Author: LION Digital

Introduction

Lizzi: (00:00) It’s January, it’s 2023, it’s the new year. And what do we have for you today?

It’s office hours, and it’s me. And some questions and some answers, and let’s get into it. I’m Lizzy from the Search Relations team.

Do meta keywords matter? 

Lizzi: (00:15)  Do meta keywords still help with SEO?

A: (00:20) Nope. It doesn’t help. If you’re curious about why there’s a blog post from 2009 that goes into more detail about why Google doesn’t use meta keywords.

Why is my brand name not shown as-is?

Gary: (00:31) Hi, this is Gary from the search team. Kajal is asking; my brand name is Quoality. That is, Quebec Uniform Oscar Alpha Lima India Tango Yankee, and when someone searches for our brand name, Google shows the results for quality. That is the correct spelling. Why is Google doing this?

A: (00:53) Great question. When you search for something that we often see as a misspelling of a common word, our algorithms learn that and will attempt to suggest a correct spelling or even just do a search for the correct spelling altogether As your brand grows, eventually, our algorithms learn your brand name and perhaps stop showing results for what our algorithms initially detected as the correct spelling. It will take time, though.

Which date should I use as lastmod in sitemaps?

John: (01:20) Hi, this is John from the search relations team in Switzerland. Michael asks, the lastmod in a sitemap XML file for a news article. Should that be the date of the last article update or the last comment?

A: (01:36) Well since the site map file is all about finding the right moment to crawl a page based on its changes, the lastmod date should reflect the date when the content has significantly changed enough to merit being re-crawled. If comments are a critical part of your page, then using that date is fine. Ultimately, this is a decision that you can make. For the date of the article itself, I’d recommend looking at our guidelines on using dates on a page. In particular, make sure that you use the dates on a page consistently and that you structured data, including the time zone, within the markup

Can I have both a news and a general sitemap?

Gary: (02:14 ) Helen is asking, do you recommend having a news sitemap and a general sitemap on the same website? Any issue if the news site map and general sitemap contain the same URL?

A: (02:24) You can have just one site map, a traditional web sitemap as defined by sitemaps.org, and then add the news extension to the URLs that need it. Just keep in mind that, you’ll need to remove the news extension from URLs that are older than 30 days. For this reason, it’s usually simpler to have a separate site map for news and for the web. Just remove the URLs altogether from the news site map when they become too old for news. Including the URLs in both site maps, while not very nice, but it will not cause any issues for you..

What can I do about irrelevant search entries?

John: (03:02) Jessica asks. In the suggested search, in Google, at the bottom of the page, there’s one suggestion that is not related to our website. And after looking at the results, our website is not to be found for that topic. Kind of hard for me to determine exactly what you mean, but it sounds like you feel that something showing up in the search isn’t quite the way that you’d expect it, something perhaps in one of the elements of the search results page.

A: (03:29) For these situations, we have a feedback link on the bottom for the whole search results page, as well as for many of the individual features. If you submit your feedback there, it’ll be sent through your appropriate teams. They tend to look for ways to improve these systems for the long run for everyone. This is more about feedback for a feature overall and less that someone will explicitly look at your site and try to figure out why this one page is not showing up there

Why is my site’s description not shown?

Lizzi: (03:57 ) Claire is asking, I have a site description on my Squarespace website, but the Google description is different. I have reindexed it. How do I change it?

A: (04:08) Something to keep in mind here is that it’s not guaranteed that Google will use a particular meta description that you write for a given page. Snippets are actually auto-generated and can vary based on what the user was searching for. Sometimes different parts of the page are more relevant for a particular search query. We’re more likely to use the description that you write if it more accurately describes the page than what Google can pull from the page itself. We have some best practices about how to write meta descriptions in our documentation, so I recommend checking that out.

How can I fix the spam score for a used domain?

John: (04:40) Mohamed asks, I bought this domain, and I found out it got banned or has a spam score, so what do I need to do?

A: (04:49) Well, like many things, if you want to invest in a domain name, it’s critical that you do your due diligence ahead of time or that you get help from an expert. While for many things, a domain name can be reused, sometimes it comes with a little bit of extra ballast that you have to first clean up. This is not something that Google can do for you. That said, I couldn’t load your website at all when I tried it here. So perhaps the primary issue might be a technical one instead.

Are spammy links from porn sites bad for ranking?

Lizzi: (05:20) Anonymous is asking; I’ve seen a lot of spammy backlinks from porn websites

linking to our site over the past month using the Google Search Console link tool. We do not want these. Is this bad for ranking, and what can I do about it?

A: (05:35) This is not something that you need to prioritise too much since Google Systems are getting better at figuring out if a link is spammy. But if you’re concerned or you’ve received a manual action, you can use the disavow tool in Search Console. You’ll need to create a list of the spammy links and then upload it to the tool. Do a search for disavow in Search Console for more steps on how to do this.

Does Google use keyword density?

John: (05:59) The next question I have here is, does Google consider keyword density for the content?

A: (06:05) Well, no, Google does not have a notion of optimal keyword density. Over the years, our systems have gotten quite well at recognising what a page is about, even if the keywords are not mentioned at all. That said, it is definitely best to be explicit. Don’t rely on search engines guessing what your page is about and for which queries it should be shown. If your homepage only mentions that you “add pizazz to places” and show some beautiful houses, both users and search engines won’t know what you’re trying to offer. If your business paints houses, then just say that. If your business sells paints, then say that. Think about what users might be searching for and use the same terminology. It makes it easier to find your pages, and it makes it easier for users to recognise that they have found what they want. Keyword density does not matter, but being explicit does matter and contrary to the old SEO myth, story, joke, and commentary, you don’t need to mention all possible variations either.

