This is the transcript for the April 2023 edition of the Google SEO Office Hours . For site-specific help, we recommend posting your question in the Google Search Central Help Community .<\/p>\n\n\n\n
John: Nissa asked: When expanding a website into the EU, can I use website.com\/eu as the subdirectory with multiple hreflang ( en-fr , en-de , en-nl , etc)? Or do I need a separate website per country? (all english, in euros)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yes, you can do that. 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 use just the language, en , to mark it as the generic English version, and annotate the other English versions appropriately. In any case, I\u2019d still back this up with a dynamic banner that displays for users from a \u201cwrong\u201d country, to help guide them to the best-possible experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Gary: Someone\u2019s asking: when I search for something included in my sitemap it\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
First, keep in mind that google doesn\u2019t index every single URL on the internet. It would be great if we could, but it\u2019s just not feasible. But to answer your question more specifically, I\u2019d check if the URLs are actually accessible to Googlebot, you can do this with the Search Console URL inspection tool . If so, 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 documents about what we perceive as high quality content .<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lizzi: Mike T is asking: does Google use product specific third-party review and rating data for Rich results?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For products, this is ok. The reviews need to be visible on the page somewhere, so make sure people can easily find and read the reviews about the product, and make sure it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Gary: David is asking: I have a site that is flagged in Google. How do I find out why it doesn\u2019t appear in search results? Search Console has nothing to report. Site is indexed but pretty much not ranking for anything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If the URL was \u201cflagged\u201d by Google, then you would see it in Search Console . Otherwise if our automated systems rank your URL lower than before, you probably need to check out our documentation about content quality , and you can find that documentation at developers.google.com\/search .<\/p>\n\n\n\n
John: The next question I have is does using a URI for a thesaurus term work for SEO?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This question specifically mentioned the NALT thesaurus , which is for the US National Agricultural Library, where there are 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\u2019re valuable to your site outside of Google. Our Search developer documentation lists the structured data which Google supports through rich results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Gary: Someone\u2019s asking about failed robots.txt files, which return with unreachable errors when trying to use Search Console URL inspection tool .<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The robots.txt unreachable error is fairly common and it\u2019s always down to your site\u2019s settings to solve it, there\u2019s nothing Google can do about it. Check your firewall settings, or other network components that steer traffic and have a configurable allowlist, check your CDN also if you use one for blocked IPs, and if all fails, check with your hosting provider. Also, you don\u2019t have to submit your robots.txt file for indexing; it wouldn\u2019t do anything at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lizzi: Pete is asking: if I delete several old indexed HTML landing pages. Should I redirect 404s to the homepage?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Maybe? It really depends on the content on those landing pages: would it matter to a user to land on the home page instead, or would it be confusing? 404s are a normal part of the internet, and sometimes a 404 status code is the best course of action if there\u2019s really not a good replacement for whatever was on the old landing page. For example, given the following scenario: there\u2019s an old landing page about purchasing aquariums, but the new home page reflects the business\u2019s new focus on high-end cat trees. 404 is probably a better approach there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s pretty likely that your old site has collected some valuable signals over time and you don\u2019t want to throw that away. If you already redirected, it may take a few weeks, occasionally a few months to see all your old URLs replaced by the new ones in Search.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
John: Alex asked: if a poorly coded ad that ran on my site 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 the way my site is crawled?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The context mentions that the ad used a relative path, so a crawler would have tried to follow the links. Overall, our systems try to recognize and handle these kinds of incidents \u2014 you\u2019re 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\u2019t cause problems for Search, neither for indexing of other URLs nor for any quality assessment. Having a lot of unindexed URLs is fine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Gary: Wolfgang is asking: would it be ok from Google perspective to provide HTTP 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Cloaking status codes 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 wrong. If you need to remove something from Search specifically, you can just add a noindex robots meta tag to the specific pages; it\u2019s much easier and so much safer than setting up weird serving conditions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We treat these as the same (they are both \u201cmoved permanently\u201d): Googlebot treats 308 as equivalent to 301 , and these codes are strong signals that the redirect should be canonical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Gary: 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How much of your website Google indexes 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<\/p>\n\n\n\n
John: Melissa asked: my website is not appearing in Google searches. I\u2019m not sure what else I need to do? Help!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hi Melissa! I took a look at the URL you mentioned, and unfortunately, it\u2019s one that we haven\u2019t even 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 take individual pages, like the homepage, to submit for indexing directly. Hope that helps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Good question! \u201cWifi\u201d and \u201cWi-fi\u201d with a dash are treated ballpark the same by Google, however since people are using the two interchangeably, we surface slightly different results for the two, but always trying to closer match the users\u2019 spelling. But from a pure understanding perspective Google does equate \u201cWifi\u201d to \u201cWi-fi\u201d with a dash.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lizzi: Ren asks: pages are missing structured data for ratingValue and the value in property reviewCount . This is only for pages with 0 reviews. Is it hurting our SEO?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hey, Ren, It\u2019s not a problem if the reviewCount is zero; this is normal for new product pages that don\u2019t have reviews just yet, and therefore this property is often empty or set to zero initially. This just means that there\u2019s also nothing for Google to show in the rich result; if there\u2019s no rating, we just wouldn\u2019t be able to show any star information at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Gary: Kamil is asking: Is there a way that my site was deleted from SERP for one certain keyword? We were 1st and now we are absent completely. Page is in the index.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s really uncommon that you would completely lose rankings for just one keyword. Usually you just get out-ranked by someone else in search results instead if you did indeed disappear for this one particular keyword. First I would check if that\u2019s the case globally. Ask some remote friends to search for that keyword and report back. If they do see your site then it\u2019s just a \u201cglitch in the matrix\u201d. If they don\u2019t, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
John: 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hi there! I took a look at the page that you mentioned in the context link in our tools. This tool is specifically meant for cases where the page continues to exist, but something specific was removed from the page, sometimes that\u2019s 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 was no longer indexed, so there\u2019s nothing for the tool to do, so it rejected the requests. Essentially, that means you\u2019re all set!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Gary: Anonymous is asking: how long until recently migrated domain to Google Domains appears on Google Search?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It largely depends on the site itself how long it takes to replace the old site\u2019s URLs with new ones in Search. It can be anywhere between a few days and many months, and it\u2019s usually faster for higher quality sites.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lizzi: Koen 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 \u2018 null \u2018? This Recipe does not have a \u2018 Name \u2018 and \u2018 Image \u2018 for every step.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To make your site eligible for recipe rich results, you need to add the required properties (they\u2019re listed in a separate table in the recipe documentation ). Image and name of the recipe are required, so you should focus on filling those out and making sure they\u2019re 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\u2019t specify the cookTime , then Google may not be able to show that part of the rich result. The same goes for reviews of the recipe, which is oftentimes empty until someone reviews the recipe (this is fine, just nothing to show until there\u2019s a review for that recipe). It\u2019s also ok not to have name and image for every step: first of all, this is only recommended if you\u2019re trying to optimize for recipes on the Google Assistant (which is known as \u201cGuided Recipes\u201d in our documentation) and if it makes sense to name your steps. Sometimes this doesn\u2019t make sense if the steps are already pretty short (for example, you don\u2019t really need to use name to shorten \u201cpreheat the oven to 350\u201d to just \u201cpreheat\u201d, but that may make sense if you recipe has lots of subsections and complex things).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Unfortunately this is usually a sign that your site was hacked. Head to our friends over web.dev and search for their hacked topics , it\u2019s not easy but it\u2019s certainly possible to clean up your site and secure it better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What is an API? Just in case you don\u2019t already have plenty of high-tech acronyms to juggle, w ..<\/p>\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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