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[00:00:22] All right. Uh, welcome everyone to today's Google Search Central SEO office hours hangout. My name is Joe Mueller. I'm a search advocate here at Google in Switzerland and part of what we do are these office hour sessions where people can jump in and ask their questions around the websites and we can try to find some answers. Um, I have a bunch of
[00:00:42] things submitted on YouTube which we can go through, but it also looks like we have a ton of people raising hands. So, let's get started there. Uh, let's see. Isabelle, you're up first. [clears throat] Hello. Good morning, everybody. Uh my question is about the crawling of our website. Um we have different number
[00:01:03] from the crawling of the ser console. Um in our server log for instance we have three times the number of the crowing from Google in our server and in search console we have one of the three bar could be possible maybe we have something wrong or we don't identificate the Google bot because the number are different I I think the numbers would always be different um just because of the the way that uh the on the in search console we report on all crawls that go through the infrastructure of Googlebot uh but that also includes other types of requests.
[00:01:53] So uh for example I think the ads bot also uses the Googlebot infrastructure uh those kind of things and uh they have different user agents. So if you look at your server logs and only look at the Googlebot user agent that we use for web search, those numbers will never match what we show in in but we have more in our server log that in Google search console.
[00:02:18] Okay. If you have more in your server logs, then to me that would sound like either you have multiple sites combined in in the server logs um or you're also counting requests by other people who use the same user agent. Uh so the the user agent isn't something that is locked and only limited to Googlebot.
[00:02:39] Anyone can say like I am Googlebot. uh but even if they're not Googlebot uh so there is is one way to double check that with the IP address and I think we have that in in our help center how to kind of double check that it's really a Google bot okay thank you I I would double check that okay cool uh quar hey John uh I have a question in mind uh we have a website and uh from last 3 to four months uh we have been working on Google web stories.
[00:03:20] Uh it was going very well till last month 5th March actually. We were having some round of 400 to 500 uh realtime users coming from Google discover on our web stories but suddenly we saw a instant drop in our visitors from Google discover and our search console is not even showing any errors. So what
[00:03:48] could be possible reason for that? I I don't think there needs to be any specific reason for for that because especially with discover it's something that we would consider to be additional traffic to a website and it's something that can change very quickly and um anecdotally I've seen that from or I've heard that from from sites in these office hours that sometimes they get a lot of traffic from discover and then suddenly it goes away and then it comes back And uh so it doesn't necessarily mean that you're doing anything technically wrong. It might just be that
[00:04:28] in discover things have slightly changed and then suddenly you get more traffic or suddenly you get less traffic. Uh we do have uh a bunch of policies that apply to content that we show in in Google discover and I would double check those just to make sure that you're not accidentally touching on any of those areas.
[00:04:50] um that that includes things like I I don't know offhand, but uh I I think some something along the lines of like clickbaity content, for example, uh those kind of things. But I I would double check those guidelines to make sure that you're all in line there. But even if everything is in line with the
[00:05:09] guidelines, it can be that suddenly you get a lot of traffic from discover and then suddenly you get a lot a lot less traffic. No, I didn't mean that. Uh, not suddenly we got it. We were having it constantly for almost three to four months from when we started working on web stories.
[00:05:28] 4 to 500 of real time visits we had. We didn't change any part of our content or the uh what we call we didn't try anything new over there. Everything was as we had done before but we saw a instant drop. Yeah. that not even that it got less and less instantly there were no visitors.
[00:05:53] Yeah, that's and an anecdotally that's that's what I hear from people that it it goes from you get a lot of traffic and then suddenly goes to almost nothing. Okay, I sorry I don't have any kind of better tip in in that regard. I I think discover is something that is is worthwhile trying out and seeing what you can do there. But it is something
[00:06:20] because of its nature, it's it's not tied to specific people searching. So it's a lot harder to kind of work on it and have it in a persistent state. Okay, cool. Okay, RTU. Hi, I'm audible to you. I cannot hear you so well, but maybe it will get better. Now, now I'm audible a little bit. Yeah.
[00:06:59] Uh sir I have a question related to uh uh old domain to like uh when we redirect any old domain to new domain and the time uh like uh uh for the backlinks uh the backlinks we are creating for the old domain uh is there they are auditable like uh when we audit when we create uh when it will redirect to new domain after that if will uh audit the old domain backlinks which we created for old domain that will be auditable.
[00:07:37] Um I I think they they would show in search console. I mean in in search console you would see a a sample of the links to your website and if they redirect through an another domain then I think we would still show that in search console. Sometimes I I think we show that in between state that's like you have a link through this other website.
