How Search Off the Record tackles SEO and web development

[music]
Hello and welcome to a new episode of
Search of the Record, a podcast coming
to you from the Google Search team where
we talk all about search and maybe have
some fun along the way. My name is
Martin and today it's the hundth
episode. Woo! [cheering] Yes. And today
with me is um Hey, wait a wait a minute.
Hello.
Um,
where are they? They they were supposed
to be here. Wait. Oh, no, no, no, no,
no. They're all on vacation.
Um,
you know what? This is the 100th episode
and no one's here. This is That's
outrageous. Okay, you know what? I'll
call them. I'm pretty sure they'll be
fine with that. Okay, let's see if we
can get Gary on the phone.
Hello. The owner of this particular
telephone is currently engaged in an
activity elsewhere. This activity may
involve grappling with the fundamental
questions of the universe or it may
involve grappling with the stubborn gem
charlet. The two are often
indistinguishable in their complexity
and level of frustration. Goodbye. Your
message will now be recorded. All right.
This is going well. All right. Okay.
That's that's not a great start. I'll
try that later. Sorry for that
listeners. Let's go with Lizzy.
Oh, hi Martin.
>> Hi Lizzy. How are you doing? Where are
you?
>> Actually, I'm out on a hike with my dog
Molly in Grundon.
>> Ah. Uh, sorry for the interruption. It
is for the podcast.
>> We're passing by a patch of cows.
Actually, uh, let me pull over to the
side so that the cowbell does not
continue to disrupt this podcast
recording.
Okay. So, what's up to what do I owe the
honor of this phone call?
>> I was wondering if you had a favorite
moment from one of our episodes.
>> Let me see. I think the one that stands
out the most to me, at least the one
that's coming to my mind right away, uh
was the one where we did dramatic
readings of the SEO starter guide, uh
just because the format and the concept
was so uh silly and unhinged. Uh and it
was also one of the first episodes I
joined in as a guest. Um, and I remember
being a lot more nervous um about that
than I am today. Um, and since then it's
been several years and we've recorded so
many more episodes, not just as a guest,
but uh as a recurring host also.
[music]
In a world of mobile devices, most
people are searching on Google using a
mobile device.
The desktop version of a site might be
difficult to view and use on a mobile
device. As a result, having a mobile
ready site is critical to your online
presence.
In fact, starting in late 2016, Google
has begun experiments to primarily use
the mobile version of a site's content
for ranking, parsing, structure data,
and generating snippets. [music]
Three years later, uh we got to do
another episode on the SEO starter guide
uh because we picked up a project um to
revamp it. Um it's a document that's I
think in the top three of uh page views
for our site uh and it just hadn't
received much love in like 10 15 years.
We even did a a podcast recording uh for
that episode when we were actively
working on rewriting that guide which I
really liked because I really feel like
it's representative of the heart of
Search Off thereord podcast where we're
really going behind the scenes on a
project that's in progress and not
complete yet. Um
really shows like the inner workings and
our thought process. Uh there's
particularly a part where I think Gary
and I are discussing, debating,
arguing
um whether or not we should include
anti-atterns in the documentation and
whether it's worth it or not, like pros
and cons. Um and I particularly liked
that you can kind of see our thought
process and that it we hadn't come to a
conclusion yet. Um, for the listeners to
avoid any spoilers, you can check the
SEO starter guide after this episode to
see whether or not we ended up including
a section on that. Um, but yeah, I hope
you can find the clip and I hope this
helps. Okay, talk later.
>> Yeah, that was a that was a fun moment.
So, let me see if I
if I can find the You know what? This
isn't live. Editor roll.
Site owners can use whatever metadata
they want. Like it doesn't really
matter. It's just usually the problem is
that they are expecting something from
the meta tag to perform some magic with
search engines and usually those
metatags don't exist or they don't do
anything and including meta keywords. I
think Google never actually used meta
keywords. I will bet a banana that we
never will. I feel very conflicted about
documenting antiatterns because we
perhaps also give ideas about like new
worries for site owners to think about.
I mean you've done mythbusting
presentations in the past. One of the
things in our myth busting presentation
is that using any other Google product
will not influence your rankings in
Google search. But the anti-attern
thing, it's imagining what our users
already know and should we address that
like hey they might have heard this or
read this thing before and so we should
tell them like hey actually you don't
need to do that or by absence of
information is that enough because like
Gary said introducing a worry or like h
don't do this they're like wait I never
even thought about doing that like what
is this thing now I have to like go look
into like what is a meta like I don't
even know what a metatag is I think we
don't actually talk about any other
metatags other than metad description.
