Google SEO Office Hours are help sessions offered by Google employees and engineers for users working in web development and positioning to answer questions that users have previously submitted through this Google SEO consultation form .
In it, users can post questions about ranking, search appearance, rich results, security, Search Console, Analytics, and other related topics about SEO and Google updates .
They are then answered at Google SEO Office Hours, which are held within the news section of Google Search Central . Specifically, they are conducted through hangouts that are recorded and subsequently published on the Google Search Central YouTube channel . Transcripts and summaries of the sessions are also published in blog format.
Google SEO Office Hours are coming to Spain, and in Spanish
These sessions, with an identical format, are coming to Spain thanks to Carlos Sánchez Donate and Dani Leitner . Each week they are accompanied by different SEO positioning professionals from our country, ready to answer all the questions that the attendees have sent in advance.
Dani and Carlos met at one of the Brighton SEOs and the idea of doing SEO Office Hours in Spain came about after Dani attended one of the English version of the sessions . There, he found out that many people were asking for them in Spanish. The rest is history, although if you are curious you can find out more in Carlos' SOH presentation article .
What you need to know about them:
See you there? If you can't make it, keep an eye on this article, because I'll attach the video and a summary of everything we talked about .
Summary of the SEO Office Hours session on with Natalia Witczyk
On this occasion, Natalia Witczyk and I attended as guests , and these were the topics we talked about with Dani and Carlos:
1. Similar categories and subcategories
User is having issues with Google selecting incorrect categories for specific searches on a website with multiple similar categories and subcategories.
It is a fact that Google can misinterpret list of suriname consumer email categories and subcategories if they do not clearly fit the search intent. But that is the problem, in that you have to analyze how well defined and worked out the search intent is .
One of the possible scenarios is that the categories that are confused share similar keywords . In this case, the semantics of each page must be worked on better.
As an added bonus, use breadcrumbs and XML sitemaps to help improve Google's interpretation of your site structure.
2. Duplicate titles and H1s
The question arises as to whether having identical titles and H1s on a page can be considered over -optimization and whether this can cause SEO problems.
Our conclusion was that Google does not automatically penalize for having identical titles and H1s , rather, it is about properly optimizing for different related terms.
So, our recommendation is to use titles and H1s that are semantically relevant and useful for both Google and users so that there is no confusion regarding the content topic (because if the user goes back in the page or pogoes, a negative user signal is sent and this can affect positioning).
3. Negative SEO attacks
We often get asked how to handle negative SEO attacks, specifically a massive increase in spammy links to a website.
It is best to use tools like Bing Master or Google Search Console to identify spam links , because if they do not appear there, it means that the search engines are ignoring them and there is no need to worry.
Only if there are thousands of links and there is a correlation between their appearance and the decrease in site traffic , then we could consider sending the list through the Disavow tool (in the case of Google).
However, it has been a long time since any of the 4 have noticed a penalty for this reason on the websites of the clients we manage.
4. Readability vs. grammatical correctness
The question is raised about how Google interprets content that prioritizes SEO over strict grammatical correctness , and whether this can affect the ranking or perception of quality of the content.
We all agree that readability is important for user experience and can influence the perception of content quality. But small grammatical errors do not usually penalize SEO .
However, when they are repeated and cause the text to sound unnatural, but forced, because the inclusion of keywords with spelling mistakes is prioritized... Then we are talking about the fact that user confidence, and that of Google, can be diminished .
Google prioritizes user experience , so clear and well-structured content can always improve ranking.
