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JOHN: Shimmy asks, hi there.
I am having an issue with having my website appear on Google,
and this is the site.
And they specify a URL.
Hi, Shimmy.
I took a look at your website.
Unfortunately, when Googlebot crawls
the site with a smartphone user agent,
the site returns a 403 HTTP status code.
This tells us that there is nothing to index,
so we don't index anything.
To check that, you can use Google Search console's
URL inspection tool.
GARY: Hi, I'm Gary from the Search team.
Someone's asking, what is less harmful,
having millions of 404 error pages or millions of 301
redirects where sold product pages redirect
at the parent listing page?
404s are completely harmless, and so are 301s.
You need to decide what's better for the specific scenario
that you are trying to solve for and just fly with that.
MARTIN: Senior is asking, what URL format and declared
canonical is the most optimal foreign ecom sites
category pages to get indexed?
Would it depend on CSR or SSR?
Thanks for the question, Senior.
Canonicalization looks at the recommendation of the site
owner through the link for a canonical tag
as well as how well a URL is linked
from other places on the web, and a bunch of other aspects.
If you canonicalize a shorter URL, that's great.
If you can't, that is not a problem.
So you're pretty free in choosing
what you want to canonicalize.
You can build client side rendered applications
in many different ways supporting shorter URLs,
but none of this impacts indexing.
So I wouldn't worry too much about it.
Also, there's no difference in canonicalization
for client side rendered apps or server side rendered apps.
JOHN: My search results only show prices in US dollars.
When I test with the help of the search results,
price currency remains the same everywhere,
even though my site shows other currencies.
Even if I'm connected to VPN, I still have the same issue.
Well, thanks for providing a sample page.
I took a look, and your website seems
to change the currency and price depending
on where the user is from.
Since we mostly crawl from the US,
this means that we just see the price
as you'd show it to users there, which is in US dollars.
To show multiple currencies in search,
you need to have separate URLs per currency
and show the price in that currency
to all users of that page.
GARY: Vandolin is asking, I purchased a domain name for $12
a year.
I tested it, and it comes up with a 404 error.
So for your domain to show up in Google Search results,
it will need to be hosted by a hosting company.
That can be even something like wordpress.com,
or wix.com, or blogger.com, whatever you like,
where you associate your domain name with a location
of your content.
And then you can start publishing content.
Then once you publish high quality content and people
find it, then so will Google eventually.
MARTIN: Luisa is asking, Google selects
incorrect canonical URLs from another country domain
according to Google Search Console
although an hreflang attribute is correctly assigned.
How can this problem be avoided?
That's a really good question.
Thanks, Luisa.
Canonicalization and hreflang are
intertwined but slightly different concepts.
With hreflang, you basically told
Google these pages are the same, but in different languages
and/or regions.
Canonicalization then makes a decision
on which one to be the main URL in our index.
And if you create a group of pages
with roughly the same content but in different languages
or for different regions, canonicalization
will still pick a main URL, but other URLs can and will
show up in the search results depending on the user's
language and region.
In your specific example, users in Germany are likely to see
the .de domain even if the .at or .ch domain is selected
as the canonical.
What makes this a bit trickier is
that Austrian and German pages probably
are very, very similar in their content,
so this might not always work 100%.
So it is a good idea to let people choose
which region they prefer to look at should the selection be off.
JOHN: Mohammad asks, when I tried
to search for my website on Google,
I found many links which are written in Chinese,
and now I want to delete those links permanently.
Well, search reflects what websites publicly show users.
If they're links from Chinese language websites
which are publicly accessible, which
allow crawling and indexing, then Google may pick those up.
Using the disavow links tool can tell Google
that you don't want them taken into account for ranking,
but it won't remove them from the web or from our systems.
Having links from websites in other languages
is perfectly fine.
And assuming these links are random spammy links
that you just don't care about, you
don't need to do anything with them.
You can just ignore them.
GARY: Someone's asking, how do I change my website
address from old domain to just new domain?
Fortunately, there are hundreds if not thousands of guides
on the internet how to do a site move.
Even we have a guide about how to do site migrations,
and you can check it out on developers.google.com/search.
MARTIN: Someone asks us, how can the content in the product page
be unique when different sellers offer the exact same product?
