English Google SEO office-hours from November 2022

These sessions cover topics submitted around anything search & 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.

Questions:
00:27 Can we use multiple values in one schema market field using comma separation?
01:10 What are the options to use the disavow feature in Search Console for domain properties?
01:50 How bad is the helpful content update for sites accepting guest posts for money?
02:24 What to do when Google does not detect the canonical tag correctly?
03:13 Is Google more likely to crawl and index the pages if the content is short?
03:52 Could dynamic sorting of listings be a reason for not indexing product images?
04:22 Is there a timeframe for the site migration?
05:20 Could the use of HTTP/3 improve SEO because it improves performance?
06:08 Why does Google keep using back links as a ranking factor?
07:14 Does it matter if the vast majority of anchors for internal content links are the same?
07:40 If you add the website schema, do you add software application schema too?
08:23 Is an excessive number of noindex pages an issue for disovery or indexing?
08:59 Is it a problem if the URL and the page don't use the same language?
09:19 How should creators respond to sites that scrape and spam?
09:56 Is it true that Google rotates indexed pages?
10:22 Should we keep an eye on the ratio between indexed and non-indexed pages?
11:02 How do we enable the Discover feature?
11:26 Does having many noindex pages linked from spammy sites affect crawl budget?
12:05 Is it thin content if I break down a long article into pieces?
12:51 Is it true that having lots of 404 pages can stop crawling and processing?
13:43 What is the current state of Key Moments video markup?
14:09 My new website is confused with a similar, older one - what can I do?
15:31 Is it possible to get FAQ featured snippets with just pure HTML?
16:08 Do self-referring canonicals help for deduplication?
16:45 Should there be some percentage of randomness in the Search results?
17:06 Why is Google not taking action on spun web stories?
17:31 Do comment pages linked with link rel=UGC get deindexed?
18:05 Are product reviews update for non-physical products without affiliate links ok?
18:36 I have 10,000 pages on my site, are there shortcuts for writing descriptions?
19:15 How can I best delete 10,000 pages of thin blog content?
19:39 Are backlinks powerful or should I focus on maximizing the quality of my site?
20:21 Must a page have a cached copy to appear in the search results?
20:39 Why does Search Console report an unknown referring URL for 4xx errors?
21:02 Should we mark automatically created pages as nofollow?
21:45 How can I best understand the performance report in Search Console?
22:25 How do I prevent pay-walled content from appearing in search results?
22:56 Does the spam score affect my site's ranking?
23:46 What should we do for out-of-stock product pages?
24:17 If hreflang is missing return tags, will it still be considered?
25:42 How can we implement hreflang without control of webpages in many countries?
26:20 Can hreflang sitemaps be placed in any folder location?
26:58 What is happening to a website that is not being indexed?
27:17 How can I handle x-default hreflang for new language updates?
28:09 Why do the product review updates impact non-review content?
28:26 What's the best way to remove old content?
29:02 Does text in images influence ranking in image search?
29:45 Is it beneficial for the local businesses to use many local listing websites?
30:13 Is a query parameter added to URLs bad for SEO?

[davidzieger]

I liked the face-to-face office hours when you could ask your questions straight away much better. In this format, I had the possibility to ask my questions directly and didn't have to hope that my question would be answered only to be disappointed at the end because my question wasn't answered again... The face-to-face format was much more efficient and effective for me, and I think many people feel the same way. Please bring back the face-to-face format!

[SEOSLY]

Thank you! I love bingeing those episodes!

[michaellewittes]

Love the Superband of Lizzi, John, Alan, Gary, and Duy! Guess Martin was playing a gig elsewhere.

[MartinZanichelli]

I LIKE THIS FORMAT!! Previously, you had answers like "I don´t know", "It depends on how it fits in the whole web", "It is hard to say", "I don´t think we are looking at XYZ"

[djs]

Why is this not on your Apple Podcasts show? 😕

[tico]

We were hacked early on 2022 and still see on searc console a 404 error from spammy pages created by the hacker. Those pages were deletes from
Our database. Is it anything else that we should do?

[JeetSingh-dfuz]

Hi team, great insights.. Wanted to understand if website doesn't follow silo structure? Does it impact ranking?

[onyourmarknj]

Wow! I'm so surprised to hear that 404 errors on your website do not have a negative impact on the health of your site. I've believed 404s were to be avoided for years and feverishly create 301 redirects for every one that gets discovered. Let me ask this... do too many 301 redirects have a negative impact on search ranking for a website and if so, how many is too many? I'll ask this question at the link in the description, in case it doesn't get addressed here.

[CriptoDeFi]

I think the question about text around images was not aswered properly. Interesting episode, though. Thank you.

[jameskennedy]

Is there a service marketing professionals can use to test content for violating google guidelines for AI generated content ? For example if content was created by outsourced resources? We currently use Grammarly

[Zapzockt]

Would be nice, if this video format would get chapters. I heard, video chapters are also good for SEO reasons ;)

Besides that, I love the new format, much better info density, not that many questions that were asked 20 times before and the many problems with live-video chats, muted microphones, very disturbing background noises and hard to understand questions is gone. The former live stream format had a bit more personality, but it had not half as much information per minute.

[sebastianhoffmann]

I don't like the new format with sound only. You sound like automated voices and the questions and answers rush through. It's more helpful to read the transcription straight away. Then you don't really need audio any more.

[sermoni]

Yo no di permiso para presentar esas páginas y en mayo cambian las leyes a favor del usuario

[Saimon]

Hate the audio only format... I like the human side of our conversations