Notes from the Google Webmaster Hangout on the 17th of May 2019.
International Websites on Separate Subdomains Will Not Be Penalized for Duplicate Content
Google will not penalize international websites that exist on separate subdomains if they have duplicate content. Instead, it will recognise the pages are identical and in most cases index both, but will only pick one URL to show in search results.
The Target Page of a Redirect Will be Used to Determine Relevance
When crawling a redirected page, Google will use the content of the target URL in order to determine the relevance of the page, as it will see different content when crawling the redirected URL.
URL Removal Tool in GSC is The Fastest Way to Remove a Test Site From Search Results
While there are several ways to remove a staging site from organic search results, including blocking Googlebot from crawling it or returning 404 or 410 error codes, John recommends using the URL Removal tool in GSC to remove it quickly.
Ensure Google is Able to Crawl All Resources Required for Mobile Friendliness
When testing sites for mobile friendliness, Google needs to render the page and will be unable to confirm if it is mobile friendly if it cannot access all of the content and resources required. The Mobile Friendly Testing tool can be used to check if there are any resources required for mobile friendliness that are blocked e.g. CSS or JavaScript.
The URL Parameter Tool in GSC is Still Effective
Despite not currently being moved over to the new Search Console, the URL parameter tool is still effective to manage parameter crawling.
Image URLs Won’t Be Fetched in the GSC URL Inspection Tool
The URL Inspection tool in Search Console is based on search results and will therefore only display web pages. If Google recognises a URL is an image, it will not be fetched with the tool and will most likely display a ‘blocked by robots.txt’ message.
For more insights from Google, check out our recap from Google I/O 2019 with all of the key takeaways for SEOs
