SEO Insights from John Mueller’s Google Search Central Office Hours Hangout 07/02/2021

“That can happen. So I mean, searches are very dynamic. So it can certainly happen that sometimes a page ranks really well. And then a few hours or a few days later, it ranks a lot worse, and then it ranks a little bit better again, usually, when you see these kinds of fluctuations, it’s because our algorithms are not 100% sure yet. And over time, it will settle down somewhere in that range. But it’s not a sign that there’s anything specifically wrong or bad with that page. That’s essentially, sometimes the algorithms are just unsure, and they kind of switch between different variations. If you significantly change your website, then our algorithms have to understand it again. So that sometimes takes time.”

“We’re going to relaunch/migrate our site, a few important pages won’t be ready for the launch, but will be added later. How should we handle these pages? Should we leave them as a 404 redirect later? How long until they lose their SEO signals? Should we redirect them to a less fitting page, and later to the right one?”

“What one of the things that I will try to do in a case like this, is try to leave the old page up as much as possible so that we, we see that part of the website is moving but also part is still there. And that way, we can kind of transition the old URL to whatever new URL ends up being there in in a consistent way that we don’t have any kind of gaps in between. If you do need to kind of move everything over and you’re saying like the old page is really not relevant anymore, and we need to create something completely new, then a 404 is certainly a possibility. If you’re sure that the new page will be up within a day or so a 503 might also be an option where you kind of like being almost like sneaky and saying, well, the page doesn’t work at the moment.

And then Google will retry it a little bit later. And then suddenly, the page is there and ready. So that might be an option. If you know that it’s just a day or two. A 404 can also work but there you kind of have a solution. Where the page ends up dropping out of the index completely. And when it comes back, we essentially have to rebuild the information that we know about that page. So it’s not that the information will be lost forever, but it takes a bit of time to rebuild again. So those I think, are kind of the options, my preference would really be to try to at least keep the old page there until you can swap it out against the new one.

So keep it at a 200, if you kind of absolutely need to keep it, if you need to redirect it and have the old version on the new site. I think that’s also okay. If you need to kind of really remove the page for a longer period of time that a 404 is kind of the right choice. But you have to assume that it’ll take a bit of time to catch up again. I’m looking at merging two brand websites where one brand will overtake the other. However, there’ll be a 90 day window, where we run both sites announcing the merger, what’s the best way to set up schema as an early indicator that they’re essentially the same site before we 301 redirect and ensure that the primary brand is what’s ranked as the secondary brand resolves, like a canonical for the entire website.”

“So if the content is within HTML, then essentially we’d be able to use that for indexing. On the other hand, if the content needs to be loaded, after someone clicks on this toggle, then we would not know that you have to click on this toggle to get that information. So though, those are kind of the two variations there. One way to try this out is to just open the page in a browser and then look at the source code and see is that information already loaded or not? If it’s loaded already, then most likely, it’ll be available for indexing.

If it’s already on the page, and your website is already being shown in search, a simple way to check is also just to search for that piece of text in quotes and to see if Google can find it.”

John 0:02
All right, welcome, everyone to today’s Google Search Central Office Hours Hangout. My name is John Mueller. I’m a search advocate on the search relations team here at Google in Switzerland. And part of what we do are these office hour hangouts where people can join in, ask their questions, all around web search and the website. Wow, looks like people are still jumping in.

But maybe, as always, maybe we can get started with some first live questions, and then we’ll go through some of the submitted questions on YouTube as well. Let’s see.

Webmaster 1 0:41
So we are working on a website that uses hreflang. And I’ve been trying to figure out what’s going wrong, because they’re ranking in France with their Belgium pages, they’re ranking in France with some Luxembourg pages. And I was trying to figure out what went wrong. So one of the things I found out is that they didn’t make a general language page. So there is no main .fr page. So that was the first suggestion I made. But I was wondering, since they’re currently focusing on Germany alone, would they need to have a .de? Then .de again, or is just .de enough? If they’re just focusing on Germany?

John 1:37
Just .de would be enough? If that’s kind of the broader level that they want to target, like the German language content, that would essentially be enough.

Webmaster 1 1:48
Okay. So they’re selling in Germany alone, it’s not Austria, not Switzerland. So I was wondering whether they need a de, de as well. Or if it’s just the e, when it doesn’t matter.

John 2:03
I think that’s generally fine. So with the hreflang, it would not kind of hide it in the other countries, it would essentially just when one of these German language pages is shown, we would use the hreflang to swap out the URL for the more appropriate URL for that page. Okay. So it’s, it’s not that it would rank higher kind of in Germany because of that. But more is like, well, if someone is searching for the brand name, for example, where we might have the French page and the German page, and they could be equally relevant, because from the brand name alone, we might not know which language version, then we’d be able to swap to the German language version for users who have the setup in German.

Webmaster 1 2:47
Yep. All right. Thinking I got it. No, thanks.

John 2:49
Sure. Um, let’s see. Vahan.

Webmaster 2 2:55
Hi, Mr. Mueller. I am the Director of IT at Search Engine Journal. So we are trying to find issues with the Twitter embed on optimizing for Core Web Vitals. And as you know, it causes a lot of troubles like content layout shift, first of all, secondly, thus start loading all the resources instantly on page load, whereas Twitter embeds are below the foldl. And one have to scroll to see it right. Does Google work with Twitter somehow to fix that issue? Because embedding fields is a very common practice across all the Core Web Vitals is a very big focus for Google. So I do think that it could be fixed with cooperation with third parties – do you have any plans on that?

