Tons and tons of valuable insight from the April 16, 2021 episode of Google’s Office Hours Hangout. Marie tweeted out a bunch of quotes this week covering an array of topics such as Passage-based Ranking, ranking with expired domains, handling unwanted redirects pointing to your site, how the mobile experience will affect your CWV score, and lots more.

We have the good stuff ready to go for our paid subscribers and we have included the April 16th full transcription at the bottom.

You can click the time before the transcription blurb to be taken to that question/answer. Anything marked with *** is something that was inaudible in the video, and unfortunately not transcribable.

Hangout Highlights

The product review update is geared towards sites with significant review-based content that also have other content.

A reminder that the product review update is geared towards websites that have a “significant amount of review based content, and also have other content.”

I’ve seen a lot of sites with declines around the same time that have almost no review content.
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— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) April 23, 2021

Q – For the new product review update, a lot of the websites that does cover product reviews also cover deals on specific days. Do we anticipate that the algorithm will affect deals specific posts? Think of Amazon Prime day or something like that?

22:30

“I don’t know, it’s hard to say. I think the change is primarily based on really kind of review-based websites and all of the websites that have a significant amount of review-based content and also have other content. It’s sometimes tricky to say in advance exactly how that will apply there.”

 

Even if you want one important page to rank, it’s worthwhile to optimize your whole website.

“If you care about one particular page in your website then you should make sure that it’s like the rest of your website that’s associated with that page is also improved as much as possible.”
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— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) April 23, 2021

23:32

“In general, we do look primarily at the page when it comes to ranking but it’s always embedded within the context of your whole website. That’s something where I would say it’s worthwhile to improve your website overall so that we actually understand a lot better how this particular page is really important and what the value of that particular page is. In particular, things like internal linking, kind of understanding of the headings, and the content of the pages, all of that helps us even if it’s outside of just that one page that you care about. That’s something where I would say if you care about one particular page in your website then you should make sure that it’s like the rest of your website that’s associated with that page is also kind of improved as much as possible.”

 

John says Google is good at ignoring expired domains used to rank other sites.

Oh, this question always stirs up controversy. Do expired domains still work to rank a site today? John says Google’s really good at figuring that kind of thing out.
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— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) April 23, 2021

Q – One of our competitors is using redirected expired domains and they were not on the last 50 rankings. And suddenly they are ranking on the first page, on the first SERP ranking. Does Google ignore the redirected expired domain or push down the website when they find the use of redirect expand domain? How much time does Google take to find that out?

25:04

“I think this is a tactic that is as ancient as the web. You buy some old expired website and then you redirect it to your website, and we have a lot of practice with it. It’s something where sometimes it feels like sites are getting away with it or seeing some value out of it, but essentially from our algorithm’s point of view, we do try to recognize this and work with it appropriately. It’s not something that I would recommend doing. I think from a business point of view, sometimes it makes sense to buy an existing website and say I will kind of like a business, work together, and have a larger client base, something like that. But it’s very different from buying an expired domain name and just redirecting it to your website and hoping that something comes out of it. It’s something where if your competitor is ranking well, then I wouldn’t necessarily assume that it’s because of these expired domains.”

Reply: So Google does ignore that? Or does it push down the rankings if they found it?

26:15 

“For the most part we would ignore that. That’s kind of the default approach that I see from our side is that when we can recognize that something kind of sneaky is being done and if we can ignore it then we’ll try to ignore it. If there are situations where it’s built into the website, the sneakiness, that we can’t just ignore that one part then it’s possible that our algorithms will say ‘oh we don’t know how to treat this website anymore we should be more careful.’”

 

No need to worry about unwanted redirects pointing to your site, unless you have a manual action.

Regarding disavowing links that redirect to your site:
“If you don’t have a manual action, then I wouldn’t look into all of the urls that are redirecting to your site.” 🤔
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— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) April 23, 2021

27:21

“I would focus on the links that you see in Search Console. With regards to redirected pages, we don’t see a redirect the same as a link. With regards to what for us is a link is essentially a kind of a connection between two canonical pages, and if you’re redirecting one page to a different page then the canonical will be either the destination or the source page there. If from there you have a link to one of your websites then essentially that link is between those two canonical versions. From that point of view, if you’re worried about individual links, I would look at what we show in Search Console because in Search Console we show the destination and the source of those links. And that’s what we would take into account and that’s what you can use for the disavow tool. I think for the most part if you’re looking at it on a per url basis like this then probably you’re looking at it in too much detail and probably, it’s not something that you need to change unless you have a manual action. If you don’t have a manual action, then I wouldn’t look into all of the urls that are redirecting to your site and try to tweak things there. If you do have a manual action then obviously you want to make sure that things are as clean as possible so that you can get out of that manual action.

 

If your setup is causing massive numbers of domains redirecting to your site, you can stop the flow of PageRank.

Regarding disavowing links that redirect to your site:
“If you don’t have a manual action, then I wouldn’t look into all of the urls that are redirecting to your site.” 🤔
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— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) April 23, 2021

29:45

“Try to find an approach that works outside of the disavow tool and handle it in that way. For example, what you can do is set up a separate site that works kind of as a jumping place where all of these domains are redirecting to that particular site and that particular site then redirects to your primary site. Then you can use the robots.txt to block crawling of that kind of site or that page that’s in between. Essentially you have all of these domains that you’re selling and they redirect to one central location, that location is blocked by robots.txt so Googlebot doesn’t see what happens there and from there you redirect to your normal pages. So users when they go to those other domains they see the redirect normally, but Googlebot essentially sees everything going to one particular place and then it gets lost. That way you’re kind of taking care that nothing from those links is affecting your normal website. It sounds like something kind of sneaky to do but essentially, in a case like this where you have a lot of redirects going to your pages and you want to make sure that they don’t negatively or positively affect your website, then having this kind of a robotic jumping board in between essentially solves the problem for you”.