Why is our title mixed up with the meta description?

Lizzi: (07:12) Michael is asking, what we should do if we are seeing that certain pages have meta descriptions in SERPs displaying the exact same text as the title tag, not our custom descriptions or snippets from the page.

A: (07:26) Hey, Michael. Well, first, I’d check that the HTML is valid and that there’s not any issue with how it’s being rendered with the URL inspection tool. It’s hard to give any more advice without seeing more context, so I’d head to the Search Central forums, where you can post some examples of the page and the search results you’re seeing for it. The folks there can take a look and give some more specific advice on how to debug the issue further.

How can I remove my staging sub-domain?

Gary: (07:50) Anonymous is asking, I have a staging site which is on a subdomain, and unfortunately, it got indexed. How can I remove it from search results?

A: (07:59) Well, these things happen, and it’s not a reason to be worried. First, ensure that your staging site is actually returning a 404 or 410 status code, so Googlebot can update our records about that site. And then if it’s a bother that the staging site appears in search, submit a site removal request in Search Console. Just mind that you are going to need to verify the staging site in Search Console first.

Will disavowing links make my site rank better?

John: (08:25) Jimmy asks, will disavowing spammy links linking to my website help recover from an algorithmic penalty?

A: (08:33) So first off, I’d try to evaluate whether your site really created those spammy links. It’s common for sites to have random, weird links, and Google has a lot of practice ignoring those. On the other hand, if you actively built significant spammy links yourself, then yes, cleaning those up would make sense. The disavow tool can help if you can’t remove the links at the source. That said, this will not position your site as it was before, but it can help our algorithms to recognise that they can trust your site again, giving you a chance to work up from there. There’s no low-effort, magic trick that makes a site pop up back afterwards. You really have to put in the work, just as if you did it from the start.

How can I best move my site?

Gary: (09:21) Clara Diepenhorst is asking, I want to implement a new name for my company while the product and site stay mostly the same. This new name changes my URLs. How do I keep my credits of the old name?

A: (09:36) Great question. And this is, again, a site move question. Site moves are always fun and scary. The most important thing you need to do is to ensure that the old URLs are redirecting to the new URLs. This is the most important thing. Once you have your new domain, make sure that you verify it in Search Console. See if you get any red flags in the security section and other reports. And once you are already with the redirections, you can submit a site move request in Search Console also. Since it’s a really big undertaking to do a site move, we have very detailed documentation about this topic. Try searching for something like “Google site move” on your favourite search engine and really just have a read, prepare yourself

Why doesn’t my site show up in Google?

John: (10:22) Rob asks, my site does not show up on Google searches. I can’t get it indexed.

A: (10:28) So Rob mentioned the URL, and I took a quick look, and it turns out that the homepage returns a 404 status code to us. Essentially for Google, the page does not exist at all. Trying it out a bit more, it looks like it returns a 404 status code to all Googlebot user agents and users can see it normally. You can test that using a user agent switcher in Chrome in the developer tools there. This seems to be more of a misconfiguration of your server, so you might need help from your hosting provider to resolve it. Google will keep retrying the page, and once it’s resolved, it should be visible in the search results again without maybe, a week or so.

How can I get my mobile version into Google?

Lizzi: (11:11) Matheus is asking Google Search Console looks at the desktop version of some, but not all articles on my website, even though it has a mobile version. How can I tell Google to look at the mobile version?

A: (11:24) Well, we’ve got a list of things that you can check in our documentation on mobile-first indexing, so I’d recommend going through that checklist and the troubleshooting section. Most of it boils down to this. Make sure that you’re providing the same content on both versions of your site and that both your users and Google can access both versions. If you’re still having issues, we recommend posting in the forum so folks there can take a look at those specific pages that are not showing up as mobile-friendly.

Why does a competitor’s social account with the same name show up?

John: (11:54) Anthony asks, my company’s social media account is no longer appearing in the search results. Only my competitors are appearing now, and we have the same name.

A: (12:06) It looks like it’s more than just two sites using the particular name that you mentioned, and this kind of situation will always be hard to find your site, and it won’t be clear to us or to users, which one is the so-called right one? I mean, they’re all called the same; they’re all essentially legitimate results. If you want people to find your site by name, then you should make sure that the name is a clear identifier and not a term that many others also use.

What could be a reason for a URL removal not to work?

Gary: (12:36) Lou is asking, why my link is still showing up on Google after I used the content removal tool and it got approved? Please help me understand this phenomenon.

A: (12:47) Using the URL removal tool is very fast. Usually, it removes the specified URL from search results within a few hours. If it didn’t remove a URL that was approved for removal by the tool, that usually means that you specified the wrong URL. Try to click the actual result and see where you land. Is it the same URL that’s shown in the search? If not, submit another removal request for that particular URL.

Which structured data should I use on a service-website?

John: (13:13) The next question I have here is; our website is a service, not a product. The price will vary on the estimate. How do I fix the invalid item for a service like ours when I use product structured data?

A: (13:28) For a local business, like the one that you mentioned, I’d recommend looking at the local business structure data. This also lets you specify a price range for your services. We have more information about this markup in the search developer documentation.