>> Okay.
>> So, it's almost like a concept that
we're not like, "Oh, just go add a bunch
of metatags to your site." That's not
something that we're even going into
right now in the SEO starter guide
because it's more that's like a
secondary like phase two.
>> Yeah. Okay. I I think that that makes
sense to me at least because it's also
kind of that aspect of like if we say,
"Oh, you don't need to use metatags
because they have no effect." And people
are like, why is Google telling us not
to use these meta keywords?
>> Yeah,
>> surely there's a secret reason,
>> right?
>> Why they're trying to hoard these
keywords to themselves
and [laughter]
we don't
>> or by not mentioning it's like, oh, this
is the secret to everything. I it's a
conspiracy about why it's not there. Let
me go look into it.
>> Okay, maybe I shouldn't have brought up
this topic in that case. I'm sorry. Like
all of the listeners should just kind of
like blur out the last 10 minutes.
>> Block it out of your memory.
>> We did not talk about meta keywords.
Don't worry, no meta keywords were
harmed.
>> I just thought of something else. The
like for anti-atterns like if you think
from chaos theory perspective
because that's the easiest thing that I
can come up with right now, then
technically anything will affect your
rankings. It's like a butterfly flaps
its wings outside the train station and
tomorrow your rankings will fall because
of a series of cascading effects. So
does that mean that we should document
that the moon and the butterflies affect
your rankings indirectly?
>> Seasonality. I don't know.
>> Well, seasonality. Sure.
>> Sure. Like it the moon. I don't know.
>> Okay. I think we should try to document
things that have more of an objective
effect than butterflies. Chaos theory is
as objective as it gets. [music]
Okay, let's see if we can get Gary on
the phone.
>> Hello. You have reached a communications
terminal currently assigned to Gary.
>> All right, this is going well. All
right. Okay, let's try Cherry instead. I
wonder where she's hanging out.
Hi. I was just relaxing. Ah,
>> Cherry, it's me, Martin. Hi.
>> Why are you calling? Did something blow
up? Oh my god.
>> No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Like that.
You just happened to be on the podcast.
I mean, where are you right now?
>> I am on holiday. Um, looking at trees.
Oh, wait. Something's moving. Well, I'm
not quite sure what I'm looking at to be
honest. I'm definitely not scouting
another venue for Search Central Live if
that's what you're thinking.
>> Uh, okay. Quick random question. As you
might know, we're recording the hundth
episode of uh Search of the Record.
What's your favorite moment from Search
of the Record so far? Anything that
comes to mind?
>> Um, my favorite? Wow. Um, 100. That's a
lot of noise. Um, I think this is a good
time to admit that I I I I don't really
listen to them to any of them.
>> Right. Okay. That was I mean, thanks for
your cander, but that was not quite the
answer I was expecting for our big
celebration.
>> Yeah. I mean, I've joined as a speaker
two or three times, which is which is
very lovely, but I'm just not um a big
podcast person in general. Nothing
personal really against um search of the
record. I just prefer the sound of well
whatever this is. Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh
oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh
oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh but but but but
but but I do use them.
>> Uhhuh. For what? To allow the penguins
to sleep.
>> No, I use them to to not get fired. Like
sometimes before presentation, I'll
listen to the relevant ones to see
what's already been said externally, you
know, so I don't accidentally say
something that I shouldn't. For example,
I found those that went deep about
indexing very useful.
>> Mhm. Okay. So, what you're saying is our
podcast has kept you employed at least.
>> Yeah, exactly. Oh, wait a second. This
is a work call, isn't it? I'm supposed
to be on vacation. Oh, dear. Martin. Um,
you are
you are suddenly breaking
up. The network here is terrible.
>> No, what? No, no, no, no. It sounds
perfectly clear on on my
>> No, no, no. You're fading. I think I'm
going to go into a a penguin a tunnel.
Very flappy. Sorry. Got to go. Congrats
on the hund. Bye. [sighs]
>> Okay. I All right. Okay. You know what?
I can work with that. Hold hold hold on.
I uh
uh I I I think
um Yeah. Yeah. Spilling the beans on
spilling the beans on caffeine. I think
we we have we have that from uh from
episode 7. Let's let's hear it.
So Gary, like since we're in a podcast
format now, would you be interested in
going through some of those details
around like how search works, how
indexing works here? What kind of
question is that? Tell us a little more
about indexing, Gary. Come on, let's do
it.
>> Man, I wish I could, but I really don't
want to.
>> You should do it.
>> Tough luck, Buttercup. You have to.