That's a pretty legitimate question,
and I think to be unique you should and can
offer your own perspective-- a genuine review, or test
you did of the product, or things
you found to be useful to know about the product
outside of the default product text
and specifications issued by the manufacturer, for example.
JOHN: Ryna asks, how can we separate
the report on Google Search Console based on the subdomain?
Well, yes, you can do this.
You can verify subdomains in Search Console.
You can also verify subdirectories there.
If you have the domain verified, then you
can just add those subsections without needing to do anything
special for verification.
And, as with all new websites in Search Console,
depending on the report it might take a few days for data
to start appearing.
GARY: Can a big amount of 404 pages in Google Search Console
lead to negative effects of rankings
of normal status 200 pages?
Well, no.
MARTIN: CM Machardy is asking, no longer in Google Discover.
What to do to come back?
Well, Discover is an organic feature
that goes with the demand and habits of users.
So there's no easy answer on how to bring Discover traffic back.
Generally, content that is indexed and meets our content
guidelines can and will be included in Discover.
But as Discover traffic is hard to predict,
and will ebb and flow, so there's
not that much you can do to depend on it.
JOHN: Shai Habour asks--
I hope I got your name right--
what is a SCHEMA type for an affiliate site?
First off, affiliate sites are fine,
but making sure that your website provides
helpful user-first content is the foundation
you should be building on.
There is no special structure data
that you can use to signal that a website is an affiliate
of another website.
It's fine to monetize your website with affiliate links.
Our guidance is to label these affiliate links accordingly
using either rel equals nofollow or rel equal
sponsored so that search engines know
that they're affiliate links.
GARY: Someone's asking, [SPEAKING FRENCH]..
Or in English, hi, how do I create a good robots.txt?
Well, there is no general good or generic good robots.txt.
Good robots.txt fits your specific needs.
Basically, it is whatever you need it to be.
For example, you might not want to allow
crawling your internal search results, which is a good thing,
or you want to allow crawling a specific JavaScript file.
It all depends on your website and how it's set up.
We do have documentation about how to create robots.txt files
in general on developers.google.com/search.
Perhaps you want to check it out.
MARTIN: Geoffrey is asking, can you
explain how Google uses quality raters to review and rate
sites?
Does it only happen after a penalty,
or is it routine for quality raters to review your site?
Thanks for the question, Geoffrey.
Quality raters technically do look at individual websites,
but don't change the live rating.
We use these responses on a regular basis from these raters
to evaluate changes, but they don't directly
impact how our search results are ranked.
If you want to learn more about the quality raters and how
their process looks like, you can learn more about this
at goo.gle/quality-raters.
JOHN: Robin asks, our website went through a site migration
about a year ago.
To this day, Search Console still
shows us about 1 million pages with a redirect.
Is there anything we can or should do?
This can be perfectly normal.
Google systems sometimes like to remember old URLs
for a very long time.
That's not a sign of a problem as long
as these older URLs are still redirecting.
You don't need to get them out of Google's memory,
and you generally can't do that anyway.
Over time, they generally drop out step by step.
Any recent performance change that you
might be seeing in Search would be unrelated to the older site
move.
GARY: Eugene is asking, my website domain
is not showing when you search on Google.
Why?
Thank you for providing your domain name,
and I looked at it.
I looked at your website, and I strongly
suggest that you verify it in Search Console
and look for hints there.
It's probably an easy fix once you are in your Search Console
account.
MARTIN: Amanda is asking, our domain
is used only for email accounts.
How can I stop it appearing in Google Search results?
Well, if you're only using it for emails,
then you don't really have content that could show up
in search results.
If you care about Googlebot not making any requests
to your domain, then you can use a robots.txt file
to block it from accessing any URL on your domain.
That, however, does not necessarily
prevent the pages from showing up in search results.
To do that, you'd have to use a no index tag or HTTP header
set to no index.
If you don't even have any website on the domain
and you just use it for email, then again,
there's nothing for Googlebot to see in the first place,
and that is nothing that could show up in search results
anyway.
JOHN: Potier asks-- and I hope I got your name right, sorry--
hello.
In Search Console, my website is displayed
to be crawled by the Googlebot desktop.