Why might my content not be indexed?

Gary: (13:43) Anonymous is asking what could be the reason for our relatively healthy and content-rich country site to repeatedly be de-indexed and our old 404 subdomains and sub holders to be reindexed instead?

A: (13:55) Well, without the site URL, it’s fairly impossible to give an exact answer, but it sounds like we just haven’t visited all the URLs on those old subdomains and in subfolders, and that’s why those URLs are still surfacing in search. If you are certain that the country site keeps falling out of Google’s index and not just, for example, not appearing for the keywords you’d like, that could be a sign of both technical and quality issues. I suggest you drop by the Google Search Central Forums and see if the community can identify what’s up with your site.

Can I get old, moved URLs ignored by Search?

John: (14:29) Alex asks, if you move a ton of content with 301 redirects, do you need to request the removal of the old URLs from the index? Because even a decade later, Google still crawls the old URLs. What’s up? Thank you.

A: (14:44) No, you do not need to request re-indexing of moved URLs or request them to be removed. This happens automatically over time. The effect that you’re seeing is that our systems are aware of your content has been on other URLs. So if a user explicitly looks for those old URLs, we’ll try to show them, and this can happen for many years. It’s not a sign of an issue. There is nothing that you need to fix in a case like this. If you check the URL’s in Search Console, you’ll generally see that the canonical URL has shifted when the redirect is being used. In short, don’t worry about these old URLs showing up when you specifically search for those old URLs.

Does Search Console verification affect Search?

Gary: (15:27) Avani is asking, changing Search Console ownership or verification code – does it affect website indexing?

A: (15:35) Having your site verified in Search Console or changing the verification code and method has no effect on indexing or ranking whatsoever. You can use the data that Search Console gives you to improve your site and thus potentially do better in search with your site, but otherwise has no effect on search whatsoever.

Why might my translated content not appear in Google?

John: (15:54 ) Now, a question from Allan, about two months ago, I added another language to my website. I can’t find the translated version through Google Search. What could be the reason for that?

A: (16:07) When adding another language to a website, there are things that you need to do and things you could additionally do. In particular, you need to have separate URLs for each language version. This can be as little as adding a parameter to the URL, like question mark language equals German, but you must have separate URLs that specifically lead to that language version. Some systems automatically swap out the content on the same URL. This does not work for search engines. You must have separate URLs. The other important thing is that you should have links to the language versions. Ideally, you’d link from one language version to all versions of that page. This makes it easy for users and search engines to find that language version. Without internal links to those pages, Google might not know that they exist. And finally, using the hreflang annotations is a great way to tell us about connections between pages. I’d see this more as an extra; it’s not required. You can find out more about sites that use multiple language versions in our developer’s documentation.

Does the URL depth of an image affect ranking?

Lizzi: (17:21) Sally is asking does the URL depth of an image affects image ranking and will adding the srcset and size code of an image in the HTML be good for image ranking?

A: (17:33) Whether an image is three levels deep or five levels deep isn’t really going to matter. What’s more important is using a structure that makes sense for your site, and it makes it easy for you to organise your images in some kind of logical pattern, while still making sure that the file names are descriptive. For example, it might make sense to have a directory called photos slash, dog slash, havanese slash molly dot png, but if you don’t have a ton of Havanese photos, then maybe just photos and then Molly Havanese dog dot png might make sense. As far as srcset and size code goes, add those if it makes sense for your image. We recommend these for responsive images in particular so we can understand more about the different versions of a given image. Hope that helps.

What happens when a part of an hreflang cluster is bad?

Gary: (18:20) Anonymous is asking, is there a difference in how hreflang clusters are treated, depending on if the hreflang tag is broken or includes a noindex or a different canonical in the clusters?

A: (18:34) Complicated topic. Hreflang clusters are formed with the hreflang links that we could validate. Validate in this context, meaning the backlinks between the hreflang tags. If an hreflang link couldn’t be validated, that link will simply not appear in the cluster. The cluster will be created regardless of the other valid links. If one of the links is no index, then that won’t be eligible for getting into the cluster.

Are sitewide footer links bad?

Lizzi: (19:05) Nazim is asking, are sitewide footer links that refer to the designer companies or the CMS harmful for SEO?

A: (19:54) In general, if the links are boilerplate stuff like “made by Squarespace” that comes with the website theme, this is not something that you need to worry about. If you have control over the link, we recommend that you add nofollow to these types of links. Also, check to make sure that the anchor text is something reasonable. For example, make sure that the link isn’t gratuitously keyword rich, for example, “made by the best Florida SEO.”

How can I speed up a site move?

Gary: (19:39) Mohamed is asking; I made a transfer request because I changed the domain name of our website in Search Console. What can I do to speed up this process? This is very, very important for me. 

A: (19:48) This is a good question. The most important thing you need to do is to ensure that your old URLs are redirecting to your new site. This will have the largest positive impact on your site move. The site move request in Search Console is a nice thing to submit, but even without it, site moves should do just fine, if you redirect the old URLs to the new ones and they are working properly. Search for something like “Google Site move” on your favourite search engine and check out our documentation about site moves, if you want to learn more.

How do I link desktop and mobile versions for m-dot sites?

