English Google SEO office-hours from September 25, 2020

This is a recording of the Google SEO office-hours hangout from September 25, 2020. These sessions are open to anything webmaster related like crawling, indexing, mobile sites, internationalization, duplicate content, Sitemaps, Search Console, pagination, duplicate content, multi-lingual/multi-regional sites, etc.

Feel free to join us - we welcome webmasters of all levels!

[LouStoriale]

To the gentleman’s question about no indexing product list pages or category list pages, if you no-index list pages, if those products that show up on those list pages are not listed anywhere else, those product pages will cease to exist in the SERPS. We tested these on a website with 800, 000 pages and over 1 million SKUs and it in fact happened exactly that way. Even if you put a canonical to the first page from all subsequent pages, often times those product pages disappear from SERPS and again many or all of the products also become throttled.

What I would do if I were you, is try to make those subsequent pages as unique as possible using variables in the title tag meta-description and H1 tag so a user would see them as somewhatunique pages or at least additional product options. It can only help you dominate that search page with multiple listings.

You will never find a case where you have a category list page, that perhaps ranks forth on the first page and when you no index the subsequent pages, your original list page moves up to third or second. That does not happen. In effect, by no indexing those subsequent pages all you’re doing is limiting your visibility and perhaps eliminating products and product pages from the search engine results pages as well.

[RickBeacham]

What is the simple algorithm for page rank?

[RickBeacham]

CLS issue: more than 0.25 (mobile) I am seeing webmaster report about this issue.  But this issue does not really effect the usuability of the site.  No buttons  are being moved only other elements .  How does this affect SEO or Index rank  or this just a warning .

[sallyraymer]

Surely, in regard to buying an expired domain with lots of backlinks - if they backlinks are not relative to your product and services it won't have that much impact? So just going and buying ten expired domains to point at your own site wouldn't work as well and shouldn't it be something an organisation might risk penalisation for trying to manipulate ranking this way?

[andro_meda]

Should I insert 1 keyword in 1 paragraph?

[RickBeacham]

Good quality images should always be linked so the user can get good details of the product. This will increase your SERP or what ever they call it today.

[RickBeacham]

If the domain name is expired and the content has nothing related to what it was before, then the trust and authority of the site will go down. Its like GE buying out a grocery store chain and replacing everything in the store with GE products...

[talhaazeez]

Use AVIF format images to improve it in 3g networks