John 3:53
I don’t know about any plans. But we essentially don’t have any special treatment for any other providers that essentially have specific content. So it’s not that we would say, Oh, this is a tweet, therefore, we will let it do whatever crazy stuff at once with core web vitals. But it is something where if a lot of sites are using those embeds, it feels like it would be in Twitter’s best interest to provide a way to enable people to embed those in a reasonable way. There was recently a conversation on Twitter about this, where someone mentioned that they were using kind of, I don’t know a specific CSS setup to make sure that these tweets don’t move around that much. I think it was something like minimum maximum height and width, something like that. And apparently with that, they were able to significantly improve things around CLS, and I think FCP as well. So that might be something to look into to see if that’s an option there. I mean, it’s also something where if you’re embedding a lot of these from them, then it’s like going to them and saying, okay, you need to get this working better. Otherwise, we’ll swap it out against something else. That might also be an option.

Webmaster 3 6:34
So a question about the page experience update. So in order for a page to benefit from the page experience update, it needs to have all the marks or it needs to have a mobile, mobile friendly HTTPS, and then neither needs improvement, I guess, or good core web vitals, or is that correct?

John 6:55
Yes. So it needs improvement, but kind of like in? or What is it?

Webmaster 3 7:06
Yeah. Um, so if previously, before the page experience update, you had a URL that was benefiting from HTTPS whatever little benefit that is. Once the page experience update rolled out and say that URL had a bad core web vitals status, would then it have lost whatever little benefit it got from HTTPS, because now it doesn’t qualify for the page experience update?

John 7:37
I don’t think so. I mean, I haven’t checked specifically on that. But my understanding is that the HTTPS aspect would essentially be parallel. Sorry, it means that you still use it, we still hold on to it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay, cool.

Webmaster 3 7:59
I can guess one other small question, well, maybe. If I’m doing a site migration, and in Search Console, I’ve executed the site migration to another Search Console. I believe that it has not fully completed in Google’s eyes until those notifications in Search Console are gone? Or will I get a new notification where it says, one of your other sites is moving to this site? And on the other one, it says this site is currently moving? Do I have to wait for those to tell me something else before I know that it’s done? Or will it just stay like that forever?

John 8:36
Yeah, I think there is a timeout there. But it’s a search console based timeout, which is essentially something I’m not sure what the number is, I think maybe it’s 180 days or, or 90 days somewhere in that range, where essentially that status essentially drops out. But that’s not a sign that the migration is complete. I don’t I don’t think we have any kind of internal status like that, where we change like, This site has completely moved over. Because often they’re just like these lagging URLs that are left for a pretty long time. Got it? So that I’m not waiting for a new notification in Search Console, basically.

Webmaster 4 9:24
My question is related to language targeting. The question is can we have two different languages in a single content tip suppose my content is an English language. And now I wanted to target Portuguese language or French. Can we include Portuguese plus English or French plus English?

John 9:50
So different language content on the same page is that what you’re looking for…?

Webmaster 4 10:00
For different directories? I have a different directory of what language to use? And like asking you can we like insert? Something like 30%? English content and 70%? For produce content?

John 10:14
Sure. Absolutely. That’s perfectly fine for languages, we primarily look on a per page basis. So we want, ideally, to have one clear language on a specific page. So that’s something where if you have different pages with different languages, that’s perfectly fine. But it makes it a lot easier for us if we have one clear language on a page, because then we can clearly say, Oh, this is in French, or this is in Portuguese, or this isn’t in Spanish, and show it to people appropriately.

Webmaster 4 10:53
Okay. And again, the same question we’ll ask: suppose I have English content of 400-700 words, and I’ve just converted all that content into Portuguese. Okay. So it is also, like 700 words, now, I want additional 200 or 300 word content in Portuguese language. So does it reflect any changes in the ranking at all? Does it impact our SEO strategy?

John 11:21
These pages would essentially rank independently. So if you have some content in English and slightly different content in a different language, then we would just rank those pages independently. So that’s something where sometimes it makes sense to have more content in a certain language, sometimes a certain language just has more words for the same content or fewer words. That’s all perfectly fine.

Webmaster 4 11:48
No, I’m just like, suppose we have content in English language. And we have similar content, which is in Portuguese language. But recently, I want to add a little more information in Portuguese. So I just wanted to add a few more. So in that case, I’m asking you, is there any problem with adding a little more content in your bot to use language?

John 12:13
That’s perfectly fine.

Webmaster 4 12:15
Okay, and does it like if I use a passive voice, or active voice does also matter in terms of ranking?

John 12:24
I don’t think so. I think that’s more a matter of how people understand your content, but I can’t see that mattering for SEO.

Webmaster 4 12:35
Okay. Okay. That’s all. Thank you so much. And one more question is related to stability. Like, for a few keywords, my ranking is not stable. Someday it is on the first page. First or second. Sunday, it’s on page 463. So what is the issue?