Let's do it. Well, it's kind of well
fine. Okay,
>> let's talk about caffeine. [laughter]
>> Actually, that's a good topic because
there was some confusion about that on
Twitter as well. So, maybe I can shed a
light or two on that topic. Actually, we
could do a breakdown of caffeine on
these podcasts.
>> Okay.
>> Yeah, we should. Okay, let's do that.
So, yeah, we have caffeine. That's our
indexing system. Only externally it's
called caffeine. internally it has some
other name but that doesn't really
matter and it does many many things and
I think that's actually not very clear
externally that it does many things for
people it's just like we have the
crawler which is Googlebot and then that
goes to something something Google magic
well people know that it gets rendered
and then something something Google
magic and then we have an index now we
can actually break down that Google
magic and People in general know that
Google magic or could figure it out if
they wanted to. But that Google magic is
essentially what caffane is doing.
Basically ingesting picking up whatever
is produced by Googlebot which is a
protocol buffer. You can look it up on
your favorite search engine what a
protocol buffer is. And then that
protocol buffer is picked up by caffeine
and then we collect signals blah blah
blah and then we add the information
that caffeine produced into our index.
Now what's happening inside caffeine?
Well the very first step is that
protocol buffer ingestion. Basically it
picks up the protocol buffer and starts
processing it. The very first step after
ingestion is conversion.
>> What does that mean? Well, it's
conversion basically. It converts,
right?
>> What to what
>> do you have problem with the word or?
>> No, I'm just like, okay, we have a
protocol buffer which has all the
information that it needs. What does it
convert there?
>> Does it convert the protocol buffer into
a different format or
>> Well, that too, but um first we have to
for example normalize the HTML.
>> Uhhuh. because as you may have heard or
noticed the internet is generally broken
[laughter]
HTML wise but we still uh try to make
sense of it. Now if you have really
broken HTML then that's kind of hard. So
we push all the HTML through an HTML
lexer. Again, search for the name, you
can figure out what that is, but
basically we normalize the HTML. And
then it's much easier to process it. And
then there comes the hot stepper. H1,
H2, H3, H4.
I know all these header tags are also
normalized. Through rendering, we try to
understand the styling that was applied
on the H tag. So we can determine the
relative importance of the H tags
compared to each other.
[music]
>> All right. Now, now
hello. You have reached a communications
terminal.
>> Oh, come on. All right. Ah, John is
probably around. Let's see if I can get
him
on the phone.
>> Hello. Hello.
>> Ah, John.
>> Oh, hi Martin.
>> Good to talk to you.
>> It's so great to hear from you. And wow,
I haven't had a phone call in ages. What
a surprise.
>> How and where are you?
>> I'm currently in the office working on
an important document. It looks like a
script maybe for podcast episode. I'm
just going to turn around really slow
and double check that you're not
hovering behind me. Anyway, what can I
help you with?
>> All right. Okay. I'm I'm I'm just
collecting people's favorite moments
from the podcast. Do you have anything
that comes to mind?
>> Wow. H It's really hard to pinpoint a
specific moment. There's so many
episodes that I found fun and
interesting. As we say, we've been
having fun with these. So, let me think.
H, not that I don't like episodes with
just a team, but I really enjoy the ones
where we have a guest joining us,
bringing insights into things that are
new and different. It doesn't have to be
a technical or heavy duty SEO thing,
whatever that is. For example, I love
the episode with Jessica U from the
Google Doodles team. It's a world I
never thought much about, but where
there's obviously a lot of thought and
care needed to help make things that
users love to find. So delightful. Such
a unique part of the Google search
engine. I loved it. Oh yeah, the doodles
one. Oh yeah, that's a that's a really
good one. That's that was wild stuff.
And I I think I've seen so many doodles
and never really thought about it
either, but I do remember that episode.
Let me let me find that. Episode 84 with
Jessica U from the Doodles team. Let me
find that. That was That was nice. Let's
have a listen together, shall we?
>> So, Doodles and Delight, can you tell us
a little bit about what does it mean to
be the lead of Google Doodles? Are you
handdrawing them? Are you uploading them
to the search results page? What is
involved there?
>> Okay. Yeah, sure. So, I lead up several
teams that are devoted to bringing joy
um to our users and our audience. And so
there are doodles which hopefully you're
familiar with, but they are the uh
changes to the logo that we've done
since the beginning of Google and that
sometimes have um interactive games or
experiences behind them and sometimes
just bring you to a related search page.