 

John says it remains important to optimize your entire page even with Passage-based Ranking.

With Passage Based Ranking, it’s still important to optimize a page as a whole.
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— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) April 26, 2021

40:26

“I would still focus on individual pages. I think the passage ranking part is more for if you’re in a situation where you have really long pages then it’s easier for Google to recognize that this particular part of a web page is important and to rank that appropriately. I wouldn’t see it as something where you should go off and try to optimize individual parts of a page but rather you should try to optimize the whole page overall. With regards to passage ranking and the overall ranking of a website, I think there’s always some overlap in the sense of if you have a website that has a lot of really long pages and maybe it’s easier for us to recognize what those pages are about. If you’re already focusing very much on SEO then you might also say, well instead of hoping that Google figures out what these individual parts of those pages are about, maybe I should just split those pages into separate pages and work on them individually. That’s of course always an option as well.”

 

Clarification on properly handling the usage of reviews on your site that were originally posted externally.

With Passage Based Ranking, it’s still important to optimize a page as a whole.
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— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) April 26, 2021

Q – We’re using an approved third party to collect our service and product reviews and these are displayed on our website using a widget, but the data is actually held against our listing on the review site itself. How would Google feel if we copied these reviews and display them on our web pages, as opposed to just using the widget to display them? 

44:13

“I think there are two aspects there. On the one hand, there’s the whole aspect “are you allowed to do this with your service provider or not?”. I don’t know how those things are handled. The other aspect is the structured data side on Google. From Google’s point of view, you can include these reviews on your pages if you essentially treat them more as testimonials rather than reviews. With regards to structured data on the pages, you can only use this review structured data on your site in a case like this, if you’re collecting the reviews yourself if it’s not something where you’re taking reviews from someone else’s site and copying them to your site. Those are kind of the aspects there. If you want to copy and paste these reviews and you’re allowed to do so, then just make sure that you’re not using the review structured data for that.”

 

Your mobile experience will dictate your Core Web Vitals ranking.

With Passage Based Ranking, it’s still important to optimize a page as a whole.
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— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) April 26, 2021

45:28 

“At the moment the plan is only to use the mobile user experience. So in the desktop search results, we plan not to use core web vitals with regards to ranking, at least for the moment. In the mobile search results we take into account the mobile Core Web Vitals of a page, that’s why  in search console we also focus more on the mobile side of things with regards to the core web vitals. The other factors that are used for the page experience ranking element, they still apply to both desktop and mobile. In particular, HTTPS, safe browsing side, all of these other factors that are about the pages themselves they apply for both desktop and mobile.”

 

Hon-code badges (or seals) aren’t considered a solid trust factor in Google’s assessment of trust.

With Passage Based Ranking, it’s still important to optimize a page as a whole.
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— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) April 26, 2021

46:25 

“I would focus on what actually provides authenticity to users where users actually feel trust about a website that they’re looking at. Obviously, if there’s some specific qualifications that you have, I think it makes sense to highlight that on a page but just taking random seals and copying and pasting them on a website, I don’t think that really impresses users and definitely doesn’t impress Googlebot. That’s something where I would focus more on what is actually acceptable by users and what makes sense there.”

 

Site links appearing in the SERPs are algorithmic and can’t be changed.

Site Links are not something you can make appear or change on your own.
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— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) April 26, 2021

51:10
“Site links are something that happens algorithmically, it’s not based on any particular markup on a web page. For the most part, it’s not something that you can explicitly target to try to make it appear. It’s something where if we recognize that there’s a need for the user when they search in this particular way to show them more results from a website then we’ll show site links but it’s not something that you can just tweak on your website and we would show it. I wouldn’t necessarily see it as something that you would be able to optimize for. I think if we do show side links for a particular page then that’s something where you can think about, are these titles okay? Is the right selection okay? But if we’re not showing site links for a website, or for individual queries, then I wouldn’t focus so much on cycling because it’s really not something that you can control like that.”

 

Here are some other Q&As from the help hangout that Marie didn’t tweet out but felt were valuable to note:

Good question about categorization and pagination on a large website.

Q – We have about 500 pages plus/minus and we have about 550,000 words, so the crawl budget is a good question when it comes to our website. But the biggest question so far that I had is what about the pagination of, let’s say, the blog articles and other kinds of articles. So let’s say the tags categories and pagination. What does Google think about them? Should they be no index, should they be nofollow, what kind of text should they contain? I couldn’t find a trustworthy source that says ‘yeah, this should be exactly how you want to have them’, because at the end of the day the user wants to see them but does the user actually want to see duplicate content on the search results?