John 12:55
That can happen? So I mean, search is very dynamic. So it can certainly happen that sometimes a page ranks really well. And then a few hours or a few days later, it ranks a lot worse, and then it ranks a little bit better again. Usually, when you see these kinds of fluctuations, it’s because our algorithms are not 100% sure yet. And over time, it will settle down somewhere in that range. But it’s not a sign that there’s anything specifically wrong or bad with that page. That’s essentially sometimes the algorithms are just unsure, and they kind of switch between different variations.

Webmaster 4 12:56
This is a revamping of the website.

John 12:57
I mean, if you significantly change your website, then our algorithms have to understand it again. So that sometimes takes time.

Webmaster 5 13:57
I work with a lot of small companies, and we try to apply all the SEO best practices, you know, that Google lays out for us, it’s a little harder to do some of the fancier, you know, back end codes kind of things. I’m more of a content writer and SEO than, you know, digital code guru, how can I help these sites to rank well, when they’re competing against these big enterprise organizations that have a lot of resources and, you know, money and people to throw behind their SEO and tend to, you know, rank higher because they are enterprise corporations? Do you have any advice?

John 14:47
Yeah, I think that’s super hard. I think small companies have a lot of advantages, especially online. In that area, because it’s a lot easier for them to kind of shift and to move quickly, compared to a large company. So I see that, at least within Google, when we come up with a really cool idea that we should implement in Search Console, it’s going to take like one or two years until we get there. Whereas external SEO tools, when they come up with the same idea that we’re like, oh, I’ll just do this, like next week, and it will be done. So I think as a small company, you kind of have that advantage of being able to move quickly, when something shifts in the ecosystem, when some new trends come up, when something I don’t know significantly changes, you can move really quickly, and you can be visible like that, essentially, immediately in search. Whereas with large companies, like, I mean, sure, they have a lot of power. And it’s like a strong brand, and all of that, but they can’t move as quickly. And that I think, is kind of one of the advantages with a smaller company. The other, I think, is something where as a small company, sometimes it makes sense to be active in areas that are just not interesting for large companies, where you kind of have the ability to focus on on a smaller segment of the market and kind of do something really unique there, which the the larger companies will say, Oh, it’s like, so much work to actually get that set up. And to kind of prioritize that. And then it’s only like a $5 million business, like, what are we gonna do with all of that small change? And as a small company, you’re like, Whoa, it’s like, a couple million dollars. That’s fantastic, right? So that’s something where I also see, especially small companies kind of have the ability, especially online, to focus on these small areas and say, well, we’ll do something really unique here. And maybe if it picks up, a really large company will also do something similar a couple of years down the line, but like, we have that kind of headway, at least and can kind of move ahead of all of these big companies during that time.

Webmaster 5 17:08
Okay, thank you. Can you give me an example of that, like what you mean by doing something really unique?

John 17:20
I don’t know. I kind of always struggle to define explicit examples that we can mention there, but I get it, I see it, for example, with SEO tools, because like, I worked together with the Search Console team. And it is something where a lot of the external, or I don’t know, non Google SEO tools essentially have the ability to kind of do things in ways that wouldn’t really be possible on Google side, be it for policy or legal reasons, or whatever. And that I think that gives these tool providers a bit of a heads up even in a market where I don’t know, Google is like this giant corporation, and they’re even offering it for free. But yet, all of these small SEO tool companies or smaller SEO companies still have a chance to kind of grow a significant user base, which is relevant for them. So I mean, that’s not something that I imagined the average small business would be creating SEO tools, but it’s like one of those areas where I tend to see that happening.

Webmaster 6 18:45
So we got this multilingual website. We recently launched it in April this year. So apart from English, we got content for users in Taiwan and for users in China. Now, the issue is that when someone is searching for this website on Google, like searching for the brand name, the site links that they they see, in Taiwan, half of the site links are full in Taiwan language, and half of the settings are in Chinese language, and that Taiwan users like they don’t appreciate that kind of behavior, like the language mixed with Chinese language. So like, what, what we can do to, you know, to fix this, like we have used hreflang tags properly. We are using breadcrumbs to show the proper hierarchy of these language categories. We are interlinking relevant pages. But what else we can do here.

John 19:38
Those are essentially the things that you would be doing so hreflang to make sure that we can provide the most matching ones and really strong internal linking to make sure that we understand which of these pages belong together. And even in those cases, I’ve seen situations where sometimes the site links are in different languages or for different types. entries. And that’s not something that you can kind of like control explicitly, they The only thing you could really do is to no index those pages that you don’t want to have shown. But then they’re not shown anywhere, which is probably not what you want.

Webmaster 6 20:16
To add this, I think the domain is a .ge domain, which is kind of a country code domain for some country, but also used by gaming websites. And we are also kind of in the same industry. So could that be it? Could that be an issue?

John 20:34
I don’t think so. It’s probably just something where the site links are sub optimal. And if you could point me to a screenshot, I’m happy to pass that on to the team. But these kinds of things happen. I don’t know, all the time, maybe not all the time, but from time to time. And it’s kind of annoying, it settles down, usually over a while. But it’s not something that you can explicitly control.

Webmaster 21:03
But maybe the site is new for Google, like it was launched in April. So maybe Google is taking time to process all the links.

John 21:10
It’s possible that it’ll settle down.