And then there are Easter eggs which are
more hidden and are on specific search
pages. So if you do the search like do a
barrel roll, your whole page will spin
or a skew or things like that. Um or
you'll see even sort of larger
interactive experiences come out um
depending on what you search. And then
we also work on sort of in product
delight. So some animations or some
celebrations of things um that are are
sort of much more um integrated uh
moments. Does this also include some of
the smaller things like the search loop
type stuff where it's like did you mean
this and it navigates back? So it
doesn't necessarily need to be like a
big flashy animated thing. It could be
like something small.
>> Totally right. Like if you search
recursion it says, "Did you mean
recursion?" That one. Yes. [laughter]
>> So good.
>> Yes.
>> Do you ever have Easter eggs inside the
doodles themselves? Like an inception
kind of thing? [laughter]
>> Yes. Yes, we do. Actually, I think the
most obvious thing is that we have a
universe of beloved characters that we
bring back um through several things.
So, one of the most popular ones is
Weather Frog. Um, so if you use Google
Weather on certain platforms, you'll see
this little frog on the bottom and he's
like wearing sunglasses and sunning if
it's hot out and sunny or he's got an
umbrella if it's, you know, raining in
your area. Um, so that was created by a
doodler on our team several several
years ago and he has appeared in some of
the doodle games, you know, uh,
competing for in different sports or
getting a boba or whatever. And then
likewise in one of the Halloween games
that we did, there was um a cat named
Momo that was inspired by one of the
doodlers actual cats and he has appeared
in various games as well and obviously
in various Halloweens afterwards, Black
Cat. And so yeah, you'll see that the a
few of these characters coming back uh
in different contexts. They're all
friends. Is this something that's
planned or is it like happened
organically?
>> It that it happened organically. It's
just our team being funny. [laughter]
You can see the reaction on the
internet. People love it. We get fan
art, you know, for these characters. We
joke that we want to create a line of
plushies. Um, I don't think that's a
business Google will get into, but um,
you know, it's, uh, it it was done
initially just for our own
entertainment, but it's, yeah, it's been
a fun sort of inside joke with our
deepest fans. [music]
Come on, Gary. Come on. Come on.
Please.
>> Hello. You have reached the
communications terminal currently
assigned to Gary. The occupants of this
residence are at this precise moment
experiencing a profound state of
unavailableness. This state is not
entirely unlike the state of being
available, but with the notable and for
you inconvenient absence of the people
you wish to speak to.
>> Wait, that's a different answering.
What?
>> Gary.
>> Oh, what?
>> Hello, Gary.
I'm calling for the hundth episode of
SOTR and I wanted to ask about your
favorite moment.
>> Why?
>> Because I like you and you are part of
Search of the Record and I want to hear
which was your favorite moment.
>> But why?
>> Because that's what nice people do. We
wanted to have a look back at all the
things that we already experienced and
did in this podcast. And uh I value your
opinion.
>> Okay.
>> Mhm.
>> I don't buy that. What? What do you need
this for? You're going to use my voice
to
break into my house.
>> No, I already did that. I don't do the
same trick twice.
>> Oh, okay. What was your question?
>> My question was, this is the hundth
episode and from the previous 99, which
one was your favorite moment?
>> Interesting.
>> You have a favorite moment? No,
>> I don't have favorites.
Um,
let's go with that one episode where we
were bantering about JavaScript. Just
the two of us, you and I.
>> M. Oh, that was a lovely one.
>> That was a good episode.
>> Yeah, that was a nice one
>> because I could talk nasty about
JavaScript.
>> You enjoyed that, didn't you?
>> Wait a minute. I do that all the time
anyway. [laughter]
All right, I'll I'll find the
>> Wait, I I'm on vac I'm on vacation. I'm
not I'm not supposed to work. And you're
calling about work,
>> Martin?
>> Yeah.
>> Explain yourself.
>> Uh, I'm
sorry,
but I really needed your help on this,
and thank you so much for helping me.
>> Okay.
>> Can I can I can I can I do something
nice for you once you are back?
>> Well, you could hang up now.
>> Okay, fine. Thank you so much, Gary.
Have a great rest of your vacation and
hopefully see you soon.
>> Bye.
>> Bye. Okay, he hung up already. All
right. Okay. So, right, right, right,
right, right. Let's find that snippet
where we talk about JavaScript. If I
remember from episode 24, there was a
nice moment where we had this episode
where we talked about JavaScript, which
was aptly called let's talk JavaScript.
So, let's do that now.
Why? Why? Why is scoping so stupid in
JavaScript?
>> It's [laughter] not stupid. Come on.
Just because it's slightly different
from most programming languages doesn't
mean that it's stupid.
>> It's counterintuitive.
>> That's true. Okay, I give you that
point. It is counterintuitive.
