Notes from the Google Webmaster Hangout on the 12th of November 2019.
Make Category Pages Indexable & Internal Search Pages Non-indexable
To get around URL duplication and index bloat issues, focus on providing high-quality category pages and making sure that these are indexable, and noindex internal search pages as the different search combinations often create low-quality pages.
Unless Video Uniquely Available on Your Site, YouTube Landing Page Will be Shown Instead of Yours in SERPs
YouTube video pages are seen to contain useful content, so these will often be served in the search results instead of the landing page on your site that serves the same video.
Google Doesn’t Show Preference to Multi-Page Websites Over Single Page Websites in Rankings
Google doesn’t have a preference for ranking websites with lots of pages over single page websites, the latter can rank well.
Submitting Another Reconsideration Request Won’t Affect Site’s Existing Place in Queue
Submitting a second reconsideration request for a website while the original is still waiting to be reviewed won’t move your site up in the queue, nor will it move your site to the bottom of the queue. The best course of action is to wait for the original request to be reviewed, which can take time as queues often form.
Structured Data Remains Important Despite Google’s Ever Increasing Understanding of Natural Language
Google still relies on some elements of manual input from webmasters in order to be able to correctly highlight structured markup. One example of this is within rich results, where individual elements of a page need to be extracted for Google to properly understand. John explained that it is currently difficult for these to be extracted automatically.
Google Algorithms are Constantly Evaluating the Quality of Content on Websites
There are different algorithms running all the time to collect signals about a website’s content in order to gain a notion of the quality and relevance for individual queries. A core algorithm update will not lead to a website being completely re-evaluated but will update the scores used.
Google Will Not Render JavaScript Content if The Page Returns a Redirect or Error Code
If you have a page which contains JavaScript content but it returns a redirect or an error code, Google will not spend time rendering the content. For example, if you use JavaScript on a 404 page to display an error message or links. With redirects, Google does not need to render the content in order to follow the redirect to the new page.
Be the First to Know About the Latest Insights From Google
