A lot of today’s podcast is going to be focusing on the Google SEO office hours with John Mueller – some of the more important things I think were discussed and my additional thoughts. From how scrapers are using Google’s own servers to crawl budget concerns.
Google’s John Mueller was asked on Twitter why the link report seems slower than most of the other reports. He said that links is not an area they think SEOs should focus too much on and thus the report is not something they “spend lots of resources” on.
SEO expert Alan Bleiweiss asked John Mueller of Google if Google has a “Google Book of Secrets” where it stores all the algorithmic changes it makes in a single location. John Mueller said that yes, Google does document all of the changes it made.
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-book-of-algorithm-updates-32650.html
John Mueller discusses a question about breadcrumb schema markup but gives some info about matching what a user sees with what is in the markup. It seems Google may not utilize markup if it doesn’t have a matching value the end user sees. FAQ schema is an exception, as you can have collapsed answers that aren’t visible.
When looking at multilingual sites, especially as you start out – you don’t have to translate every page. Google looks at multilingual sites by page.
Another question came up about crawl budget on Google SEO office-hours, and again John asked the number of pages. About 10,000 pages and John quickly said you don’t have to worry about crawl budget. The question was more about auto-generated pages that are no-indexed and showing up in search console and John gives a good answer on when you would no-index vs block in robots.txt and how those pages might still show up in the index.
Scrapers are getting smarter and using Google Cloud services to run their quote GoogleBots to scrape site content. Doing this at first glance is a Google IP and may not set off red flags, and even allow more unrestricted access to your site. Make sure the IPs reverse domain to googlebot and not just google.
Most of the search algorithms Google launches work across all languages. There are exceptions, like when Panda first launched and the product reviews update and some others.
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-algorithms-languages-32643.html
This year was full of surprises for search engine and digital marketing professionals, as well as the second year of the COVID pandemic. From title change fiascos to improved shopping options and new ways of tracking data, this year was packed with changes that could potentially affect their brands’ visibility.
Transcript:
Welcome to the opinionated SEO, where we talk about recent news and updates in the digital marketing world of SEO paid advertising and social media that impact you as a marketer. Also throw in some of my opinion to the mix. Let’s go.
A lot of today’s podcast is going to be focusing on Google SEO office hours with John Mueller happened just a couple days ago. Some of the more important things I think were discussed. And my additional thoughts from how scrapers are using Google’s own servers to crawl. To budget concerns. So let’s just jump right into a couple of these here.
Starting actually on Twitter John Mueller’s asked about why the link report seems slower than most of the others and long story short, he said, Just don’t worry about it. You shouldn’t be spending too much time on it, so we don’t put too much effort into it. I agree. I think that a lot of people really spend way too much time on link building efforts and trying to get people to link back when they should be focusing more on creating content that is linkable.
Somewhere around 25% of the time is spent on link-building. A recent poll. So I think that’s probably about right. I wouldn’t spend too much more time than that. Yeah.
All right. We had a Alan asking John Mueller here. If there’s a Google book of secrets with all the changes and yeah, Google has a change log, so to speak for their algorithm. So they know what changed, things like that. However, The response was it’s not going to help you if you had access to it.
It’s not, in an Excel doc where you can just go through and say, oh, this is why my site, was impacted in this way or use it to take advantage. And I have a, an agreement here. I think that so many of these algorithmic changes for. Really well done site. Isn’t going to make much of a difference.
Maybe it would give you some ideas on focus or, general trends, things like that. But in the end, I don’t think knowing every single minor detail that was changed in Google’s algorithm, it’s going to give you that competitive advantage over someone. Who’s just creating a great site with great content with great user experience.
All right. Next one here was actually one that I really liked was a discussion about breadcrumb schema, markup, and the difference between what an end-user sees versus what’s actually in the schema markup. And John basically said, if you are. Presenting something to the user that’s different in the schema, then it’s very likely they will not use that schema markup.
The only difference or exception is FAQ schema where you can have collapsed answers that aren’t visible. I would go on to. I think some of the local markup and things like that, but my opinion here, anything that you’ve got in schema, try to make sure that you have somewhere on your page. So if you have local markup talking about your location, city, state, things like that, make sure you have that on your page.
