Author: LION Digital

Quality of Old Pages

Q. When assessing new pages on a website, the quality of older pages matters too

• (15:38)  When Google tries to understand the quality of a website overall, it’s a process that takes a lot of time and if new 5 pages are added to the website that already has 10000 pages, then the focus will be on most of the site first. Over time Google will see how that settles down with the new content there as well, but the quality of the most of the website matters in the context of new pages.

Link Equity and Backlinks

Q. Links from high value pages are treated with a little bit more weight compared to some random page on the Internet

• (17:02) When assessing a value of the link from another website, Google doesn’t look at the referral traffic or at the propensity to click on that link. John explains that Google doesn’t expect people to click on every link on a page – people don’t follow links because some expert said to do so, look at the website and confirm whether things written are true about the website. People follow the link when they want to find out more information about the product. Therefore, things like the referral traffic or the propensity to click are not taken into account when evaluating the link. 
  When evaluating the link Google looks at the page factors and quality of the website linking. It works almost the same way PageRank works – there is a certain value set up for an individual page, and the fraction of that value is passed on through the links. So if a page is of high value, then the links from the page are treated with more weight compared to random pages on the Internet. It’s not exactly that way now as it was in the beginning, but it’s a good way of thinking about these things.

Other questions from the floor:

Category Page Dropping in the Rankings for One Keyword

Q. If a page tries to cover more than one search intent, it might lead to the page dropping in rankings

• (00:34) The person asking the question talks about a category page on his website that has a huge advisory text, dropping in the rankings for a particular keyword in a plural form. John says that in this particular category page there is so much textual information that it’s hard to tell whether the page is for people who want to buy the products or for those who want to get more info about these products, if the page is for someone looking for one product or for a bigger picture of the whole space. Therefore, John suggests splitting those pages and have two for different purposes instead of one that tries to cover everything.
  As for the singular and plural forms of the keyword, he thinks that probably when someone searches for plural they want different kinds of products, and when searching for singular someone might want a product landing page, and overtime the system tries to figure out the intent behind these queries, and also how this intent changes over time. For example, “Christmas tree” might be an informational query, and around December it becomes more of a transactional intent. And if a category page covers for both, on the one hand, it’s good, because it covers both sides, but at the same time Google might see only the transactional side and ignore the informational one. So having these two intents on a separate page is a reasonable thing to do. There are different ways to do that: some people have completely separate pages, others make informational blogs from which they link to category pages or individual products.

Q. Even though this drop might happen to only certain keywords, Google doesn’t have a list of keywords for these things

• (04:52) The person asking the question wonders why this happens only to some keywords, and if there is a list of specific keywords that this happens to. John says that it’s doubtful they will manually create a list of keywords for that, as it’s something that the system tries to pick up automatically, and it might pick it up in one way for certain pages and differently for others, and change over time.

Content Word Limit

Q. There is no limit on how many words the content on the category page should be

• (09:05) There needs to be some information about the products on the page, so that Google understands what the topic is, but generally that is very little information and in many cases Google understands that from the products listed on the page if the names of the products are clear enough, for example “running shoes”, “Nike running shoes” and running shoes by other brands. In this case, it’s clear that the page is about running shoes, there is no need to put an extra text there. But sometimes product names are a little hard to understand, and in that situation it makes sense to put some text there, and John suggests that these texts need to be around 2-3 sentences.

Q. The same chunks of text can be used in category pages and blogs posts

• (10:19) Having a small amount of text duplicated is not a problem. For example, using a few sentences of text from a blog post in category pages is fine.

Merging Websites

Q. There is no fixed timeline on when the pages of the merged websites are crawled and the results of that become visible

• (10:56) Pages across a website get crawled at different speeds: some pages are recrawled every day, some are once a month or once in every few months. If the content is on the page that rarely gets recrawled then it’s going to take a long time for that to be reflected whereas if it’s content that is being crawled very actively, then the changes should be seen within a week or so.

