English Google SEO office-hours from July 2024

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SPEAKER: Karina asks, we're migrating to a new CMS.
We will have some pages in the old CMS
for months, some in the new CMS without an hreflang connection.
Can Google handle this?
What about ranking as an international brand?
Well, Karina, it's somewhat common
to have an incremental migration and not have everything lined up
from the start.
When it comes to missing markup, like structured data
or hreflang, if it's not on the page yet,
it won't be taken into account.
Once you fully upgrade the site and the markup returns,
then it can be taken into account again.
For hreflang, there are always multiple pages involved.
If some of them don't have the markup yet,
then that connection just won't be taken into account.
A transition like this is not great.
Your site will be affected appropriately
when the site is incomplete, but it
won't cause longer term issues.
GARY: Hi, this is Gary from the Search team.
N is asking, what non-search features does
GoogleOther crawling support?
This is a very topical question, and I think
it's a very good question.
But besides what we have in the public,
I don't have more to share.
Basically, GoogleOther is the generic crawler
that may be used by various product teams
for fetching publicly accessible content from sites.
For example, it may be used for one of crawls
for internal research and development.
As you may know, historically, Googlebot was used for this.
But that kind of makes things murky and less transparent.
So we launched GoogleOther so you
have better controls over what your site is crawled for.
That said, GoogleOther is not tied to a single product.
So opting out of GoogleOther crawling
might affect a wide range of things across the Google
universe.
Alas, not Search--
Search is only Googlebot.
SPEAKER: I used to have my site's product appear
in rich results on Google's home page.
But after a sitemap issue, they disappeared.
Despite following Google's schema guidelines,
they haven't reappeared.
Can Google provide more detailed guidance
on getting products to show in home page rich results?
Unfortunately, it's hard to say much more
without seeing specifics.
My recommendation for a situation where you're not
sure which part of a site is causing
a technical issue like this would
be to get help from experienced folks.
They'll often know common issues and be
able to check them efficiently.
It could be someone from your hosting platform, maybe
a trusted consultant or someone from the Help forums.
Good luck.
GARY: [INAUDIBLE] Kim is asking, when a Korean person searches
Google in Korean, does a .com.kr domain or .com domain will do
better?
Well, this is a very good question again.
It's also not very easy to answer.
Generally speaking, the local domain names, in your case .kr,
tend to do better because Google Search promotes content local
to the user.
That's not to say that a simple .com can't do well.
It can.
But generally, .kr has a little more benefit,
albeit not too much.
If the language of a site matches the user's
query language, that probably has more impact
than the domain name itself.
SPEAKER: Michael asks, what's the impact of a huge expansion
of our product portfolio on SEO performance-- for example,
going from 10,000 products to 100,000?
I don't think you have to look for exotic explanations,
Michael.
If you grow a website significantly-- in this case,
by a factor of 10-- then your website
will, overall, be very different.
By definition, the old website would only
be 10% of the new website.
This means it's only logical to expect
search engines to reevaluate how they show your website.
It's basically a new website after all.
It's good to be strategic about changes like this.
I would not look at it as being primarily an SEO problem.
GARY: Will is asking, hi, I have launched a new site recently,
and Google still references some links from the previous site.
I'd like to remove them from search results.
How can I do this?
Well, this is normal.
Think about it this way.
People may call a product or entity
by its old name for a long time after the name was changed.
I still call Search Console Webmaster Tools
because I just can't let go.
Google Search is a reflection of what people seem to want,
so sometimes it can't let go of old names as easily.
SPEAKER: How to remove all the indexing errors
under page indexing report?
Gary on my team--
hi-- has put together a few LinkedIn posts on this topic.
I'll link to them for you.
The shorter answer is, you don't have to fix
all issues that are reported.
Many issues will be expected-- for example, if you
remove a part of a website.
Other issues might be normal--
for example, that search engines just don't index everything
on a website.
If you're curious about specific kinds of reported issues,
I'd recommend posting in the Help forum
to get insights from other site owners.
GARY: Sanjay is asking, is it possible to get an API link
to status.search.go ogle.com/summary?
Well, this is your lucky day.
You can grab the RSS feed and the history JSON linked
from every page of the status dashboard
to grab the data that we have.
And from there on, you can build whatever you like.
SPEAKER: Rifat asks how to increase the number of product
snippets in Search Console.
It's not clear to me exactly what you mean.
Perhaps it would be useful to chat with folks in the Help
forum about it.
If you're asking about product rich results,
these are tied to pages that are indexed for your site.
And that's not something which you can just change by force.
It requires that the page be indexed,
that the page has valid structured data on it,
and that our systems have determined that it's worth
showing the structured data.
Our product structured data documentation has more.
However, there's also the possibility
to submit your feed to the Merchant Center
to show products there.
This is somewhat separate and has different requirements,
which I'll link to.
Often, a CMS or a platform will take
care of these things for you, which
makes it a little bit easier.
GARY: [INAUDIBLE] is asking, I manage
a lot of sites on GSC, Google Search Console.
Can I have unlimited index requests?
Well, no.
SPEAKER: My brand is being confused
with a common English word in Google Search results
affecting my website's visibility.
Can you guide me on this SEO issue?
These kinds of suggestions will resolve themselves over time
as our systems recognize that users are looking for your site,
not accidentally misspelling a common word.