Lizzi: (20:24) Nilton is asking, at the moment, my site is not responsive. It has a desktop version and an m-dot site. In the documentation, it says the treatment we need to do is something in relation to canonical and alternate. My question is, do I need to put the canonical in the desktop version? The documentation doesn’t make it very clear. 

A: (20:42)Thank you for your feedback; I will definitely try to make this clearer in the docs. The desktop URL is always the canonical URL, and the m-dot is the alternate version of that URL. So on the desktop version, you’ll need a rel canonical that points to itself and a rel alternate that points to the m-dot version. And then, on your m-dot page, you’ll have only a rel-canonical that points to the desktop version of that page. Hope that helps.

How important is EXIF data?

Gary: (21:14) Sagar is asking, how important is EXIF data from an SEO perspective for an e-commerce site or sites where images play key roles?

A: (21:25) Well, this is an easy question. I really like easy questions. The answer is that Google doesn’t use EXIF data for anything at the moment. The only image data, or metadata, that we currently use is IPTC.

Conclusion

John: (21:41) And that was it for this episode. I hope you found the questions and the answers useful. If there’s anything you submitted, which didn’t get covered here, I’d recommend posting in the Search Central help community. There are lots of passionate experts active there who can help you to narrow things down. And of course, if there’s more on your mind, please submit those questions with a form linked below. Your questions here are useful to us and to those who catch up on recordings, so please keep them coming. If you have general feedback about these episodes, let us know in the comments or ping us on social media. 

I hope the year has started off well for you. For us, well, it’s been a mixed bag, as you’ve probably seen in the news, things are a bit in flux over here. You can imagine that it’s been challenging for the team, those we interact with internally, and also me. In any case, the questions you submit give us a chance to do something small and useful, hopefully, so please keep them coming. In the meantime, may your site’s traffic go up and your crawl errors go down. Have a great new year and see you soon. Bye.

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Introduction

Lizzi: (00:00) Hello, hello, and welcome to the December edition of the Google SEO Office Hours, a monthly audio recording coming to you from the Google Search team answering questions about search submitted by you. Today, you’ll be hearing from Alan, Gary, John, Duy and me, Lizzy. All right, let’s get started.

How to reduce my site from 30,000 products to 2,500?

Alan: (00:22) Vertical web asks. My old site is going from 30,000 products down to two and a half thousand. I will generate 400 thousand 301 redirects. Is it better to start on a clean URL and redirect what needs to be redirected to the new site or do it on an old URL? 

• A: (00:44) We generally recommend keeping your existing domain name where possible. We support redirecting to a new domain name as Google will recognise the 301 permanent redirects and so understand your content is moved. However, there’s a greater risk of losing traffic if a mistake is made in the migration project, it is fine to clean up old pages and either have them return a 404 or redirect to new versions, even if this affects lots of pages on your site.

Does Google ignore links to a page that was a 404?

Gary: (01:09) Sina is asking; it’s been formally asserted that Google ignores links to a 404 page. I want to know whether links to that page will still be ignored when it is no longer 404.

• A: (01:22) Well, as soon as a page comes back online, the links will be counted again to that page after the linking pages have been recrawled and the fillings have been deemed still relevant by our systems.

Do speed metrics other than Core Web Vitals affect my site’s rankings?

John: (01:37) If my website is failing on the Core Web Vitals but performs excellently on the GTMetrix speed test, does that affect my search rankings?

• A: (01:47) Well, maybe. There are different ways to test speed and different metrics, and there’s testing either on the user side or in a lab. My recommendation is to read up on the different approaches and work out which one is appropriate for you and your website.

Why doesn’t Google remove all spam

Duy: (02:06) Somebody asked, why does Google not remove spam webpages? 

• A: (02:11) Well, over the years we blogged about several spam-specific algorithms that either demote or remove spam results completely. One such example is Spambrain, our artificial intelligence system that’s very good at catching spam. Sometimes for some queries where we don’t have any good results to show, you might still see low-quality results. If you see spam sites are still ranking, please continue to send them to us using the spam report form. We don’t take immediate manual actions on user spam reports, but we do actually use the spam reports to monitor and improve our coverage in future spam updates. Thank you so much.

Do too many 301 redirects have a negative effect?

John: (02:55) Lisa asked. I create 301 redirects for every 404 error that gets discovered on my website. Do too many 301 redirects have a negative effect on search ranking for a website? And if so, how many are too many?

• A: (03:13) You can have as many redirecting pages as you want. Millions are fine if that’s what you need or want. That said, focus on what’s actually a problem so that you don’t create more unnecessary work for yourself. It’s fine to have 404 pages and to let them drop out of the search. You don’t need to redirect. Having 404 errors listed in Search Console is not an issue if you know that those pages should be returning 404.

How does Google determine what a product review is?

Alan: (03:42) John asks, how does Google determine what a product review is for the purposes of product review updates? If it’s affecting non-product pages, how can site owners prevent that?

• A: (03:54) Check out our Search Central documentation on best practices for product reviews. For examples of what we recommend, including in product reviews. It is unlikely that a non-product page would be mischaracterized as a product review. And it is unlikely that it would have a significant effect on ranking, even if it was, it’s more likely to be other ranking factors or algorithm changes that have impacted the ranking of your page.

Should I delete my old website when I make a new one?

John: (04:23) I bought a Google domain that came with a free webpage. I now decided to self-host my domain, and I wanted to know if I should delete my free Google page.I don’t want to have two web pages. 

