This video and transcript is from the English Google Webmaster Central Session that was held 31st May 2019.
The session is open to anything that is webmaster related and is an informal chat about items such as crawling, indexing, mobile sites, internationalization, duplicate content, Sitemaps, Search Console, pagination, duplicate content, multi-lingual/multi-regional sites, etc.
Video transcript
all right welcome everyone into today's webcast the central office hours hangout my name is John Mueller I am a webmaster trends analyst here at Google in Switzerland and part of what we do are these office hours hangouts where webmasters publishers SEO is can jump in and asks their questions all around web search and the websites looks like a bunch of questions were submitted already but if any of you who are here live want to jump in with the first question feel free hi John can you hear me hi I'm Nick hi if you wouldn't mind it's 1:00 in the morning where I am so I'm getting ready to fur bed very soon oh my gosh okay um anyways I kind of submitted a question a couple sessions ago and it was pretty broad so it wasn't possible to go to in depth which I understand so I'll try to frame it like this I guess the website you know that I run is basically it had been around and has been around for quite a long time by over ten years and it was getting what I would call pretty consistent performance in search until about the past year where we were seeing precipitous drops and now it's basically at 5% of the traffic it had a year ago that being said I do think it's algorithmic because nothing is showing up under manual actions or security issues one of the tell-tale signs that I briefly kind of touched on is a fact that if I were to search the actual brand name which it's a very specific sequence of words like I could say with 99% certainty if somebody types in the brand they're looking for my site um so the site is actually showing up on page two of the results when I search for the brand name it's being out ranked by the LinkedIn page or a Glassdoor page it's being out ranked by other sites referring to the main website but the main web site itself is nowhere to be found on the first page so I mean not being said to me that means like for some reason the website ended up on a bad list or something I don't know how else to to describe it but that's what it feels like to me so if it would be okay with you I would I would love to share just a bit more details in the chat window for you to go back to you later okay I guess for someone in my situation like I said with a very broad description like this I mean we're definitely trying to clean up some of the content there's a lot of pages it's it's a community site so it's lots of user-generated stuff but have you seen other websites go through something like this in the last year I mean changes can always happen so I I mean seeing other websites news traffic is something that we do see over time and it's I guess it kind of depends on the website itself the kind of content it has with regards to what what directions it might take from there so there are certainly situations where I'd say maybe the website model is not something that that is a sustainable anymore as it was in the past which is something that that comes into play for example if you have a website directory where you're just collecting links to other companies and you have the phone numbers and addresses but essentially you don't have that much more information it feels like that kind of model is something that like that information is available now everywhere in pretty much every website every company has their own website so there is no need for these kind of or less need I guess for these kind of directory pages so that's that's one aspect where I'd say maybe the the overall model is something that worked really well in the past because it was really needed in the past but maybe things have changed over time and then of course there are other kinds of websites where I'd say maybe our algorithms in the last year or so have been focusing more on and where they're a bit more critical for example one one area that I've seen mentioned a lot is the whole medical space where I see people posting online talking about authority expertise those kind of things where I'd say that definitely makes sense where in the past it was really hard for us to judge kind of the the quality of the medical or medically oriented site and over time our algorithms have gotten better in that regard and that's an area where I'd say maybe if you if you had a low-quality affiliate site that was focusing on these medical topics then maybe you you would be seeing changes there even though perhaps over the last ten years or so you had a really good run so that's that's another area where I'd say maybe from an algorithmic point of view you might see bigger changes but I really don't know about your specific case so if you want to drop some more information into the chat I can take a look at that and see if there's something more specific I can tell you about that that would be great thank you it is a medical website it turns out okay no coincidence there but yeah I will share more details in in the comments pertaining to our situation so okay great thank you thanks all right anyone else that wants to jump in or the first question yeah I can jump okay yeah I mean interested about well they're so uh you know example in Google Earth or Facebook ads or YouTube when I stopped for a ticket Iseman I can play you know if age with your cooperation behavior and you know example in the to form I was surprised when we provide Russian videos about is your bottom of marking and quite yet this your and I was surprised that I thought that my audience is older than 25 years and I thought it's the same male or female part it's not like this and our audience is less than 25 years I think white from 18 to 25 and yeah and until it was a limited you know to access to this but what about Google for example if you have some keyboard and we need to combine before user intentions of course I know about the geolocation Google considers this but what about other I don't know like behavior age and these parameters we will consider I don't know to use like it renews your mouth like smell is no other so so I guess the question is if we use demographic information our search results ranking yeah I know that you use a geolocation yeah local search but what about the user behavior their age you know their I don't know interests for this Google combined this information if personalization data I know I don't think so I'm pretty sure we we don't have anything explicit in in our ranking systems where we would say this person is a younger person therefore we should send them to younger people friendly websites I don't think we would have anything specific there it's it might be something that you would see from a personalization point of view on a per user basis but I don't think we would have anything on a demographic level when it comes to search ranking ranking factors mm-hmm it's an interesting question though yeah never thought about that but I don't think we eat we have anything specific in that area yeah because in paid ads you can play you know the time to choose which audience you want to show your ads but in Google it means the Ainu because you know I am I