Webmaster 7 21:20
I have a very specific question. I’m working on a multilingual website. And we’ve been using the hreflang tags in the Sitemaps. Not, not at the page level, but Sitemaps. And let’s say that the website is structured in a way that the main tool and the main site is completely multilingual. And then there is a block section that at the moment is only one language, but it will be multilingual. And we have this situation in which we want to create Sitemaps in their language. Um, so let’s say we have the different blocks of the main language page and all the alternate tags. So let’s say for the English, then English, all the translations, then the other sitemap, let’s say German would have been first, the German main version of the page, then the alternate. So I wanted to ask one, is that a good practice? Would there be any problem? If that’s okay.

And then the other question is, we have the blogs. There are some blog posts that, of course, are not relevant to other regions, other languages. So some will have a translation, some won’t have the translation. So can we pack all of those within one single sitemap for each language that, for some cases, would have an hreflang tag and the other one wouldn’t?

John 23:07
Now, so you can structure sitemap files however you want, it’s like you can make them by language by site section. Essentially, it’s totally up to you, I would try to make them in a way that they can be kind of stable with regards to the URLs that they include. So don’t like take all of the URLs from your site and randomly put them into sitemap files, but have some kind of a system to distribute them primarily so that when we process one sitemap file, we get kind of the same URLs back when we when we look at that more for the situation where we like, usually, we don’t process all sitemap files all at the same time. So if the URLs were to jump between sitemap files, we might process one file and see one URL, process the other file and then see the same URL again. And then in the end, we might miss some URLs because like it’s randomly swapping between files. But having it kind of persistent in any method that you think is relevant for your side, it can also be alphabetical or like whatever you want to do, is kind of that’s that’s the important part. With regards to content that’s only in certain languages, or that doesn’t have any hreflang annotations for it. That’s also perfectly fine. Kind of, like I mentioned before, not having the annotations doesn’t mean we won’t show it for other languages. But having annotations kind of helped us to show the appropriate version. So if you just have one version, then like, that’s the version that will show you don’t need any hreflang annotations for that.

Webmaster 8 25:15
It’s an international web site and I had a very trifling question, I’m afraid, got a client I’ve been talking to they’re having problem. They’ve got English in different regions of Canada, US, Australia, UK. They’ve got hreflang, which seems to work and share the right one for rich results. They’ve got product rich markups that doesn’t seem to be get switched out that seems to be sticking to just the one version. Is that the way it’s meant to work? Or have they got something else going on? that we’re not sure about?

John 25:46
What do you mean?

Webmaster 8 25:49
Like I said, with the rich results, the structured data for product seems to be coming from the usa.com, which is the default. So the search for a product in the UK. Actually, the UK does seem to sometimes pick up things. So they’ll search running Canada, sometimes. And it will show with the US dollar result in which results, so basically appears to be taking the markup from the default page from the one DUI, if you check as well is the canonical one. So it’s showing the wrong prices? Because obviously US and Canadian dollars are as different as Australian dollars, so it gets a little bit confusing. I’m not sure if that’s just the way it works, or they’ve got something else going on.

John 26:36
Okay, so you mean, within the normal web result? Kind of rich? results markup in there? Okay, so not not like the product search? separate? No. Okay. So what’s probably happening there is we’re seeing these as duplicates, and we’re picking one of those versions as the canonical, and then using href. Lang to swap out the URL. But since we have one as a canonical, that’s the one where we pull the rich result information from. Yeah, so that’s, that seems kind of unfortunate that we would kind of like pick one canonical across different currencies.

Webmaster 8 27:18
It literally is just the price and maybe a number that’s different on the page. So it’s entirely understandable that it is no Did you? It just makes it kind of awkward in this situation.

John 27:31
Yeah. If you can send me some examples where that’s happening. I’m happy to pass that on to the team. Because usually we try to recognize when things like phone numbers or prices are different across different versions and say, Oh, we shouldn’t kind of duplicate these pages because they are unique. So if you have some examples, I’d be happy to look at that. But sometimes when it’s really like just the currency symbol that’s different across these pages, then it can’t happen that our algorithm say, Well, this is like, like almost exactly the same page, we should just make it easier for the site owner and treat them as one page, which in this case, makes it more confusing, but no, okay. I’ll chat with them.

Okay, let me run through some of the submitted questions as well, so that we don’t lose track of any of that. And we’ll have more time for your live questions along the way, as well.

Let’s see, we’re going to relaunch/migrate our site, a few important pages won’t be ready for the launch, but will be added later. How should we handle these pages? Should we leave them as 404 redirects later? How long until they lose their SEO signals? Should we redirect them to a less fitting page, and later to the right one? So yeah, I think that is kind of tricky.

What one of the things that I will try to do in a case like this, is try to leave the old page up as much as possible so that we see that part of the website is moving but also part is still there. And that way, we can kind of transition the old URL to whatever new URL ends up being there in a consistent way so that we don’t have any kind of gaps in between. If you do need to kind of move everything over and you’re saying like the old page is really not relevant anymore, and we need to create something completely new, then a 404 is certainly a possibility. If you’re sure that the new page will be up within a day or so a 503 might also be an option where you kind of like being almost sneaky and saying, well, the page doesn’t work at the moment.

And then Google will retry it a little bit later. And then suddenly, the page is there and ready. So that might be an option. If you know that it’s just a day or two. A 404 can also work but there you kind of have a solution. Where the page ends up dropping out of the index completely. And when it comes back, we essentially have to rebuild the information that we know about that page. So it’s not that the information will be lost forever, but it takes a bit of time to rebuild again. So those I think, are kind of the options, my preference would really be to try to at least keep the old page there until you can swap it out against the new one.