[00:08:02] Okay. Uh in the option like link but after redirection is it possible then we redirect to the new domain like we can view for the old domain also. Sure. Sure. No I mean some sometimes sites change domains. I would not recommend doing that regularly. I I think every domain move that you make it
[00:08:25] it brings challenges and possible problems but uh if if you need to change your domain name that that happens. Yeah. So one more question like uh uh my website uh like uh some uh spammy website are regularly copying our content like uh spammy like which having very low domain authority that type of websites are copy the blog content. So
[00:08:54] we are doing like uh manual uh for red listing those URLs from Google CRP. We are just manually submitting the request to Google by the form you know uh after that uh our URLs are delisting from Google SCRP. Is it the right way to get it from these type of activities or we can go for any alternate option for this like uh uh in further we will not see such type of spammy activities for on our website.
[00:09:30] How how do you mean alternate process? So like very spammy like which is very low authority toxic backlinks. We are getting so many toxic backlinks like most of the websites are copying our content. Our whole content is copying on our website and then we are dlisting for dlisting them from Google SCRP. We are
[00:09:52] submitting the request to Google. Uh then they are manually removing this domain from like Google. So is it the effective way to get rid from these type of activities or we can go for any other alternate option or any paid or free option which is available. You can also so so I I think if if another site is
[00:10:15] copying your copyrighted content then probably the DMCA uh form I I think that that you're using is is the right way to go there. Actually yeah we have taken a plan also earlier but for a limited time because uh plan is very expensive for it. So that's why we are thinking uh we should uh delist the URLs manually. So
[00:10:39] we are thinking if uh we get any other option like for this instead of premium plans I I don't think we have any kind of paid plans or anything like that. Uh so the DMCA process if if that applies to your your case that should be something that that is available for free. You can just use it directly in
[00:11:05] search console or I don't know wherever the form is. Uh so that that might be one approach. The DMCA process is a legal process. Uh and I can't give you legal advice. So you might have to check wi with a lawyer to see if it's appropriate. Uh the other thing that you could do if you wanted to is to use the disavow backlinks tool uh if if you're worried about those links for for the most part if it's a random spammy site.
[00:11:35] I would not worry about it. I would not use a disavow backlinks tool because it's just extra work. There will be no effect of toxic backlink on a website. No, I can't imagine. No. Okay. Uh so one more question. uh like uh a website is going through migration process. So we have uh followed
[00:11:55] checklist like which we should consider before migration process and uh we followed and we worked on it and uh speed update we are worried about that uh certainly like we will get a a traffic loss for the website. Is there any chances uh we'll get a traffic loss? a website will have a traffic loss in
[00:12:17] small amount or like it's always possible. So with with migrations when you're moving from one domain to another it's there's always a period of fluctuation in between and usually if you're following the the guides that we have then it's it's a minimal fluctuation but uh it's it can still happen.
[00:12:41] Okay. So is it enough to uh which checklist we are following like uh which are available in search engine land search engine is it enough for it like uh to get rid from traffic loss like minimal amount of traffic losses. Yeah. Is it enough for it or we should go we we have a a checklist in in the search developer documentation uh for site moves and I I would double check that.
[00:13:07] Okay. Thank you so much sir. Sure. John John, I'm sorry to interrupt, but can I offer RTO another suggestion here about the DMCA and and and much like you, I I'm not offering legal advice, but but there is there is another path, another remedy that you can take, which is um you can find out who the host is. There's a site
[00:13:31] that I believe is called who ish hosting this.com. uh you can find who the host is and they generally have a department that you can reach out to with an email address such as legal at whatever the name is or abuse at. They have these departments and you can reach out to them and say that someone is infringing on your content but you need to give them backup um documentation. Uh and uh generally
[00:13:59] they they will not ignore this. There's a area of law called safe harbor um in which you know that means that hosts can't moderate everything that they're hosting. Um but they if if they're told enough times about infringements and you give them legitimate uh documentation um they're almost bound to take it down.
[00:14:22] The problem is that sometimes becomes a game of whack-a-ole where people change hosts. Um but uh it takes time and eventually these people if they are infringing on your content they'll give up and they'll stop doing it. Uh so thank you so much for the for your response like can you share the link with me on chat box for this like which you share it would be good for me.