• A: (04:37) If you set up a domain name for your business and have since moved on to a new domain, you should ideally redirect the old one to the new domain, or at least delete the old domain. Keeping an old website online when you know that it’s obsolete is a bad practice and can confuse both search engines and users.

Should paginated pages be included in an XML sitemap?

Alan: (04:59) Should paginated pages such as /category?page=2 be included in an XML sitemap? It makes sense to me, but I almost never see it.

• A: (05:12) You can include them, but assuming each category page has a link to the next category page that may not be many benefits, we will discover the subsequent pages automatically. Also, since subsequent pages are for the same category, we may decide to only index the first category page on the assumption that the subsequent pages are not different enough to return separately in search results.

My site used to be hacked, do I have to do something with the hacked pages?

John: (05:37) Nacho asks, we were hacked early in 2022 and still see Search Console 404 error pages from spammy pages created by the hacker. These pages were deleted from our database. Is there anything else that I should do?

• A: (05:55) Well, if the hack is removed, if the security issue is resolved, and if the pages are removed, then you’re essentially all set. These things can take a while to disappear completely from all reports, but if they’re returning 404, that’s fine. 

Does Google care about fast sites?

Alan: (06:11) Tarek asks, does Google care about fast sites?

• A: (06:15) Yes. Google measures core web vitals for most sites, which includes factors such as site speed, and core web vitals is used as a part of the page experience ranking factor. While it’s not something that overrides other factors like relevance, it is something that Google cares about and equally important users care about it too.

Can Google follow links inside a menu that shows on mouseover?

Lizzi: (06:38) Abraham asks, can Google follow links inside a menu that appears after a mouseover on an item?

• A: (06:45) Hey, Abraham. Great question. And yes, Google can do this. The menu still needs to be visible in the HTML, and the links need to be crawlable, which means they need to be proper A tags with an href attribute. You can use the URL inspection tool in Google Search Console to see how Google sees the HTML on your site, and check to see if the menu links are there. Hope that helps. 

Why did the reporting shift between my mobile and desktop URLs?

John: (07:10) Luki asked, we use sub-domains for desktop and mobile users. We found a strange report in Search Console in early August where the desktop performance has changed inversely with the mobile performance. And the result is that our traffic has decreased. 

• A: (07:30) The technical aspect of the indexing and reporting, shifting to the mobile version of a site is normal and expected. This happens with mobile-first indexing and can be visible in reports if you look at the host names individually. However, assuming you have the same content on mobile and desktop, that wouldn’t affect ranking noticeably. If you see ranking or traffic changes, they would be due to other reasons. 

Does having many redirects affect crawling or ranking?

Gary: (07:56) Marc is asking, Do many redirects, let’s say twice as many as actual URLs affect crawling or ranking in any way? 

• A: (08:05) Well, you can have as many redirects as you like on your site overall; there shouldn’t be any problem there. Just make sure that individual URLs don’t have too many hops in the redirect chains if you are chaining redirects, otherwise, you should be fine.

Can I use an organization name instead of an author’s name?

Lizzi: (08:21) Anonymous is asking, when an article has no author, should you just use organization instead of a person on author markup? Will this have a lesser impact on results?

• A: (08:36) It’s perfectly fine to list an organization as the author of an article. We say this in our article, structured data documentation. You can specify an organization or person as an author, both are fine. You can add whichever one is accurate for your content. 

What can we do if someone copies our content?

Duy: (08:53) Somebody asked a competitor’s copying all of our articles with small changes. In time, it ranks higher than us. DMCA doesn’t stop them or seem to lower their ranking. What else can we do, if their site has more authority?

• A: (09:09) If the site simply scrapes content without creating anything of the original value, that’s clearly a violation of our spam policies, and you can report them to us using our spam report form so that we can improve our algorithms to catch similar sites. Otherwise, you can start a thread on our Search Central Help community, so product experts can advise on what would be some of the possible solutions. They would also be able to escalate to us for further assessment.

Do URL, page title, and H1 tag have to be the same?

Lizzi: (09:35) Anonymous is asking: the URL page title and H1 tag. Do they have to be the same? 

• A: (09:44) Great question, and no, they don’t need to be exactly the same. There’s probably going to be some overlap in the words you’re using. For example, if you have a page that’s titled “How to Knit a Scarf”, then it probably makes sense to use some of those words in the URL too, like /how-to-knit-a-scarf or /scarf-knitting-pattern, but it doesn’t need to be a word for word match. Use descriptive words that make sense for your readers and for you when you’re maintaining your site structure and organization. And that’ll work out for search engines as well.

Is redirecting through a page blocked by robots.txt a valid way to prevent passing PageRank?

John: (10:17) Sha asks, is redirecting through a page blocked by robots.txt still a valid way of preventing links from passing PageRank?

• A: (10:28) Yes, if the goal is to prevent signals from passing through a link, it’s fine to use a redirecting page that’s blocked by robots.txt.

Why is my site flagged as having a virus?

Alan: (10:37) Some pages on my website collect customer information, but my site is always reported as being infected via a virus or deceptive by Google. How can I avoid this happening again without removing those pages?

• A: (10:53) Your site might have been infected by a virus without you knowing it. Check out https://web.dev/request-a-review for instructions on how to register your site in Search. Console, check for security alerts, then request Google to review your site again after removing any malicious files, some break-ins hide themselves from the site owner so they can be hard to track down.

Is there any way to get sitelinks on search results?