That’s visible to the user. That’s going to give you the. Possible way of having that visual. So for a lot of people that putting that content may be in the footer so that it’s always there making sure that schema markup exactly matches. That would be a big plus. So if you’re seeing some issues with your schema markup, not showing up.
Make sure that you have it visible on your site as well to an end-user something that Google bots can be able to see. So it’s not hidden behind, a JavaScript client side rendering, things like that. All right. Multi-lingual sites. Do you have to translate every single page? The answer is no Google looks at multi-lingual sites page by page.
So if you only translate five pages into say Spanish, Google will only look at those pages for Spanish searchers. So very important to start with your translations at your most important pages are the ones that would be most appropriate for your alternate languages and continue that translate. Two other pages, but Google’s not gonna look at, okay, you’re searching in Spanish and you have five pages and you have a hundred in English.
It doesn’t even look at those hundred English pages for that searcher. Make sure that you have that in your strategy when you’re looking at launching that he also goes on to say, you don’t have to have the whole thing translated to launch. It’s good to just start out with your top page.
All right. Next question came up about of course crawl budget. The first thing that John asked was how many pages do you have? And they said five to 10,000 and he said, you don’t have to worry about crawl budget. I’m a huge proponent here. Not worrying about crawl budget, unless you’re starting to hit those millions of pages.
If you’ve got five to 10,000 pages, Google’s going to crawl your site. No problem in a month, unless there’s something wrong with your site, like it’s taken 10, 20, 30 seconds to load a page. Then you have some other issues. But I would say that is not a huge concern. If you’re looking at five, 10,000 pages or less, the question went on more about auto-generated pate.
The question was more about auto-generated pages that were no way indexed and the best strategy for that, because they were showing up in search console. And yeah, they’re going to show up in search console because Google is saying, we looked at that page, you NO, indexed it. So we’re not going to display it.
And it’s going to show us. Which is fine. You want that? You want Google to say, we’re not going to show this page so you can make sure, Hey, it’s still visiting it. The alternate way is to block it with robots text. However, those pages can actually still show up in the index. So something to be take into consideration.
So John gives some pros and cons to each method. Something very good to look at. Next here. Question was about seeing their site getting hit by Google bot and using like URL parameters, things like that. But my takeaway to this was actually that I. Maybe a bigger issue is that scrapers are actually getting a lot smarter and they’re using Google cloud services.
So you can, you get sign up just like Amazon, AWS, Google has similar services, but you can run a scraper through there. And it’s actually, the IP will go back to Google because it’s Google is infrastructure may not set off red flags, things like that. In fact, depending on how your, fire wall or.
Whatever limiting system you’ve got to keep certain scrapers off your site may have more of a catchall for Google IP addresses that allows them kind of unrestricted access where it’s not a. Going to keep them from hitting your site too often. Because those IPS reversed a main to Google. So you have to really make sure they go back to Google bot.
You also have to probably check to make sure it works for like Google ads, things like that. Definitely something to take into consideration. You may have to do some manual work here to see if this is happening to you. I know we’ve had issues where someone’s pulled all the data from our site and if that.
Something that we needed to block. It’d be pretty difficult if they were using something like a Google cloud service because we’d really have to ensure that it wasn’t blocking Google bot. And then just the last thing here was just a little interesting discussion about. How most of the Google algorithm updates work across all languages with some exceptions like Panda when it first launched and product reviews, updates.
So something to take into consideration, especially going back to when we were talking about the multi-lingual approach, where you may actually see that one section of your site in one language is more effective than another. But in general, for the most part, The language is not a factor in algorithm updates.
And so that is pretty much it there’s one little article from search engine review that talks about the SEO 20 21 in review. Some of the things that we saw, the title, rewrite, fiasco, shopping options, the, black Friday. Updates right before it launched. So a nice little interesting read. So I’ll go ahead and leave that link in the show notes and let me know anything else you guys would like to see covered and have a great day. .