13:13

“Good question. So what I try to differentiate with regards to pagination is why you’re doing this, the pagination part. In particular, is it that you’re splitting content up into multiple pieces and kind of paginating a very long article and splitting it into parts one, parts two, parts three? Or is it more a matter of you have links to individual pages that you would like to have found. For example, if you have an e-commerce site and you look at a category page, then it’s not so much that there’s any content that is unique on page two or page three but there are links to other products which are there. So those are kind of the two main differentiations that I have there. And when it comes to content, if you’re splitting the content up across multiple pages then of course you want to make sure that that is indexable so do whatever you need to do to make sure that those pages are findable, that you have links to kind of part two, part three, part four within your website, that those pages are also indexable, that they don’t have a canonical pointing to another page, for example, but rather that they’re easily findable and indexable. So if it comes to content that is split up, make sure it’s absolutely indexable. When it comes to essentially just a matter of finding links to other pieces of content then I think it’s something which you could argue both ways in terms of, with a lot of websites, the content is so well cross-linked that we don’t necessarily need to see page five of a category page. So maybe you’ll say page five of the category pages should be no indexed or you can kind of use the rel canonical pointing back to the first page of the set. Those are all kinds of things that you can do to reduce the amount of pages that need to be crawled from a website. So that’s kind of the thinking there. With regards to crawl budget, I would really only look at this if you’re in a situation where you have hundreds of thousands or millions of pages and then it’s more a matter of crawl budget where we say ‘well we’re running out of time, we can’t actually crawl everything here’. If you’re in the order of thousands or tens of thousands of pages on a website, then from our point of view we can deal with that. It’s a lot, but it’s not an excessive amount and if your server is up to it, maybe we’ll crawl it all in one day even. If you have hundreds of thousands or millions of pages or hundreds of millions of pages then you really need to make sure that crawling is as efficient as possible. So those are kind of the aspects I would look at there.”

 

If you exclude Googlebot from seeing ad-block detection is that considered cloaking?

Q – We have a site that is considering adding ad blocker detection to prevent users from accessing the site whenever the ad blocker is on. The site also has a RedgeWall paywall which they do have the schema markup for. The question here is if we decide to exclude Googlebot from seeing the ad-block detection will we be flagged for cloaking in that situation?

20:19

“Probably not, I think in general that would be fine. I would kind of see that as a way of, I don’t know, recognizing that Googlebot doesn’t actually have an ad blocker installed. So it’s kind of a unique setup that Googlebot has with regards to rendering pages and I think that would kind of be okay. In regards to cloaking, the cloaking team mostly tries to watch out for situations where you’re really showing something different to users as to Googlebot. With regards to ad-blocking or I don’t know other kinds of things where it’s like you have to be logged in to actually see the content, that’s kind of different. I don’t know, I’m not completely a fan of all of these anti-ad blocking setups but it’s something where if you need to do it then I think that’s an appropriate approach.”

Full Transcription

Below you can find our full transcription from John Mueller’s Office Hours Hangout on April 16, 2021.

Q:0:41 – When we are Googling the brand name with the country, instead of ranking our home page, Google is ranking the page which contains the country name in the page content or meta title. So how do we fix this?

A: 0:59 –  “Well I guess if you’re searching for the country name, then we’re just trying to show that to you, so it’s not necessarily something to fix other than to change the content of the pages there. But what I would usually do with these kinds of things where you run across a query where you think your site is ranking in a weird way, is to first try to figure out if that’s actually a problem. In the sense of are people actually searching like this for your company and what are they expecting to find. Depending on what you see there you might notice well actually it’s only me that is searching like this for my company, or you might see lots of people are searching like this for my company. If you see lots of people are actually searching like this for your company, then obviously since these are your pages you can adjust them and change them however you would like to have them be, and based on that we’ll try to show that in search.”

 

Q: 2:19 –  So I have a question, I’ve also asked it in the Youtube comments, regarding canonicalization and your official guidelines regarding not using no index in order to sort of control this a bit better. Why do you recommend not using no index in order to fix it? If for instance Google is picking up the wrong canonical or ignoring the canonical tag. 

A 2:55 – “So I think the not using no index is almost more of a theoretical recommendation than something that I would say is a requirement. In the sense that if you’re saying that something is a canonical of a different page, then you’re saying that they’re equivalent. If you’re saying one of them should not be indexed and the other one should be indexed, then you’re kind of saying ‘well they’re not really equivalent’ because you want them treated in very different ways. So that’s kind of where from a theoretical point of view it clashes a bit, in that you’re saying oh these are the same but at the same time oh they’re very different. From a practical point of view, I don’t see this causing any problems. If you’re in a situation where you really strongly want to have one page be a canonical, and you’ve done everything else that you need to do to make sure that the internal linkings are in the right place, the sitemap file has the right urls, all of that, then using no index like that is something that is not going to cause any problems. So I think that’s always kind of the tricky aspect there. As humans, we like to simplify things a little bit and try to fit a simple model in our mind and then like theoretically they’re different, they shouldn’t be treated the same, but from a practical point of view sometimes you do what you have to do and it just works. So it’s not that your site will rank worse if you do it like that.”

 

Q: 4:48 – I was just going through some international target guidelines. So nowadays a lot of people have to just expand internationally if the business requires this. I had some confusion about different multilingual and I just checked out all Google documents but still, there is some confusion. One thing that you have recently made very clear is that if I have different versions in different languages then hreflang is not really required if the wrong page is not ranking. But the problem that I am having is I could not find – unless I could not understand – what is country targeting and why is it required? There are different case scenarios right, one version is that when I have the dot com version and I am just creating different folders and targeting them into different countries. The other case is when I’m having these country-specific domains and targeting them. So my concern was that in the dot com version a lot of times it happens that we are targeting dot com as global but in the next phase, we are expanding it to different countries like slash UK slash etc. In that case, I just wanted to understand how exactly it helps because global and specific to local is trickier, and nowhere in documents has Google really described all about it.