Index Coverage Report

Q. After merging websites, if traffic is going to the right pages, if there is a shift in performance report, then there is no need to watch out for the Index Coverage Report

• (13:25) The person asking the question is concerned by the fact that after merging two websites, they’re not getting any difference in the Index Coverage Report results. John says that when pages are merged, their system needs to find a new canonical for this page first, and it takes a little bit of time for that to be reflected in the reporting. Usually, when it’s the case of simply moving everything, it’s just a transfer, there is no need for figuring out the canonicalisation. And when it’s the merging process, it takes more time.

301 Redirect, Validation Error

Q. The Change Address Tool is not necessary for migration, checking the redirects is more priority

• (20:53) John says that although some people use the Change of Address tool when migrating a website, it’s just an extra signal and not a requirement – as long as the redirects are set up properly, Change of Address doesn’t really matter. If there are things like 301 redirect error, redirects need to be re-checked, but it’s hard to tell what the issue might be without looking at it case by case. John suggests that the person asking the question can look at the things like, for example if he has a www version and a non-www version of their website, he might need to look at his redirects step by step through that. For example, he might be redirecting to the non-www version and then redirecting to the new domain, and then submitting the Change of Address in the version of the site that is not a primary version – that’s one of the things to double-check. Basically, whether it’s the version of the website that is or was currently indexed is being submitted or maybe it’s the alternate version in search console.

Several Schemas on a Page

Q. There can be any number of structured data on a page, but it should be noted that only one kind of structured data will be shown on rich results page

• (23:36) There can be any number of schema on one page, but John points out that for most cases when it comes to the rich results that Google shows on the search results, only one kind of structured data will be picked to be shown there. If someone has multiple structured data on their page, then there is a very high chance Google will pick one of these types and show in rich results. So if there is a need for one particular type to be featured, and there is no combined uses in the search results, then it’s better to focus on one structured data that is to be shown in rich results.

Random 404 Pages

Q. Random 404 URLs in a website don’t really affect anything

• (24:39) The person asking the question is concerned with a steady increase of 404 pages on his website that are not part of the website, and them making up for over 40% of the crawl response. John argues that there is nothing to worry about, as these URLs are probably random URLs found on some scraper site that is scraping things in a bad way – that’s a very common thing. When Google tries to crawl them, they return 404, so the crawlers start to ignore those pages. 404 pages don’t really exist. When looking at a website, Google tries to understand which URLs it needs to crawl and how frequently it needs to crawl them. And after working out what needs to be done. Google looks at what it can do additionally and starts trying to crawl a graded set of URLs that sometimes includes URLs from scraper sites. So if these random URLs are being crawled on a website, that means the most important URLs have already been crawled, and there are time and capacity to crawl more. So, in a way, 404 are not an issue, but a sign that there is enough capacity, and if there is more content than what was linked within the website, Google would probably crawl and index that too. It’s a good sign, and these 404 pages don’t need to be blocked by robot.txt or suppress them in any way.

Blocking Traffic from Other Countries

Q. If you’re to block undesired traffic from other countries, don’t block the U.S., since the website are crawled from there

• (27:34) The person asking the question is concerned that they’re getting their Core Web Vital scores go down because they originated in France and there is a lot of traffic from other countries with a bad bandwidth. John advises against blocking traffic from other countries, especially the U.S. as crawlers crawl from the U.S., and if it’s blocked, the website pages wouldn’t be crawled and indexed. So if the website owner is to block other countries, he should at least keep the U.S.

Q. Blocking the content for users and showing it to the Google Bots is against the guidelines

• (28:47) From the guidelines, it’s clear that the website should be showing to the crawlers what it shows the users from that country. John says, one way to not involve undesired traffic from some countries (countries for which the website doesn’t provide service), is to use Paywall Structured Data. After marking the content up with the Paywall, the users that have the access can log in and get the content, and the page can be crawled. 
  Another way for that, John suggests, is providing some level of information that can be provided in the U.S. For example, casino content is illegal in the U.S., so some websites have a simplified version of the content which they can provide for the U.S., which is more like descriptive information about the content. So, if, for instance, there are movies that can’t be provided in the U.S., the description of the movie can be served in the U.S., even if the movie itself can’t.