wanna I can explain why I asked about this question because you know we write blog posts and we want in order to write information to our personae not have our readers and try to one persona not to crowd and yeah and I'm English interesting how I can combine my blogpost with this persona and music in town yeah yeah I I think that's something that you can definitely do not not specific that we would use it as a ranking factor but if you can target your user is better and right right for your user as well but I think that's something where you will have success regardless of how we use that is as a ranking factor mm-hmm like I think it's a good approach to take those different things especially if you have a YouTube channel that kind of aligns with your blog then maybe you get some more information on the demographics of the users there I suspect you also get some of that in Google Analytics or in other analytics packages but I don't know the details there but you know I see that the old data are different and audience and different on YouTube on Facebook and Google you know I don't see one audience you know okay they have different mood and pick up it influenced yeah and I'm interested in the politics you of course I can check in Google Analytics data but you know I wanted to provide value to this to my readers if yeah if Google considers Google doesn't consider I I got it okay thank you yeah yeah cool all right let's see what kind of questions we got Patrick asks where his favicon is I I think that's that's one question that's been running around for a while so we recently started showing the the favicon in the search results in the mobile search results and it looks like people are trying different things out I I think in general that's that's okay we we have some guidelines with regards to what to watch out for and we generally work to update the favicons automatically so if you decide you want to change your logo or if the favicon then that's totally up to you I have a client website which is in the plastic-surgery in industry and the home page contains a gallery of before-and-after photos to help sell potential results that they can achieve I found that the home page is almost non-existent in the index when the gallery is on the page and after removing it the home page ranks again can you elaborate on the level of nudity or skin showing the the systems or like what can we do to avoid this I don't know about your recipes my question is you have a new okay on a specific response cool so so I don't know exactly how it is with your specific site but I've seen this kind of theme come up before with regards to especially plastic surgery websites because that seems to be where you tend to have that more and in talking with the the SafeSearch team that kind of tries to figure out which which page there should be shown and with with the same search filter on or with the cert SafeSearch filter off they feel that this is kind of working as intended so when we see images where we're kind of afraid with regards to maybe the nudity or the the amount of I don't know skin or I don't know how you would frame it with regards to Plastic Surgery sites but essentially with regards to the images on the site or on the page then that's something where our filters might kick in and say like where we're unsure here we're going to stay on the safe side so that's probably what what you're seeing there and especially if you're saying that when you include the gallery or when you remove the gallery you see these changes then that's kind of points in that direct thanks for yeah so with regards to the direction you can go from there I think that's kind of up to you if you feel that this gallery of images is really critical for your homepage then obviously maybe it's it's worth kind of taking that into account and saying well I want these images on the homepage and maybe my ranking would SafeSearch turned on might not be as good or you could say maybe there is a middle ground where you Said's like you have have a button kind of like show show gallery and it takes you to the gallery directly from the homepage so that it's not exactly the homepage that's that's affected yeah that was my own proposed solution so I think you can find that cool alright question about privacy policies terms of services contact us about those pages if you set up a website and such pages are not published and a search quality rater rates or guide your site negatively to due to this will the Raiders later we judge your site when they're added at a later date is there anything the webmaster needs to do once these pages are added so I I think you probably mixing up two things here on the one hand the the search quality Raiders are people who do look at the search results and the pages that we show in the search results and they do follow the the search quality evaluators guidelines that I think we published or that we've been publishing for a while now and that does include things like watching out for terms of services privacy policies those kind of things however those Raiders are there primarily to judge different algorithms that we want to test so what usually happens is that one of the teams comes up with an idea and says I I think ranking would be better if we took this factor into account or if we rank things slightly differently this new algorithm that they're working on and then for the e to kind of double-check that their suspicions are actually good we generate a set of search results pages essentially with an a version without that change and a B version with that change and we send all of these to the search quality raters and then the Raiders look at these search results they look at the websites that are linked from there and then they say well in this case the the change with with the the algorithmic change is better or in the other case maybe they change without or the the version before was better and based on that we try to refine our algorithms so it's not that the Raiders would look at your site and say this is a bad site it should drink lower in the search results it's more that the Raiders would look at the general algorithm and say well in this case this version is better or this version is better so what what tends to happen there is that our algorithms kind of take the the feedback that we give Raiders with regards to rating things into account so that's something where potentially indirectly our algorithms could be watching out for things like privacy policies or Terms of Service about us pages and that's something that they if if we were to pick that up I don't know if we would have an explicit algorithm just for that I I think that probably wouldn't make so much sense but it's possible that there is some effect from that taking into account our algorithms and so if we were to look at that explicitly and look for those kind of pages what would happen there is when we've repress time we crawl the pages and we see that these pages now exist and they're linked on the website then our algorithms would automatically take that into account so there is nothing special that you would need to do if you make changes on your website in in a direction where you think that this actually improves your website overall our algorithms would try to recognize the new state of the website as we find it and take that into account when it