English Google SEO office-hours from September 2022
LIZZI SASSMAN: Hello,
hello and welcome to a very special edition
of SEO Office Hours. My name is Lizzi, and I'm
here to answer some questions with you today. JOHN MUELLER: Hi, everyone. John Mueller here. We're all on the Google Search
Relations team, based here in Switzerland. Like Lizzi mentioned, we're
doing this Office Hours session a bit differently. The goal of this
format is to make it a bit easier for
everyone to participate, including on our side.
We'd like to experiment with
the format a little bit, so we may try
variations over time. Also, that means that
the processing here is kept to a minimum. So at least, in
the beginning, it won't be as polished as the
other content on this channel. We'll work on that once
things have settled down a little bit more. And now let's continue
with your questions. MARTIN SPLITT: Where is it? Where is it? Where is it? Where is it? Where is it? Where is it? It's here.
JOHN MUELLER: Hold
on a second, Martin. You're not on mute. First up is Lizzi. LIZZI SASSMAN: So the first
question that we've got here is from Dimo, a site that
connects seekers and providers of household related services. Matching of listings
is based on zip code, but our users come
from all over Germany. The best value for users
is to get local matches. Is there some kind
of schema markup code to tell Google algorithm show
my site also in the Local Pack. Please note we do not have local
businesses and cannot utilize the local business markup code. The site is– and I'm
going to redact that. Yes, so Dimo– as you
noted, local business markup is for businesses with
physical locations. And that means that there's
typically one physical location in the world for that place. So it should only
show up for that city. And your other question,
currently, there's no rich result feature
for online services only that you could use
structured data for, but you can claim your business
profile with Google Business Profile manager and specify
a service area there.
So I think that that could help. JOHN MUELLER: And now's
your chance, Martin. Go for it. MARTIN SPLITT: Indra asks,
Google Search Console shows excellent core web vital
scores for our site, but I understand that it only
shows details of Chrome users. A majority of our users
browse using Safari. Is there a way to measure page
experience or the core web vitals on Safari browsers,
and is there a way to improve the experience? Well, you can't really use
Google Search Console for this, but you can definitely
measure these things yourself with the browser developer
tools in a Safari browser and maybe ask around if you
have any data from Safari users through analytics, for instance. There's nothing here that we can
do this for the page experience or Search Console's
page experience resource because the data
is just not available. JOHN MUELLER: For the next
question, I'll paraphrase. How can I best switch from
one domain to a new one? Should I clone all the content
or just use 80% of the content? What is the fastest
way to tell Google that they're both my sites? We call this process
a site migration.
It's fairly well
documented, so I would look up the details
in our documentation. To simplify and leave
out a lot of details, ideally, you'd move the
whole website, 1 to 1, to the new domain name and
use permanent 301 redirects from the old domain
to the new one. This is the easiest for
our system to process. We can transfer
everything directly. If you do other things like
removing content, changing the page URLs, restructuring,
or using a different design on the new domain, that
all adds complexity and generally makes the
process a little bit slower. That said, with redirect,
users will reach your new site, regardless of whether they use
the old domain or the new one. LIZZI SASSMAN: And our next
question is from IndeQuest1. Do you support the
use and the full range of schema.org
entities when trying to understand the content
of a page, outside of use cases such
as rich snippets? Can you talk about
any limitations that might exist that might be
relevant for developers looking to make a deeper
use of the standard? So to answer your
question, no, Google does not support all of the
schema.org entities that are available on schema.org.
We have the search gallery which
provides a full list of what we do support for rich
snippets, like you mentioned, in Google Search results. But not all of those
things are visual. We do talk about
certain properties that might be more
metadata-like, that aren't necessarily
visible as a rich result. And that still helps
Google to understand things, like authors or
other metadata information about a page. So we are leveraging
that kind of thing. JOHN MUELLER: And
next up, we have Gary. Hey, Gary.
Which questions
did you pick out? GARY ILLYES: Anton Littau is
asking, in Search Console, I get the message "sitemap
could not be read" in the sitemap report. No other information
is provided. What could be the reason that
the sitemap cannot be read by the Googlebot? Good question. The "sitemap could not be
read" message in Search Console may be caused by a number
of issues, some of them technical, some of them
related to content quality of the site itself. Rarely, it may also be related
to the hosting service, specifically if you are
hosting on a free domain or subdomain of your
hoster, and the hoster is overrun by spam sites
that may also cause issues with fetching sitemaps. LIZZI SASSMAN: Our next
question is from Nicholas. Hi, John. Well, I'm not John. But anyway, hi, Nicholas. We would like to
know how algorithms treat cartoon illustrations. We've got guides and tips that
are illustrated on our website, and they're not performing
well in the SERP.