Lizzi: (11:20) Rajath is asking, is there any way to get sitelinks on SERPs?

• A: (11:25) Good question. One thing to keep in mind is that there’s not really a guarantee that sitelinks or any search feature will show up. Sitelinks specifically only appear if they’re relevant to what the user was looking for and if it’ll be useful to the user to have those links. There are some things that you can do to make it easier for Google to show sitelinks. However, like making sure you have a logical site structure and that your titles, headings, and link text are descriptive and relevant. There’s more on that in our documentation on sitelinks, so I recommend checking that out. 

Does having two hyphens in a domain name have a negative effect?

John: (11:59) My site’s domain name has two hyphens. Does that have any negative effect on its rankings? 

• A: (12:06) There’s no negative effect from having multiple dashes in a domain.

How important are titles for e-commerce category page pagination?

Alan: (12:12) Bill asks, how important are unique page titles for e-commerce category product listing page pagination? Would it be helpful to include the page number in the title?

• A: (12:25) There is a good chance that including the page number in your information about a page will have little effect. I would include the page number if you think it’s gonna help users understand the context of a page. I would not include it on the assumption it’ll help with ranking or increasing the likelihood of the page being indexed. 

Is it better to post one article a day or many a day?

John: (12:44) Is it better for domain ranking to regularly post one article every day or to post many articles every day or to post many articles every day? 

• A: (12:53) So here’s my chance to give the SEO answer: it depends. You can decide how you want to engage with your users: on the downside, that means there’s no absolute answer for how often you should publish,on the upside, this means that you can decide for yourself.

What is the main reason for de-indexing a site after a spam update?

Gary: (13:12) Faiz Ul Ameen is asking, what is the main reason for de-indexing of sites after the Google spam update?

• A: (13:19) Well, glad you asked. If you believe you were affected by the Google Spam update. You have to take a really, really deep look at your content and, considerably improve it. Check out our spam policies, and read more about the Google spam update on Search Central.

Can Google read infographic images?

John: (13:38) Zaid asks, can Google read infographic images? What’s the best recommendation there?

• A: (13:45) While it’s theoretically possible to scan images for text, I wouldn’t count on it when it comes to a web search. If there’s a text that you want your pages to be recognized for, then place that as text on your pages. For infographics, that can be in the form of captions and all texts, or just generally, well, you know, text on the page.

Is it possible to remove my site completely if it was hacked?

Gary: (14:08) Anonymous is asking whether it’s possible to completely remove a site from Google Search because it has been hacked and leads to thousands of invalid links.

• A: (14:20) Well, first and foremost, sorry to hear that your site was hacked. Our friends at Web.dev have great documentation about how to prevent this from happening in the future, but they also have documentation about how to clean up after a hack. To answer your specific question, you can remove your site from search by serving a 404 or similar status code, or by adding noindex rules to your pages. We will need to recrawl your site to see the status codes and noindex rules. But that’s really the best way to do it.

Why does my Search Console miss a period of data?

John: (14:54) I’m missing months of data from my domain property on Search Console from April 2022it connects directly to August 2022. What happened?

• A: (15:07) This can happen if a website loses verification in Search Console for a longer period of time. Unfortunately, there is no way to get this data back. One thing you could try, however, is to verify a different part of your website and see if it shows some of the data there. 

How can I deindex some bogus URLs?

Gary: (15:25) Anonymous is asking, I want to deindex some bogus URLs. 

• A: (15:30) There’s really only a handful of ways to deindex URLs: removing the page and serving a 404 or 410 or similar status code. Or by adding a noindex rule to the pages and allowing Googlebot to crawl those pages. These you can all do on your own site. You don’t need any specific tool. But Googlebot will need to recrawl those pages to see the new statuses and rules. If we are talking about only a couple of pages, then you can request indexing of these pages in the Search Console.

Why is some structured data detected only in the schema validator?

Lizzi: (16:04) Frank asks why is some structured data markup detected on the schema validator, but not on Google’s rich result test?

• A: (16:14) Hey, Frank. This is a really common question. These tools are actually measuring different things. I think you’re referencing the Schema.org markup validator, which checks if your syntax in general, is correct, whereas the rich result test checks if you have markup that may enable you to get a rich result in Google Search. it doesn’t actually check every type that’s on schema.org, it only checks those that are listed in the list of structured data markup that Google supports, which is about 25 to 30 features, so it’s not fully comprehensive of everything that you’d see on Schema.org, for example. 

Do you have people who can make a website for me?

John: (16:47) Do you have people that I can work with to create a functioning site?

• A: (16:52) Unfortunately, no. We don’t have a team that can create a website for you. If you need technical help, my recommendation would be to use a hosted platform that handles all of the technical details for you. There are many fantastic platforms out there now, everything from Blogger from Google to Wix, or Squarespace, Shopify, and many more. They all can work very well with search and usually, they can help you to get your site off the ground.

Why are some sites crawled and indexed faster?

Gary: (17:21) Ibrahim is asking why are some websites crawled and indexed faster than others?

• A: (17:25) This is a great question. Much of how fast a site is crawled and indexed depends on how the site is perceived on the internet. For example, if there are many people talking about the site, it’s likely the site’s gonna be crawled and indexed faster. However, the quality of the content also matters a great deal. A site that’s consistently publishing high-quality content is going to be crawled and indexed faster. 