comes to ranking things so you definitely don't need to kind of wait for some rigor to come and visit your website again this is something that or other them's tend to do automatically over time John can I can I have a question on on search quality as well sure so this is something that some of the folks from the Romanian SEO community brought to brought to me and it's regarding certain queries that after the March update results seem how can I put it I'll just give you an example so so mine easier to look at so there's one very large retailer here that has a lot of pages indexed including search pages and those seems to have indexed these kind of e-commerce search pages that you know a contained all kinds of keywords and they seem to show up and even though it's it's basically the same kind of pages that the content is almost the same because that's for example for bed sheets a certain type of bed sheet so you'll notice that the first three results are basically the same thing just the keyword is singular plural things like that so it's kind of the same thing and it's search pages so I'm not sure if that's the best user experience so to speak and that that this happens for a lot of so I got I got a lot of examples like this and this is a this is one or more a bit more extreme or it's like the first eight results are from the same website that's kind of dominating now high position pages yeah I bet they're happy though but yeah I mean I'm just I'm sure it there really no other website that's good enough to you know dope go against three almost duplicate pages yeah I have heard this before I think specifically about Romanian websites maybe some some other country as well where we especially with some of the Equality updates that we may eat I think over the course of this year earlier this year where people have been complaining and saying that the quality overall isn't as good as it used to be I I don't know what what the plans are there I I do know that the search team is aware of these issues so it's it's something that they've also seen they've also kind of seeing the complaints that we passed on to them so it's not it's not something where from from our point of view I'd say this is the way it should be but rather this is maybe I don't know something that we could still be working on okay it means aware of these kind of yeah yeah I mean these kind of search queries are really useful for us so if you run across queries where you see this is actually really bad or that the search results are kind of okay but they're filled with essentially copies of the same thing over and over again they're not known that's that's really useful for us to have yeah I'm sure I'm sure people are buying from from that website it just doesn't see organic to have the same multiple copies as you mentioned a basically in page ranking out ranking it everything I'll leave you in the chat are linked to my product form stage' if you have any updates cool sorry can I follow up on this question sure isn't it like a rule that you should not index like tags pages and like search pages as well you shouldn't indicate them we we do have a guideline that you should block search results pages which there are two reasons for that on the one hand what can easily happen is that we crawl a lot of pages and we overload the server and on the other hand what often happens is that these pages tend to be lower quality pages and that they're not so useful for users as maybe something like a clean category page would be with regards to tag pages that kind of is is a question there as well is is the tag page of search page or is it a tag page more like a category page and that's something that really kind of depends on the way that the website is set up in the way that the website tends to handle that and for both of these I tend to see it as something where we would see it as a strong recommendation to block these kind of search results pages from being indexed but not as something where we would say if we ever see a search results page then we would apply a manual action to that website because what we've also seen a lot of times is that there are some really good search results pages where you look at them you say well this is actually not an auto-generated page like you would just generate a page based on a million items and you filter for keywords it's actually more like a category page and in those cases I think it makes sense to have those index because maybe people are looking for I don't know blue running shoes and you have a search page that's blue running shoes actually it's it's the search search page and not a category page but it contains all of the blue running shoes that you have which is maybe a good result for users so if the search page provides value today or visit your user that's okay to index these pages yeah yeah I feel there is a huge opportunity for manipulation to ultimately generate these like for all these long tail keywords and yeah yeah I I think I think that's that's something that has always been around it is always a kind of worry but for the most part I think our algorithms are generally pretty good at recognizing the quality of the page so if we see that a site is automatically generating search results pages and they're generating millions of them then our algorithms would probably look at that and say well these are pretty low quality pages therefore maybe there's more of the website that's also low quality maybe should we should be more critical with regards to ranking this site overall so that tends to to balance things out a little bit sometimes things get get by our filters or by our algorithms and we we show them in search results more visibly so we're not perfect in that regard thank you okay John I have some follow-up question that so users may come in to look at the quality perspective is what the pages are good enough to being so on the social pages my question is regarding that this thing or the category page is when you're talking about so how we can ensure that I mean the quality is maintained on those pitches really high as I mean considering the we are only going to provide the product details there like an having good on these order price details and everything so now then how Google can actually decide or relate that prospective as in quality which pages has a better in towards like as compared to others so how we can diagnose that particular things I think that's hard yeah I there is no simple answer there with regard especially when you're talking about pages that are automatically being generated that's something where you almost have to take your own expert knowledge of the the topic area and apply that so what I've sometimes seen is sites try to find other metrics that they can follow to get a light understanding of how users would perceive the quality so I've seen sites use things like analytics information with regards to number of visitors that actually go to these pages they the behavior of the the users on those pages those are sometimes useful ways of looking at this I've seen some really large sites say that any any search results page for example that has more than I don't know two key words in the query is something that they would automatically block there are different approaches that you can take it's not something where I'd say there is one simple answer that works for