We tried to be unique,
using some types of illustrations and persona
to make our readers happy. Do you think we did
not do it right? I don't know because
I don't think I've ever seen your
cartoons, but I can speak to the how
to improve your cartoon illustrations in SERP. So our recommendation
would be to add text to the page to
introduce the cartoons, plus alt text for
each of the images. Think about what people will be
searching for in Google Images to find your content. And use those kinds
of descriptive words versus just saying the
title of your cartoon. Hope that helps. GARY ILLYES: Chibuzor
Lawrence is asking, does posting one content
daily increase rankings? No, posting daily or at
any specific frequency, for that matter, doesn't
help with ranking better in Google Search results.
However, the more pages you
have in the Google index, the more your content may
show up in Search results. LIZZI SASSMAN: OK, and the
next question is from Suresh. About the helpful content
update that only 10% write quality content,
and the rest, 90%, don't right quality
content, lengthy content– but how should they
write quality content? Does Google agree with
the word count or not? Well, nope, content
can still be helpful whether it's short or long. It just depends on
the context and what that person is looking for. It doesn't matter how many
words, if it's 500, 1,000. If it's answering the user
intent, then it's fine. It can be helpful. These are not synonymous things. JOHN MUELLER: I'll paraphrase
the next question, hopefully, correctly.
In short, when using words
from a page title in the URL, should I include
stopper words too? For example, should
I call a page whyistheskyblue.HTML
or whyskyblue.HTML? Well, thanks for asking. Words in URLs only play a
tiny role for Google Search. I would recommend
not overthinking it. Use the URLs that
can last over time, avoid changing them
too often, and try to make them useful for users. Whether you include stop
words in them or not or decide to use numeric IDs,
that's totally up to you. GARY ILLYES: Sanjay
Sanwal is asking, does different bots type, image,
and desktop share crawl budget? And what about different hosts? Fantastic question.
The short answer is, yes,
Googlebots and its friends share a single crawl budget. What this means to your
site is that if you have lots of
images, for example, Googlebot Images may use
up some of the crawl budget that otherwise could have
been used by Googlebot. In reality, this is not a
concern for the vast majority of the sites. So unless you have millions
of pages and images or video, I wouldn't worry about it.
It's worth noting that
crawl budget is per host. So, for example, if you
have subdomain.example.com, and you have other
subdomain.example.com, they have different
crawl budgets. JOHN MUELLER:
Christopher asks, we've sold the German subdirectory of
our website to another company. They request us to 301
redirect the subdirectory to their new German site. Would you advise against it? Would it hurt us? Well, on the one
hand, it all feels kind of weird to sell
just one language version of a website
to someone else. On the other hand, why not? I don't see any problems
from redirecting from there to a different website. The only thing I would watch
out for, for security reasons, is that you avoid creating
so-called open redirects, where any URL from there is redirected
to an unknown third party.
Otherwise, that sounds fine. LIZZI SASSMAN: Sam
Gooch is asking, I'm experimenting with a new
learning video, rich result, and can see it's being picked
up in Google Search Console. Can I expect to see
clicks and impressions from this in the search
appearance filter as we can see with some
other rich results? Well, to answer this
question specifically, there's no guaranteed
time that you'll be able to see a specific
rich result in Google Search after adding structured data. But I think what you're
asking about here is for a specific thing to
be added to Search Console, and we'll have to check with the
team on the timeline for that. And we don't pre-announce
when certain things will be added to Search Console.
But you can check the
rich result status report for learning video and
make sure that you're adding all of the
right properties and that it's valid and ready
to go for Google to understand what it needs in order to
generate a rich result. Hope that helps. JOHN MUELLER:
Roberto asks, we're planning to share the
same backend and front end for our two brands. We're ranking quite well
with both of them in Google. How big is the risk
of penalizing action if we use the same HTML
structure, same components, layout, and same look and feel
between the different brands? What would be different are
the logos, fonts, and colors.
Or would you suggest migrating
to the same front end but keeping the different
experience between the two brands? Well, this is a great question. Thanks for submitting it. First off, there's no penalty
or web spam manual action for having two almost
identical websites. That said, if the URLs
and the page content is the same across
these two websites, then what can happen for
identical pages is that our systems may pick one of
the pages as a canonical page. This means we would focus our
crawling, indexing, and ranking on that canonical page. For pages that aren't
identical, we generally index both of them.
For example, if you have the
same document on both websites, we'd pick one and only
show that one in Search. In practice, that's often fine. If you need both pages
to be shown in Search, just make sure they're
significantly different, not just with a modified
logo or color scheme. MARTIN SPLITT: Anna
Giaquinto asks, JavaScript SEO, what to avoid
along with JavaScript links? Well, the thing with
links is that you want to have a proper
link, so avoid anything that isn't a proper link. What is a proper link? Most importantly,
it's an A HTML tag that has an href that lists a
URL that is resolvable, so not like a JavaScript colon URL. And that's pretty much it. If you want to learn more on
JavaScript specific things for Search, you can go to the
JavaScript beginner's guide on developers.google.com/search
and see all the things that you might want to look out for.