>> Thank you. Hoisting.
>> I think that comes back to historical
reasons. Can we actually explain scoping
and hoisting before we
>> go ahead?
>> So [laughter]
with scoping, scoping is about where a
thing lives. So in code you have
variables which are basically little
placeholders where you give a name to
some sort of value. So for instance you
might have a variable called name in
that you would store I don't know Anna
for instance and then later on you can
use that to do things for in a very very
simple example you have a login form
with a username and a password and you
want to send that username password
combination to the server to actually do
a login you will probably have a
variable named username and one named
password and then you have some code
that takes whatever has been put into
the input fields for username and
password and stores it in these
variables to then later on send a
request to the server using these
variables and whenever you would type
into the input field again you would
update the variables so that you always
send whatever has been just typed into
the input fields to the server. Now the
question of scoping is where in the code
can I access these? And by default if
you just write JavaScript without any
functions or fanciness everything is
global
which is great and is terrible.
>> It is I will go with terrible.
[music]
>> Okay. All these snippets actually make
me wonder what was my favorite moment
from the podcast. I mean, the the
conversation with JavaScript was fun and
uh and but I I think the one where Lizzy
and Gary and I talked about pi and ants
and
all that stuff just to segue into
deoing.
That that was a that was an interesting
one. Let's let's have a listen at that
episode for a moment. DEOing. Ah,
episode 34.
But anyway, they are still the wrong
audience and that is something that
happens on the web as well uh to some
extent and we notice that with Lizzy on
um developers.google.com/arch
site um that we like to call onesie
because it's easier to say,
>> right? But why don't you want as much
traffic as possible on our
documentation?
>> Because some traffic is the wrong kind
of traffic.
>> How so? So with traffic usually what you
want is to have it convert. In case of
search documentation or developer
documentation that would be they
complete some action as a result of
reading the documentation. And if they
are for example reading the wrong kind
of documentation because we optimized
for something that we shouldn't have
then they are not going to be able to
complete set action. And I think we have
quite a few examples for this but one
prominent one was the removals u
documentation. If you think about it
there are at least two tools maybe three
um where you can remove search results
for example those three tools
documentation should be optimized
differently for different keywords so
they attract the right kind of traffic
from search engines
>> so that the people use the right tools
for what they are trying to accomplish.
>> Right. I think we could uh take a step
back actually to talk about how we
discovered this was an issue because it
was not necessarily that we just looked
at our analytics to see oh we are having
too much traffic and we don't want that.
It was actually
>> wait.
No, it's Well, I'm saying this.
[laughter]
Uh, so we were getting buckets of
feedback reported to us through our send
feedback button that were people saying,
can you remove this picture of me on
Instagram or all these other uh use
cases that we were just like, well, this
is not the flow that you should like,
how did you arrive here, first of all.
Second of all, the document that is here
is not going to help you on this
journey. And we wanted to help those
people find the right point, but also
make sure that our doc was actually
getting viewed by the people that it
should be getting viewed by.
>> So what you're saying is that to
identify the traffic that we don't want
on our pages, you had to add a feedback
functionality so that we we got feedback
on what people thought the intention of
the dog was. And then we saw that that
mismatched with what the dog actually
intended to do.
>> Yeah. Like how the problem arrived to us
was not necessarily us looking at data
in a vacuum. Um we were looking at other
things and then thought hey actually I
think that one way that this is uh that
could be solved is if we were to deo
this part of our site because uh we saw
that a large amount of our traffic was
coming from search. And uh then we
investigated like what does it look like
when you search for remove something
from search and our page was at the top
and we didn't necessarily want that for
generic type query.
>> That is fascinating because normally
people would like die for getting on the
top of search results and now you're
saying oh we really want to get out of
it for this specific query.
[music]
Well, well, well. I think we made this a
nice little review. Maybe y'all want to
tell us your favorite moments. Let us
know in the comments. Either way, I'd
like to say thank you all so much for
being with us for 100 episodes. We're
super grateful for all the conversations
and comments and likes and listens you
all have given us and we are very much
looking forward to more episodes full of
fun and insights from behind the scenes
at Search Central. I do definitely hope
that you had fun and I do hope that
we'll all be back at the microphones
together soon. So, leave us a like and
subscribe and uh talk to you soon.
Bye-bye.
We've been having fun with these podcast
episodes. I hope you, the listener, have
found them both entertaining and
insightful, too. Feel free to drop us a
note on LinkedIn or chat with us at one
of our next events we go to. If you have
any thoughts, let us know. And of
course, do not forget to like and
subscribe. Thank you so much for
listening [music] and goodbye.