All right, welcome everyone to today's Google Webmaster Central Office Hours Hangouts. My name is John Mueller. I'm a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google here in Switzerland. And part of what we do are these Office Hours Hangouts. Where publishers like the ones here are welcome to join in and ask any questions around web search and their websites. We can try to find answers for issues that have shown up. As always, if any of you want to get started with the first question, feel free to jump on in now. Hello, John. Hi. How are you? Pretty good. How are you? I'm good. John, I have some question. Recently, we have some issue in some project. And all the questions are related to this project. So one question is one of our clients launching a website. It is almost a website. They sell spa products. Now, the products they are selling, most of the product have description. Now, 50% description are actually product specification. And they are getting the product specification from actual manufacturer website. So it is almost the 50% of the content are almost the same. And another issue is that manufacturer are Australian websites. So both are Australian websites. So both are operating in Australia. So will it be an issue for a perspective? No, that shouldn't be a problem. So what happens there is when we recognize that exactly the same content is on two of these websites, then we'll try to find the most matching one to show in the search results. So if someone is looking for something general that is only in the description which is shared across these two, we'll try to find the best match that works for them there. OK, so that will be a duplicate content issue. I mean, technically, it's duplicate content, but it's not like we would demote or rank a website lower because it has content like that. That's completely normal. With a lot of products when they're sold worldwide, you end up having the same description on lots of places. I think it makes sense to have a unique description or at least have unique content around the whole thing. So that could be something like reviews that either you do as an expert or that other people do for the product. That could be additional information about why your location is the best place to buy this, which might be as simple as, well, located the same country as you are. That all of those things kind of help. And the next question is one of our clients, they provide training service around Australia, various locations in Australia. But what they did, they created three pages, one for the house cleaning, one for the home cleaners, one for domestic cleaning. Now, all of them are almost the same thing. And the content on the page are almost the same. Now, at the beginning, it works fine. We trained for the 3Q words perfectly. But now, their ranking is dropping. Is it because they have three pages which have almost same content and same topic? I think what probably happens there fairly quickly is that it ends up looking like doorway pages, that it's just like swapping out the location and all of the rest of the page is actually the same. And what usually works better there is to have one really strong page that kind of gives a general information rather than to dilute it across a lot of different pages. So if we remove the two pages and keep one page and redirect the two pages to that one page, will it work better? OK. Probably, probably. OK. What about if we instead of removing those pages, if we use canonical tags, will it work? It would be pretty much the same as a redirect for us. So in search, we would try to focus on one URL. For users, both of those URLs would still be there. So for example, if you want to use the URLs for advertising, then maybe it makes sense to keep both of these. If you want to make sure that everything is really combined on one URL, then I would just redirect. OK. Thank you. All right. One more question before we add into the deep list. Yes. So this is Michael LeWittis from Gossip Cop. And I think we spoke maybe about a year ago, and we redesigned the site. We worked on the content. I mean, we have been working 24-7. And in the last few months, very happy with how everything was going until about Tuesday night, started seeing some weirdness. And then today, searches on basic celebrities with whom we have generally rank, we were seeing very absurd sort of results. I mean, one of the classic examples was if you put in Ben Affleck's name today, and top searches was a story about his brother's beard, a story about Rose McGowan, and one about JK Simmons, who wants to be in the next Batman film. There was a thing with Angelina Jolie, which was a sort of Ukrainian site pretending to be an American site, which had LeapFrog People magazine, which is one of our biggest magazines in Alice. So there seemed like some weirdness. But again, we were wondering, maybe we did something, because a lot of our traffic has been, thankfully, AMP. And none of our traffic today was on any news stories of which there were about 12 or so. It was all 24 to 48 hours old. And we're wondering, I know you can't really speak too much about the algorithm if there's a tweak, but nothing we've done has changed. If anything, we keep doing, I think, by the day, better work, frankly. So I don't know what specifically changed there. It's always possible that there's some algorithmic changes happening, that maybe there's something from the web spam side as well that might be kicking in or falling out, where suddenly all of these weird sites are showing up again. But one thing you mentioned there with regards to the content, where you said that it was the older content that was showing up, are you seeing or not picking up the new content? The first 25 or so stories in analytics were really 24 to 48 hours old, very little traffic, because it wasn't seen, frankly, from the new stuff yesterday. OK. So I don't know. That sounds like it might be something of a technical issue as well. I'm happy to take a look at that. But what you could do is maybe send me a question. Sounds like it might be something of a technical issue as well. I'm happy to answer that. I lost him for a second. Yeah. So what might be useful is if you could send me a message with your domain, obviously, so I can double check with the crawling side to see that things are being crawled properly. And some of those sample searches that you said were looking really weird. So for us, what's really helpful is especially that the more generic searches, like you mentioned on people's names, where you're seeing really, really bad results in the top search results, then that's really useful for us to kind of pass on to the team and say, hey, these results are really bad. We need to fix that regardless of whether it's like your site that's up or one of the other sites. So that's kind of really useful for us there. But in general, I'm not aware of anything kind of like celebrity or news focus that would be