[MELODIOUS MUSIC]
JOHN MUELLER: Nissa asked, when expanding our website
into the EU, can I use website.com/eu
as the subdirectory with multiple hreflangs,
or do I need a separate website per country?
So yes, you can use that subdirectory.
Hreflang annotations are per page,
and you can apply multiple annotations to the same page.
In your case, you could either specify the list of countries
in English that apply to that page,
or you could just use a language EN
and mark it as a generic English version.
And then annotate the other English versions appropriately.
In any case, I'd still back this up with a dynamic banner
that displays for users from the wrong country
to help guide them to the best possible experience.
GARY ILLYES: Hello, I'm Illyes Gary from the Search Relations
team.
Someone is asking, when I search for something
included in my sitemap, it is not showing an indexed post.
It says only one page and page 2,
but there are approximately 200 pages on my website.
What should I do?
First, keep in mind that Google doesn't index every single URL
on the internet.
It would be great if we could, but it's just not feasible.
But to answer your question more specifically,
I check if the URLs are actually accessible to Googlebot.
You can do this with Search Console,
you are in inspection tool.
If they are accessible, then remember
that the URLs that Google tends to index
are those that are of high quality.
Check out our documentation on developers.google.com/search.
We have quite a few docs about what we perceive
as high-quality content.
LIZZI SASSMAN: Hello, it's Lizzi from Search Quality.
Mike T is asking, does Google use
product-specific third-party review and rating data
for Rich Results?
Hey, Mike.
For products, this is totally OK.
The reviews just need to be visible on the page somewhere.
So make sure people can easily find and read
the reviews about that product.
And make sure it's relevant to that product page.
Product reviews should be about an individual product and not
a category of items.
Our documentation on review snippets has more info on this.
So I recommend checking that out.
GARY ILLYES: David is asking, I have a website
that is flagged in Google.
How do I find out why it doesn't appear in SERPs?
GSE has nothing to report.
Site is indexed, but pretty much nothing ranking for anything.
If a URL or a site was flagged by Google,
then you would see it in Search Console.
That's why we have the manual actions report.
Otherwise if our automated systems
rank your URLs lower than before or doesn't rank them at all,
you probably need to check out our documentation
about content quality.
And you can find that documentation
at developers.google.com/search.
JOHN MUELLER: The next question I have is,
does using a URI for a thesaurus term work for SEO?
So this question has specifically
mentioned the NALT thesaurus, which is for the US National
Agricultural Library, where there are specific URIs defined
for specific items.
At the moment, this is not something
that Google Search supports.
It is, however, fine to use these annotations
if they're valuable to your site outside of Google.
Our search developer documentation
lists the structured data which Google
supports through Rich Results.
GARY ILLYES: Someone's asking about failed robots.txt files
which return with unreachable errors
when trying to use Search Console URL inspection tool.
So robots.txt unreachable error is fairly common,
and it's always down to your site settings to solve it.
There's nothing Google can do about it.
Check your firewall settings or other network components
that steer traffic and have a configurable allow list.
Check your CDN also if you use one for blocked IPs.
And if it all fails, check with your hosting provider.
Also, you don't have to submit your robots.txt
file for indexing.
It wouldn't do pretty much anything at all.
LIZZI SASSMAN: Pete is asking, if I delete several old indexed
HTML landing pages, should I redirect 404s to the homepage?
Maybe.
It really depends on the content on those landing pages.
Would it make sense to a user to land on the new home page
instead, or would it be confusing?
Also, 404s are a normal part of the internet.
And sometimes a 404 is the best course of action
if there's really not a good replacement for whatever
was on the old landing page.
For example, given the following scenario.
There's an old landing page about purchasing aquariums.
But the new home page reflects the business's new focus
on high-end cat trees.
A 404 is probably a better approach there.
GARY ILLYES: Nick is asking, how do I delete an old website
from Google Search?
If you are moving to a new domain, please, please, please
redirect your old site to the new one
instead of just deleting the old site.
It's pretty likely that your old site has collected
some valuable signals over time and you really
don't want to throw that away.
If you already redirected it, it may
take a few weeks or occasionally a few months
to see all your old URLs replaced
by the new ones in search.
JOHN MUELLER: Alex asked, a poorly coded ad that
ran on my website has resulted in 1.2 million bad URLs being
discovered by Google in just a few days.
Is this a problem for me?
Will it affect my site in the way that it's crawled?
So the context mentions that the ad used a relative path.
So a crawler would have tried to follow all of these links.
Overall, our systems try to recognize and handle
these kinds of incidents.
You're not the first one to create a ton of irrelevant URLs
accidentally.
That said, it can happen that this temporarily
increases the overall crawling, resulting in a higher
load on the server until things back down again, perhaps
after a few weeks, depending on the situation.
The fact that these URLs do not get indexed
won't cause any problems for search,
neither for indexing or for other URLs
nor for any quality assessment.
Having a lot of unindexed URLs is fine.
GARY ILLYES: Wolfgang is asking, would it
be OK from Google's perspective to provide status code
410 to Googlebot and status code 200
to users for SEO irrelevant URLs which are massively crawled?
Or will this be considered cloaking?
Cloaking status code specifically
is generally a pretty bad idea, and I would strongly
advise against it.
When you have multiple serving conditions,
eventually something will go wrong.
And your site may even fall out of search results depending
what went actually wrong.