Why do Google crawlers get stuck with a pop-up store selector?

Alan: (17:51) Why do Google crawlers get stuck with a pop-up store selector? 

• A: (17:56) It can depend on how the store selector is implemented in HTML. Google follows a href links on a page. If the selector is implemented in JavaScript, Google might not see that the other stores exist and so not find the product pages for those stores.

How can I verify my staging site in Search Console?

Gary: (18:13) Anonymous is asking if we have a staging site that is allow-listing only specific developers’ IP addresses, if we upload a Search Console HTML file, which I suppose is the verification file, will Search Console be able to verify that site?

• A: (18:30) Well, the short answer is no. To remove your staging site from search, using the removal tool for site owners first, you need to ensure that Googlebot can actually access the site, so you can verify it in Search Console. We publish our list of IP addresses on Search Central. So you can use that list to allow-list the IPs that belong to Googlebot so it can access the verification file. Then you can use the removal tool to remove the staging site. Just make sure that the staging site, in general, is serving a status code that suggests it cannot be indexed, such as 404 or 410.

How can I get a desktop URL indexed?

John: (19:08) How can we get a desktop URL indexed?  The message Search Console says the page is not indexed because it’s a page with a redirect. We have two separate URLs for our brand, desktop and mobile.

• A: (19:21) With mobile-first indexing. That’s normal. Google will focus on the mobile version of a page. There’s nothing special that you need to do about that, and there’s no specific trick to index just the desktop version…

Is it possible to report sites for stolen content?

Lizzi: (19:36) Christian is asking, is it possible to report sites for stolen content, such as text, original images, that kind of thing?

• A: (19:46) Yes, you can report a site. Do a search for “DMCA request Google”, and use the “report content on Google” troubleshooter to file a report. 

Is adding Wikipedia links a bad practice?

John: (19:57) Is adding Wikipedia links to justify the content bad practice?

• A: (20:03) Well, I’d recommend adding links to things that add value to your pages. Blindly adding Wikipedia links to your pages doesn’t add value.

Is there any difference if an internal link is under the word “here”?

Lizzi: (20:14) Gabriel is asking, is there any difference if an internal link is under the word “here” or if it is linked in a keyword?

• A: (20:23) Hey Gabriel, good question. It doesn’t matter if it’s an internal link to something on your site or if it’s an external link pointing to something else, “here” is still bad link text. It could be pointing to any page, and it doesn’t tell us what the page is about. It’s much better to use words that are related to that topic so that users and search engines know what to expect from that link.

Why does my news site’s traffic go up and down?

Gary: (20:46) Niraj is asking, I follow the same pattern of optimization, but my news website traffic is up and down.

• A: (20:53) Well, for most sites, it’s actually normal to have periodic traffic fluctuations. For example, seasonality affects e-commerce sites quite a bit. For news sites, specifically user interest in the topics you cover can cause fluctuations, but all in all, it is normal and not something that you have to worry about usually. 

Is changing the URL often impacting my SEO performance?

John: (21:16) Is changing the URL often impacting my SEO performance? For example, a grocery site might change a URL from /christmas/turkey-meat to /easter/turkey-meat. The page is the same, and the URL is just changed with a redirect. 

• A: (21:35) I wouldn’t recommend constantly changing URLs. At the same time, if you must change your URLs, then definitely make sure to redirect appropriately. 

How does freshness play a role in ranking seasonal queries like Black Friday deals?

Alan: (21:45) How does freshness play a role in the ranking? For seasonal queries like Black Friday deals, it makes sense to update frequently as news or deals are released, but what about something less seasonal?

• A: (21:58) You may decide to update a Black Friday deals page frequently to reflect the latest offers as they come out. Remember, however, that Google does not guarantee how frequently a page will be reindexed, so not all of the updates are guaranteed to be indexed. Also, a good quality page that does not change much may still be returned in search results if we think its content is still relevant. I would recommend focusing on creating useful content and not spending too much time thinking about how to make static pages more dynamic.

Is there a way to appeal Safe Search results?

John: (22:33) Adam asks, is there a way to appeal Safe Search results? I work with a client that has been blocked from their own brand term while resellers and affiliates are still appearing. 

• A: (22:44) So first off, I think it’s important to realize that Safe Search is not just about adult content. There’s a bit of nuance involved there, so it’s good to review the documentation. Should you feel that your website is ultimately incorrectly classified, there’s a review request link in an article called “SafeSearch and your website” in the Search developer documentation. 

How can I update my site’s brand name?

Lizzi: (23:08) Danny is asking. My site name in search reflects the old domain’s brand name, even with structured data and metatags. What else can I do to update this information? 

• A: (23:22) Hello, Danny. The site name documentation has a troubleshooting section with a list of things to check that’s more detailed than what I can cover here. You want to make sure that your site name is consistent across the entire site, not just in the markup. And also, check any other versions of your site and make sure that those are updated too. For example, HTTP and HTTPS. If you’re still not having any luck, go to the Search Console help forum and make posts there. The folks there can help.

When migrating platforms, do URLs need to remain the same?

John: (23:51) Aamir asks while migrating a website from Blogger to WordPress, do the URLs need to be the same, or can I do a bulk 301 redirect?

• A: (24:02) You don’t need to keep the URLs the same. With many platform migrations, that’s almost impossible to do. The important part is that all old URLs redirect to whatever specific new URLs are relevant. Don’t completely redirect from one domain to another. Instead, redirect on a per URL basis.