So keep it at a 200, if you kind of absolutely need to keep it, if you need to redirect it and have the old version on the new site. I think that’s also okay. If you need to kind of really remove the page for a longer period of time, a 404 is kind of the right choice. But you have to assume that it’ll take a bit of time to catch up again. I’m looking at merging two brand websites where one brand will overtake the other. However, there’ll be a 90 day window, where we run both sites announcing the merger, what’s the best way to set up schema as an early indicator that they’re essentially the same site before we 301 redirect and ensure that the primary brand is what’s ranked as the secondary brand resolves, like a canonical for the entire website.

So the suggestion of a canonical is probably a good approach here. With the rel=canonical, you’re essentially telling us that this content is equivalent to the other one, and you prefer the other one to be the primary version. I think the downside of using a rel=canonical in this situation is we will already start migrating the search results over to the new version of your site. So users would still be able to see both of those versions. But in search, essentially the new version or the primary version would start to become more and more visible. And it might be a little bit awkward if someone is looking explicitly for the old version. But with the rel=canonical, you can kind of set that up ahead of time before you start doing the move as well. Otherwise, there’s no kind of way of using structured data markup to say, well, we’re going to merge in a certain period of time.

The other thing to keep in mind, when you do end up doing the kind of merging of the different sites is that merging and splitting sites tends to take longer than just a pure redirect from one domain to another. So that’s something where I would expect a little bit of a longer time, maybe a couple of months for things to settle down around search, before it actually ends up working. That kind of like everything is moved over to your preferred site. Does Google block read information on a page if it’s in a toggle, a small symbol that you click on, which opens up with more information? Can you recommend a helpful step by step video for beginners to implement structured data.

So if the content is within HTML, then essentially we’d be able to use that for indexing. On the other hand, if the content needs to be loaded, after someone clicks on this toggle, then we would not know that you have to click on this toggle to get that information. So though, those are kind of the two variations there. One way to try this out is to just open the page in a browser and then look at the source code and see if that information already loaded or not? If it’s loaded already, then most likely, it’ll be available for indexing.

If it’s already on the page, and your website is already being shown in search, a simple way to check is also just to search for that piece of text in quotes and to see if Google can find it. With regards to getting started with structured data, I’m not aware of any kind of like simple getting started guide for structured data, because I think it depends quite a bit on the way that you have your website set up. So that’s something where if you’re working with pure HTML, and you’re doing everything manually, then going to the developer documentation is probably a good idea.

You can copy and paste the examples there. If you’re using an existing CMS or hosting system, like WordPress, or Wix or something like that, then oftentimes there’ll be plugins that you can just enable for the site, which makes it a lot easier for you to add structured data in a way that doesn’t require you to actually do any of the code part itself. So that’s kind of the direction I would head where I’m going to assume that you use something like WordPress or Wix or Squarespace or something like that.

I would try to find a plugin or a simple way to just activate that within your website and then just fill out the fields and let the plugin do the structured data for you. Can backlinks from low quality websites make a negative impact on blog SEO, and do user comments have any effect on page ranking? So just backlinks from low quality websites, usually we will just ignore those. I don’t think that would have any negative effect on a website’s SEO, what would be more problematic is if you go out and actively buy a significant amount of links for your website, or kind of do something else, which essentially goes directly against our webmaster guidelines.

So that’s something where I’d say that’s problematic. And that’s something I would avoid doing and clean that up, if you notice that happening from someone who previously worked on your website. But if you’re just seeing random, low quality links to your website, I would totally ignore those, they absolutely have no effect on your site. And regarding user comments, and page ranking, if these are comments on your website, then the primary effects that I would expect from that is essentially that sometimes user comments do provide a lot of value additionally to your content. And sometimes those comments can be used for ranking as well in search.

So if someone is searching for something that is only visible in a comment on your website, then your pages could be visible, because of that comment that is also embedded on those pages. So essentially, it’s a way of having content that is available on your pages. It’s just not content that you wrote yourself. But at the same time, it’s also something where if if this, these user comments are really low quality, and they kind of drag your site’s overall quality down, then that is something that we would also see as a part of your website, or we say, well, we look at your website overall. And we’re not really sure about the quality of your website overall. And our systems wouldn’t really differentiate between like, well, this is content you wrote, and this is content someone else wrote, but happened to leave in a comment on your website.

A number of our pages can rightly be classified as an FAQ on how to end an article, but should we add all three types of schema.org structured data? Or is it better to just choose one. So I think there are two aspects here. From our guidelines, we want to make sure that the structure data you have in your page matches the primary element on your page. So if you’re saying that you can add an FAQ to a random page on your website. Sure, you can do that. But is this FAQ kind of the primary part of the page or relevant for the primary part of the page, that’s something that you kind of need to figure out. So that’s one aspect.

The other aspect is that in the search results, some of the rich results types, we can combine, and some of them we can’t combine. So for example, if you have a recipe and you have ratings, then we can often combine that in the search results in one rich results type. However, if you have an FAQ, and you have an how to, then, at least from what I recall what these look like, these are things that wouldn’t be combined in a single rich result type, which means our systems would have to pick one of them to show and maybe we’ll pick the type that you would have chosen, but or maybe you would have a different preference on your side.

