we know that our results are not perfect but we also cannot take literally every question. There's just no way that we could like if we could have engineers whose only job is to work on search and debugging search issues, maybe we could take a look at every single escalation that we get perhaps but in the current state it's just not feasible to take every question and debug and fix every potential issue that we find. The other aspect to this is that I can't take questions or I can't give preferential treatment to acquaintances or friends so I wouldn't be able to escalate your issue, John. Sorry. Oh no. Tough up. But let's say my site I am an advertiser at Google and my site is really important. It's nothing like my actual blog and it's something that lots of people search for on Google and they really want to find it and suddenly it gets dropped from the index and I contact my account manager like really angry and it's like I will stop advertising with Google unless you fix this indexing issue for my site. What kind of thing would happen there? So here's the thing. The point where you lost me is the money aspect of it. Well, you partially lost me. Whenever I see that people are quoting that they spent millions with Google ads it's like, well, yeah, okay, and basically that's it. That will not make us debug. In this context, in your questions context what might make a difference is that the policy recognizes that we might need to take action where we know that the problem is affecting lots of our users but those kind of decisions are essentially made by the search leadership not individual search engineers or us, essentially. Okay, but those exceptions are not based on how important I feel my site is. It's based on some objective measure that Google would apply. Yes, indeed. Yes. It's never based on how much you spend on Google ads or any other Google product Google Cloud or whatever or how important you think your site is or pretty much anything just like objectively how important your site is for Google users. Okay, so basically I have a problem with my site in search then I need to go to the public channels but what if the problem is not my site per se but rather some spam that is ranking above my site and it's like surely Google wants to clean out that spam right? Now I feel like I'm in a deposition or a journalist grilling me or some easy hearing or something thank you for these questions, John they are very, they are great so spam is yet another thing that we don't like in our results and we do our best to keep it out the results and we encourage people to submit spam reports. I don't remember how you can get to that spam report form but you can search for it and you will probably find it but we take those spam reports in aggregate. We don't take action on individual spam reports. We look at the bigger picture painted by the spam reports and try to find scalable ways to deal with specific kinds of spam. So if you have an issue with spam then yeah, report it and that's pretty much your best bet and just don't wait for a quick action because that's not how it happens. Okay, cool but I guess another question I sometimes see especially from co-workers on the sales side is when a site has trouble verifying in Search Console or when they have trouble using Search Console in a specific way would that fall under this kind of policy as well or would we say, well, Search Console is just a product and using it doesn't affect Search. Well, Search Console is a Search product so definition it falls under honest results and I know it's super frustrating for account managers and customer support managers and whoever talks to external folks and escalates internally but even there we cannot give unfair advantage because think about it, we wouldn't be able to give the same level of support someone who is I don't know computer illiterate to find our email and email us because we just don't have capacity for that. If we had capacity for that then again it might make things different but currently we don't and we do want to have a fair or a level playing field for everyone. That sounds pretty good. I do see how frustrating this can be for co-workers on the sales side with these kind of things. I don't know, do you also sometimes see these cases being escalated up where it's like my boss will talk to your boss and then next boss and VP and whatever do you see those kind of situations like being helpful or does that not change anything? Turns out that I have feelings which I didn't know but sometimes they come up and it's weird and when people escalate to us and we have to tell them no because honest results feel bad for them because I worked on support a long while ago before Google and I know that it puts them in a very tough position but escalating on the ladder is not making anything better. If anything I might actually develop a bias against that person and essentially don't feel anything next time they escalate something and just be more blunt with them on email when they will escalate and also I think those working on honest results those who are enforcing the policy they also don't really appreciate these ladder escalations because ultimately the honest results internally is very clear on what we can do and what we cannot as a search team where we can take escalations from and where we cannot and just escalating on the ladder will not solve literally anything if anything it will just add more frustration Yeah, so have you seen some of these sites where you push back for honest results reasons end up going to the public channels or do they just try to figure things out in different ways? I did, actually. I do see every now and then people who I push back on post on Twitter for example like if I recognize the name the URL from them I can start looking but they would still get the same level of support so for example if I miss their tweet for example I will not go and actively look for their tweet if it happens to show up in my face when I go to Twitter which happens a lot then I might start looking but then that happens with other tweets as well Cool, so if you were working at a bigger company that has like relationships with Google already what would you do if you ran into kind of a search issue with your website? It's not being indexed properly, it's ranking in a way that you think is bad would you still try through kind of the account manager side or would you say oh I'll just do everything public? Honestly I would go to your office hours Yeah, these office hours so I tend to do them every week and I post about them on our YouTube channel in the community section so if you go there you can find out when the next ones are, we also have them listed on the events page for the group overall so in that events calendar you can see the next office hours that are lined up and usually what happens is people can post their questions on YouTube and I'll post the link to join the office hours session which is basically a video call with a smaller group of people and they can join in, ask questions directly interact a little bit and we'll post the recording of that afterwards on the YouTube channel so go to youtube.com slash google webmasters or to google.com slash webmasters slash connect I think Wow, you're like a walking bookmark collection Martin, awesome Yeah, digging it I know that account managers or cloud customer managers they can't authoritatively answer search questions and I know already that they will be pushed back on so there's no point escalating there but I would still rather talk to a person who claims to be real and try to get some answer at least to me it's obvious already that we can't always give direct answers like