How much do I have to do to update an algorithmic penalty?

Duy: (24:24) Johan asked if a website gets algorithmically penalized for thin content, how much of the website’s content do you have to update before the penalty is lifted? 

• A: (24:34) Well, it’s generally a good idea to clean up low-quality content or spammy content that you may have created in the past. For algorithmic actions. It can take us several months to reevaluate your site again to determine that it’s no longer spammy. 

How can I fix long indexing lead times for my Google-owned site?

John: (24:49) Vinay asks, we’ve set up Google Search Console for a Google-owned website where the pages are dynamically generated. We’d like to get insights into what we should do to fix long indexing lead times.

• A: (24:05) Well, it’s interesting to see someone from Google posting here. As you listeners might know, my team is not able to give any Google sites SEO advice internally, so they have to pop in here like anyone else. First off, as with any bigger website, I’d recommend finding an SEO agency to help with this holistically. Within Google, in the marketing organization, there are folks that work with external SEO companies, for example. Offhand, one big issue I noticed was that the website doesn’t use normal HTML links, which basically makes crawling it a matter of chance. For JavaScript sites, I’d recommend checking out the guidance in our documentation and our videos. 

How does the helpful content system determine that visitors are satisfied?

Duy: (25:49) Joshua asked, how exactly does the helpful content system determine whether visitors feel they’ve had a satisfying experience?

• A: (25:58) We published a pretty comprehensive article called “What creators should know about Google’s August 2022 helpful content update” where we outline the type of questions you can ask yourself to determine whether or not you’re creating helpful content for users. Such as, are you focusing enough on people-first content? Are you creating content to attract search users using lots of automation tools? Did you become an expert on a topic overnight and create many articles seemingly out of nowhere? Personally, I think not just SEOs, but digital marketers, content writers, and site owners should be familiar with these concepts in order to create the best content and experience for users. 

Should we have 404 or noindex pages created by bots on our website?

John: (26:40) Ryan asks, bots have swarmed our website and caused millions of real URLs with code tacked on to be indexed on our website through a vulnerability in our platform. Should we 404 these pages or noindex them?

• A: (26:56) Either using a 404 HTTP result code or a noindex robots metatag is fine. Having these on millions of pages doesn’t cause problems. Depending on your setup. You could also use robots.txt to disallow the crawling of those URLs. The effects will linger in Search Console’s reporting for a longer time, but if you’re sure that it’s fixed, you should be all set.

Will adding a single post in Spanish to my English site affect my search rankings?

Lizzi: (27:20) Bryan asks if my site is all in English and I add a single post in Spanish, will that affect search rankings? 

• A: (27:29) Hey, Bryan. Sure. That’s totally fine. It’s not going to harm your search rankings. I also recommend checking out our guide to managing multilingual websites, as there’s a lot more to cover when you’re thinking about publishing content in multiple languages.

Do all penalties show up in Search Console?

Duy: (27:44) Stepan asked In Google Search Console exists a section called Manual Actions. Do Google show all penalties there and always notify domain owners when a domain is hit with some penalties?

• A: (27:58) We have manual actions, which are issued by human reviewers and algorithmic actions, which are driven entirely by our spam algorithms, such as Spambrain. We only communicate manual actions to site owners through Search Console. You can search for manual actions reports. There’s a page there that lists a lot of information to help you understand more about our different types of manual actions, as well as how to file a reconsideration request when you receive and already address the manual action.

Will SEO decline? Should I study something different?

John: (28:33) Caroline asks, will SEO decline in favour of SEA and SMA? I’m starting my internship and need to know if I better redirect my path or continue on my way and specialise myself in accessibility.

• A: (28:49) I’m not quite sure what SMA is, but regardless, there are many critical parts that lead to a website’s and a business’s success. I definitely wouldn’t say that you shouldn’t focus on SEO, but at the same time, it’s not, well, the answer to everything. My recommendation would be to try things out. Find where your passions and your talents lie, and then try more of that. Over the years things will definitely change, as will your interests. In my opinion, it’s better to try and evolve than towait for the ultimate answer. 

Does the number of outgoing links affect my rankings?

Duy: (29:24) Jemmy asked, does the number of outgoing links both internaland external, dilute PageRank, or is PageRank distributed differently for each type of link?

• A: (29:35) I think you might be overthinking several things. First of all, focusing too much on PageRank, through building unnatural links whether it violates a policy or not, it takes time and effort away from other more important factors on your, such as helpful content and great user experience. Second of all, sites with internal links allowed us to discover not only new pages, but also understand your site better. Limiting them explicitly would likely do more harm than good.

Conclusion

John: (30:07) And that was it for this episode. I hope you found the questions and answers useful. If there’s anything you submitted which didn’t get covered here, I’d recommend posting in the Search Central Help community. There are lots of passionate experts there who can help you to narrow things down. And of course, if there’s more on your mind, please submit those questions with the form linked below. Your questions here are useful to us and to those who catch up on these recordings, so please keep them coming. If you have general feedback about these episodes, let us know in the comments or ping us on social media. I hope the year has gone well. For us things have certainly evolved over the course of the year with well ups and downs and a bunch of new launches. I’m looking forward to catching up with you again next year, perhaps in another episode of these office hours. In the meantime, may your site’s traffic go up and your crawl errors go down.
Have a great new year and see you soon. Bye!

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