#Google Webmaster Hangouts Notes – 8 March 2019













Hey! Welcome to MarketingSyrup! This post is part of my Google Webmaster Hangouts Notes. I cover them regularly to save you time 🙂

You can find the answers to the SEO community questions below with the timestamps from the video. And here is the full video of Google Webmaster Hangouts from March 8th:

Make sure your translated content is of high quality (1:33)



If you need to translate your content, make sure it’s of high quality. So not just use Google Translate. Instead, you can take the Google translate version and clean it up to make it more readable. This makes a big difference and that’s something that users and Google notice.

If from the algorithmic point view Google can tell that this is really high-quality content then it will try to rank it better in the search results.



If your page is frequently updated, it’s better to serve static HTML to Google rather than JavaScript content (3:42)



First, Google indexes a page, then it tries to render it like a browser would. This process is easier if you have just HTML without JavaScript. But even if you’re using JavaScript, it’s not the case that the static HTML version would be delayed from indexing until this JavaScript part is ready. First, HTML gets indexed, later during the second wave of indexing, Google picks up JS content. But for most sites, this difference is not significant.



However, for websites that are frequently updated (e.g. news sites) and need to be rendered quickly, make sure that Google can pick up this content as quickly as possible. In this case, serving a static HTML version of the page to search engines is a good solution.



Google fetches the resources differently during the mobile-friendly test and real indexing (10:11)



One of the aspects that is a bit complicated at the moment is that Google has different priorities for the mobile friendly test compared to normal Googlebot indexing.



With the mobile-friendly test, Google tries to pull in resources as quickly as possible from the live server, and during indexing Google caches a lot of these resources and just takes the cached version of them. So during the mobile-friendly test, Google tries to render the page as quickly as possible and is able to pull in most of these resources but some of them might time out. That’s why you can see errors in the mobile-friendly test:







The same happens in the live test in Google URL inspection tool, Google tries to pull in the live resources there as well.



But for indexing, Google has more time available for pulling in those resources, so they don’t usually time out. Moreover, Google uses cached versions of them. In that context, URLs with session ids or JS URLs make it hard for Google to re-used the cached resources.

Kristina’s note: All this means that in most cases you can ignore the resources errors you see in the mobile-friendly and URL inspection tools. But be aware of the dynamic URLs with session ids, they complicate the indexing process a lot.



In some cases, Google can assume that a page is duplicate even before actually testing it (14:14)



This is more common for eCommerce websites or websites that are using a templated framework.



Such a scenario can happen if Google sees a URL pattern when a large number of URLs with different parameters are leading to the same content. Then Google might start ignoring this parameter (or parameters) and treat such pages as duplicates. So if it has already indexed part of such URLs, it can just ignore other URLs of the same type even before checking them.



It’s also applicable to multiple websites. If you have a lot of different eCommerce websites and they all provide the same set of products and have the same product URLs after the domain name, Google might index only one of these websites and see the rest as its duplicates.



Kristina’s note: THIS IS HUGE!

Improve your traffic and revenue from SEO within 60 days!





Split product variations only if people specifically look for them (18:48)



For eCommerce stores which have configurable products, it make sense to split a product page into multiple variations with separate URLs only if people explicitly search for these variations.



You can see find more on this in one of the previous John’s replies.



Speed is one of the many ranking factors, and it’s not the determining one (21:18)



While site speed is a ranking factor, Google doesn’t rely on it too much when it comes to rankings. That’s why you might see slower websites ranking higher than yours sometimes.

Kristina’s note: But this doesn’t mean you don’t need to think about site speed. Check out these image SEO tips.

Google prefers JSON-LD markup to microdata (22:45)



Yes, that’s how it currently works. That’s why all new types of structured data come out for JSON-LD first.



More answers on structured data:

Google can easily find and index content hidden in tabs (24:40)



In general, hidden content in tabs is not a problem for indexing, Google can find and index it. Just make sure this content is not something important for users. Then you might want to display it directly on the page.