everyone I think overall if you have good or reasonable category pages then I would I would lock the search results pages from being indexed just so that you don't have to worry about all of these fine details like is this search results page good enough or is this kind of not good enough and how do i quantify that if if you have clean good category pages for your website then you don't need to rely on the search results pages to also be indexed sure thanks John Chuck another pin to the next question all right hi sorry to jump into the second one but I've got a website that I've been battling with till about the last six months I've just tries to be a question and a link to website it's called rocket and still come to the youth in the channel so I have three one reader to the main thing so if you go to any home today you on any variation of 301 redirects and I've completed the change of address from Google search console yet if you do a site colon rockin don't come today you search a home page and all a lot of the other page that still has this tool in the index and you kind of help me diagnose that if weather is something we can do now or if the song we can do privately because it's been breaking my brain that's probably normal so the confusing part there is when when we process a redirect like this we we still understand that the old site is associated with these new URLs so what what tends to happen there is with a site query when you excessively look for the old site will say well we know this old site and we still have a bunch of these URLs in our memory so we'll show them to you because you're explicitly asking for them and in practice though when you look at the pages themselves for example when you look at the cache page or when you look at the the page with the inspect your L tool you'll see that the canonical is actually the new URL I don't know the cache page it's kind of hard to tell because you overwrite I think part of the top but in general what you'll see is that we've moved on to the new URL as a canonical URL which means we've processed the site but if if someone explicitly asks us for the old domain that will so show it so essentially it's it's working it's probably working okay I don't see it offhand but it's probably working okay and just because you're seeing the o-type in the side query doesn't mean that the old site is still the one that's being indexed so simple way you can double-check as well is to just search for like the page title and when I try that I get the dot-com version so I think your site moves okay and just the site query is kind of confusing because on the one hand we're trying to be helpful and say well you're looking for the site and we know about the site and leadership let's show it to you on the other hand you're looking at those results as a I'm trying to diagnose a specific situation based on these results and that's not something that you'd be able to do with a site query there okay so then follow up to this then is I'm also just posted in chat as well is that the old website is still ranking for for example the keyword of strata management software when googled in Australia it is in both position three uncom delay you the ultimate and calm for the new domain so this is the kind of main point of contention with the client because I read you a theory for them and they currently have two different groups as ranking when they should have had everything consolidated into one and then they agents 301 redirects okay I mean it's just try that query pad you see the dot-com oh okay further down so what probably happened is we we just don't have that one URL moved over yet so let me just double check I mean if it's redirecting then that's generally not a problem but so my theory behind this is that it currently if you click on the URL and search results of the Dondre you the 300 ones – revenge – home didn't you again and then at 301 redirects Creek home so it might be something written their idea I still feel that the it's in position three and six so ultimately the clients not really complaining I want to make sure that don't call me see anyone in the actual search results at the end of the day yeah I I think what you could probably do is use the inspect your l tool and submit that URL to be recrawled and reprocess that would probably pick that up what what I expect would would probably happen here though is that that extra listing that you have kind of an in the sixth place with a combat a you would disappear in favor of the.com version which I don't know I mean the the ranking would be okay I think that would be fine it's just that you don't have three listings shown for that query and just would have to so I don't know if you would be much better off by by forcing that over but it will happen anyway over time okay so the website was migrated at six months ago and the dot-com delete the old domain distiller position through so you're saying that if the change of address was completed successfully the 301 redirect is still in place correctly even if there is a redirect chain the eventually Google will pick it up and if I want to force it across I should inspect the URL and Google search console the new one yeah and request the test live URL Jacksonville is that correct yep yep thanks for that cool sometimes a bit tricky with individual URLs but a site moves can take a bit of time and depending on how things were set up and when they were set up that made might take a bit so what I also noticed is your site I think is being indexed with mobile first indexing so you need to make sure that the mobile version also redirects and has the canonical all of that set up as well or maybe it's even responsive design which would make it a lot easier yes responsive and there's no indoor no subdomain or anything like that so yeah it also does have some domains which are still active on the old domain and there's all sorts of other things but if you say that I can probably get the old results gone just by indexing requesting indexing in the pages that will probably solve my problem for the majority of it so thank you for that cool all right let me run through some of the other questions that were submitted and then we could do some more from you all we have an article ative page that has quite similar images to child pages are listed on the archive the archive page is banned from the safe search while the child pages are considered safe what factors do the safe search algorithm use apart from images and vanity to consider whether a page is safe I don't know what the the exact factors will be but we we take into account a number of different things and it can certainly happen that a part of your site is seen as being fine with regards to Save Search and part of your site is seen as something that we would filter with safe search activated so usually what what I recommend doing there is making sure that you have a clearly separate clear separation of this kind of content so that it's easier for our algorithms to say well everything in this folder here can be filtered by safe search everything in in the rest of the site or in this other folder here is generally family friendly or safe search friendly content and we'd be able to show that appropriately so that's probably the direction I would head there it sounds like your content is kind of borderline with regards to