[00:14:46] Cool. Yeah that that definitely also makes sense. Um let's see Joseph. Yes. Hello John. Hi. Uh we have a content publishing website since 2009 and uh we experienced experienced a bad migration in 200 in 2020 where we uh encountered a huge drop in organic traffic. So the question here is that uh
[00:15:14] we had a lot of broken links. So we use the 301 redirect to redirect uh these these broken links to the original articles. Uh but what we did in the robots text uh we dis we disallowed these links so that the crawling budget won't be gone on uh crawling these 404 pages. So uh the main thing here uh if we fixed
[00:15:41] all these redirects if we we redirected to the same article with the proper name uh can we remove uh can we remove these links from the robots.ext text and how much time does it take to actually be considered by Google? Um, so if if the page is blocked in the robots's text, we wouldn't be able to see the redirect. So if you set up a
[00:16:05] redirect, you you would need to remove that block in the robots's text. Um with regards to the time that takes I there there is no specific time because we don't crawl all pages with the same speed. Uh so some some pages we may pick up within a few hours and other pages might take several months to be recrolled. Uh so that's I I think kind
[00:16:32] of tricky. The other thing I I think worth mentioning here is if this is a from a migration that is two years back now, then I I don't think you would get much value out of just making those 404 links kind of show content now. I I can't imagine that that would be the reason why why a
[00:16:56] website would be getting significantly less traffic. um mostly because it's it's I mean you unless unless these pages are the the most important pages of your website but then you you would have noticed that uh but if these are just generic pages on a on a bigger website then I I can't imagine that the overall traffic to a website would drop because they were no longer available.
[00:17:26] Okay. Uh another question about the optimal content length on a page. You know, we have encountered many blog posts that talk about uh let's say we need to have uh uh around uh 100 or 1,000 words per page. So what's the optimal uh content length? I don't think there is one. So some
[00:17:48] pages are very short, some pages are very long. It's it kind of depends on on the amount of information that you want to give users. there is this term uh propagating now uh the thin content is it applicable by Google or not? Um usually that applies more to to the overall website. So it's not so much
[00:18:09] that one page doesn't have enough content. It's more that the the website overall is is very light on actual information. Okay. So, I I wouldn't like use the the word count as a way to to recognize that. I I think sometimes the word count is useful for you to look at a larger website overall and to try to find areas where maybe you you could be doing better, but I wouldn't use it as as a metric to guide kind of like the specific things that you do on a website.
[00:18:45] Okay. Okay. Thank you so much. Sure. Uh Rob, hi John. Thanks for the time. Um my question pertains to uh it's a crawling question pertaining to discovered not indexed. Um we run a two-sided marketplace since 2013 that's fairly well established. We have about 70,000 pages and about 70% of those are
[00:19:10] generally in the index and then there's kind of this budget that uh uh crawls the new pages that get created and those we see movement on that so that uh old pages go out, new pages come on. Um at the same time we're also writing blog entries um kind of from our editorial team and to uh kind of get those to the top of the queue we always use this request indexing on those uh so they'll go quicker. we add them to the site map
[00:19:36] as well, but we find uh that we write them and then we want them to get on to the Google as quick as possible. Um, as as we've kind of been growing over the last year and we have more content on our site, we've seen that that sometimes doesn't work as well for the new blog entries and they also sit in this discovered not index queue for a longer time. Is there anything we can do to uh
[00:20:02] like internal links or something? Is it is it content based or do we just have to live with the fact that some of our blogs might not make it into the index? Yeah, I I think overall it's it's kind of normal that we don't index everything on a website. Uh so that can happen to kind of the the entries you have on the site and also the blog posts on the site. It's not tied to specific kind of
[00:20:29] content. Um, I I think using the uh inspector tool to submit them to indexing is is fine. It definitely c doesn't cause any problems. Um, but I would also try to find ways to make those pages kind of as clear as possible that you care about them. Uh so essentially with internal linking is is
[00:20:50] a good way to do that to to really make sure that from your homepage you're saying like here are the five new blog posts and you link to them directly so that it's easy for uh for Googlebot when we crawl and index your homepage to see oh there's something new and it's linked from the homepage so maybe it's important maybe we should go off and and look at it. Okay. So, if it's linked
[00:21:13] from the homepage, it's more likely that Google sees it as important than if we just add it and it kind of gets added on a sub blog page. Yeah. Okay. Definitely. Okay. That helps. Yeah. Making it as obvious as possible for us to to figure out. Okay. To see that. There's also usually if if you have a
[00:21:32] blog section on your site, you also have RSS feeds. And uh if if you have that set up, I would also submit those to Google and in search console. uh just because RSS feeds tend to focus more on the newer content and that kind of helps us to pick those up a little bit faster. So we use them similar to to
[00:21:52] sitemap files but sometimes RSS feeds are are a bit easier for us to pick up. Okay, that's a good hint. I I can implement that on the Google search cons. Cool. Cool. Thanks for your time. Sure. Uh Rohan All right. Um, hey John, thank you so much for taking on my question here. So,
[00:22:17] I'm one of the uh moderators at Reddit and ever since uh GPT3 based AI writing tools started to get advertised. Um, our community is having a debate over whether or not to use them. Although our stance is al mostly against it but we are trying or maybe I should say we are struggling to see what is Google's official position um on the same someone had posted on Reddit um if they should be using these AI content writing tools to which you responded no but you had no um further explanation to it and then you had also posted some cryptic tweets about it so I'm just trying to understand more that How does Google react to websites uh hosting AI written content and uh what is your suggestion for all of us?
