Notes from the Google Webmaster Hangout on the 31st of March 2020.
You Don’t Need to Include Blog Schema Markup on Every Paginated Page of Your Blog Content
The need to include blog schema markup on every paginated page of your blog content depends on what you are trying to achieve. If you are marking up a set of pages and the intro, for example, is relevant for the whole set, it might be enough to have it just on the first page.
You Can Use Large Images in Google Discover Without Using AMP
It is fine to use large images in Google Discover without using AMP as Google wants to move away from the form opt-in. An alternative is to use the max image preview robots meta tag, you can specify the use of a large image with this.
Google Uses Both The Content of an Image and the HTML Page to Decide Which Image to Display in Search
Googlebot doesn’t see the content of an image and instead needs to understand the context from the webpage. They look at the HTML page and the combination of the image plus the webpage is used for ranking purposes. They primarily use the webpage to understand the image and always need the combination of the image and webpage when it comes to ranking.
Ensure Canonical Tags and Internal Linking is Consistent for Google to Understand
First of all you need to figure out what you want to have happen, you should then make it as clear as possible. If you are using canonical tags inconsistently and your internal linking is also inconsistent Google is going to have to make a guess, and this might change over time. Canonicalisation is about picking a URL to show in search, not for rankings, so if the content is the same then the rankings will be the same.
Nofollow Changes For PDF content That is Also a HTML Page
You can add a noindex tag to a PDF using the X-robots tag header, along with any of the other robots tags within this header. Nofollow should continue to work the same way internally, in that Google won’t treat that link as being important. However, just because you nofollow internally, it doesn’t mean Google will never see that file, as other people can link to it externally.
Ranking of Desktop Sites Can Sometimes Differ to Mobile Sites
Desktop sites can sometimes rank differently to mobile sites. If, for example, the mobile page isn’t mobile-friendly Google would potentially show it a bit lower.
Content Contained in Accordions Will Still Be Crawled With Mobile First Indexing If In the HTML
Google takes into account everything contained in the HTML of a page, specifically on mobile pages.
Including Additional Schema Helps Google Understand Pages Better
Aside from schema types that directly affect snippets, using other schema types can help Google better understand a page, however, you won’t see any direct ranking impact. The use of this will depend on the specific pages.
Having External Nofollow Links in the Navigation Does Not Effect Rankings
Having external nofollow links within the navigation is fairly common, just as lots of websites have links to advertising with nofollow links. This should not have any impact on rankings.
There May Be Some Delays To How Reconsideration Requests are Operating Currently
John expects reconsideration requests may be slightly slower than normal, this is likely due to the teams having to reorganise and get setup for remote working.
There Are Some Advantages & Disadvantages To Using a Local Player Over Youtube
The main differences would be that Google would have to recognise that the video is there and with a common player format this is really easy. However, if you use your own, Google might have trouble understanding it is a video. The other thing is that the landing page of the Youtube video might rank in search, which means the Youtube page could rank above your content.
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