 Especially in backlinks. There's one ankle on METS, right? If I have a lot of backlinks, I'll probably, you know, rank higher. So there's a METS. Yes, it's one of the signals, but that's not the only signal. You have hundreds and hundreds of signals and people actually spam. People actually spam the bad URLs. It's easy to game that one. If that would be the signal, it's so easy to game. You just buy a bunch of links, really, and then you're like, whoa. Hello and welcome back to SEO Mythbusting. This is the beginning of season two and we have listened to your comments and feedback last time. So in the first season, we were basically taking questions from developers and busting myths that are coming from developers. This season is more on the SEO side and the first one is really exciting. It's Sandhya from Microsoft and you're on the team that makes the Bing Webmaster Tools. Absolutely. Thank you, Martin, for inviting me and it's amazing to be here and talking to you. It's two search engines. Yes, and we are not isolated from each other. We are working together to make search better for all the users on the web and for all the webmasters there. Absolutely. Whatever we speak today is going to be my personal opinion. I'm not a Microsoft spokesman person, so yeah. Pretty much the same on my side. So what we're doing here is exchanging our personal experience, working in this field, working in this community. What would you say is actually the most frequent booth or question that people are coming with to you? All right. Yeah, one of the top questions we ever hear in all forms of communication is, how can I rank on the top, right? That's like number one question everywhere. That's the number one question from everyone, literally. It's interesting that they're very passionate about it, but we can't help it because at the end of the day we're trying to meet the user's needs and what they really need. We try to match the need and what they have, so we try to educate them. And there's hundreds of factors, right? It's not that we can turn a knob or something or we go into a database and go like, change that number from five to two and boom. No, that never happens. I mean, there is a myth. There is a myth that we could because some people actually reach out to us and say, hey, can you help? Can you tell us exact steps what to do? And we try to help as much as possible in terms of giving them what are the fundamentals they have to do on the website and if they have the right intention. It's all in a public documentation. You don't get private support from the user. Yes, and they're all there in the webmaster guidelines, both in Google side as well as in Bing as well. So I think if they follow that, I'm sure for the right intent they will rank on top. Exactly, just put the user first and you'll be doing fine mostly, right? That's kind of the get the basics right and you'll be doing all right. And I find it interesting and like sometimes people get really creative. Like I got like a message on Instagram asking about ranking and I'm like, what's happening here? Yeah, I know. We get direct messages on Twitter sometimes especially if you're an actor out there and sometimes even on emails support. Support is understandable. Sometimes they're trying to figure out who knows you and then they reach out through that as well. Yeah, they do that. This is interesting because like we get all these these requests coming in and like people ask us questions pretty much all the time and all sorts of channels. And I know that we are not one person facing these questions in the public eye and you're not one person on the team either. So you have Fabrice Cannell and you have Frédéric Douard and it's you and it's others probably in the future as well. What we see happening is that sometimes we get asked the same question each of us individually to figure out like are we responding the same way? Do you get that? Yes, absolutely. We hear that a lot because we see the similar pattern coming through so we try to give the same responses at the end of the day. Otherwise they would get, you know, take it in different context a little bit. That's the thing, the context. Sometimes these questions depend on so much context and then someone asks you a question given this context and the answer is A. But then the same question given a different context, the answer is B. And then people like to ditch the context and then school like, but Martin said A. Yeah, and they would take it literally. Yeah, so we're very conscious about it. What we do is when we say it, we try to do a little longer bigger sentences so that it's not, you know, yes, that's do. That's probably we'll take it in a different context. We try to cover that fully. We try to share as much and be transparent as much if it's taken out of context. That's unfortunate. I mean, it's unfortunate. I mean, there would be some incidents like that. It's a challenge. Sometimes it's a challenge. I'm sure like Yandex and Baidu probably do that same thing as well. Do you also have the feeling that certain things are getting a lot better and we're getting a better understanding and also the tone is nicer and more constructive