#Google Webmaster Hangouts Notes – 5 April 2019













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

Here are the notes from April 5th, the timestamps of the answers are in the brackets. Let’s dive in!

Having comments for blog posts is not a ranking factor but still can indirectly help with rankings (1:40)

Relevant and helpful comments can add more keywords and overall value to a blog post as well as help to build a community of people interested in your content.

But this doesn’t mean that having a comments section automatically makes a website better and increases its rankings. It’s rather an indirect factor that can potentially influence how a website is seen by Google.

Kristina’s note: you’re welcome to leave comments on this blog 🙂

Google doesn’t provide specific reporting on voice queries (6:42)

There are 2 types of voice queries.

Voice queries done like a normal search but using voice instead of typing the keywords. Such searches return the same results as normal ‘typed’ searches would. Thus, Google doesn’t separate these queries from others in GSC Performance reports. Voice searches made with assisting devices – Google Home, Alexa, etc. They are more like a featured snippet. And they are not counted or reported by Google anywhere specifically.

Google values quality over quantity (12:12)

There’s no ranking benefit for having more pages than less. It’s more important to make sure that the quality of your content is high, even if you have just a few pages.

Think about what information you have that users are searching for and how you can provide it in the way that answers their needs. Don’t count words and pages, focus on the content instead.

SEO is not going anywhere (15:08)

There’s a growing number of featured snippets and answers that are available directly on Google search results pages, so for many websites the amount of clicks is decreasing as people don’t need to go to them for answers anymore.

But this doesn’t mean that SEO is dying, it’s just a natural shift. Moreover, such things as making sure that a website is crawlable and indexable as well as promoting your content to make sure it matches what people are actually searching for – these things are not going away. #SEOisAlive

Pages with the same content but targeting different countries are treated as duplicates but hreflang can help to guide users to the right version (25:08)

Google will treat multiple pages with exactly the same content as duplicates even though they target different countries. So it’ll just use a single URL as a canonical and will show it in the search results.

If you have hreflang in place, Google will still treat only one of the duplicate pages as a canonical. But it will swap up the URLs in search to show more relevant country versions which is good for users.

More on hreflang:

Google can’t read text on images, so use a traditional way to provide more context (27:36)

Google uses many things to understand what is displayed on an image. But it still can’t read text on images.

Alt tags, captions, content around images, names – all these things provide direct context to Google and help it understand and rank images in the Image Search. Use them!A

Also, check out this post on Image SEO.

If you want to see if Google picked up your JS or other types of content, use URL Inspection tool in GSC, not page cache (29:38)

A cached page is a cached HTML that Googlebot saw when it tried to crawl and index that page. But it doesn’t reflect what Google would actually use for indexing because it woudn’t include things like JavaScript when it’s exwcuted and changes tthings on a page. So the cached page is only a static HTML.

In the Inspect URL tool you’ll see the rendered version that Google uses for indexing. Sometimes you also see a static version there when Google hasn’t had a chance to go and render this page yet.

If you want to see how Google would theoretically render a page, then you can use the live test in the URL Inspection tool to see how the page rendered – screenshot as well as the HTML and JavaScript errors.