Page Grouping

Q. When it comes to grouping, there is no exact definition on how Google does grouping, because that evolves over time depending on the amount of data Google has for a website

• (35:36) The first thing John highlights about grouping is that if there is a lot of data for a lot of different pages on a website, it’s easier for Google to say that it will do grouping slightly more fine-grained rather than rough, while if there is not a lot of data, then it might end up taking the whole website as one group.
  The second thing John points out is that the data collected is based on field data that the website owner sees in Search Console, which means that it’s not so much of Google taking the average of an individual page and averaging them by the number of pages, but rather Google will do something like traffic weighed average. Some pages will have a lot more traffic and there will be more data there, some will have less traffic and less data. So if a lot of people go to the home page of the website and not so many on individual products, then it might be that home page weighs a little higher just because it has more data there. Therefore, it’s more reasonable to look at Google Analytics or any other analytics, figure out which pages are getting a lot of traffic, and by optimising those pages improve the user experience that will count towards Core Web Vitals. Essentially, it is less of averaging across the number of pages and more averaging across the traffic of what people actually see when they come to the website.

Subdomains and Folders

Q. Subdomains and subdirectories are almost equivalent in terms of content, but there are differences in other aspects

• (45:25) According to the Search Quality Team, subdomains and subdirectories are essentially equivalent – the content can be put either way. Some people in SEO might think otherwise.
  John argues, there are a few aspects where that plays a role, and it is less with regards to SEO and more about reporting. For example, like if the performance of these sites are to be tracked separately on separate host names or together in one host name. For some websites Google might treat things on a subdomain slightly differently because it thinks it is more like a separate website. John suggests that even though these aspects may come to play a role, it’s more important to focus on the website infrastructure first and see what makes sense for that particular case.

Gambling Website Promotion

Q. From the SEO side, there is no problem in publishing gambling related things

• (48:59) John is not sure about the policies for publishers when it comes to the gambling content, but he says that SEO wise, people can publish whatever they want.

Removing Old Content

Q. Blindly removing old content from a website is not the best strategy

• (49:42) John says that he wouldn’t recommend removing old content from a website just for the sake of removing it – old content might still be useful. He doesn’t see a value in that for SEO side of things, but he points out that archiving the old pages for usability or maintenance reasons should be fine.

Duplicate Content

Q. Duplicate content is not penalised, with a few exceptions to this rule

• (55:05) John says that the only time when Google would have something like a penalty or an algorithmic action or manual action is when the whole website is purely duplicated content – one website scraping the other website. For example, when it’s an ecommerce website that has the same description, but the rest of the website is different, that’s perfectly fine – it doesn’t lead to any kind of demotion or dropping in rankings.
  With duplicate content, there are two things that Google looks at, the first being, if the whole page is the same. That includes everything – the header, the footer, the address of the store and things like that. So if it’s just a description on an ecommerce website matching the manufacturer’s description, but everything around that is different, it’s fine.
  The second thing about the duplicate content plays a role when Google shows a snippet in the search results. Essentially, Google tries to avoid creating search result pages where the snippet is exactly the same as the other websites’. So if someone is searching for something generic, which is only in the description of that product, and the snippet that google would show for the website and for the manufacturer’s website are exactly the same, then Google tries to pick one of the pages. Google will try to pick the best page out of those that have exactly the same description.

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Quote Websites

Q. Websites with the same quotes rank separately and don’t get penalised for having the same quotes

• (00:40) Pages from different websites with quotes rank separately because quotes are usually one or two lines of text, and there is so much more information on a web page that quotes do not define those pages as the same. John also points out that quotes are from authors who have written something long ago and is  public information – it doesn’t matter who said it first or which website posted it first – it’s not like whoever said it first will appear first in the search results, and if it did, it probably wouldn’t have been from an average quote based website. And, subsequently, since quotes are public information, they don’t get penalised as well.