how our safe search algorithms might look at it which which is fine I mean sometimes there's content out there like that but if you want to take that into your own control a little bit more than I'd recommend finding a way to separate those two parts a little bit clearer so that you have less or or it's a little bit more certain with regards to safe search which parts would be shown which parts would not be shown my website gets hundreds of links that seem to be spammy I suspect maybe one of my competitors is trying to decrease my rankings do I need to keep disavowing these links week after week or should I only be worried if I get unnatural links manual action so in general we we do automatically take these into account and we try to kind of ignore them automatically when we see them happening and for the most part I suspect that works fairly well I I see very few people with actual issues around that so I think that's mostly working well with regards to disavowing these links I suspect if these are just normal spammy links that are just popping up for your website then I wouldn't worry about them too much probably we figured that out on our own if you're worried about them regardless if there's if it's something that you're not sure about you're losing sleep over these links and you just want to make sure that Google handles them properly then using the disavow tool is perfectly fine the disavow tool is not an admission of guilt or anything like that you're essentially just telling our systems these links should not be taken into account for my website and there are multiple reasons why you might want links not to be taken into account that's not something that our algorithms would would try to judge for your website so if you're seeing spammy links from certain sites using the domain directive makes it easy to to handle these into this eval file and you can just submit those there on the other hand if you're if you feel that these links are pretty normal spammy and something that any algorithm would figure out and you can just leave them alone and just kind of move on I think for most websites out there pretty much they really largest majority of websites you don't need to use a disavow tool and that's also why we have to disavow tools so separate from search console so that you don't get tempted to using this avowal tool because it looks like there's normal part of search console that everyone should be using but it's really something that you only really need to use in in really extreme cases we received a notification from the trusted safety team regarding low quality search results pages on our site being crawled and indexed while we're working to solve this problem is there any short-term risk of a manual penalty being applied an algorithmic penalty or Google taking any other action to remove those pages from index I don't know which notification you received there but in general when when you receive a notification like this it's because someone from the manual webspam team has taken a look and seeing that they're the real issues with regards to those search results pages and usually what what also happens at the same time then is that a manual action is placed on specific URL patterns from your website so that we don't index more of those pages so probably if you received a notification like that and this is also already where we're already trying to filter those out of the search results pages so that's that kind of risk that you're worrying about there has probably already happened solving that and doing the reconsideration flow to remove that manual action I think makes sense regardless like I mentioned before with search results pages there are two aspects there on the one hand the quality side which sounds like you ran into there and on the other hand the technical side that we end up crawling a lot more pages and we actually need to and both of those can play a critical role for some websites so that's something where even if a manual action is already in place to kind of take these pages out of the index I certainly try to find a way to clean up the technical side as well so that we don't have to crawl and index a ton of different pages just to keep up with your website when these pages wouldn't actually be that useful for users anyway yes yeah I have some qualification this is it on your manual action so recently working on a website so this is what happens like I'm kind of taking a charge of the website but though it is targeting the international market as well be I mean all this country targeting with or subfolder wise and the thing is I come in I was going through this or manual action thing I just what is they having a manual action for unnatural links which is affecting some pages of the website web sites are either the third party maybe blogger or something like that apart from that we don't have any backing as search well just wanted like I mean what is the reason of having the manual action for those kind of backlinks apart from that I am seeing this or manual action notification in every country side like I mean I have verified individually different folder for different countries per se so I'm getting is manual action for each and every country so having a manual action for domain.com where it is going to affect my others folder structure is good so are they subfolders or are they different domains yeah they are subfolders okay yeah I mean if they're subfolders and that would what kind of makes sense to show that in because it's essentially the same domain so showing the same manual action there I think what makes sense there are two places where where I I remember where we take this this kind of kind of targeted manual action with regards to specific pages and specific links on a side and on the one hand that could be if if a site is buying links for example for very specific elements within within the site or doing something kind of sneaky with regards to links in that regard so that's something where we sometimes take very targeted action and say well we'll just ignore this specific set of Link's because we know that there it's pretty well defined it's something that we can isolate fairly well and we'll just work to ignore those on a manual basis another place where I've also seen that happen is specifically around reputation management so that's one area where we'll also often see that people build people usually SEO so reputation management companies build up links to pages that they find favorable and these these might be completely the legitimate websites they're talking about maybe one person or one company in a reasonably favorable way and in order to try to hide the less favorable content in the search results they'll go up and buy links or build links for specific pieces of content on essentially legitimate web sites and from our point of view that that's also problematic because these are unnatural links to those pages and in order to resolve that sometimes when we have to do that manually we will do a manual action specifically regarding those links and those pages so that's something where as the website that has a website that might be affected by something like this there's nothing really that you need to do there it's not that you need to kind of clean up those links at someone else placed they're pointing at articles that you have on your site