And if you have a strong preference on your side, I would just make that super clear to us by just providing that kind of structured data. So if you’re saying like, oh, the FAQ results, I really like those for these pages are super relevant here. But it’s also kind of an article and kind of a how to, then I would just focus on your preferred one kind of the FAQ in that case, or if you’re saying like the How to is really the way that I want to have this page shown and search, then I would focus on that time. As I understand it, internal links can pass authority, and that authority can be divided or diluted as more internal links are added to the page.

Is this another SEO myth? Or is this roughly how it works? If so, does that mean that having a lot of internal links on our page could do more harm than good? So, yes, yes or no, I think, in the sense that we do use the internal links to better understand the structure of a page. And you can kind of imagine the situation where if we’re trying to understand the structure of a website with the different pages that are out there, if all pages are linked to all other pages on the website, where you essentially have like a complete internal linking across every single page, then there is no real structure there. It’s like this one giant mass of pages for this website, and they’re all interlinked, we can’t figure out which one is the most important one, we can’t figure out which ones of these are related to each other.

And in the case like that, kind of like having all of those internal links, that’s not really doing your site that much. So regardless of the kind of PageRank, and authority and passing things like that, you’re essentially not providing a clear structure of your website. And that makes it harder for search engines to understand the context of the individual pages within your page within your website. So that’s kind of the way that I would look at that there. And similar to the second question that you had there with regards to lots of internal links, doing more harm than good.

Yes, if you do kind of dilute the value of your site structure by having so many internal links, that we don’t see a structure anymore, then that does make it harder for us to understand what you think is important on your website. And I think providing that relative sense of importance is, is sometimes really valuable, because it gives you a little bit more opportunity to kind of fine tune how you’d like to be present in the search results, where if you tell search engines like pretty clearly indirectly, well, this is my primary page, and from there, you link to different categories and the categories link to different products, then it’s a lot easier for us to understand that if someone is looking for this category of product, this is that page that you should that we should be showing in the search results. Whereas if everything is kind of cross linked, then it’s like, well, any of these pages could be relevant. And then maybe we’ll send the user to some random product instead of to your category page, when they’re actually looking for a category of products.

Let’s see regarding images on our website, how to find the perfect balance between maintaining high image quality as well as making sure that images are lightweight and load fast. It seems that both of these things are encouraged by Google, but they both take away from each other. Yeah, I don’t know if there’s ever a perfect balance. But especially with regards to images there are lots of things that you can do, especially with the responsive images set up in HTML, where you can essentially specify different image files for different resolutions.

And through that make it possible that when users load a page, for example, on a mobile phone, they’ll get a page that loads really quickly because it has optimized images for that device size. Whereas when a user loads that page with a really large screen, we can kind of swap out and show the higher resolution images as well. So that’s something where the whole responsive images set up, I think is a really good idea.

The other aspect here is also that a lot of the modern image formats that are out there, I’m thinking of web P and eBay if I don’t know how to actually pronounce that, where you essentially have ways of providing really high quality images at a fairly high resolution with like not that bite size prize price that you would usually have for really large images. So those are all different options that you can look into.

There’s also image lazy loading that you can use, where if an image is below the fold, you can say, well, the browser doesn’t need to load that image until the user scrolls into view. So there’s lots of things that you can do there. And I think what is kind of interesting specifically about images and SEO is, a lot of the things that you can do are very technical and various things that you can measure fairly clearly.

Or you can take Lighthouse, or one of the testing tools and just measure the page as it loads. And see, like how large is that page? How many bytes need to be transferred? And really kind of work with the numbers rather than working with that black box of SEO, where you like you tweak some things and then wait a month or so to see how the rankings evolve. What’s your vision for the future of SEO? I don’t know. Good question. I don’t have that five minute answer. On the future of SEO.

I think one of the things that people always worry about is everything around machine learning and that Google’s algorithms will get so far as to automatically understand every website and SEO will be obsolete. Nobody will need to do that. I don’t think that that will happen. But rather with all of these new technologies, you’ll have new tools and new ways of looking at your website. Making it maybe easier for you to create really good content to create clear structures for your website. Similar to how things have evolved, I think the last 1020 years as well, where in the beginning, you would write your own PHP code and craft your own HTML. And it was a lot of work. And over time, all of these CMS has evolved where essentially anyone can go off and create a website without having to really understand any of these HTML and kind of like server side basics.

And I think that evolution will continue in that there’ll be more and more tools available. And you’ll be able to do more and more things in a way that kind of works fairly well for search engines. And it’s not that the SEO work will go away, but rather it’ll evolve. And so maybe instead of like can tweaking h2 tags, and h1 tags, you’ll just kind of like delegate that to a CMS that makes sure that the most important content is already included as a heading on the page.

Since PageRank is a finite resource, is it a good idea to reserve page ranking using PRG pattern for not important pages like privacy policy pages. So the PRG pattern is kind of a weird trick to make something kind of work like a link, but actually not be a link. And it uses things like posting to the server and then the server does redirects and all kinds of weird things. From my point of view, you absolutely don’t need to use any of that. If you want to make sure that a link does not pass any PageRank, then use the rel=nofollow.