A: 6:29 –  “Yeah, so it is a complicated topic. I think any website that is expanding globally runs into these issues and there tend to be two approaches. One is just ‘I will make lots of different versions and hope that one of them works’, but I think from a practical point of view that’s probably not so great. In general, we differentiate between geotargeting and the hreflang annotations. So with geotargeting, that’s a setting in Search Console if you have a country-specific top-level domain that applies there, geotargeting is a way of improving your ranking in individual countries when a user is looking for something local. If you have something that is specific to an individual country, and you know that users are looking kind of with a local intent in those countries, then with geotargeting you get a little bit of a ranking boost. With hreflang on the other hand, it’s more that if you already have pages that are ranking in these individual countries, make sure that Google is showing the right version of that page. They’re subtly different in that regard and I think the tricky part, that you kind of touched upon as well is, you can have a global website that works well in lots of countries and you could also have specific country-specific pages or specific country-specific websites that also work well in different cases. I think the decision on whether or not to have a global site or country-specific versions is tricky, and it’s hard to kind of come up with an absolute answer for that. On the one hand, there’s the aspect of do you really have something country-specific that you’re offering, or are you just taking kind of a globally available product and making it available in all countries. If you don’t have anything really country-specific that you’re offering, I don’t see that much value in making different country-specific pages because you’re just diluting things. On the other hand, there’s also the aspect of are user’s actually looking with a local intent for your information? So for example, if you have I don’t know documentation on javascript, then people are not going to search in their country for documentation on javascript and expect to find something from their country. In their language obviously, but not necessarily from the country. On the other hand, if you need a washing machine repairman or something like that, then probably they’re going to search with the kind of mindset that they would like to actually find someone who’s local and who is nearby who can help with this problem. So those are different aspects that you kind of have to take into account, I mean you don’t have to take them into account, but I think if you take all of these things into account it’s a lot easier to come up with an efficient approach and say ‘okay for these kinds of queries I can tell people want to have something local, and I do have something local, then I will create some geo-specific content for those different pages’. And for other types of queries I see users are just searching for general information, maybe a product manual or something like that, and for that, I don’t need to have a geo-specific page. Then based on that you can make a decision. Is it worthwhile to set up a country-specific website, or is it essentially just like trying to cover a tiny bit more but not actually significantly enough more that it’s worthwhile to create a whole new website for. I think there’s a lot of thought that goes into this, and I think if you’re just getting started and you want to expand globally with a website I would definitely try to find some SEO consultant. Someone who can help you who has done this before with other websites, who can give you some of the tips and tricks and kind of help you to avoid some of the pitfalls along the way.”

 

Q 10:56 – Regarding this, the problem was that when we usually check in Google Search Console, we find that the country target is set as global or as the country is specific for dot com something and when we are changing the country target in Google Search Console, can we expect different global something we are changing it to global in that country we may drop ranking.

A: 11:23 – “It’s possible if users are searching with kind of a local intent. I mean if users are searching for something and they don’t really care where it’s from, then switching to global shouldn’t have any negative effect in that country.”

 

Q: 12:04 – Just a quick story from where my question comes from. We’re a leading SEO agency in Switzerland which has quite a lot of clients. And we’re actually one of the biggest SEO agencies when it comes to words and articles in the German, Austrian, and the Switzerland region. We have about 500 pages plus/minus and we have about 550,000 words, so the crawl budget is a good question when it comes to our website. But the biggest question so far that I had is what about the pagination of let’s say the blog articles and other kinds of articles. So let’s say the tags categories and pagination, what does Google think about them? Should they be no index, should they be nofollow, what kind of text should they contain? I couldn’t find a trustworthy source that says like ‘yeah this should be exactly how you want to have them’. Because at the end of the day the user wants to see them but does the user actually want to see duplicate content on the search results?

A:13:13 – “Good question. So what I try to differentiate with regards to pagination is why you’re doing this, the pagination part. In particular, is it that you’re splitting content up into multiple pieces and kind of paginating a very long article and splitting it into parts one, parts two, parts three? Or is it more a matter of you have links to individual pages that you would like to have found. For example, if you have an e-commerce site and you look at a category page, then it’s not so much that there’s any content that is unique on page two or page three. But there are links to other products which are there. So those are kind of the two main differentiations that I have there and when it comes to content if you’re splitting the content up across multiple pages. Then of course you want to make sure that is indexable. Do whatever you need to do to make sure that those pages are findable. That you have links to kind of part two/part three/part four within your website, that those pages are also indexable, that they don’t have a canonical pointing to another page for example but rather that they’re easily findable and indexable. So if it comes to content that is split up make sure it’s absolutely indexable, when it comes to essentially just a matter of finding links to other pieces of content then I think it’s something which you could argue both ways. In terms of with a lot of websites, the content is so well cross-linked that we don’t necessarily need to see page five of a category page. So maybe you’ll say page five of the category pages should be no indexed or you can kind of use the rel canonical pointing back to the first page of the set. Those are all kinds of things that you can do to reduce the amount of pages that need to be crawled from a website, so that’s kind of the thinking there. With regards to crawl budget, I would really only look at this if you’re in a situation where you have hundreds of thousands or millions of pages. And then it’s more a matter of crawl budget where we say ‘well we’re running out of time we can’t actually crawl everything here’. If you’re in the order of thousands or tens of thousands of pages on a website, then from our point of view we can deal with that. It’s a lot, but it’s not an excessive amount and if your server is up to it maybe we’ll crawl it all in one day even. If you have hundreds of thousands or millions of pages or hundreds of millions of pages then you really need to make sure that crawling is as efficient as possible. So those are kind of the aspects I would look at there.”