[00:23:11] Yeah. So, so for us, these would essentially still fall into the category of automatically generated content, uh, which which is something that we've had in in the web master guidelines since almost the beginning, I think. And, uh, people have been automatically generating content in in lots of different ways. And for us, if you're
[00:23:35] using machine learning tools to kind of generate your content, it's essentially the same as if you're just, I don't know, shuffling words around or looking up synonyms or doing kind of the translation tricks that people used to do. Uh those kind of things. My my suspicion is that maybe the quality of
[00:23:53] content is a little bit better than kind of the the really old school tools, but for us, it's still automatically generated content. And uh that means for us it's still against the web master guidelines. So we would consider that to be spam. Uh so follow up on that. Are you saying
[00:24:10] that Google was able to understand the difference between human and AI content? I I can't claim that. But uh I mean for for us if if we see that something is automatically generated then the the web spam team can definitely take action on that. And I like I I don't know how how the future will evolve there, but I imagine like with any of these other technologies, there will be a little bit of a cat-and- mouse game where sometimes people do something and they get away with it and then the web spam team catches up and kind of solves that issue on a broader scale. Uh but uh from from
[00:24:51] our recommendation, we we still see it as automatically generated content. I think I don't know over time maybe this is something that will evolve in that it will become more of a tool for people kind of kind of like you would use machine translation as a basis for creating a translated version of a website but you still essentially work through it manually and maybe over time these AI tools will evolve in that direction that you use them to kind of be more efficient in your writing or to um make sure that you're writing in a proper way kind of like the the spelling and the grammar checking tools which are also based on machine learning. Um but I
[00:25:34] don't know what what the future brings there. So you're saying currently it's not there yet. I I mean currently it's it's all against the web master guidelines. So from our point of view if we were to run across something like that if the web spam team were to see it they they would see it as spam.
[00:25:55] Got it. Got it. Thank you so much. Sure. Uh all right, Viola. Uh yes. Good morning. Um I would like to ask you uh does using an HML tags such as PAN or class into an H1 uh can affect my website from a SEO point of view? I don't think so. I I mean my my understanding is that we we would still
[00:26:29] see that as a heading and as long as it's a valid heading, we would be able to use that. I don't know from a technically kind of valid HTML point of view if that's still the correct way to do a heading. But from from our point of view, we would probably just see that as a heading.
[00:26:49] Okay. So it's not a problem if I I want to make animation for my H1 I use span class because uh we think that our website uh go down in the ranking for some for this reason and others reality. So the I don't know if maybe it's better to have a clean H1 without anything inside or I I think I I can't imagine that a website would drop in visibility because of that.
[00:27:23] Okay. Yeah. And my second question is uh does a low raising mobile results on Google page speed like LCP FID uh might have affected our website rank after the introduction of the new algorithm last summer uh because we were like the fourth around my city. Okay. If I check a web agency or a keyword that
[00:27:52] we uh so after the introduction of this algorithm and uh going on Google search console we find out that our these parameters like LCP FID pro for mobile has a bad rating like 48 not for desktop that is 90. So it's okay. Uh so could be this the problem of our uh could be it's it's hard to say just based on that. So I I I think the
[00:28:33] there's maybe two things to to watch out for. Uh the the number that you gave me sounds like the page speed insight score that that is generated I think on on desktop and mobile um kind of that number from zero to 100 I think. Yeah. Yeah. Uh we we don't use that in in search for the rankings. uh we use the
[00:28:56] the core web vitals um the where where there is LCP, FID and CLS I think and uh those are based on or or the the metrics that we use are based on what users actually see. Uh so if you go into search console there's the core web vitals report and that should show you the those numbers if it's within good or bad kind of in those ranges. Uh but if I
[00:29:26] go on Google search console on core web vital. Okay. Uh he said to me uh that the datas for from the n last 90 days are not uh enough for this type of uh device. Yeah. Okay. Then in that case it's it's not due to that. So we we have to have enough data that we we can collect from users to be able to understand the status of the core web vital for the site.
[00:30:02] Uh but uh especially for smaller sites, we we might not have enough data and uh then we would not use that as a factor there. So even if the page speed insight score is bad, uh that isn't something that we would use. we would only use it if we really have data from users that tell us that it's actually slow in practice.