we can't directly answer something but I also found that just giving a general direction and I salute general direction can be very helpful if you just see the path that you should take that might already be enough to debug a certain issue on your side or on my side, on Google's side cool and the other thing is that I know for certain that this person John Mueller don't make that face you know that person too he does escalate internally when he thinks that there's something systematic going on or something looks utterly weird and we should perhaps debug and for that we have internally this form called go slash bad or go bad where people can escalate to the search team and ranking team issues that they think are important and what they encountered themselves perhaps it's not a general debugging forum general debugging yes I salute general debugging it's not a debugging forum so it's not like the ranking team will take action or start debugging every single issue posted there it's more like a collection of issues that were reported I suppose basically a historic records of issues you can see that there's something systematic going on for example or it's a one-off issue okay so yeah I would just go to the office hours I heard they are awesome I've never been but I heard they are awesome they're fantastic and also I use the go bad form a few times with things that were quite badly broken and they get triaged quite quickly if they are obviously problematic I mean this is something that we see externally all the time I guess people who are more involved with search they tend to have an eye for this where someone on Twitter or some acquaintance will be like oh I searched for this kind of popular term and I received these really weird results and it feels like Google should be serving something better it's not that I have a site that is directly involved or that I have anything kind of tied to this particular query but this search is just kind of broken and it could be improved and for cases like that this form is something that I really think is useful I mean like you said Gary we just get so many different kinds of issues all the time it's impossible to fix everything that comes up and with any complex piece of software I guess there are always some parts that are subtly broken or sometimes visibly broken so there's always something to do but it's cool to have kind of this way to report these kind of issues I guess externally you can also use the feedback form directly in the search results but sometimes if something is really critically broken and really badly broken then getting our attention either like one of us three or Danny Sullivan or someone else on the search side that can make it so that we can kind of recognize the issue a little bit faster fix it a little bit faster yeah I'm kind of happy that you mentioned the feedback form because I know that some of the analysts do escalate from those feedbacks to the go bad group so they do get attention like there is some human well someone who claims to be human looking at those feedbacks and taking them internally if they are actionable at least cool cool so I guess another thing that is perhaps less common nowadays is when people go to your desk and they ask questions there in person is that something you've ended up doing Gary? I miss those times yeah I used to have so much fun with going to others desk what do you mean so much fun like when he taped my mouse or when he put something into one of the USB ports and I was like why is this not working and yeah I mean one of the ports I thought it was all of the ports true yeah all of them yeah I would not go for one port I would just tape all the ports when I went to the office recently after such a long time not being able to go I tried to use my computer and the mouse didn't work and I was like hmm I wonder if Gary was here but it turns out that my whole computer had just frozen so yeah I like to pull minor practical jokes on my coworkers and sometimes that ends up being very public expression of affection I guess oh you mean like the time I expressed my love for cheese yes yes that was one of those cases that was a friendly reminder that your computer has confidential information that others should probably not see and your account has access to confidential information that others might not need to see so I gave you a very affectionate hint to lock your computer when you are not at your computer of course you were just like three feet one meter away from the computer but still but I have to keep you on your toes so I posted in your name on twitter that you love cheese you're welcome it was great I thought it was fun and it seemed to pick up some Steve as well at one of the conferences back when you went to conferences it was like such a long time ago at one of the conferences someone gave me a cap and a t-shirt with I love cheese on it it was fantastic that's awesome but now I'm safe at least I think I'm safe don't give Gary ideas I miss conferences I do miss conferences too I used to get swag all the time I don't miss the swag but I do miss the people and the point that you can like have conversations yeah I only miss the swag I mean look like I'm showing it to you I'm sitting in a t-shirt with Daniel Weisberg's face on it wow it's amazing so Weisberg's face on my chest that came out wrong on a t-shirt so you're saying we should have Daniel in this podcast as well or is he indirectly present already yeah he's already here come on and he's very quiet I appreciate that but we should definitely have guests maybe we could have Anna our producer sometimes chiming for example like for example how hard it is to work with us well with me oh we could have Lizzie our tech writer, Lizzie Harvey we could have her we could have Cherry for example Cherry Promovin she's our teammate working on Southeast Asia Outreach in Southeast Asia well actually APEC I think we could have her I think we're putting a lot of pressure on us now that we mentioned all of these people that we could have I'm doing it on purpose the other one I thought would be kind of cool is someone from the internal SEO team because Google needs SEO as well different Google properties and that would be I guess an interesting discussion also with regards to honest results policies there is like how do they interact with us because from what I usually see is like they come to us with a question sometimes and usually they just get pushed back right away so it'd be interesting to see their side of that story how that works out for them yeah we should definitely do it okay fine we will get something set up also if you listener have ideas about what you would like to hear on this podcast feel free to ping us on Twitter and please don't self nominate direct messages or would you prefer in the help forum not direct messages public tweets also they can't DM me I don't allow people to DM me cool all right so I guess with that let's take a break here thank you all for listening in I hope that you found this insightful and kind of useful and saw a little bit of some of the challenges that we face with all of the escalations that we get from people externally we always find it interesting to talk about these topics it's like all of us get different kinds of questions externally and hearing how we handle them it's sometimes really interesting so if you're keen on listening to our next episode make sure to stay tuned subscribe to the podcast and if you are one of the guests that we mentioned as being a potential guest then I don't know watch out for an email from us and if you have feedback for us in general feel free to drop that on Twitter thanks again and see you next time bye