Geotargeting

Q. To target different countries, create subdomains or subdirectories and set geotargeting on Search Console individually

• (05:08) Search Console supports only one country at a time, it’s not possible to make it target different countries at the same time. John suggests that when you want to target several countries at the same time, you should create subdomains or subdirectories of your website for these countries and add them to Search Console separately. Once you have them added, if they’re generic top-level domains, you can set the geotargeting individually. For example, yourwebsite.com and the “/” and “fr” for France, and you can add that to Search Console and in the geotargeting section you can indicate it’s for France. If you have a country code top level domain like .in or .uk and etc, then you can’t do geotargeting.

New CSS Property

Q. New CSS property might have only indirect effect on Core Web Vitals and subsequent ranking

• (06:40) John doubts that the new content-visibility CSS property will come to play a big role in website assessment. He says that there are two points where implementing the new CSS might come into play: the first being the fact that Google uses the modern Chrome browser when rendering the pages. But since HTML is the factor taken into account for indexing, and it is already loaded, implementing the new CSS might be a matter of shifting things around in terms of the layout, but it wouldn’t play a big role in rendering – Google would still index the content normally. The second thing is the speed the users see the content in – that could play a role for Core Web Vitals, because for the Core Web Vitals Google uses field data, the speed that the users see. If for users who access the pages with the modern version of Chrome the pages are loading faster due to the implementation of the new CSS that will be reflected in the field data, and overtime that might be taken into account. To make it more clear whether implementing would actually change anything, John suggests implementing the new CSS on a test page and test the page with the lab testing tools before and after and see if it makes a difference. If the difference is big, then probably it should be implemented, otherwise – not really.

Lead Generation Form

Q. Lead Generation forms affect SEO when they’re located above the fold and treated as ads

• (10:49) John says that in general, lead generation forms don’t affect the SEO side of the page that much. However, he points out that the algorithms look for the ads that appear above the fold and push the main content below the fold, and the lead generation form might be treated as an ad. That might not always be the case, as what the lead gen form is for and what the page is trying to rank for also matter. For example, if the page is about car insurance and the lead gen form signs people up for car insurance then that probably wouldn’t be treated as an ad, but if the page is about something completely different, like oranges, then the car insurance lead gen form on top of the page would be seen as an ad.

Images on the Page

Q. Image placement on the page doesn’t really affect anything

• (12:53) Whether the image at the top of the article or somewhere in the middle doesn’t matter that much for the SEO side of the website. John points out that even for the Image Search it is not really important.

No Follow Links

Q. Google discovers and indexes the pages that no follow link points to

• (13:34) With no follow link, Google essentially tries to stop the passing of signals, but what can happen is that Google still discovers the page to which the link points, crawls and indexes it separately. Sometimes people use internal no follow links to point at a specific page within their website, and they expect that internal page to not show up in search because it’s linked only with no follow link. However, from Google’s point of view, if they can discover the page, crawl it and index it, they might still index it independently.

Link Building

Q. In addition to creating a good content, it’s essential to spread a word about it to pop up in search

• (14:41) Creating a good quality content might not always be enough. To appear in search results, it’s important to spread a word about your content, try to find people interested in that type of content and talk them into writing about it. However, it’s common to buy guest posts, and John argues that it’s not the best strategy, and is potentially damaging to the website. If someone from the website team looks at something on a website, and they see that there is a wide variety of different kinds of links, and even when some of them potentially might have a weird story behind them, overall there are still lots of reasonable links, the website team will let the algorithm handle it. But if the website team sees that all the links look a lot like guest posts, and they’re not labelled as such, that might be something they would take action on. So, it’s important to create good content, find people who might be interested in it, and try to stay away from problematic strategies.