[00:30:24] Uh so I I would use that score as a way to kind of prepare for when you have more traffic and have those numbers, but it it wouldn't be the reason why your website would drop. Okay. Uh so we have to find the reason. [laughter] Yeah. In another way. Okay. I understand. Okay. Thank you very much.
[00:30:47] Cool. Sure. Um, let me go through some of the submitted questions and I have more time afterwards to go through like all of the people with the raised hands as well here. Uh, so stick around. Let's see. Um, the first question I have here is, does it make a difference if a navigational link is visible on desktop but hidden on mobile? Uh can eventually
[00:31:10] non-visible navigation links be considered less relevant as visible ones? Uh so I I suspect by hidden on mobile it means it's not removed on mobile but rather just not visible directly and as long as the link is within the HTML of the page for us that's fine. For crawling we can still pass signals to those links. All
[00:31:34] of that is fine. uh if on the other hand the link is not even in the HTML on mobile and we crawled the site with mobile first indexing then we would not see that link at all. Uh so that's I I think the important distinction to to think about there. Uh you can check this in search
[00:31:56] console with the inspect URL tool uh to try to fetch that page and to see if in the HTML the link is actually still there. If the link is there then that should be fine. Uh we have some shortcuts on our website. Uh so these are some German shortcuts like R or UA uh or ZBSP. Oh, it's so awkward to to read these
[00:32:25] German shortcuts in English. Uh is this readable for Google or should we avoid shortcuts uh on our website? Um so from kind of from a practical point of view, if this is something that you're trying to rank for, then I would make it as clear as possible what you're trying to rank for. uh but these are essentially
[00:32:45] just shortcuts that you would use in writing on a normal page and the content that you want to rank for is essentially not the shortcuts but kind of like what's around the shortcuts and from that point of view I I would not worry about this uh if if this is normal language usage then it it is what it is it is what users expect they can read it they can understand it and that's that's essentially fine from our point of Uh we're seeing competitors showing up in search results with aggregate rating and high price low price rich results used on e-commerce product category pages. Uh based on the documentation, it
[00:33:26] looks like this is not an approved use case. So I wanted to check and verify if I'm understanding the documentation correctly and if this is something that we should be working on as well. Um yeah, unfortunately not everyone implements things the way that we have it documented. uh whether that's on
[00:33:44] purpose that they're doing things in ways that we don't want them to do or whether it's accidentally just implemented incorrectly, it's sometimes hard to tell. Uh but if you're looking at the documentation and it's clear to you how you should be doing it, then I would try to do it that way and not uh kind of the way that we we say not to use it. So, especially for category
[00:34:07] pages, I I think our guidance is still that you should not be using uh this kind of structured data there because it's not the same product. It's a bunch of different products. Uh so, I I would try to avoid that. Uh we recently started a chat tool as a help service. The button is is a small
[00:34:28] bubble in the bottom left corner on mobile. Uh it covers a bit of content because the bubble is an overlay. Uh will we have a ranking problem because of the because of a usability problem? Uh should we have an additional close button? Uh the bubble is visible on all pages also when users change pages. Uh
[00:34:47] so I don't know about the usability side. I can't really give you advice there. uh but with regards to uh kind of search's general ranking guidelines there I think there are two aspects that could come into play and it's something where you probably have to make a judgment call on on your side. Uh on the
[00:35:08] one hand there is the inter intrusive interstitial guidelines that we have uh where if you have an interstitial on your pages that is intrusive for users then that's something that we would recommend avoiding. That's a part of the page experience ranking factor and it's something where we we don't have like a fixed number of pixels or anything like that which we would say would be intrusive and my guess is if you have a chat bubble in the corner then that would not be uh considered intrusive by your users. Uh the other aspect is
[00:35:45] around the core web vitals. Uh so in particular I think the the LCP and maybe the content layout shift so the time it takes to load the page and if the content shifts around while that page is loading uh depending on how you have implemented this uh kind of chat bubble in the corner that might be something that would be playing a role and uh that's something which probably you can test where you turn that on and off and you try it out in your browser to see what is the effect there. Uh the effect
[00:36:19] that you see in your browser is kind of a different effect than users might see but it gives you a bit of guidance. Uh so in particular for core web vital we use the the metrics that users see which we called field data in the chrome user experience report and uh if you test it yourself we would consider that to be lab data which might be slightly different than from what an average user would see. Uh primarily this is due to
