This is an audio-only recording of the Google SEO office-hours from April 2024 – a transcript is available at https://goo.gle/SEO-june24.
These sessions cover topics submitted around anything search and website-owner related like crawling, indexing, mobile sites, internationalization, duplicate content, Sitemaps, Search Console, pagination, duplicate content, multi-lingual/multi-regional sites, etc. The answers are compiled by the Google Search Relations team.
Need site-specific help? Post your question in the Google Search Central Help Community, and get answers from our Product Experts and other experienced web professionals: http://goo.gle/sc-forum.
Do you have a question about Google Search or SEO? It might be a good fit for the office hours. You can submit your question for Google SEO Office Hours here: https://goo.gle/seo-oh.
Chapters:
0:00 – Intro
0:28 – How can one be transparent in the use of AI translations without being punished for AI heavy content?
1:35 -Does Search Console include site search results?
1:46 – PageSpeed Insights vary from time to time when I check my website. Why is it not stable? Can you give me the performance score?
2:50 – We’ve just bought a domain name, but the cache hasn’t reset and it’s not showing up in Google results. How do we fix this?
3:32 – Is it “against” webmaster guidelines if we use AI tools to generate initial content drafts but have hired editors to humanize and review them, and to implement brand and SEO guidelines?
4:27 – Does an auto translation of my website for other regions affect my ranking negatively?
4:55 – Do many affiliate links hurt the ranking of a page?
5:32 – Should I fix all broken backlinks to my site to improve overall SEO?
5:54 – Is a website using NextJS technology SEO friendly? Are there any issues I need to pay attention to in order to configure my website to be SEO friendly?
7:00 – I canonicalized part time course pages to full time course pages on a university website as the content was 93% same. Is this a good strategy?
7:18 – If most crawl requests are sent to a subdomain that’s not used anymore, what should be the best course of action? No-index? Redirection?
8:22 – How to alert Google of sabotage via toxic links?
8:49 – On March 3rd 2024 we migrated our website from a bespoke e-commerce site to Shopify. Since then our search traffic has fallen by over 60%. What could be the reason?
10:46 – Is it important for title tags to match the H1 tag?
11:04 – Does Google penalize duplicate content for localized websites?
11:17 – I am using a third party tool to check indexation in Google search results for an A/B Test. Is this in violation of Google’s machine generated traffic policy?
11:54 – I have a High Search Volume, with a Top number 1 Keyword Ranking, and my CTR is just 0.8%. What could be the reason for the low CTR? What’s your suggestion?
12:56 – Can broken HTML and errors in browser console cause a negative impact on a website?
13:22 – On some of my e-commerce category pages, is it ok to list (and link to) all products pages with all variants for Googlebot but not to list all for humans?
14:12 – The SEO Starter Guide specifically makes the statement “If your website includes pages that are primarily about individual videos…” Can we have clarification on the meaning of this?
14:52 – Why would Google consider LinkedIn Pulse articles as an original publisher even though it was published on our website first?
15:46 – Wrap up
Check out past office hours → https://goo.gle/gsc-seo-oh
Subscribe to the Google Search Central YouTube Channel → https://goo.gle/SearchCentral
#SEO #Google
Speakers: John Mueller, Gary Illyes
Products Mentioned: Search Console – General
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🙋 Do you have a question about Google Search or SEO?
It might be a good fit for the office hours.
You can submit your question for Google SEO Office Hours here → https://goo.gle/seo-oh
I have installed a sitemap plugin for WordPress and this plugin has published all links from my invoices and quotes, and google is trying to index them. Of course, these should not be indexed. I deleted the plugin and created a sitemap manually. Now I have a several thousands of 404 pages because of the invoices and quotes. What impact does it have on SEO?
Image thumbnails are missing on our search results page but my rankings are still the same only dropped from 2nd places. Disappeared image thumbnails lowers our rankings in the long run! Hope that you’ll fix this bug on your end Google for the sake of us publishers.
And where´s Tina?
Thanks a lot. I always enjoy watching the SEO office-hours. Keep up the good work!
lol! The LinkedIn thing … for those of us hit by hcu our content took never rank above LinkedIn so it’s our only option
Image thumbnails are missing on our search results page but my rankings are still the same only dropped from 2nd places. Disappeared image thumbnails lowers our rankings in the long run! Hope that you’ll fix this bug on your end Google for the sake of us publishers.
Google, why are you even posting ? Your recent GitHub leak shown that you constantly lie to webmasters and users. Page rank is still there even thou you lied to court about it, sandbox exists even thou you said it doesn't, incoming links are still a top factor even thou you keep lying that it isn't. Guys, look for Google GitHub leak.
Addictive!
Hi Google, there are so many of us affected by the missing thumbnails in SERPs and despite our repeated efforts for clarity, you continue to ignore us. This is both a user issue and site owner issue – users aren't enticed to click on high-quality content (because there are no thumbnails) and site owners are losing rankings and traffic. Your failure to respond is cruel and displays a complete lack of empathy for us. We have worked so hard and you just ignore us as if we are nothing. Please, please fix this bug.
Time waste video
Dear Google, quite a few of us submitted questions regarding the missing thumbnails in the SERPS. We're struggling to understand why, no matter which channel or platform we use, we are just completely ignored on this issue. Please, please can you help us get it fixed? You say that it doesn't have enough of a user impact if there are no images to show the user what to expect inside the post, but yet you increase the size of the favicons instead. From our perspective (when livelihoods are involved), it makes it really hard to understand how this is more important to users.