Promoting a Unique Website

Q. There are several things to remember when trying to promote a website with a new type of analytical service

• (18:23) The person asking the question described the situation with his website: they analyse a number of real estate agents, and whenever someone searches for the best realtor in his area, their list of top realtors pops up. He says that 90 percent of their pages is not indexed, and he is not sure what exactly to do to rank in SERPs. John points out that there are several things that need to be considered to make the startup successfully rank. 
  First, before things go too far, John suggests it would be a good idea to check whether the website pages are actually useful for people and are not just a recompilation that come as a result of back end data analysis that spits out some metrics for individual locations. For example, to make sure that when a city has 10 realtors, and someone searches for top realtors the result it’s just those 10 realtors that are in the phone book. Basically, it’s essential to make sure the website is actually providing some unique value for the users. John advises doing user studies to figure out what the best UX for these kinds of pages is, what kind of information people need, and that the content is trustworthy. That’s the first thing to do because if the content is of low quality that is a bigger problem than having a lot of good content and trying to get them indexed.
  As for getting them indexed, it’s something that happens naturally over time.
  Secondly, John says that it’s useful to decide what kind of pages are currently the most important ones on the website and which ones you want Google to focus on through internal linking and making sure that they’re high-quality pages. So even if, currently 90 pages on the website are not indexed, and 10 are, it’s reasonable to make sure those 10 are fantastic pages that a lot of people like and recommend. As a result, over time Google will crawl more pages and more frequently, and crawl a bit deeper.
  John points out that it’s always tricky, especially with a website like this to create an internal linking structure in the beginning that focuses on things that are important, because it’s very easy to just list all the postal codes in numerical order, and Google might end up crawling the pages that have low value for the website overall. So from the beginning it’s good to create a more funnelled web structure and then expand step by step until Google ends up actively indexing all the content on the website.

Affiliate Links

Q. It’s enough for Google that most, even if not all, sources that link to the website as affiliates follow the guidelines

• (26:34) It’s hard to make everyone who links to a website as affiliates to follow the guidelines, and for some website owners that might seem problematic. But John points out that they understand the situation, so they just want to make sure that the things that are published or said on the website match the guidelines. Also, it’s okay if only a part of those who link to the website follow the guidelines. 
  Some might suggest that disallowing crawling of the affiliate parameters could be a solution to this, but John argues that that will result in those pages being indexed without any content. He advises focusing on normal canonicalisation, even though that wouldn’t affect how the value of those links are being passed on. 
  He also shares that some websites set up something like an affiliate domain that is separate and that is blocked from crawling and indexing or just blocked from crawling that redirects to the actual website. It works good for a large-scale affiliate sites, but for an average website that might be an overkill.
  In short, he says that as long as the website owner is giving the right recommendation and the significant part of the users are following them, there shouldn’t be any need to do anything past that.

Embedding Videos on Website

Q.It’s not necessary to switch to a different video format on a website just for SEO purposes – there are ways to make everything neat and efficient

• (29:10) The person asking the question is concerned with embedding YouTube videos on his website, as they slow his website loading speed down – he thinks about switching to the mp4 format because it doesn’t create such problems. John argues that might be unreasonable to do just for the SEO purposes – there are different ways of embedding videos, and there are different formats of videos. In particular, when it comes to YouTube, there are ways to embed videos that use a kind of lazy loading where there is an image of a placeholder, and the video is activated by clicking on the placeholder. This way, the page will load pretty quickly. Also, the YouTube team is working on improving the default embed, so that might improve over time.
  Hosting the videos on the website itself might also be reasonable. However, the thing to watch out for is the fact that Google is able to recognize the metadata for these things, and with normal YouTube embed it can pull that out fairly well. When embedding videos manually or with the help of custom players, it’s important to check that the structured data on the page is appropriate as well.

Hosting and Crawling

Q. By default, the type of hosting one has doesn’t affect the efficiency or amount of crawling that the Google can do

• (31:08) The type of hosting that one has doesn’t affect the crawling, however the hosting can be bad or slow – it’s not an attribute to the specific kind of hosting. Shared hosting, VPS or any kind of hosting can be slow or fast regardless of the type, and that’s something that holds the importance.