or what do you think the trend is in the community? I think people are much more aware. I think there is a lot of evangelism, you know, what happens behind the scenes. I think if you think about like people understand how search works earlier, there was a concept in terms of, hey, they're probably kind of doing some manual actions and things like that. But now people know it's not true, right? The other thing which we also see now, I don't know if you've seen from Google is, hey, I'm advertising out here. Will I get ranked higher? Oh, yeah, we hear that. We hear that. Yes. Do you have that as well? Yes, we do that. So I'm saying no ads is very different ranking and organics very different. They're very separate. You don't want to mix it. Absolutely. There's a very strong separation between it and I'm sure you're doing the same thing. So I think that I wonder and maybe that's just my personal lens to it because I am very technical and coming from a technical side of things. I think the community is picking up more and more technical SEO and getting more technical and looking at the technical details. Would you say the same or is it different for you? No, they are definitely getting technical and they're doing a lot of work, especially, you know, trying to give us, make sure that we understand that, you know, the content behind that, right? And, you know, what's the intent? What is the website? They do a lot of work, but one thing we also notice is that they forget the fundamentals in the grand scheme of things. That's why they're doing it and a classic example is the blockers and robots text and you're not able to crawl them. Hey, why are you not crawling me? Hey, you blocked me. You're telling us we shall not crawl, but you're not crawling me like, huh? Yeah. So we actually developed a couple of tools for that and we have a verifier being bought. The reason we did that is because when we talk to all these people, hey, why are you blocking us? They said, hey, you're crawling me too much. And then say that we really, because we have logs and stuff like that. And we found that it's actually somebody masking as being bought and they were crawling. That happens a lot, doesn't it? Yes. And then we're basically telling them, hey, check out the IP range. And we said, you know, this is the IP range from which being bought will crawl you. If it's different, you know, you can just block it at your server level or let us know and then we'll figure it out. You're also having the indexing API that you can basically submit content? Yes, URL submission. We call it URL submission API. Websites can actually submit URLs, especially if it's new or updated. And we allow them instant, you know, very fast indexing, instant indexing of that. Yeah, it's a push mechanism rather than a pull mechanism as robots and crawling have been. We've also done something called crawl control. You tell us, if it's peak business hours, then we won't crawl you. Tell us, you know, off peak and then, you know, we'll crawl you during the time and give us a tell us the rate. And that's a good signal. That's a really, really cool tool. So after that, it's got better, but it's still, it's still out there. A lot of people still do that. We do get all sorts of support requests like, oh, I have this problem that every now and then, not every now and then, like every day, Googlebot crawls all these pages that I set to no index and forbid in robots.txt and we're like, are you sure that it's Googlebot or not? It's like someone masking at Googlebot. And then it usually turns out. Yeah, there are so many crawlers out there. We're seeing like a bunch of stuff happening. So the robots.txt is a fantastic example because it has been a basically de facto standard, but it is not really a standard. We're really happy to see that we're all working together and getting it into an actual standard and making that more explicit these days. That's right, that's right. That's really, really cool. Yeah, and I saw the articles, very nice. Right, Gary is working with Yal and it's so nice to just get everyone together. And we are, as you say, we're all trying to service the same intention and the same customer, exactly. And we're not plotting each other against each other. It's more like trying to figure out and learn from each other. I really, really like the crawl control tool and I wish we had that. Yeah, there are so many tools out there which you have. You're integrating with them, right? If I'm verified in Search Console, I am automatically verified in Webmaster Tools. Yes, we just released that. One of the things, hey, it's so tough. I mean, when we talked to Webmasters, they said, hey, so it's very time consuming to verify. And you'll notice that the same verification mechanisms are also there in Search Console. So we said, hey, if the same verification mechanisms, they will honor that. And, you know, you've done all the work, so we'll honor it. You can actually keep both of them in sync together, right? You verify, you can import your site maps and, you know, you're all set in sync, making it so easier. So I have an interesting challenge that I wonder how you're dealing about this. Because it