I would like to know, if possible,
what is preventing the migration of my website
to the mobile index?
Well, most likely your website is already
in mobile first indexing.
To double check, you can go to the crawl
stats in Search Console and check the crawler
types mentioned there.
If the smartphone Googlebot is the most common crawler type,
then you're all set.
Essentially, all sites are being crawled and indexed
with their mobile versions now.
The handful of ones which are only
crawled with a desktop crawler are
those which essentially do not work
at all with mobile devices.
GARY: VT is asking, could a query string in hreflang
give mixed signals to Google in any way?
And then there is an example for an hreflang annotation.
Well, thank you for the easy question.
This shouldn't cause big issues at all.
I can't promise it won't cause issues
at all though because you need to be consistent, generally,
with these kind of things.
Otherwise, you might get some canonicalization surprises.
MARTIN: Somnat Hador is asking, what
is the effect of website form design and form
position in SEO ranking?
Forms don't play a special role in ranking.
It's content like any other content, and as such,
the visual design doesn't matter so much.
But where you place it on the site
might give Google an idea of the importance
of the content for you.
If you are using overlays for your forms,
be aware that this might have an impact on user experience
on your site.
JOHN: Would de-indexing and aggregating
8 million used products into two million
unique indexable product pages help improve crawlability
and indexability with regards to discovered currently
not indexed?
It's impossible to say.
I'd recommend reviewing the large sites guide to crawl
budget in our documentation.
For large sites, sometimes crawling more
is limited by how your website can handle more crawling.
In most cases, though, it's more about overall website quality.
Are you significantly improving the overall quality
of your website by going from 8 million pages
to 2 million pages?
Unless you focus on improving the actual quality,
it's easy to just spend a lot of time
reducing the number of indexable pages
but not actually making the website better,
and that wouldn't improve things for search.
GARY: Danielle Ross is asking, should a global company use
the .ai domain as their GTLD, or is it considered by Google
as a CCTLD for the country of Anguilla?
Timely question.
As of early June 2023, we treat .ai as a GTLD in Google Search.
So yeah, you can use it for your global presence.
JOHN: Gan Shayam asks--
and I hope I got your name right, sorry if not--
I want to clear all not found 404 errors in Search Console.
Well, unfortunately, there is no setting
to clear out old errors shown in Search Console.
These are collected and updated automatically over time
as we crawl your website.
Also, 404 errors are not a problem.
It's expected that all websites return 404 for pages
which do not exist.
That is actually a good thing.
GARY: Someone is asking, we need your professional advice
with our website ranking.
Can we have a meeting on this?
Let us know what time and date that
will be convenient for you.
Well first, thank you for wanting to meet us, but no.
The Search team doesn't offer private help meetings
for any reason.
You will have to follow the same path that everyone else takes.
If you want to know what that path is,
check out our documentation at developers.googl
e.com/search/help.
JOHN: How to request indexing of my recent publication
in a top journal on Google Scholar.
I do not have my own website.
I am just a PhD student, and they link to another profile
page that they have there.
This is something that comes up from time to time.
I looked at the URL that you specified.
Confusingly, the same content is available on a number of URLs,
and we indexed one of the other versions instead.
One way to find this is to open the page,
copy some text from it, and to search for that text rather
than the URL.
Also, make sure that the page is accessible to users
who aren't logged in.
In any case, I bookmarked your paper on social companionship
with conversational agents and am curious to read through it.
GARY: Philip is asking, do best practices for redirects
apply the same for PDF URLs, video URLs, and image URLs
the same as if it was a web page URL?
Yes.
Other file types, including binary files
like videos and PDFs, can be redirected the same way
you would redirect web pages.
JOHN: Toby asks, if hreflang tags are correctly
implemented but only on a section of our website--
for example, just the European folders--
would they still be used as an international targeting signal?
Hreflang is done on a per-page basis.
So it's fine if just a part of your website uses them.
I would, however, double check that seeing the wrong pages
in search is actually a problem before spending a lot of time
implementing hreflang.
Also, keep in mind that you can implement hreflang
with a sitemap file, too.
In other words, if you can't edit the pages themselves,
you could still specify hreflang annotations for them.
Check out our documentation for more.
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