Crawling

Q. If Google seems to be crawling your website slowly and rarely, make sure the quality of the few important pages is good first, and then grow your website in terms of page quantity

• (35:31) When lots of pages on a website don’t get crawled, that is something that falls into the category of crawl budget. Not that it’s a problem for the website, but there are always two sides when it comes to crawling: capacity for crawling and demand for crawling. Capacity for crawling is about how much Google can crawl: if there is a small website, probably Google can crawl everything. Demand for crawling is something that a website owner can help Google with: it’s the things like internal linking to let Google know about the relative importance of pages, and also it’s something that Google can pick up over time by recognising that there is a lot of good and important content that needs more time and more crawling.
  If a situation arises that there are a lot of pages that haven’t been indexed, it might mean that there were too many pages created, and it’s better to focus on fewer pages to make sure they’re better first, and once they start getting indexed quickly, to create more pages and grow the website step by step.

Changing URLs

Q. If website URLs are not configured according to the best practices, it’s not reasonable to change them unless there is a bigger revamp to be done

• (39:17) When a large portion of URLs across the website is changed, it might create some fluctuations for a couple of months, and by the end of that period the results will most likely be the same as before – so you have a period when everything is worse than before, and then it becomes just the way it was. However, if there is a bigger revamp to come that will make things worse and confusing for a period of time anyway, then it is worth cleaning up URLs. If it’s a completely new website that is to be created, it would be good to make sure URLs are intact from the very beginning.

Homepage Ranks Higher Than Individual Related Pages

Q. When the homepage ranks higher for certain queries than the website pages that fit the query better, it’s good to help Google understand the relative importance of the individual page

• (41:15) If a website’s homepage ranks higher for certain queries than the website pages that actually match the query better, John argues, it’s not always a problem – the homepage ranking high at least means that the SEO side of the website is already quite good. However, he explains that it shows one of the issues with the Google system – that is, Google can’t understand the relative importance of certain pages. What most likely happens is that the homepage is often a strong page that includes the keywords in the search query, and while the individual pages get recognition as well, the system doesn’t understand that it’s a better match for the query and that it is more important. With internal linking, better quality across the pages, more focused information on these pages can help to improve that.

Passage Ranking

Q. Passage ranking is different from the automatic jump to the part of the text relevant to the search query after clicking on a result in SERPs

• (43:20) With passage ranking, Google tries to understand on a longer page which has several unique parts of a page within the same page and rank it (not pulling out a sentence and ranking it or showing differently). So a really long (often not super SEO optimised) page might contain several intents, and Google recognises a certain part of the page being relevant to a search query, so it ranks the whole page in the SERPs, even if there are a lot of irrelevant parts to the page. So passage ranking, which is more about ranking, should not be confused with pointing out a specific part of the page. At the same time, Google is trying to understand things like anchor within a page as well. For example, there can be a hash editorial part at the end of a URL, which could point to a different part of the page, and Google tries to understand it and include in the site links, when they show the page itself. Or sometimes they take things that they show in a featured snippet and link to that directly on the page using some new HTML API, that allows them to add something to the URL so that it goes to that specific text segment of the page. So passage ranking and jumping to a specific part of a page are different things.

Dynamic Menu and Related Posts

Q. Dynamic menu and related posts work well for both users and crawlers.

• (53:35) Creating a dynamic menu on the website that takes into account the action of a user doesn’t create a problem for Google crawlers, as on the Google’s side everything is static, and it can understand the connection between the links. However, if there is something within the navigation that depends on how the user navigates through the website, and that needs to be reflected in search, that is trickier. Since Google crawls without cookies, it can’t keep that trail.
  Linking related content on a content page is also a good approach, since it works well for users, and gives Google more context when it crawls the page.