If you want to make sure that a link works well then don’t use a rel=nofollow. That’s essentially my perspective on that. So I would not go off and create these kind of fancy constructs, where you’re doing things like posting and redirecting on a server because it just adds so much more complexity, and you get absolutely no value out of that. So that’s kind of my primary take on technologies like these, I think it’s really cool to kind of come up with this kind of a setup. But it’s not something that I would implement on a website on a day to day basis. It is terrible to maintain. You can’t use any of the existing tools on it, because you can’t really crawl the website. I would absolutely kind of be discouraged from that setup. With regards to PageRank. And essentially what is going here is kind of like PageRank sculpting.

Are you saying I don’t want any PageRank going to my privacy policy pages. Our systems are pretty good at recognizing how these pages interact within a website. And from my point of view, you don’t need to do things like blocking PageRank, from going to your privacy policy pages. These are things that are totally common on the web. It’s not something that we would be surprised if we found a privacy policy page for your website. But rather, it’s kind of like a normal part of the web. And we expect to find it on our website almost. So that’s not something I would consider hiding in general. PageRank sculpting within a website is something I will try to avoid as much as possible because it’s possible to really significantly break the way that your website is crawled.

And you don’t notice that when you interact with the page in a browser. So that’s something where I would try to avoid that as much as possible. We just have a few minutes left before I pause the recording. So maybe I’ll just go back to some live questions. In the meantime, looks like they’re still better Hands up. I also have a bit more time afterwards if any of you want to stick around a little bit longer.

Webmaster 9 49:05
So, my question is regarding international targeting. Today I was working for a client and what we saw is like we have created different pages for different countries targeting those pages and of course, all the pages are an English language. And we have created a subject like the USA or France or Australia. And we have set one canonical URL to open all the pages and the HTML and tags are also properly implemented.

But for different different locations we see sometimes for countries like France we see UK pages getting ranked or Australia some something else is getting ranked. So I just wanted to know like, like all interlinking or the we have like created different sites set map like now know, if the pages are for UK we have created like a sub, or a nested sitemap for them in the breadcrumbs are properly organized in telling you also, it will create.

So what could be possible, isn’t it between all those parameters? I still like Google something else for different different locations?

John 50:22
Yeah. So I think there may be two or three things to mention. One, is, if we don’t have the pages all crawled and indexed already, then with the href, Lang annotation, we will kind of miss that connection. And we might show the wrong version. The other is similar to I think one of the questions before with regards to canonicalization. If these pages are significantly similar, then we might pick one as a canonical. And we might use that one to show in the search results.

So if, for example, these are both English language pages, and the content itself is essentially the same across them, then that’s something where maybe we’ll say, well, these are duplicates, we’ll just pick one and show those. And I think last is also that, with any setups that you have, you need to assume that Google won’t always get it right with regards to internationalization. And you need to provide some kind of a backup mechanism on your site as well. So usually, that’s done with the sort of a banner on your pages where if you can recognize that a user is from the wrong country, then you can show with JavaScript, a banner on top saying, like, hey, it looks like you’re from I don’t know, Indonesia.

And this page is for Australia, here’s a link to the Indonesian version of our website. So those are kind of the approaches I will take there. On the one hand, like if, if these pages are really duplicates of each other than, like, sometimes you just have to take that into account, if we just haven’t crawled and indexed those pages. And sometimes it’s a matter of just waiting until that happens. If you have a lot of different country versions, and we’re not crawling and indexing all of them, then maybe it makes sense to reduce the number of country versions just so that we can kind of like focus more on the versions that you do have. And then finally, like, just assume that Google won’t always get it right. And users will sometimes go to the wrong version of the page. And you need to be able to catch that on your site as well. Okay, sure. Thanks, john. Thanks. Sure. Let’s see, Chris. Yes.

Webmaster 10 52:48
I’m working on a site that has public profiles as a component for users. However, this isn’t a social network where users can follow one another, or there’s a directory-like page where all the public profiles are listed; each user has a profile and a unique URL to their profile. And so I wanted to understand what is the right way to expose to search crawlers so that when a user types in their name on Google, their public profile link from our site can also show up, I was looking at the robots txt files for sites like LinkedIn, and Twitter, and they don’t expose the individual users profile links. And so it doesn’t appear to be in the sitemap either. So I was wondering if there’s a way that we can also do something similar so that search crawlers can find it without exposing it in the robot txt files.

John 53:36
So you want it to be indexed or you don’t want it to be indexed. We do want it to be indexed. Okay. Essentially, you don’t need to do anything special in a case like that. So from our point of view, these would essentially just be normal pages within your website. And ideally, you would cross link them within the website normally. So if there’s, I don’t know, a comment or some reference to a specific user, you would link to their profile page. And then we could crawl the website normally, and essentially, kind of like find a way to those profile pages, and then just index them like that.

Webmaster 10 54:16
Okay. And if we don’t like the commenting functionality, or any way for pages that are exposed to be linking to the user’s individual profile, is there anything that we could upload into Search Console, for example, like the links of public profiles that can allow search to identify them?

John 54:34
I mean, you could put them in a sitemap file, and we could pick them up like that. However, if they’re only linked in a sitemap file, then it’s a bit hit and miss if we would actually go off and index them. Because we don’t have any context for those individual links. It’s basically like here, here a bunch of pages on my website, and we only give them to you in the sitemap file users wouldn’t be able to find them otherwise. Then our systems would be a little bit reluctant probably to actually go off and index all of those pages.