If you need to remove something from search specifically,
you can just add the noindex robots meta tag
to the specific pages.
It's much easier and so much safer
than setting up weird serving conditions.
LIZZI SASSMAN: Ricardo is asking,
how does Google handle 308 status code compared to 301?
Well, we treat these as the same.
They are both moved permanently.
Googlebot treats 308 as equivalent to 301.
And these codes are strong signals that the redirect
should be canonical.
GARY ILLYES: Shailesh is asking, indexing on Google Search
Console is very, very slow.
There are many items that are pending for indexing, how
to increase the speed for that.
How much of your website Google indexes
and how fast depends on how much of your site
Googlebot can access and the quality
of the content on your pages.
The higher the quality, the more your site Google might index.
If you want to learn more, check out our documentation
at developers.google.com/search.
JOHN MUELLER: Melissa asked, my website is not
appearing for Google searches.
And then Melissa mentions the URL.
I'm not sure what I need to do, help.
Hi, Melissa.
I took a look at the URL that you mentioned.
And unfortunately, it's one that we haven't ever seen at all.
This makes it really tough for us to discover and to index.
Apart from encouraging others to mention your website,
you can also add the website to Search Console.
Submit a sitemap file and submit individual pages.
For example, the home page for indexing there directly.
I hope that helps.
GARY ILLYES: Anonymous is asking,
why is Wifi and Wi-Fi with a dash not considered
same by Google?
This is a great question, also fun question.
Wifi and Wi-Fi with a dash are treated both part
the same by Google.
However, since people are using the two interchangeably,
we surface slightly different results for the two,
but always trying to closely match the user's spelling.
From pure understanding perspective,
however, Google does equate Wifi to Wi-Fi
with a dash, just checked.
LIZZI SASSMAN: Ren asks, pages are missing structure data
snippets for "ratingValue" and value in property review count.
This is only four pages with zero reviews.
Is it hurting our SEO?
Hey, Ren.
It's not a problem if the review count is zero.
And this is actually normal for new product pages that
don't have reviews just yet.
And therefore, this property is often empty
and set to 0 initially.
This just means that there's also nothing for Google
to show in the Rich Result. If there's no rating,
we just won't be able to show any star information at all.
GARY ILLYES: Camila is asking, is there a way
that my site was deleted from SERP for one certain keyword?
We were first, and now we are absent completely,
but the page is in the index.
It's really uncommon that you'd completely lose
rankings for just one keyword.
Usually, you just get outranked by someone else
in search results instead.
If you did indeed disappear for this one particular keyword,
first I would check if that's the case globally.
Ask some remote friends to search for that keyword
and report back.
If they do see your site, then it's
just a glitch in the matrix.
If they don't, then next, I would go over my past actions
to see if I did anything that might have caused it.
Have I changed my internal link structure or page layout
or acquired more links, or if I use the disavow tool and so on.
Each of these may have some effect on ranking.
So going through them is probably going to help.
JOHN MUELLER: The next question I have here is,
the webmaster has made changes to an initial article.
I submitted a request through the outdated info tool,
but it got denied.
Hi there.
So I took a look at the page that you mentioned
in the context link in our tools,
and it looks like you use the cache update
tool, which also removes the snippet that's shown.
This tool is specifically meant for cases
where the page continues to exist
but something specific was removed from that page.
Sometimes that's a name or a phone number.
The tool will only accept requests
where we can determine that the text was removed
and where the text was still indexed.
In this case, the text is no longer indexed.
So there's nothing for the tool to do.
So it rejected the request.
Essentially, that means you're all set.
GARY ILLYES: Anonymous is asking,
how long until recently migrated domain to Google Domains
appears on Google Search?
Well, it largely depends on the site itself,
how long it takes to show up in Google Search.
It can be anywhere between a few minutes and many months.
And it's usually faster for higher quality sites.
LIZZI SASSMAN: Cohen is asking, how can you
optimize your recipe structured data in order to make
it eligible for Rich Snippets?
Does it matter if all optional attributes are null or empty?
Also, this recipe does not have a name and image
for every step.
Is this OK?
Hey, Cohen.
To make your site eligible for a recipe Rich results,
you need to add the required properties.
These are the ones that are listed
in a separate table in the recipe structured data
documentation.
Image and name of the recipe overall are required.
So you should focus on filling those two out and making
sure they're not empty.
If the optional properties are empty,
that can be OK as these are nice to have.
It just means that we might not be
able to show additional enhancements for that
Rich result. For example, if you don't specify the cook time,
then Google might not be able to show that part in the Rich
result. Same goes for the reviews of the recipe, which
is often empty until someone reviews that recipe.
This is fine, just nothing to show until there's
a review for that recipe.
It's also OK not to have the name and image for every step.
First of all, this is only recommended
if you're trying to optimize for recipes on the Google
Assistant, which is known as Guided Recipes in our docs,
and if it makes sense to name your steps.
Sometimes this doesn't make sense if the steps are already
pretty short.
For example, you don't really need
to use the name to shorten a step that's
like "preheat the oven to 350" to just "preheat."
But this could make sense if your recipe
has lots of subsections and complex things.
GARY ILLYES: Anonymous is asking,
my site's description shows spam not from my site.
Well, unfortunately, this is usually a sign
that your site was hacked.
I would head to our friends over web.dev and search
for their hacked topics.
It's not easy, but it's certainly
possible to clean up your site and secure it better.
[MELODIOUS MUSIC]