but rather we've kind of taken care of that on our side with a manual so from from our point of view if this is isolated like that then that wouldn't be affecting the rest of your website it would really be affecting that kind of set of links specific set of Link's pointing at a specific set of pages on your website and we're essentially just neutralizing those so that you don't have to worry about that or do anything with that sure thanks John Oh entitlement oh can we get a set of those examples basically I mean we don't know what are those pages actually and and if we know like I mean if somebody knows who's actually building the links they know for what pages they're actually targeting but when it's coming through the third party or anyone is building backlinks or any third party website so we don't know so we are just kind of you know very you can say in a state I mean what page is to diagnose or I mean we have a very huge website millions of pages out there and we don't know like I meant where it is getting affected yeah I I know it's the the manual webspam team tries to provide examples whenever they can but sometimes that's not that easy so the the usual recommendation that I'd have there is to file a reconsideration request and give some information on what you're seeing or what you're kind of confused about and sometimes the manual website and things will be able to come back to you and say well it's affecting this set of queries or this set this set of pages on your website or on the external website so sometimes they can come back with that kind of information it's not guaranteed that they'd be able to do that okay yeah thanks John hey actually I think playing Google PageSpeed insight recently and I saw that there were least one sign was around 1 to 1.5 seconds which is very terrible so I was thinking to try some new hosting or move my host you so my question is changing the IP effects ranking or not now changing IP you sign okay okay one more thing like this is my fourth sign same question and the images are is still not index I and I I'm unable to find any reason like I am serving the latest version of the image VP version and everything is fine but it still the images are not getting in the Google search result and the old console was able to show us whether the images are indexed or not but in this search console there is no option with it from which we can look at it so what can I do right now it's been more than one month what what do you mean more than one month the images all the images are the index only the author images which are posted on here after the fight is on WordPress only the author images are available on google images and there is no other images available on the google and that's why my ranking is affecting and it's getting down everyday would only affect traffic from google images so so the the normal web search ranking wouldn't be affected by that but if you can copy the website and some sample images into the the chat here I can take a look at that afterwards ok I have told you other site URL you can check the comments the technics is a dot-com and I think this is my fault I'm telling you ok cool you see it NO xyz.com ok yeah there is no manual action and no messages in the Google search console regarding this all right that's the in reference to recent announcements on mobile first indexing for new sites does this come into play for new sites or only for new domains important to know since the default States for new websites will be mobile force indexing since I am considering redesigning my site it's specific to new domains so essentially what what is happening is we're shifting to from a model where we have a list of all the domains that are already on mobile first indexing to model where we'll have a list of all the domains that are not on mobile first indexing so anything that is new will be processed with mobile first indexing by default so if you're doing a redesign and if you're launching on an or kind of revamping on a separates folder on your website or even on a separate subdomain of your website all of those would still be seen as being part of the old domain so whatever your old domain status is would would play a role here so if it's already moved to mobile first indexing then that redesign will be moved as well if it hasn't moved to mobile first indexing then that redesigned that change on your website would also not be under mobile first indexing and as we've talked about before it's not that mobile first indexing is a ranking factor so it's not that you need to be in mobile first index in order to be competitive but rather this is more of a technical thing on our side with regards to how we crawl and index the the content from your website I have a publisher who has a site on WordPress they're considering disabling a heavy plugin to thoughts only to improve PageSpeed scores the plugin makes no visual visual changes would that be advised or not recommended if you have a plugin that doesn't make any changes then personally I would remove that because usually the the less overhead you have with regards to code that's running on your server the less you have to worry about so specifically with regards to maintenance but also speed like you mentioned here those are those are two aspects that I think are pretty critical so if if you have a plug-in that isn't doing anything useful for your site then maybe make sense to disable that working for a publisher with regards to URL structure we're using very short urls like domain.com slash one two three four they're easy to share and but the URLs for news articles that contain keywords or similar information many SEO agencies have pushed us to have speaking your own so with keywords in them in cases speaking URLs get generated by titles which contain numbers that change after a while the editor may made a typo a few minutes later the the URL could change as well this is why we decided to use just IDs which URL structure would you recommend for news articles and is it advisable to change the whole URL structure to speaking URLs that would be necessary to implement redirects for all existing articles so generally in talking with the team on our site they've always said that you don't need to have keywords and urls and they're essentially equivalent on our side so we use URLs primarily as an identifier there is a very small factor with regards to keywords in your house but if you're working on a larger website and that's something where you probably won't see that that's affect at all the the bigger thing that I would watch out for here which I think there is the one that you're worrying about is if you change from one URL format to another what will happen then so in general what happens there is that what you need to recrawl and pre-process the whole website in order to understand what the new status is so that's something where there's definitely a longer period of time where you'll see fluctuations across your website until we've been able to kind of settle things down again and understand that this new URL on your website is linked from these different parts of your website and the context of these pages is like this or like that so you definitely see a fairly a reasonably long time of things in fluctuation there and it's a lot harder for us to reprocess something like this then for example the site