So it’s really something where we’d need to be able to find links to those profile pages somewhere within the normal content of the site, and kind of, like crawl our way through that. Which could be, I mean, I don’t know how these would be embedded. But on the profile pages themselves, you could have things like related links, where you say, like other users from this location, and then kind of like cross links, link them like that.

But yeah, essentially we’d need to find normal links to those pages. The other thing maybe to keep in mind as well, is that user profile pages are super popular top target for spam. So that’s something where if spammers realize they can create a profile page, on your website, and it’s indexable, then they’ll go off and do that en masse with bots and kind of create millions of profile pages with names like I don’t know, by this pharmaceutical here. And it’s something where, especially if you’re starting off to provide profile pages, you really need to keep in mind that it’s super popular target for spouses.

Webmaster 11 56:27
So my question is kind of similar to the previous one, but also kind of the opposite at the same time. So um, our site started kind of ranking recently, like on page two of a kind of fairly competitive keyword, our like, search query, but um, yesterday or the day before, it kind of plummeted to Page Six. And I noticed it’s because Google recrawled their site, and on index, like four or 500, on user profiles, but they were all private. So I, it’s my assumption that they’re marking it as spam.

And I guess, like, my first instinct was to, you know, 451, all the pages are 401, all the pages on authorized, but all the projects bootstrap with create react app? And that’s all that’s a single page application. And, like, there’s no really, there’s not really a way to return any status code other than 200. I’m on like, a client served application like that.

Um, so yeah, I guess like, my question is, like, where do I go from there? Um, because I was thinking of having the profiles redirect to like a slash unauthorized, and then add it to my robots. txt. But um, yeah, just like any thoughts would be super helpful.

John 57:40
Now. So I think, first of all, if, if these pages just got indexed now, then I would not expect our system to say, Oh, the quality of the website is bad, we will not rank that well anymore. So my assumption is that, like, if these pages just got indexed, now, it’s probably unrelated to the change in ranking that you’re seeing. One of the things that recently happened is we launched another core update, I think yesterday. So if that kind of aligns with yesterday, then maybe that’s related to the core update. And the core updates tend to be more on a broader quality basis across a website.

So that would also take into account the indexable pages for the website. But if these pages were just indexed, like last week or so then that probably wouldn’t be playing a role there. But rather kind of the content that was indexed over the last couple of months, that might be something that we take into account for a quality update. That’s kind of the one thing. The other thing with regards to single page apps and pages that you no longer want to have index, one thing you can do is add a no index to these pages, you can do that with JavaScript as well, where when you load the page, and you kind of recognize, oh, this is actually a page that shouldn’t be indexable, then you can use your JavaScript to edit the DOM and add the no index robots meta tag to that page. That’s one thing you can do.

You can also, of course, redirect to an unauthorized page, if you want to do that. On the unauthorized page, I would also use the no index instead of the robots meta tag instead of the robots. txt disallow. Just because with the no index, we really know that we shouldn’t be indexing this page. And if it’s an error page, then you don’t want to have that index. Whereas if you blocked the page with robots, txt, then we wouldn’t know what’s on that page. And then we would go off and probably index the URL without knowing its content. And we might end up showing that in the search results.

So especially for a single page app, I would use robots meta tag, no index, not the robots. txt. So those are I think the two things main things I mentioned in that regard. And I think if, if you suspect this is based on the core update, from from a timing point of view, I would go and look for the blog posts that we did, I think last year about core updates. And they’re a bunch of questions, they’re things that you can ask yourself kind of about the website’s quality overall. And I would try to go through that, ideally, with someone who kind of knows your website, but is not directly involved so that you can get some really objective answers and reactions based on some of the questions that are there.

Webmaster 11 1:00:41
Okay, that’s perfect. And, um, I guess it’s kind of a smaller question. But um, if I want to move my URL to a more concise, a smaller and a higher quality TLD. But that new URL doesn’t have like any keywords that I’m targeting? Or like any backlinks to the site, if I were to migrate it in Search Console with the rank be maintained? Or is it still kind of starting from scratch? Because I’m losing a lot of those, like, things I had before? Yes.

John 1:01:11
Usually, that would be maintained. So the keywords in the URL are really helpful for us, when we first recognize a website. We don’t know anything about the website. But as soon as we know something about the website, we kind of index some of your content, then we can focus on your actual content and not the URLs themselves. So that’s something where oftentimes people will focus too much on having keywords in a domain name. And in the end, not realize, well, actually, the content is the important part.

It’s not the keywords in the domain name. If you were to do that for a single page app, I don’t know if that’s combined. The tricky part is in Search Console, we check to see if there are 301 redirects in place. So if you want it to migrate to a different domain with a single page app, you would need to make sure that your server generates those 301 redirects on a per page basis, and not do that with JavaScript.

All right. Let me take a break here with the recording. And I’ll be around if there are more questions, and it looks like they’re more hands up. So we can go through some of that as well. If you’re watching this on YouTube, one, one last thing I almost forgot to mention is we have a survey running on the YouTube channel, there’s a link, I’ll put the link in the description. There’s also a link, I think in the thread for this video.

And I would really appreciate it if you could take the short time to go through that survey and leave us some answers there to help us figure out what we could do to make the channel and the videos that we’re producing a little bit better and a little bit more useful for you as well. Alright, and with that, let me take a break with a recording and maybe we’ll see some of you in one of the future Hangouts.