#Google Webmaster Hangouts Notes – 3 May 2019 – Part 2













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 May 3rd. This is Part 2, you can find the 1st part here. The timestamps of the answers are in the brackets.

But first…. This is really important

I’ve been covering GWH for a few months already. During this time, I’ve got many regular readers and I always welcome everybody to my blog. The main idea is to give you all the needed info in an easy-to-digest way.

I must admit that I’m spending lots of time on that. And I would love to better understand who reads the Notes. So could you please do me a favour and answer the following questions in the comments below (or if you’re very shy, you can chat with me on Reddit):

What’s your name?

What do you do (are you an SEO, business owner, etc.?)

What SEO topic bothers you the most?

Thanks a lot! Now we can move on 🙂

If your website gets a manual action, you’ll get a GSC notification (26:36)

If your website is penalized, you’ll receive a notification in Google Search Console. Thus, if you don’t have any notifications, your website is not under a manual penalty.

Choose the Service You Need

It’s fine if not all your content is indexed by Google (33:48)

Google doesn’t index all the content and images you have on your website, and that’s fine. What happens here is that Google chooses only the content that will be useful for users.

Higher level pages don’t get any ranking boost (35:43)

You can structure URLs whatever you think is useful for your website. So it might be either site.com/services/service1 or just site.com/service1. It’s more important how you organize your internal linking and IA.

Moving embedded resources to a CDN will help optimize crawl budget and website speed (38:33)

Crawl budget is used not only on the pages you have but also on all embedded resources, including images, CSS, JS files. This is needed as Google considers the embedded resources when rendering a page, and it doesn’t want to negatively impact your server speed.

One thing you can do to optimize crawling and speed up your website, in general, is to move your images, videos or other files to another server (e.g. a CDN). This is more applicable to large websites.

There is a number of speed metrics that are important for crawling and indexing (42:52)

The time needed to provide HTML pages when Google requests them

Server response time

The number of embedded resources to simplify rendering

Note that crawling & indexing speed is a little bit different than site speed for users.

Disavow links are taken into account immediately after Google processes them (48:35)

Google takes into account the disavow file immediately after recrawling the URLs specified in this file. It results in dropping those links off the link graph.

Note that the disavowed links can still be shown in the Links report in Google Search Console.

If you had a manual action connected to unnatural links, submit a reconsideration request after disavowing those links.

And now you can answer the questions I asked at the beginning if you haven’t done it already!

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I cook digital marketing dishes. Take 3 tablespoons of on-page SEO, add 2 pinches of backlinks and sprinkle it all with paid advertising. Season to taste with actionable data from Analytics and bake until golden brown. Serve hot.