 

Q: 16:19 – I want to go back to hreflang, I posted a question on the community tab. We have a scenario where we have a huge global website where we have to set up hreflang in a site map because html is just not feasible. I found best practices for where you have hreflang in the html where you have separate mobile and desktop pages. So the mobile pages point to mobile pages, desktop pages point to desktop pages. How do we do this when we’re setting up hreflang in a sitemap?

A 16:57 –  “Essentially the same way. I guess in a case like that you probably don’t have the mobile pages separately in the sitemap at the moment or how do you have that?”

Reply:  “We have some, we don’t have them separately. We have annotations set up for some of the websites but not for all. So half of them are properly set up, half of them are not yet properly set up.

John:  “And you have the kind of m dot pages where you have separate mobile urls is that correct?”

Reply: We have m dot and we also have a different site with the slash SP so we have a couple of different patterns.

A 17:41 – “Wow okay that sounds complex. Yeah so I think in a case like that what I would try to do first of all is map out the whole site and get all of the urls and figure out how they’re connected. Essentially our guidelines with regards to sitemaps for m dot pages are such that you don’t need to lace them in a sitemap file. But I think in your case where you have hreflang annotations that you want to apply to the m dot pages then I would absolutely list them. It’s not that there is any downside to listing the m dot pages. Our recommendation is essentially just based on like you don’t need to, that you can save time doing it. If you really want to apply annotations for those m dot pages then I would list them in the sitemap file, and then there on an individual basis, you can also include the hreflang annotations between the m dot versions.

Reply:  I don’t think we can have like an m dot something. M dot example is the English page and then the www example is also the English version so we can’t set it up like that. So it would be the m dot with an annotation plus an hreflang?

A: 19:03 – “Yes so it would be the m dot. You would list the m dot in the sitemap file, then you have I think that separate block with the hreflang annotations in the sitemap file, and on a per url basis you would list the alternate m dot version. So the English m dot page would point out the French m dot page and the German m dot page things like that.” 

 

Q 19:48 – We have a site that is considering adding ad blocker detection to prevent users from accessing the site whenever the ad blocker is on. The site also has a RedgeWall paywall which they do have the schema markup for. The question here is if we decide to exclude Googlebot from seeing the ad-block detection will we be flagged for cloaking in that situation?

A 20:19 – “Probably not. I think in general that would be fine. I would kind of see that as a way of I don’t know recognizing that Googlebot doesn’t actually have an ad blocker installed. So it’s kind of a unique setup that Googlebot has with regards to rendering pages and I think that would kind of be okay. In regards to cloaking, the cloaking team mostly tries to watch out for situations where you’re really showing something different to users as to Googlebot. With regards to ad-blocking or I don’t know other kinds of things where it’s like you have to be logged in to actually see the content, that’s kind of different. I don’t know, I’m not completely a fan of all of these anti-ad blocking setups but it’s something where if you need to do it then I think that’s an appropriate approach.”

 

Q 21:27 – “And if we decide to serve Googlebot the ad-block and it’s an overlay do you anticipate any problems with Google understanding the content there?

A 21:39 – “If it’s an html overlay on top of the existing page, then I don’t see that as being problematic because we would still see the actual content in the html kind of behind that. That’s similar if you have something like a cookie banner or a cookie interstitial that you’re essentially showing just an html div on top of the page. From our point of view, if we can still index the actual content from the page then that’s fine.”

 

Q 22:12 – For the new product review update, a lot of the websites that do cover product reviews also cover deals on specific days. Do we anticipate that algorithm affecting deals specific posts? Think of like a prime day or something like that.

A 22:30 – “I don’t know, it’s hard to say. I think the change is primarily based on really kind of review-based websites and all of the websites that have a significant amount of review-based content and also have other content. It’s sometimes tricky to say in advance exactly how that will apply there.”

 

Q 23:14 –  Is it necessary to optimize the whole website if you want to rank a particular page or the url? Or is it okay if you don’t optimize the whole website?

A 23:32 – “In general we do look primarily at the page when it comes to ranking but it’s always embedded within the context of your whole website. That’s something where I would say it’s worthwhile to improve your website overall. So that actually we understand a lot better how this particular page is really important and what the value of that particular page is. In particular things like internal linking, kind of understanding of the headings, the content of the pages, all of that helps us even if it’s outside of just that one page that you care about. That’s something where I would say if you care about one particular page in your website then you should make sure that it’s like the rest of your website that’s associated with that page is also kind of improved as much as possible.”

 

Q 24:29 – One of our competitors is using redirected expired domains and they were not on the last 50 rankings. And suddenly they are ranking on the first page – on the first SERP ranking. Does Google ignore the redirected expired domain or push down the website when they find the use of redirect expand domain? How much time does Google take to find that out?

A 25:02 – “Yeah I think this is a tactic that is as ancient as the web. You buy some old expired website and then you redirect it to your website, and we have a lot of practice with it. It’s something where sometimes it feels like sites are getting away with it or seeing some value out of it, but essentially from our algorithm’s point of view, we do try to recognize this and work with it appropriately. It’s not something that I would recommend doing. I think from a business point of view sometimes it makes sense to buy an existing website and say I will kind of like a business, work together, and have a larger client base something like that. But it’s very different from buying an expired domain name and just redirecting it to your website and hoping that something comes out of it. It’s something where if your competitor is ranking well, then I wouldn’t necessarily assume that it’s because of these expired domains.