if you move from one domain to another and you map your URLs one to one to your new domain then we can process that pretty quickly sometimes within a day or so but if you change all of the URLs across your whole website and that's something where I imagine you'd see changes in the order of several months until everything is settled down so that's that's kind of the the one aspect there and that you'd see these fluctuations the other aspect that you might see you very minimal change in the end it kind of also comes into play there so that's more a question on your side are you willing to take into account that maybe for a couple of months things will be fluctuating quite severely just so that you have this potentially improvement with regards to some keywords in your URLs so that's just kind of tricky I don't know which direction I would take there if you're sure that keywords and urls make sense for example if you can separate pages on your website out better based on folders and you can separate things out a little bit clearer so that you can track specific parts of your website's easier so kind of like you mentioned here you have / news / politics if you want to track the performance of your politics content then having that in a separate folder makes it a lot easier compared to everything kind of in a flat structure where you just have one number so from that point of view I try to find the different pros and cons to the new structure and the old structure and think about like how many pros do you need to kind of cancel out this potential multi-month time of fluctuation or maybe you're saying well this is actually more of a long-term goal and we like to get to kind of more keywords in URLs but we don't need to go there from one day to the next and we have maybe the engineering resources to do that incrementally then that might be something where you'd say well all new content gets these new format URLs and the old content stays on the old ones until a time where we're sure that things are working out with the new euros and then at that point we migrate the old URLs as well and if it's in the news website then usually the older URLs are less visible in search anyway so if there's some fluctuation with regards to how the old URLs are shown in search then that's probably not something that would be critical for your website so that might be another approach to take to kind of take it incrementally to a state where you're saying well this is more of what I'd like to have oh wow we still have a bunch of questions left and almost no time let me see if I can run through a bunch of these and we can run over a little bit as well you mentioned the hidden content and ranking and not being able to use that for that kind of snippets with regards to tabs and mobile first indexing I don't know what what the current status is there I need to double check my understanding is that with regards to mobile first indexing we would see this as content that's normally visible as well but I need to double check not hundred percent sure working on e-commerce sites that is regularly changing some category pages too nuanced leaving behind a lot of blank pages with 200 result code the behavior can't be changed so I need to do something there so I'm thinking of redirecting them through a Google tag manager with JavaScript redirects do you think that would work or which one would you prefer JavaScript or meta refresh I I think JavaScript redirect would be preferred there we probably picked that up but especially if you're going through Google tag manager and a JavaScript redirect then that's something that would take a bit longer to process than a clean server-side redirect so depending on how big of this problem this actually is for your website it might be worth trying to find a way to do that server-side if this is more of a cleanup thing that you think you'd like to do in the long run then maybe that's okay to just leave it like this I social bookmark my site after one week I noticed that the site which I bookmarked has been marked as spam so the pages have through the pages have any effect on my ranking I don't think those pages would have any effect on your ranking because probably we're also ignoring those social bookmark sites the links from there that's a really really old SEO strategy and we have a lot of practice in recognizing those kind of links and just ignoring them when will the speed and search console tool get updated with the Evergreen Googlebot any timeline I don't know I know the team is working on that so I wouldn't expect it to take too much longer but I don't have any specific timeline question about Google News I saw a big drop in news since the second week of March and kept declining ever since I don't know about Google News and how that would would play together with regards to being penalized from Google News I suspect if that were the case then you would not see your site at all in Google News it wouldn't be that it would just be ranking lower in Google News but I don't really have much insight into the Google News site can you confirm that links top linked pages externally in search console does not include 404 URLs linked externally I think it would be very useful to discover broken links from search console something that we can only do with external tools as far as I know that the linked pages would not include links to 404 pages at least not to 404 pages that we know about because what would happen or what needs to happen with regards to links is we have to have one page that is linking like where the link is coming from and a link destination and if we don't have either of those then essentially that link is not something that we can we can track in our systems or that would be useful to track in our systems so for that probably using external tools is an option is it a good idea to use my PPC landing pages to rank for local areas maybe that's kind of up to you and what kind of landing pages you have but what I've seen sometimes is people using PPC or similar topics to test landing pages and see how to create landing pages that perform really well and then to update the normal search ranking pages as well to kind of that newer model half my pages are shown and crawled currently not indexed it's quite a long time now I'm guessing it's because low quality content and I'm not really sure is there any way to check the reason why it's not indexed and how to resolve no there's not usually not really a way to double-check the reason why it wouldn't be indexed it's it's completely normal that we don't index all pages on a website so just because you see a large chunk of pages that are either crawled currently not indexed or I think the other one is submitted and not indexed that can be completely normal if you're worried about the quality of your website and usually that means there is something with regards to quality that you can improve and we do try to take into account quality when it comes to picking which pages we want to have indexed so that could be something to focus on as well obviously that's kind of tricky because if we're not indexing those pages we're not taking the quality of those pages into account either so you need to focus on the quality of your website overall not just the quality of the pages that are currently not indexed can anyone tell me how different is hosting