LIZZI SASSMAN: Our next
question is from Sakshi Singh. Let's say I research
on a keyword which has no volume or
keyword density, but we are appearing for those
keywords on the first page. Should we target that keyword? Well, Sakshi, you can
optimize for whatever keywords you want it,
and it's not always about the keywords that
have the most volume. I would think about how
people should find your page and target those keywords. GARY ILLYES: Kim
Onasile is asking, hello, you previously advised
that there are no SEO benefits to audio versions
of text content and that audio specific
content doesn't rank separately like video content.
However, given you
also said it might be that there are
indirect effects, like if users find
this page more useful, and they recommend it
more, that's something that could have an effect. Will audio content be
given more priority and independent ranking
following the helpful content algorithm update? This is an interesting question. And ignoring the helpful
content algorithm update part, no, audio
content, on its own, doesn't play a role in
ranking of text results. LIZZI SASSMAN: Our next question
is from JohnMu on Twitter. He's asking, what is the
answer to life, really? Well, and that one's easy, John. It's the number 42. I thought you already knew that. MARTIN SPLITT:
Someone asked, is it OK to fetch meta contents
through JavaScript? I think that means is
it OK to update meta tag data with JavaScript? While that is possible to do,
it is best to not do that.
It may give Google
Search mixed signals, and some features may
not pick up the changes. Like, some specific
search result type might not work the
way you expect it. Or it might have
incorrect information, or it might miss something. So I would suggest
not to do that. GARY ILLYES: Anonymous is
asking, both of my websites have been hit by different
updates, around 90% drops, and are suffering
from some type of flag that is suppressing our sites until
the soft penalty is lifted. Or is there even a soft penalty? Good question. No, the named updates that we
publish on the Rankings Updates page on Search Central are not
penalties in any shape or form. They are adjustments to
our ranking algorithms so they surface even higher
quality and more relevant results to Search users. If your site has dropped in
rankings after an update, follow our general
guidelines for content, take a look at how you could
improve your site as a whole, both from content and user
experience perspective, and you may be able to
increase your rankings again.
JOHN MUELLER: Ayon
asks, when would be the next possible update
for the Search results? Well, on our How
Search Works site, we mentioned that we did
over 4,000 updates in 2021. That's a lot of updates. Personally, I think
it's critical to keep working on things that
a lot of people use. Our users and your users
expect to find things that they consider to
be useful and relevant. And what that means
can change over time. Many of these changes tend to be
smaller and are not announced. The bigger ones, and
especially the ones which you, as a site
owner, can work on are announced and listed
in our documentation. So in short, expect us to
keep working on our systems, just like you, hopefully,
keep working on yours. LIZZI SASSMAN: And our next
question is from Darius. Hi, Darius. So Darius is asking, does
having star aggregated ranking on recipes improve its position? I think what Darius
is asking about is the stars that
show up for recipes and with structured
data and whether or not that has an effect on ranking. So while the stars are more
visual and eye catching, structured data in and of
itself is not a ranking signal.
And it isn't guaranteed that
these rich results will show up all the time. The Google algorithm
looks at many things when it's creating what
it thinks is the best Search experience for someone. And that can depend
on a lot of things, like the location,
language, and device type. JOHN MUELLER: Christian asks,
I have set the rel=canonical together with a
noindex meta tag. When Google does not
accept a canonical at all, all internal links are dropped. When I don't set
a rel=canonical, then I can see the internal
links in search console in the links report. Is this normal? Well, this is a complex
question since it mixes somewhat unrelated things. A noindex says to
drop everything, and the rel=canonical hints that
everything should be forwarded. So what does using both mean? Well, it's
essentially undefined. Our systems will try to
make do the best they can in a conflicting case like
this, but a specific outcome is not guaranteed. If that's fine with
you, for example, if you need to use this setup
for other search engines, then that's fine with us too.
If you want something
specific to happen, then be as clear as possible
for all search engines. LIZZI SASSMAN: And our next
question is from Thijs. I'm not sure if I'm
saying that right– Thijs. If a video is indexed in
the video indexing report, is it still worth adding
the video structured data on that page and why? Well, yes. Just because something's
indexed doesn't mean that there's
not opportunity to improve how it appears. Structured data helps
Google understand more about your video,
like what it's about, the title, interaction
statistics, that kind of stuff. And adding structured
data can make your videos eligible for
other video features, like key moments. So it's not just, oh, get your
video indexed, and that's it. There are other
things that you can do to improve how your
content appears on Google.
MARTIN SPLITT: Tamás asks,
can I cloak a list with lots of products to Googlebot and
show users a Load More button? I think this is not
cloaking, as what users see when they click
on the Search result roughly matches
what Googlebot sees. And if you have a
Load More button, users will click that if
they don't see the product they are expecting there. So I don't think
this is cloaking, and that's a solution
that I think works from a crawling point of view.
JOHN MUELLER: And that
was it for this episode. I hope you found the
questions and answers useful. If there's anything
you submitted which didn't get
covered here, I'd recommend posting in the
Search Central Help Community. There are lots of
passionate experts active there, who can often help
you to narrow things down. Let us know on Twitter
how you find this. We hope to line up more
of these for the future. In the meantime, may
your site's traffic go up and your crawl errors go down. Catch you next time for more..