Reply –  So Google does ignore that? Or does it push down the rankings if they found it?

John – “For the most part we would ignore that. If that’s kind of the default approach that I see from our side is that when we can recognize that something kind of sneaky is being done and if we can ignore it then we’ll try to ignore it. If there are situations where it’s built into the website, the sneakiness, that we can’t just ignore that one part then it’s possible that our algorithms will say ‘oh we don’t know how to treat this website anymore we should be more careful’”.

 

Q 26:54 – I have two questions about the disavow tool. The first question is if I disavow a domain that is redirecting to my website, will it also have an effect on his backlinks, or do I also need to disavow his backlinks? Because in Google Search Console I can see the backlinks from the redirect domain. 

A 27:21 – “I would focus on the links that you see in Search Console. With regards to redirected pages, we don’t see a redirect the same as a link. Essentially with regards to what for us is a link is essentially a kind of a connection between two canonical pages, and if you’re redirecting one page to a different page then the canonical will be either the destination or the source page there. If from there you have a link to one of your websites then essentially that link is between those two canonical versions. From that point of view if you’re worried about individual links I would look at what we show in Search Console. Because in Search Console we show kind of the destination and the source of those links. And that’s what we would take into account and that’s what you can use for the disavow tool. I think for the most part if you’re looking at it on a per url basis like this then probably you’re looking at it in too much detail and probably it’s not something that you need to change unless you have a manual action. If you don’t have a manual action, then I wouldn’t look into all of the urls that are redirecting to your site and try to tweak things there. If you do have a manual action then obviously you want to make sure that things are as clean as possible so that you can get out of that manual action.

Reply 29:03 – I don’t have a manual action but I have a client who is running a domain marketplace and every domain that he is selling it’s redirecting to a product base. Some of the domains that are redirecting might have many backlinks and for example, I noticed that the disavowing tool has a limit of 50 000 urls. My client has more than 200 thousand redirecting domains, how should I handle them?

A 29:45 – “Yeah so what I would do there is to try to find an approach that works outside of the disavow tool and handle it in that way. For example, what you can do is set up a separate site that works kind of as a jumping place where all of these domains are redirecting to that particular site and that particular site then redirects to your primary site. Then you can use the robots.txt to block crawling of that kind of site or that page that’s in between. Essentially you have all of these domains that you’re selling and they redirect to one central location. That location is blocked by robots.txt so Googlebot doesn’t see what happens there and from there you redirect to your normal pages. So users when they go to those other domains they see the redirect normally, but Googlebot essentially sees everything going to one particular place and then it gets lost. That way you’re kind of taking care that nothing from those links is affecting your normal website. It sounds like something kind of sneaky to do. But essentially in a case like this where you have a lot of redirects going to your pages and you want to make sure that they don’t negatively or positively affect your website, then having this kind of a robotic jumping board in between essentially solves the problem for you.

 

Q 31:36 – We recently restructured our website to make it less convoluted due to many subpages. Since the site is now pretty straightforward, we’re not sure if including a breadcrumb navigation is still necessary.

A 31:50 – I think there are two aspects here. The question focuses on the user experience side, which is something definitely to think about. I don’t have that much advice on the user experience side. Just purely from an SEO point of view, there are two aspects there. On the one hand, we need to be able to crawl your website so we need to be able to find links to the different parts of your website. If you have this kind of cross-linking happening naturally within your website, especially if it’s a smaller website now, then that’s perfectly fine. You don’t need to add extra breadcrumb links to make the website interlinked a little bit better. The other aspect is the kind of U.I. that we show in the search results. It’s something that I see more often. We don’t show the URL in the search result but, rather try to show some kind of a breadcrumb navigation for that for that individual page. You can do that with the breadcrumb structured data. For a smaller site, maybe that’s not as critical but it’s a nice way to give some sense of structure for users when they’re searching and finding your pages in the search results. Those are kind of the primary aspects there and, if you feel you don’t need breadcrumbs from a U.I. point of view and, you’re sure that the internal linking works well within your website and, you can test this with the various crawling tools that are out there. If you look at the search results pages and you’re saying, “well these look okay to me”, then I don’t think you need to add any breadcrumb navigation on top of that. On the other hand if you’re saying the internal linking is not that great and/or you would like to have these clear breadcrumbs in the search results, then adding the breadcrumb structure data seems like a good move.

 

Q 34:12 – When switching a website from Squarespace to WordPress, will this affect my Google search rankings?

