Notes from the Google Webmaster Hangouts on the 4th of October, 2016.
AMP Doesn’t Impact Rankings
Implementing AMP is not a ranking factor at the moment. They are treated like any other mobile page.
There Is No Way to See Which AMP Pages Are Indexed in Google
AMP pages don’t appear in the index so site: queries won’t show them. Search console will only show you a total count, and a list of pages with problems. John suggests using analytics data to see pages with visits from Google to infer the pages are indexed.
Google Processes New Links Almost Immediately
John says that new links to new or existing pages are picked up and processed almost immediately.
Negative SEO Shouldn’t Affect Your Site
“Negative SEO” shouldn’t really affect your site. John says that their manual investigations of suspected negative SEO have shown they are already handled correctly by the algorithms.
Separate Non-WWW/WWW and HTTP>HTTPS Redirects are OK
It’s OK to use separate redirects for Non-WWW to WWW and HTTP to HTTPS which can result in 2 steps. Ideally you would redirect in a single step where possible.
Google Distinguishes Primary Content from Boiler Plate Content
Google detects boiler plate content which appears in the site in the page header, side navigation or footer and treats this separately to the primary content.
Google Penguin Devalues Links Instead of Penalising Them
The new algorithm in Penguin devalues spammy links instead of applying a penalty. Despite this, John says getting rid of disavow completely would be a bad strategy, as you can use the disavow file for any links you do not want to be associated with.
Slow JavaScript on Pages May Affect the Google Rendering
If your pages have slow loading JavaScript, this might cause Google an issue with rendering the pages. If Google is not able to render them in a reasonable amount of time, we will just render the HTML version of the page.
Search Console Country Targeting Doesn’t Effect Language
If you target a specific country in search console then you will get a boost local rankings for that location, but it won’t impact searches for same language in a different location.
Add Structured Data Markup to Dedicated Pages not Listing Pages
You shouldn’t add structured markup data to pages which contain lists of separate items e..g. listing pages. It should only be applied to pages when they are specific to the one main item on the page.
Use Info: Queries to Find Duplicate Pages
If you search for a URL with an info: query, and Google shows an alternative URL, it shows that Google thinks the pages are equivalent.
Re-Writing Content into Different Languages Is OK
Translating content into different languages, or adding additional information is OK. Auto-translation, or just swapping out individual words is not OK.