Depending on the specifics, that can take many months, though.
There's no shortcut for this.
GARY: Someone's asking, is there an HTML markup or tag
to tell Google to ignore not value text parts?
The short answer is that there's no tag or annotation
you could use for this.
One hacky way to achieve what you want
is to inject into the page the weird tags that you don't
want indexed with JavaScript and disallow
crawling that JavaScript.
If we can't fetch it, we can't see it.
SPEAKER: Andy asks, I'd like to know if the recipe schema
for structured data can be used for non-edible recipes--
for example, a deodorant or washing machine powder?
No, our structured data guidelines
are very clear in this regard.
I don't recommend misusing the markup for other purposes.
GARY: Someone's asking, can the Google team help
transfer SEO rankings from one previous domain
to the new domain?
Well, no, but you can.
See our migration guidelines for the not-so-secret method
how to do this.
SPEAKER: If I have an agency that
is managing our organic SEO on a monthly basis,
how can I tell if anyone has been actively optimizing?
I have a suspicion that the agency has not been
optimizing our site for years.
This is a great question.
When we worked with an SEO agency
for some of the Search Central content,
we had regular meetings to discuss the work
that they did, to look at the reports about the site's
progress, and to discuss any upcoming work.
This did require a bit more time,
both from them and from us.
But I found it very insightful.
I think it helps to lightly understand the kind of work
that an agency would do so that you
can confirm that they're doing what you'd expect them to do.
And even then, there's a component of trust involved.
We have a page about hiring an SEO, which has some insights.
And there's our SEO Starter Guide,
which can explain a bit more.
And also, perhaps the folks from the SEO industry
who are listening to this can comment
on how they'd help a client to understand how
they're spending their time.
GARY: Someone's asking how to perform noindex tag to Google
Search engine.
I imagine this is about how to apply a noindex tag.
Well, the noindex rule is applied
to individual pages or other resources on your site.
If you want to add a noindex rule to your HTML pages,
you would add a robot's meta tag with a noindex value
in the page's HTML head element.
We have really extensive documentation about this.
Check it out.
SPEAKER: Andre asks, can we use product variant structured data
for a website that has a product configurator for 3 million
variants but no price output?
Well, yes, you can use structured data markup even
in cases where you don't have all the required fields.
But also, our systems would likely
ignore such markup since we'd consider it incomplete.
In your case, I don't think the product variant markup would
be suitable for over three million variants,
so I'd try to find other ways to focus the markup on variations
that you'd commonly offer.
GARY: Chaz is asking, will Google spiders
crawl links in an RSS feed that is embedded on a webpage?
Well, yes, Google may use RSS feeds
that are referenced on your site to discover your new URLs
or other URLs on other sites, kind of like sitemaps.
See our sitemaps documentation.
We mention RSS there.
SPEAKER: Hi.
I just wanted to ask and fix an issue in where
I updated my logo for the SEO for my website on Thursday,
and yet there hasn't been any change when I checked on Google.
Is there any way to fix this?
New logos are cool.
And in this case, I assume you mean the favicon.
Since favicons tend not to change that quickly,
our systems generally don't refresh them that often.
I'd make sure you've updated all the relevant files.
Sometimes there are multiple favicons
marked up in separate files.
And then just give it more time.
Check out our favicon documentation for more.
GARY: Matt is asking, I recently read on the SEO Starter Guide
that having headings in semantic order
is fantastic for screen readers, but from Google's
Search perspective, it doesn't matter if you're using them out
of order.
Is this still correct?
Because an SEO tool told me otherwise.
Well, we update our documentation
quite frequently to ensure that it's always up to date.
In fact, the SEO Starter Guide was refreshed just a couple
of months back, if I remember correctly,
to ensure it's still relevant.
So what you read in the guide is as accurate as it can get.
Also, just because a non-Google tool tells you
something is good or bad, that doesn't
make it relevant for Google.
It may still be a good idea.
It may be a very good idea, just not necessarily
relevant to Google.
SPEAKER: Does the Google account use
to verify a domain on Google Search
Console have to match the owner of a new Google site?
Search Console verification is so
that you have access to the data and the settings that
are relevant for your website.
For Google, it doesn't matter who
has verified ownership of the website.
That said, from an organizational point of view,
it seems like a bad practice to rely
on employees' personal accounts to manage the company web
presence.
But again, for Search Console and Google Search,
that doesn't matter.
That's up to you.
Clement asks, does blocking crawl or indexing on a URL
cancel the linking power from internal or external links?
Hi, Clement.
I'd look at it more like a user would.
If a page is not available to them,
then they wouldn't be able to do anything with it.
And so any links on that page would be somewhat irrelevant.
If you want a page to be easily discovered,
then make sure it's linked to from pages
that are indexable and relevant within your website.
It's also fine to block indexing of pages
that you don't want discovered.
That's ultimately your decision.
But if there's an important part of your website only linked to
from pages that are blocked, then that
will make search much harder.
Hi, Gary.
I have a number of sitemap files on my website.
How can I organize them?
I'm not a cat.
Sorry.
I'm also not Gary.
Sorry.
When it comes to sitemap files, you
can organize them however you want.
The limits are documented.
I think it's 50,000 pages per sitemap file.
If you're generating sitemap files automatically,
I'd just fill them up.
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