A 34:19 – Yes most likely it will. It can be either positive or negative for your website in terms of what the final effect will be. Anytime you’re changing your CMS, you’re making pretty big changes on your website and sometimes people make these big changes because they want to improve things for SEO so it can be positive if you do them well. It can also be negative if you make this migration in a bad way. In particular, when we think about a website we don’t think just about the text on the pages. If you copy and paste the text to the other website that’s one part of a website but, the other part is everything around the website so the internal linking, the URLs that you have all of the signals that we’ve collected over time for the individual pages that you have, the headings on the page, the images, the way the images are embedded. All of these things add up and for us it kind of paints a bigger picture of how we should show this website in the search results. If you’re making a change by switching from one provider to a different provider then on the one hand, this is a chance to rethink your website and think about what could I do to significantly improve things overall. On the other hand it’s also a chance to make sure that you’re creating a checklist for yourself and saying “like these are all of the things I want to make sure remain in place when I move over” so things like I want to make sure that all of the old URLs continue to work, or that they at least redirect. Make sure that you have the right headings on the right pages, not that you end up with just your company name as a heading for every page on your website. Think about the images as well and think about like “are you getting a lot of traffic from image search” and if so, maybe you should think about images even more than you would otherwise.  There’s a lot of work that’s involved with trying to figure out what you need to watch out for with a migration like this. I think the good part is that a lot of these more mainstream CMS setups, they have a lot of practice with migrations and for the most part, if they have tools to export and import then for the most part that’ll work out fairly well. In a lot of cases, probably it’ll be pretty smooth but I would really recommend if you care about search, make sure to read up on everything around site migrations, make a lot of checklists, list all of the pages that you have, everything that you care about so that when you make that migration, you can double check to make sure that you really have everything covered, that the tools that you have available actually do what they’re supposed to do. The tricky part is by the time that you notice that something has gone wrong with a site migration, it’s often a month or two later and then you’re already going down the wrong road and fixing that is sometimes a lot harder than if you can fix that and recognize that right when you’re doing the migration.

 

Q 37:41 –  Will AMP stories be more prominent in the search results?

A 37:43 – I don’t know, my guess is they will be at least for a while to see how things are showing up but I really don’t have any insider information on AMP stories. That guess is just purely based on the fact that it’s a cool new format and there are lots of people making cool things with AMP stories so maybe we should show them more.

 

Q 38:11 – As user experience is one of the determining ranking factors, could you give us a quick insight into how user experience is measured by Google?

A 38:20 – I think that’s super tricky. On the one hand, we don’t have a pure user experience ranking factor. Rather we have individual things which kind of map into user experience. The two parts that I thought I’d call out are, I think it’s the page layout algorithm, I don’t what the official name is, but essentially the algorithm where we try to recognize when there’s significant unique content above the fold on a web page, which kind of maps into user experience in terms of, “is the page when a user clicks on it from the search results, is it just filled with ads or is there actually content there?”. That’s something we do care about so that’s something that kind of maps as a ranking factor and kind of also goes into usability a bit.  The other aspect is everything around core web vitals which is coming up, I think next month or so, where we take into account things like speed, usability with the cumulative layout shift, first input delay, as kind of a measure for how quickly a page is responsive and take that into account with regards to ranking.  Those are kind of the primary aspects that I am kind of aware of that would fall into kind of user experience as a ranking factor.  It’s tricky because it’s not that we have user experience as a ranking factor, it’s just that there’s a little bit of overlap.

 

Q 40:10 – As Google introduced passage ranking, does this shift importance from optimizing the page as a whole to optimizing certain sections of a page? Can a good passage ranking boost the overall ranking of a website?

A 40:26 – I would still focus on individual pages. I think the passage ranking part is more for if you’re in a situation where you have really long websites or really long pages, then it’s easier for Google to recognize this particular part of a web page is important and to rank that appropriately. I wouldn’t see it as something where you should go off and try to optimize individual parts of a page but rather you should try to optimize the whole page overall. With regards to passage ranking and the overall ranking of a website, I think there’s always some overlap in the sense of if you have a website that has a lot of really long pages and maybe it’s easier for us to recognize what those pages are about. If you’re already focusing very much on SEO then you might also say, well instead of hoping that Google figures out what these individual parts of those pages are about, maybe I should just split those pages into separate pages and work on them individually. That’s of course always an option as well.  

 

Q 41:42 – What is the treatment that Google gives to public URL for a whole website used for test purposes only?

A 41:53 –  I think things around essentially test websites or staging websites for the most part, we don’t try to recognize them and say “oh, this is a staging website” and treat it differently. Rather the tricky part is sometimes we do find them in search and then we end up showing them in search. You as a site owner might say, well I don’t want you to do that so, that’s usually the aspect that comes into play there. With regards to staging websites, if you want to be sure that Google does not crawl and index your staging website then I would make sure that you’re using some kind of authentication on the staging website so that Google can’t actually access the content but rather, that you can still use it on your own to test things out. At least Google won’t be able to access it so, that’s kind of the recommendation there. The advantage of using authentication versus things like robots txt or no index on pages is that with authentication, you recognize right away if you accidentally include that on your primary website so if you push that staging website live and you leave authentication in place then that’s pretty obvious. Whereas if you push your staging website live and you leave the robots txt block in place or the no index in place, then you really have to watch out for that and it happens all the time that sites end up being blocked by robots txt or no index because a staging website gets pushed live like this. That’s why we tend to recommend authentication. 

 

Q 43:49 – We’re using an approved third party to collect our service and product reviews and these are displayed on our website using a widget, but the data is actually held against our listing on the review site itself. How would Google feel if we copied these reviews and display them on our web pages, as opposed to just using the widget to display them? 

A 44:13 – I think there are two aspects there. On the one hand there’s the whole aspect “are you allowed to do this with your service provider or not?”. I don’t know how those things are handled. The other aspect is the structured data side on Google. From Google’s point of view you can include these reviews on your pages if you essentially treat them more as testimonials rather than reviews. With regards to structured data on the pages, you can only use this review structured data on your site in a case like this if you’re collecting the reviews yourself if it’s not something where you’re taking reviews from someone else’s site and copying them to your site. Those are kind of the aspects there, if you want to copy and paste these reviews and you’re allowed to do so, then just make sure that you’re not using the review structured data for that. 