[00:36:47] maybe the different connections that users have or different devices, the capabilities, how how fast they are, how much RAM they have, uh those kind of differences. But usually if you turn it on and off, you you will quickly see is there an actual difference or not? And if there isn't difference, then you kind
[00:37:05] of have to make a judgment call. Is this something I want to worry about or not? Or maybe it's something that you just track for a while to double check. So those are kind of the the two primary things that come into play. Another one that uh we've seen in the past which is kind of a weird edge case specifically around these uh chat uh things that that sometimes run with with JavaScript in the corner is that uh oftentimes they will use the page title as a way to signal that actually there's a chat message waiting for you. it'll add
[00:37:40] something like a one to the page title. Uh if some chat operator is waiting for you to kind of chat with them essentially and if you use JavaScript to change the page title then that is something that we could pick up when we render the page. And we have seen cases where suddenly all pages of a website have a one attached to the title which comes from one of these chat tools. Uh,
[00:38:05] so that's something to to watch out for and maybe turn off if you have a chance to kind of uh adjust that there. Um, let's see. In search console, we have search appearance filter that shows AMP articles that appear in search. Uh, that's all fine, but the URLs that appear under AMP article filter are non-AMP URLs. The search console show
[00:38:28] the canonical for those URLs or is this a reporting issue? Uh so in general in search console we do try to show the canonical URLs in the performance report. Uh it's not 100% perfect because there are certain kinds of URLs that we we report on slightly differently. Uh but uh we we do try to show for the most
[00:38:49] part the canonical URL. So I would not be surprised if you see the canonical URL in the general performance report on AMP. Um, I believe there's also a separate AMP report which you can double check, but I'm not sure if that's there or not. I don't know. Confused right now. Uh, but uh that that might
[00:39:12] also be one place to check. Uh, but in any case, I I would not see that as kind of a an issue on your side if we're showing the canonical URLs there. That's kind of the the way we we wanted to do that in search console. And again, it's not it's not 100% consistent because some types of search appearances we we show the way that we show them. Uh
[00:39:35] sometimes they also include the the hash in the URL if we're kind of including a a link to a specific section of a page. Um so it's I I would say to a large part canonical, but not 100% sure. Um let's see. Question about crawling. I recently redesigned my website and changed the way I list my blog posts and other pages from pages one, two, three, four to a view more button. H can Google
[00:40:01] still crawl the ones that are not shown on the main blog page? What is the best practice? Um if not, let's say those pages are not important when it comes to search and traffic. Would the whole site as a whole be affected when it comes to how relevant it is for the topic uh for Google?
[00:40:19] Uh so it on on the one hand it depends a bit on how you have that implemented. The a view more button could be implemented as a button that does something with JavaScript. And those kind of buttons we would not be able to crawl through and actually see more content there. On the other hand, you
[00:40:38] could also implement a view more button essentially as a link to kind of page two of those results or from page two to page three. And if it's implemented as a link, we would follow it as a link even if it doesn't have like a label that says page two on it. Uh so that's I I think the first thing to double check is
[00:40:59] it actually something that can be crawled or not. And with regards to kind of like if it can't be crawled uh then usually what would happen here is we would focus primarily on the the blog posts that would be linked directly from those pages. And uh it's it I mean it's something where we probably would keep the old blog posts in our index because we've seen them and index them at some point but we will probably focus on the the ones that are currently there. One
[00:41:31] way you can help to mitigate this is if you cross-link your blog posts as well. Uh so sometimes that is done with category pages or kind of these tag pages that people add. Uh sometimes uh blogs have a mechanism for linking to related blog posts and all of those kind of mechanisms add more internal linking to a site and that make it possible that even if we initially just see the first page of the results from your blog, we would still be able to crawl to the rest of your website.
[00:42:04] And one way you can double check this is to use a local crawler. uh there are various uh thirdparty crawling tools available and you if you crawl your website and you see that oh it only picks up five blog posts and probably like those are the five blog posts that are findable. On the other hand, if it
[00:42:23] goes through those five blog posts and then finds a bunch more and a bunch more then you can be pretty sure that Googlebot will be able to crawl the rest of the site as well. Uh to what degree does Google honor the robots text? I'm working on a new version of my website that's currently blocked with robots file and I intend to use robots text to block indexing of some URLs that are important for usability but not for search engines. Uh
[00:42:49] so I want to understand if that's okay. Uh that's perfectly fine. Uh so when we we recognize disallow entries in a robots's text file, we will absolutely follow those. uh the the only kind of situation I've seen where that did not work is where we were not able to process the robot's text file properly.
