Google Webmaster Hangout Video and Discussion - 10 Apr 2015

[engine]

As you all know there are regular Google Webmaster Hangouts, and sometimes there a useful snippet, and others, there's not much that stands out. Of course, much of it is relevant only to the person asking the question, so i'll try and highlight anything that may be of relevance, in general.

Here's a recent Google Webmasters Hangout, in English, with Q&A.

Watch the video and let's have the discussion over the topics raised in this thread.

Topics include, Panda, Penguin, Doorway page update, Mobile update, etc.
If you want to skip along to the topics, here are a few that may be of interest.

At about 25 minutes, a discussion about disavow. According to John Mueller, the disavow submission is processed immediately to check for errors, then the system will hold the information until those relevant pages are crawled, and checked against the disavow. However, everyone will have to wait for the next Penguin update for the disavow, crawl and index to be updated.

It, of course, then begs the question, when will Penguin next update? That, of course, is not something Google's John Mueller was able to answer.

At 27 minutes, there's a discussion about mobile update on April 21. It seems, according to the video that Google is prepared for this and John makes some suggestions.

He says, don't release a page that is "half-baked" it's better to wait and release a page as soon as it's mobile friendly. If it's a page that is infrequently crawled, you can encourage spidering by updating the sitemap, or use Google fetch and re-crawl.

Throughout the video I heard the terms, unique and compelling mentioned more than once, and it's clear that all our sites have to be that to ensure relevance.

At 36 minutes, there's a discussion as to why Mobile is separated in GWT. The reason is so that webmasters can understand the demands and issues for the mobile user.

At 48 minutes there's a discussion about switching http to https and the issue over links. It seems Google can handle the issue of external links incoming to http though good use of rel=canonical, however, all internal links ought to be addressed accordingly to avoid "confusing signals sent to Google.

At 59 minutes, Toolbar pagerank was discussed, and, although it's not a particularly interesting topic for many, some still find it useful. We know that TBPR will no longer be updated, and at present, google has no plans to remove the toolbar entirely.


So here's the video.



Discuss...

[goodroi]

Unfortunately some webmasters listen to John's words and not the meaning that he is trying to convey with those words. Technically I can scrape a page and change one word and its unique but that is not what Google is trying to find and rank. Google really wants to see significantly unique and compelling content that is valuable to users.

[Robert Charlton]

Mods note: For those of you who checked this Hangout when it was first posted... we've fixed the embed code that kept the video timeline hidden. You can now pick spots to view and also note where interesting topics are located.

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Disavow...

At about 25 minutes, a discussion about disavow. According to John Mueller, the disavow submission is processed immediately to check for errors, then the system will hold the information until those relevant pages are crawled, and checked against the disavow.

This disavow discussion begins at around 25:20. One thing that stood out in John's comments... for purposes of disavow (and for some other algorithms Google runs) it takes a long time to crawl all the pages. At about 26:50, John notes that a complete crawl might take a couple of months "depending on the pages". The disavow file is checked against the links which Google finds as it runs the crawl.

It strikes me that this takes as long as it does because most of these links come from pretty crappy pages that Google doesn't crawl very often... and that they probably include what we used to call the Supplemental Index... pages that are on the lower end of Google's crawl budget.

When all of the pages are crawled, the algorithm then deals with them. Those concerned with Penguin need to wait until a crawl cycle is completed before results are computed and changes are published.