 

Q 45:18 – Are user experience for both desktop and mobile taken into account when it comes to core web vitals as a ranking factor or is it only the mobile experience for the user that counts? 

A 45:28 – At the moment the plan is only to use the mobile user experience so in the desktop search results we plan not to use core web vitals with regards to ranking, at least for the moment. On the mobile search results we take into account the mobile core web vitals of a page, that’s why also in search console we focus more on the mobile side of things with regards to the core web vitals. The other factors that are used for the page experience ranking element, they still apply to both desktop and mobile. In particular, HTTPS, safe browsing side, all of these other factors that are about the pages themselves they apply for both desktop and mobile.

 

Q 46:20 – Are seals a good way to improve the E.A.T of a website? 

A 46:25 – I would focus on what actually provides authenticity to users where users actually feel trust about a website that they’re looking at. Obviously, if there’s some specific qualifications that you have, I think it makes sense to highlight that on a page but just taking random seals and copying and pasting them on a website, I don’t think that really impresses users and definitely doesn’t impress Googlebot. That’s something where I would focus more on what is actually acceptable by users and what makes sense there. 

 

Q 47:54 – I have a few questions related to schema markup, site links and search console. I have implemented the FAQ schema on my web pages, but I’m not able to recognize whether it is live or not. It shows in Google Search Console, it appears these fields have FAQ schema but I want to see if it is live or not and how it is appearing. We apply on ratings for review ratings, it appears as a rating in Google SERP but for FAQ schema, I’m not able to recognize. How can I recognize that?

A 48:42 –  I don’t know if there’s a simple trick to do it. One thing you can do is to do a site query for your website so just cite colon and then your domain name or specific pages where you have this markup. For the most part we will try to show the markup that we would show there. That could be one way to kind of see what it might look like. The other thing with FAQ markup in general or schema markup overall is we just don’t show it all the time so sometimes you need to try different queries out and see where it would show up. In search console, in the performance report, you can filter down by some of the rich results types. I don’t know if it’s by FAQs as well but for some of the rich results types you can filter down and you can find a little bit closer which queries users are using. Based on that you can sometimes reproduce it, sometimes not always.

Reply 49:47 – In the search performance report, I see a search appearance option and there I have seen web light results, FAQ schemas, valid pages which has FAQ schemas but I want to see how it will appear when I will implement a FAQ schema on the pages, how it will show on Google SERP. 

John 50:19 – If you just want to see what it looks like you can also use the rich results test. I believe it has a preview link there where you can preview what the page would look like with that type of structured data. That might also be an option.

 

Q 50:39 – Another question related to site links. I have some pages which I want to appear in Google SERPS as a site links desired pages. I built some backlinks for them and I did internal linking as well. I’ve been doing this for one year now but still those pieces are not appearing. What more tactics can I do for this?

A 51:10 – Site links are something that happens algorithmically. It’s not based on any particular markup on a web page. For the most part it’s not something that you can explicitly target to try to make it appear. It’s something where if we recognize that there’s a need for the user when they search in this particular way to show them more results from a website then we’ll show site links but it’s not something that you can just tweak on your website and we would show it. I wouldn’t necessarily see it as something that you would be able to optimize for. I think if we do show side links for a particular page then that’s something where you can think about, are these titles okay, Is the right selection okay, but if we’re not showing site links for a website, or for individual queries, then I wouldn’t focus so much on cycling because it’s really not something that you can control like that.

 

Q 52:15 – One option is coming in search experience called web light results. Can you explain what web light results are?

A 52:17 – Web light is a system that we have in place which is active I think only in a handful of countries where we see that users with very limited devices and very limited bandwidth are using the web to search and where we can recognize that it makes sense for us to show them a version of a page that is much lighter so that is that is much faster for them to interact with. That essentially is shown in search console. We have a help center page on web lite. I would double check that. It also has information on how to opt out, if you say I don’t want this to happen, it gives you information on how you can test your pages, what they would look like with web lite. Depending on your site and where your users are, you might see that in search console or you might not see that at all but I would check out the help center page for web live.

 

Q 53:39 –  I’m trying to target an audience for multiple locations but I have only one option in search console. There is no multiple option for it. What we can do in this case?

A 54:04 – If you have one website that you want to use geo targeting for multiple locations, then you would have to just put it global and either not select something in search console, or call it unlisted. I think if you explicitly want to say, it is meant to be global but you can’t take one website and use geo-targeting for multiple countries. What you could do, if you have specific country specific content is to split the website up and then for the individual parts you can verify them separately in search console depending on your domain name. Then you can do country targeting for those individuals but taking a website and splitting it up so that you have individual country versions is a pretty big step. I wouldn’t just try that out or blindly do that.

 

Q 55:06 –  I have seen lots of tutorials for it and I went to lots of articles for it but I’m not understanding what they mean by “not set”? In Google analytics we see the term “not set” as in the traffic coming through not set. 

A 55:30 – What might be happening is that Google analytics doesn’t see the query that is associated with a user coming to a page. I thought they used something like not provided or something like that. Essentially for most of the traffic that comes from search we don’t include the query as a parameter. That’s why analytics see the traffic is coming from Google but they don’t know which query it was. If you want to see the queries then you have to use search console, your performance report