[00:43:11] Uh but if we can process the robot's text file properly if it's properly formatted then we will absolutely stick to to that when it comes to crawling. Uh another caveat there is usually we update the robots text files maybe once a day depending on the website. Uh so if you change your robot's text file now it
[00:43:31] might take a day until it takes effect. Uh with regards to blocking crawling so so you mentioned blocking indexing uh but essentially robots text file would block crawling. Uh so if you block crawling of pages that are important for usability but not for search engines usually that's fine. What would happen
[00:43:53] or could happen is that we would index the URL without the content. So if you do a site query for those specific URLs, you would still see it. Uh but if the content is on your crawable pages, then for any normal query that people do when they search for specific term on your pages, we will be able to focus on the pages that are actually indexed and crawled and show those in the search results.
[00:44:19] So from from that point of view, that's all fine. Um let's see. uh for example, fireworks is one of the products and services that Google considers dangerous and that you should avoid in your ads and destinations. Do such terms also affect the ranking of business website that legally offers such profits? Uh so
[00:44:43] from from a Google search point of view, I'm not aware of kind of a list of products that we would consider to be problematic. Uh I I do believe on the Google ads side there there are certain products where uh the ads team for whatever policy reason doesn't want to allow advertising for but that's completely separate from Google search.
[00:45:06] And from at least from from what I'm aware of uh if you mention these things on your website they can appear in the normal search results. There's nothing really blocking that. And you you definitely see that if you just try to search for fireworks. you will find sites that sell you fireworks.
[00:45:24] Um, let's see. We're about to launch a new e-commerce site and we're debating on how many pages we should initially go live with. Uh, since it's a new domain, I'm worried a bit that Google will only index a small portion of the website at first. What would be the press best approach here? Uh, so I think we have
[00:45:43] this covered in our e-commerce documentation. Actually, we looked at this uh with with a variety of teams and I I think everyone had like a different idea of which which approach to take and I think we have maybe three options or so covered in the documentation. So I I would double check that. It depends a
[00:46:04] little bit on what you want to achieve and how that that should happen. Uh, also with regards to e-commerce sites, if you're trying to get these products into Google Merchant Center for Google Google Shopping, I I think it's still called Google Shopping. Uh, then you might have different considerations than
[00:46:25] if you're just launching a website on its own. Uh, but the the documentation that we have for e-commerce sites, I would definitely check that out. Um, let's see. There's just one question I want to grab quickly before I switch over to to you folks again because like you're so patient. Thank you. Um and
[00:46:46] it's a long question but I'll just take the first part uh to make it even easier. So it it's a food blogger and the first question is Google said uh that there's a maximum of 16 words uh that you can use in your alt text and uh the question is kind of like does Google read the rest of my alt text and like what does this mean for usability and uh I I think the the important part here is we don't have any guidelines with regards to how long your alt text can be. Uh so from a Google search point of
[00:47:19] view, you can put a lot of things in in the alt text for an image if that's relevant for that particular image. Uh when it comes to the alt text, we primarily use that to better understand the image. Uh so if someone is searching for I don't know in Google images for something that kind of matches the alt text, then we can use that to understand that your image is relevant for that alt text on that specific page. That's kind
[00:47:44] of the primary use case of the alt text. We do also use the alt text as a part of the page, but to to me that's usually something that is already visible on the page anyway. So it's less something that is critical to the page itself. Uh so I would really use it as something that applies to the image and I would use it for usability reasons and for Google images to better understand that specific image.
[00:48:11] And I I think what might also be worth mentioning is when it comes to Google images, you don't necessarily need to describe exactly what is in the image, but rather kind of like what this image means for your particular page. Uh so if you have a picture of a beach, you could use an alt text and say, "Oh, this is a beach." But you could also say, "This is the beach in front of our hotel." Or, "Uh, this is the beach that we took a photo of when we were doing a chemical cleanup." And kind of those intents are very different and people would be searching in different ways in Google images to find more information there and kind of giving that extra content uh context al always makes sense in in my opinion.
[00:48:56] Okay. Um lots of questions left. I'll try to add some comments uh as replies there as well. Uh but maybe we'll switch over to some live questions and I have a bit more time afterwards too if any of you want to stick around. Uh, let's see. Sean, I think you're up next. Uh, hi John.