from a free hosting like blogspot than from a paid hosting will it have any effect that my search results ranking is blogspot considered inferior to hosting with WordPress so these are all different ways of hosting hosting a site usually what what the big difference there is with regards to the free kind of platforms or the the simpler platforms and something like WordPress is with regards to the flexibility and the customisation opportunities that you have there so if you just want to have a website out there and you just need to have your content visible at all then using any of the platforms out there is usually a good idea but if you need to do something very specific if you want to track things in a very specific way if you're I don't know collecting leads in a very specific way if you need to do something fancy with regards to multilingual users or to use us in different countries then that's something where having your own hosting maybe on WordPress maybe on some of the other platforms out there can make a lot of sense so that's usually the way that I would look at it there if you're not sure what I'd recommend doing is setting up your own domain in any case that's something that you can do with most of these free platforms and when you're using your own domain if you later switch to a more customized a little complex for meeeeee like WordPress or anything else then you kind of keep all over your content and keep all of the URLs and you can just move on to the new platform so that makes it a lot easier to migrate and that way you can kind of work with the free platform you recognize where the limitations are where you'd like to do more than what is possible and if you find a different platform that offers all of those opportunities that you're looking for then maybe at that point it makes sense to move on but it's certainly not the case that there's any inherent SEO advantage to these platforms your content is hosted we can access that users can access it so from that point of view that's that's all fine is it a good idea to block a certain URL from being crawled or is it better to let Googlebot decide and use the configure URL parameter tool the the URL parameter tool is a great way to give us hints about which URLs or URL patterns you don't want to have crawled but it's not the same as a robots.txt file so if you need to block crawling for example if your server does something that takes a lot of time to be processed when we access that URL then that might be something where you want to use the robots.txt file to really be clear and say I don't want you to access these URLs at all how can we report manipulated structured data this ephemeral page has no relevant category there's a structured data or rich rich snippet spam report form that you can use for single pages like about us is it recommended to use Rich Snippets for the single article on the page or not totally up to you that's something like an about Us page if you have a structured data type that fits that I think that's fine I don't think you'd see any special handling in the search results with regards to using just the article markup for example on a page like that our website has 140 language and country localized versions all connected correctly with HR flang but Google is often showing the wrong versions in the search results is there any limit to the number of href Lang have alternates that we can include does Google treat this as a suggestion rather than a strict directive there's no limit to the number of alternatives that you could provide however there are practical limitations in the sense that if you have a hundred and forty copies of all of your content that we have to crawl and index all of those copies and we might not be able to crawl and you know all of those copies depending on the website so that's something that sometimes plays a role there does Google treat this as a suggestion or directive we treat this more as a suggestion it gives us a little bit more information about those pages we can't treat it as a strict directive because we really need to make sure that it actually works out well or rather it's not that we can't it's more that most of the time when we don't when we don't take that into account it's more that there are technical reasons why why we don't do that so for example maybe clean backlinks canonicalization plays a role there as well and then the general setup of the atria playing Constellation is something that that often plays we're all there so it's not that I'd say we treat it as a subtle hint but more as something or I'd say there are a few things that need to align for us to be able to use it properly and just because we see the href Lang link on one page doesn't mean that we will always show exactly that link we really need to make sure that the rest of the signals also aligned before we can show that href Lang URL in the search results and especially if you have a hundred and forty versions then that's a lot of versions that can kind of subtly fall out of alignment so I imagine especially with a bigger setup like that that it gets tricky I don't know which website this is but in general I'd recommends using fewer variations rather than more variations so in particular if you have the same language content for a number of different countries you don't really have anything specifically country dependent on those pages then I'd recommend folding those together and just having one really strong language version rather than having all of the individual country versions obviously for larger websites that's a lot easier said and okay I imagine there are still more questions that got submitted we're way over time now so I'll set up the next batch of hangouts you're welcome to drop things there or if there's something more general that you'd like answered we're doing another set of Q&A videos so for those you essentially just need to tweet the question at Google webmasters or the Google WMC account with the hashtag ask Google webmasters and we'll be picking out a bunch of those questions soon and start recording videos and the aim is to do that more on a regular basis so that it's not just like one-time shot but actually that we do this on a regular basis and these are specifically more like I guess the general questions that are easier to answer where the the question fits into a tweet which are not site-specific and where we can kind of formulate a general answer that would be useful for everyone so you're welcome to do that as well and of course there's also the webmaster help forum where bunch of volunteers spend their time helping out and they have a lot of experience with a lot of these webmaster questions pretty much everything that comes up in the webmaster hangouts they've seen as well so if you drop questions in the forum there that's also a good place to get advice or if you've been following these hangouts for a while and you can probably also help out in those forums and help to answer a lot of the questions that are dropped there too okay so I think with that let's take a break here it's it's been great having you all here thanks for all of the tons of questions that were submitted to sign and I wish you all a great weekend and hopefully we'll see each other again in one of the next hangouts all right bye everyone thanks John bye have a great day thanks Joan bye-bye thank you