is very hard to get people the right guidance on this. And when I'm saying that, I mean JavaScript, right? So we both know JavaScript is probably the most expensive resource you have on your website. Because images are not that expensive. Even video, you can pass more or less as it comes in. But JavaScript, you can't. On one hand, people are building really cool things on JavaScript. On the other hand, I don't want them to entirely rely on JavaScript. That's true. It's a really narrow path to navigate. What are you doing on these things? So it's very similar, right? At the end of the day, the challenges are, it's very expensive. And the first thing we have to figure out is the intent. If the website of the page has the right intent. And if you're able to figure out the intent behind it, it's easier to prioritize. Sometimes you would just have, like, you know, just execute a couple of JavaScripts at a point and no title, no description, no metadata script. None of that. I'm like, we don't even know what it is. Do we really want to execute? So that time, you know, it's a challenge. Because at the end of the day, you have a certain set of resources. And you figure out... You have to use that reasonably, yeah. ...reasonably. It's a ROI question. And I think that's a judgment call, which, you know, we would encourage the websites to actually do that. Right. So would you say... It's a right balance. It is a balance that you have to strike. So would you say, I mean, a client-side rendered application in JavaScript is not a problem by itself. It's just more expensive and you have no hints up front. So you can't figure out the intention. You do not have the title. None of this exists until the JavaScript is executed. What would you say that server-side rendering and, like, hydration is a good way to fix that as in when you ship a bunch of initial content to the browser and then use JavaScript to enhance it for the user, kind of giving you a balance? Yeah, the right balance. Yes, you need to do both of them. And at the end of the day, you also want to make sure... It's a lively page, right? It is, yeah. You want rich results as well to serve your customers and especially in this world, people want, you know, richer results. Richer results. So you need to balance that. So some server-side and some client-side. So that's a lovely to hear that. We are aligning on recommendations again. This is really cool. And do you also sometimes get these weird questions where people are leading with a random third-party tool? We have this tool and the score in this tool is 75. And I don't understand why we're not ranking high. And you're like... Yeah, that's the DA's. All of these lovely metrics. I'm like, hmm, fantastic. That's good. You know, they need some number and metric. And they try to ask those questions, but you don't have an answer because that's not the only signal. There are multiple things. I think a lot of people really don't understand that there's a query intent. You know, people really think about the serving side and what they have in the index. People forget there is a query intent. You know, there's a user intent behind it and we have to match. I think that education is not yet there with the audience. I think if we do a little more in that, people would understand, hey, there is a query intent and then there is, you know... That would be... Yeah. You know, the document intent. So we can kind of sum it up into, like, rather than just looking at a number that a random tool gives you, try to understand what your user needs and what the intention is and then serve that intention. Yeah. I mean, it's just an education. People need to know that. That is true. Yeah. But we keep saying this for years and years and... Yeah. It's not yet landed this way, I would feel. Yeah. It's unfortunate. But I think we have landed a success and I'm, like, getting an overview of what the community brings to our tables and to, like, share that we are not, like, different in that sense. We are basically seeing the same kind of, like, challenges and we're seeing, like, the kind of the same kind of recommendations. And if you do the same stuff, all the search engines would pick up exactly the same stuff. Yeah. The fundamentals are very, very similar. There could be some differences. Sure. But that's expected. Exactly. The secret source is a little different. Different, but the fundamentals are, you know, the same across all search engines. Yeah. So hopefully people will get to the point of serving their users and have very nicely clean intent pages. And yeah, we are seeing more interesting things coming in the future. Yes. Thank you so much for being here. Yeah, thank you so much. And I'm talking about all of this with me. Yeah, thank you so much, Martin, for inviting me. This is wonderful. Absolutely. Absolutely. All right. In that case, thank you very much for joining us and enjoy. Hey there. I hope you liked the video. This is my next guest, Alexis Sanders, and in the next episode we will be talking about... Fraud budget. Fraud budget. So stay tuned and check out the next one to learn more about what we have to say on the topic. See you there, everyone. Ciao.