Flexible Sampling

Q. Flexible Sampling should be used to index the whole page for the pages that have gated content

• (57:34) Flexible Sampling allows the website owners to use a structured data markup on gated pages to let Google know which parts of the pages were gated and which were not. After that, these pages can be dynamically served to Google Bots slightly differently than they would be served to an average user. That means that when something like the URL inspection tool is used the whole content together with markup can be seen and the whole page with these markups would be indexed, and when a user goes to that page he would see gated or limited access set up.
  This feature is also documented in Google as subscription & Paywall Content, and different types of CSS selectors need to be specified for the different types of content.

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Google’s Removal tool

Q. Removal tool doesn’t interfere with the indexing or the crawling of a page

• (04:41): The removal tool in Google Search Console basically just hides the page in the search results. During the time that the removal is active, Google will recrawl and re-index that page normally.  If you add a no-index meta tag to those pages, we will notice that usually within that half-year time, and then Google will drop the page from the index naturally.

Q. When the removal tool is implemented, Google still uses the removed pages to assess the website, but only to a certain extent

• (09:36): The pages where the removal tool was implemented are still indexed if they don’t have a no-index or any other kind of block. Google just doesn’t show them in the search results. Usually, when talking about individual pages, that’s not going to skew Google’s overall assessment of the quality of the website. But if a removal tool is implemented on a significant part of the website, then that’s something when it could affect the understanding of the overall quality of the website

Internal Link Equity

Q. The value of the links pointing to no-index pages gets lost

• (10:45): There are some situations where Google keeps no-index pages with links in its index when it freshly processes them, and it understands there’s a no-index on it, so it doesn’t use them for anything, but it can process them for sure. However, for the most part, when Google recognises that no-index is a persistent state on a page, then it won’t do anything with this page. Google will ignore it completely, and those links pointing to the no-index page go nowhere, and the links get dropped.

Broken media attachments 

Q. Media attachment bugs don’t really affect Google’s impression of the website. The relevance of the website matters more

• (14:12): Sometimes, media attachment bugs happen, but Google doesn’t see them as a huge problem since they don’t tend to be shown in search anyway. John says that getting rid of these kinds of pages makes sense, but it’s more of a matter of making sure that the website is clean, strong and relevant. Google often indexes a lot of not-so-valuable pages, but it doesn’t worsen the quality of the website.

Duplicate pages 

Q. Having pages that are kind of the same but actually different makes your job harder. Stick to creating one stronger page instead

• (20:10): The example comes from the person asking the question: he has a website that promotes the services of fixing Apple products, and he has multiple pages for different models of iPhone. They talk about almost the same things, but for different iPhone models. John points out that this person is “competing with himself” because if someone types “iPhone screen repair” all his pages related to that will compete with each other and have to rank for this keyword on their own. John suggests that it’s better if all the information about fixing the screens of different iPhone models is on the one really strong page. However, he also mentions that it makes sense in areas where the competition is strong – in a case when the website is one of its kind, it might be better to have all those multiple pages.

Schema Markup Plugin

Q. Before implementing something out of Google’s functionality on your website, it’s always good to check in with the Google policies

• (23:00): The person asking the question uses schema markup of Google My Business Reviews on his website, with a special plug-in that allows him to put that as a widget on the footer. He wants to know whether having that on all pages would be considered a duplicate. John argues that even if it’s not a duplicate per se, the problem lies in the fact that the reviews are not collected directly on the website itself, so it might be against Google policies. Before using any plug-ins outside Google, it’s always better to see if this is not breaking any rules.

Website Speed

Q. The website’s speed, according to Google Search Console, is not an important assessment factor compared to the real experience of people accessing the website from the same country where the website is hosted

• (24:04): There might be a difference in what Google Search Console shows as an average response time of the website and what a tool that measures average response time from the local access displays, as the Google bots do crawling mainly from the US. The good thing is that for ranking purposes, Google pays more attention to what people from where the website is hosted are experiencing in terms of response time and not what the crawlers from the US are getting.

