Google Office Hours with John Mueller Jan 21st, 2022 Recap

Today I’ll be recapping the Google Office Hours with Google’s John Mueller from January 21st, 2022. As always, I’ll provide a synopsis of the question and answer, my opinion, and a link to the question in the video. The video ran an hour, I’ll try to summarize this for you in about fifteen minutes.

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Questions seemed to focus a bit on internationalization, and internal linking. Hope you enjoy:

The value of internal links in header, footer, or in content?

It’s pretty similar. Content matters based on where it is in the page, but not links.

Seeing links – they are paid, and the sites are ranking #1, why is that contradiction from what Google says?

John: Really, they’re probably doing a lot of things right, and they’re not going to get removed for just one thing wrong, the algorithm also can usually tell those kinds of links and they’ll just ignore them.

There are so many factors, you can make mistakes on a few areas and it won’t remove you from the index, if you follow bad advice.

Some links are not crawling according to Google Search Console.

John: 1 – Maybe a technical issue

2 – We just don’t crawl everything

How much resources should we spend based on the value of the website. Improve the quality of the website and you should see Google crawl the site more.

25% of the pages have dropped being indexed, quite dramatically a few months ago. Submitted pages dropped by 50%. They thought it might be structured data that’s not valid.

John: Issues with structured data would not mean that we would drop it from indexing.

It’s likely that it’s a quality issue.

Seeing images in organic search results, not the image tab. There isn’t documentation in google Search Central. 

John: These are essentially a kind of snippet. It’s not based on markup.The algorithm recognized the images are on these pages and showing some images would help them to decide which of the results to click on. There really isn’t anything you can do on the site to enable that, just things to keep them images from showing.

Multiple websites for each location but just a different phone number and address.

John: Address and phone number is not enough to be considered not a duplicate. 

1 – Pick one domain and have individual landing pages for location – best for more locations if you can’t separate them out.

2 – Make the content different. Doesn’t make sense with like 100 locations

3 – Google My Business – profiles for each location.

Allright, then it was my turn. 

We have a strong US presence and moving into international. Should we go with ccTLDs or a single domain with subfolder country / language. Technology isn’t an issue, and I think being able to target Google Search Console to each unique domain by country may be the most advantageous option.

John: There are multiple things that come into play – multiple sites vs a single strong site. ccTLD is super obvious for targeting, so it’s a good approach. 

Part of what John said was about being able to market as the “website for Canada” then having its own domain would be better.

Is there a way to capture a folder without a trailing slash in Google Search Console adding a new property?

No, a page without a slash is just a page. If it has a slash it’s a folder.

Site downtime, and how that affects indexing.

A short downtime, like 12-18 hours, some pages might drop from the index. It should be back fairly quickly, the pages most often crawled will get picked back up first. They would likely have been noticed during the technical issue and dropped at that time. They’ll get recrawled fairly frequently so should pop back in quickly.

If you have this issue, have something that can server a 503 page when things go wrong. That tells Google to come back later to double-check. You have about a day or two to run a 503 for Google to consider it a temporary glitch, and they won’t be dropped.

If you server an error page, 404, or an empty page, Google might assume the page has actually gone.

Splitting the domain, what should we do in search console?

John: Splitting or merging sites, you can’t use the change of address tool in search console.

That only works on 1:1 moves.

This is kind of a reverse internationalization, removing the countries from the site and just focusing on one. But all the countries were already in subfolders, so would moving the main language to the root have a big impact on ranking?

John: you are restructuring the site, and so you should expect some fluctuations in search. Make sure the everything is cleanly moved to the new location. Keeping the UK subdirectory might make it easier if you do end up moving to other countries again. Any move where you are making significant changes to the URL structure of the site, you will see fluctuations in ranking because Google has to recrawl the whole site and understand the new structure. This fluctuation can take a month or two.

This person really asked, can we trust the answers given. John had a great response which boiled down to, these are all based on documented items and each answer typically is tailored to the person asking and their unique situation. It doesn’t apply broadly across the board and so you have to understand the context of each question.

Internal Linking, more important than URL structure?

Doing things like nofollow to terms of service pages doesn’t change anything and it’s a waste of time. Really what you want is to create a kind of graph of how things are linked, and see if it is a clean or messy structure. This helps ensure Google knows which pages are more important.

The recording ended after one more question about multiple languages on a single page, if that’s something you have issues with, go ahead and take a look, but it seemed fairly edge case.

I then had a chance to talk to John again and ask about client side rendering issues a client was having, this particular client was having trouble replicating the issue as GoogleBot sees it. John discussed how you can use lighthouse to emulate the crawler, which is really just a chrome browser.

I hope this was useful for you – each of these are posted on the blog @ opinionatedseo.com and you can easily watch the videos from the start of the question along with the synopsis.