[00:49:13] Hi. Hi. I have a question that will be a little bit similar to the the one you answered earlier, but it's regarding the HTML and JavaScript, the classic one. And uh I have let's say I have an HTML uh with uh there are some parts which is hidden by CSS display norm. And when a user first land on the page that is
[00:49:36] hidden for some reason UI reason to simplify the UI and then that that hidden contents can be only seen when a user click the button and then the JavaScript JavaScript runs Jav JavaScript click event runs and JavaScript change the status of CSS and then user see the contents. So my
[00:49:57] question is it looks a little bit gray for me because that uh since the Google can never run any JavaScript events. So I wonder if the contents which as is hidden by CSS when a user first land on a page can be the target of the Google evaluation or not. It it can still be indexed. So that's
[00:50:20] something if if it's in the HTML itself in in the DOM when the page is loaded then we can use that for indexing. Uh if it's something that needs a JavaScript event to then fetch something from the server and then display that then that's not something that we would recognize. But if it's in the DOM, if it's in the
[00:50:40] HTML and it just goes from being uh hidden to visible that's that's perfectly fine. Okay. So is is a variation would be the same as the one that is not hidden or probably I mean it's always hard to compare like how things will rank in in uh kind of in in the end but my my assumption is that it would be pretty much the same. I think it's also
[00:51:09] something from a user point of view you might want to watch out for and that's more kind of like when someone goes to your web page and uh after it's been shown in search and that is essentially that if you're promising the user something it's it's a good idea to show it show the user that when they go to your web page. Uh, so we we apply that
[00:51:33] when it comes to things like intrusive interstitials or kind of like too many ads on a page. If they go to your page, they should be able to find what they were looking for. And if this is additional content that you're providing, which is not kind of the primary reason why they're going to your page, then that's that's fine. That's
[00:51:51] kind of like a usability way to give more functionality to a page. However, if the primary content is blocked like this, then that's something where I would expect the users to be a little bit unhappy if they go there and they don't realize, oh, this is how I get that piece of information.
[00:52:09] Uhhuh. Okay. So what what would the case that only when we see the contents to the user from the PC and never can seeing the contents from the smartphone um with actually the the element itself is embedded on HTML but hidden and user can never have a chance to undo the hidden. I I don't think we we would separate
[00:52:36] that out because some sometimes that's also just a a usability uh mechanism that that sites use where uh you have essentially a responsive design and within the responsive design setup for certain screen sizes you you hide something like the sidebar and from our point of view that's fine.
[00:53:02] Okay. Thank you. Sure. Cool. Okay. Uh Joy, hi John, I have two questions. Hopefully we won't take up too much time. So the first is does a portion of content It's really hard to hear you. Sorry. Uh can you perhaps speak closer to your microphone? Is that better? Yes. Perfect. Sorry about that. I have two questions
[00:53:27] that I hope won't take too much time. Um, so does the portion of content created by a publisher matter? And I mean that in the sense of affiliate or maybe even sponsored content. Um context is there's a Digi Day newsletter that went out today that mentioned that publishers were concerned that if you have let's say 40% of your traffic or content as commerce or affiliate your website will become or considered by Google a deals website and then your authority may be um dinged a little bit.
[00:54:00] Is there such a thing that's happening in the ranking systems algorithmically? I I don't think we we would have any threshold like that. Um partially because it's it's really hard to determine a threshold like that. You can't for example just take the number of pages and say this is this type of website because it has 50% pages like that. Uh because the pages can be
[00:54:28] visible in very different ways. Some sometimes you have a lot of pages that nobody sees and uh it it wouldn't make sense to judge a website based on something that essentially doesn't get shown to users. And I guess this may be like a part B to that. um how much does it matter if a
[00:54:49] publisher is outsourcing content um for scalability reasons um versus having content created by staff orers staff writers? Um I I I don't think for for the most part that we would differentiate. It's more about the quality of the content overall. Uh so that's something where if you outsource the content and you get good content back then you publish that good content. Uh so from from that point
[00:55:25] of view I I wouldn't say that outsource content versus in-house content is kind of different by definition when when it comes to the overall quality. How would you even know? I don't know. Yeah, I think there are ways that Google would pick that up, especially if you label that. I think that's pretty easy to pick
[00:55:53] up. I I I contest that if you you're talking about Google understanding an employment contract at that point. If I've got a staff member sitting in my office full-time or one sitting sitting at home being paid by the hour, I don't see how you'd ever know who's written anything. Fair enough.
[00:56:15] I could be wrong. I have been before. [laughter] I I I don't think Yeah, I I mean it it would be different if you're aggregating content from other sites. That's something which which we could pick up on. But if it's really just someone inhouse or someone from an agency writing the content for you, it's it's the content that you're publishing.
[00:56:44] Okay. All right. Thank you. Appreciate it. Cool. Okay. Uh let me take a break here and pause the recording. It's it's been good having you all here. Thank you all for joining. Thanks for submitting so many questions. I have a bit more time afterwards so we can go through the millions of people with raised hands as well. Um and we we can see what what we
[00:57:05] end up with. Uh thanks for joining. If you're watching this on YouTube, you're welcome to join one of the next office hour hangouts. Uh we do these about weekly. Usually I announce them a couple days ahead of time in the community section. You can drop your questions there or you can watch out for the link and join us live if you'd like to. All
[00:57:24] right. And with that, let me find the button to pause.