Content Silos

Q. Content silos are a great move to let your users understand your website better

• (26:01): Content silos are not primarily an SEO move, but more of something that might be done for users’ convenience, in the sense of if it’s clear for users that the site is really strong on a specific topic. That makes it a lot easier for them to understand the context of the individual things on the website, and indirectly Google understands things a bit better for SEO as well. John argues that thought like  “those internal links are coming from this theme page and going to that theme page that should match exactly, and then Google will rank our pages better” shouldn’t be the primary focus here. 

Localisation 

Q. There is no clear number on how many localisations a website should optimally have

• (31:16): There is no such thing as “too many localisations”, but having a lot of versions of the same page in a way “dilutes” the website – pages might turn out to be less strong overall, and it makes it harder for Google to understand what the website’s strengths are. As a result, each individual version of the website might rank worse than it could have. Having website versions for every country in the world is not a great idea, neither is having an international website with only one version – every website has its own optimal point depending on the website itself and its users.

Interstitials 

Q. Making interstitials is still not welcomed, but the way they appear on the website makes a difference

• (34:58): Google looks at intrusive interstitials as a factor that would affect rankings because it’s a page element and a part of the page experience. However, John says: “this is essentially focused on that moment when a user comes to your website. So if you’re using interstitials as something in between the normal flow of when a user goes to your website, then from our point of view that’s less of an issue. But really, if someone comes to your website and the first thing that they see is this big interstitial, and they can’t actually find the content that they were essentially promised in search, then from our point of view, that looks bad”.

Disavow Files

Q. There is no fixed time for deleting and processing disavow files

• (44:21) Google picks up disavow files immediately, but “unblocking” the links takes time. Over some period of time, as the links are recrawled, Google recognises that there is no disavow file and takes that into account. John suggests that it’s better to update the existing disavow file to what you want and expect Google to pick up on that after some time, rather than to delete the file, wait till it’s gone and then update a new file.

Q. Disavow files that were previously created from one account in the Search Console can be accessed and updated from a new account.

• (45:38) Even if, for some reason, there is a need to set up a new Search Console account for a verified website, the new account still has an option to access, download and update previously created disavow files.

Search Console and Lighthouse

Q. Google Search Console is a field test; Google Lighthouse is a lab test

• (46:45) Google Search Console and Google Light House might show different numbers about a website, and it might seem confusing. John reveals that Google Search Console is basically a field test, and it shows what the website users’ experience is actually like, while Google Lighthouse is a lab text and shows what could be potentially improved: things like iterative debugging and optimisation processes that might not be directly showing up to users. That’s why indicators in these two tools might not match, and it’s good to consider both.

Domains and subdomains

Q. For a website that hosts a lot of user-generated content, it’s always safer to have the users under subdomains or to move the website’s own content to a whole domain

• (52:16) Sometimes a website that hosts a lot of users who create their own blogs, generates content etc., wants to actually rank for some target keywords on its own. However, the content generated by users, which can sometimes be of low quality, spam or some other things that are considered problematic might not let the website rank on its own. If a user’s blog, for example, contains a lot of spam, it is regarded as “the whole website has a lot of spam”. So, it’s always better to have users on subdomains of the website instead of the main domain, or even to move the website’s own original blogs and content to another domain and to isolate it from user-created content.

Uncommon Downloads

Q. The uncommon downloads problem might come from hosting something unique, almost per user type of thing

• (56:17) If a website hosts something like a software tool, that a user can sign up and download, then uncommon download warnings might keep popping up quite often. That’s because in this case, a user gets a zip file or executable specifically for him, so Google can’t scan it and tell if it’s malware or not. But the website owner can ask for the review request, and the file gets double-checked, and the issue might be resolved. 

John points out, that this is one of the reasons why it’s good to have users isolated from the main website domain or have the main website on some other domain: uncommon downloads problem might be happening because of the files uploaded by a user, and it might affect everything that is hosted on the same domain.

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