happening there. Parmai Naivite, how do I get in touch with you? Oh, you can send me a note on Google+. Google+, OK. So you can probably just send me like a private note there. Sometimes it's a bit tricky on Google+, to send private messages. But you can just like add me there and we can do that. Thank you. Sure. All right. More comments or questions before we get started. Hi, John. Hi. I have one question about new search console. We have some error about soft 404 errors. When we try to find this page, this page looks normally. It's not have some redirects or 404 status. The headers come 200 status. What can be the problem there because this error is existing? So a soft 404 means that you're actually not returning a 404 code. So not having the 404 there would be a guide for correct. Or well, at least correct in the sense that you're not 404. The most common soft 404s that I've seen are redirects to a shared page. Like you remove a page from your website and you redirect that page to your home page. That's often a sign for us that it's actually a soft 404, not that you've moved this detailed page to the home page, that kind of thing. The other is one page with a 200 result code. That's also a very common use case where we look at that and say, oh, actually, no content here that we should index. Sometimes it's as simple as an e-commerce page that has a product listing that says, this product is not available. Or a search result page that you have on your site that says there are no results found for what we're searching. So all of these things, they kind of combine into the soft 404 group. What sometimes also happens is that we get it wrong. So I see this time, for example, on programming websites where you're talking about error messages and you're saying, well, you can serve a 404 error like this and it will show a page not found and this is the code to kind of do that. And sometimes we look at that and we say, oh, it says this page is not found. So we will treat it as soft 404. And those are the cases that are really useful to us because then we can take a look at that and say, oh, we need to restart. Does any of that match what you were seeing? What? Not really. OK. So what I would do then is either send me a note or maybe do a post in the help forum with the URL that you're seeing and the details that you have there. Then people can generally take a look at that and say, oh, this is because you're doing this. Or they can look at it and say, oh, this is an error and we'll pass it on to you. Actually, this has come from help forum. OK. Yeah. Cool. So if you can send me a link to your forum thread, then I can take a look there too. OK. Thanks. I appreciate it. Thank you. Sure. Thanks. Hi, John. Hi. I have a question. We have created a few millions redirects five years ago for our website because we changed the link, the URL structure, and now using the new Google Search Console, we found those links there. So it's five years old. How we can remove them? Or it's OK to keep them? Does it affect SEO? That shouldn't be any problem. Yeah, that should be completely fine. These things are sometimes in a way that our systems just have a very long memory and they will remember them and try them again. I was scared when I saw five million links there from five years ago. It's a little bit late. So do you mean in the index information or in the links to your site? In index coverage. Index coverage. Are these URLs maybe blocked by robots text? Is that possible? No, no, no. 301, where it leads. Yeah. Sometimes it just takes a while to be reprocessed. So what you could also do, or what might be happening there, is that we're actually indexing the redirection source instead of the target URL. Exactly. Yeah. That can always happen. So for canonicalization, where we pick which URL to actually show, we take redirects into account, but we take a lot of the other canonicalization factors into account as well. So if you have a rel canonical on those pages, that helps us. If you have the target URL in your sitemap file, that helps us. All of these things kind of add up. And we look at it and say, oh, there's a redirect here. But actually, there's a rel canonical here. And internal linking is here as well. So we will keep this URL index instead of the other one. And that can happen sometimes across a large part of a website. So what you could do, if you feel really strongly about this, you can make sure that all of the other signals really combine and say, this is the URL that should be indexed. If you don't care that strongly about it, then you can just leave it. So that shouldn't have any effect on SEO at all. It's just a matter of which URL is actually shown. And maybe it's this one. Maybe it's that one. Thank you. Sure. All right. Let me jump through some of the questions that were submitted. Lots of stuff here as well. Google explained that content hidden for UX purposes will be given full weight when sites are switched over to Mobile First Index. How will Google deal with abuse? Yeah. So we have to deal with this anyway. So it's not something that's completely new. Sometimes sites do weird stuff. Sometimes on purpose, sometimes on accident. In general, what we try to do in these kind of cases is to have algorithms that recognize kind of the problematic situation and to try to ignore that. So that sites that do this accidentally, they don't have a big problem with that. Sites that do that on purpose don't have any advantage from doing this kind of sneaky stuff. And usually, that works fairly well. Sometimes we run into problems where we're always happy to get feedback. But for the most part, especially things like the keyword stuffing that's often mentioned in this regard, that's something we can deal with fairly well algorithmically. Then Glenn asks about links in PDFs. I double checked on this, but I haven't heard back. So we'll have to get to this again in one of the next hangouts. We know that every page index is taken into account when Google evaluates quality. But if an affiliate site is disavowing a directory or disallowing a directory that contains many redirects to e-commerce sites, and many of the URLs in that directory get indexed, is that a problem quality-wise? Should we de-index those? What should we do? So if this is content that is blocked by robots text, then we don't take that content into account for the website because we can't see that content. So essentially, that's fine to keep it like that. Usually, especially with affiliate-based websites, the problem is more with the rest of the content on the website. And that it does need to have some kind of unique and compelling value, some reason for us to actually show it in the search results. So usually, it's not so much that a website is affiliate-based, but rather that the rest of the website is just very thin and not very useful. So that's usually what I would focus on there, not so much the fact that it's affiliate-based and you're trying to hide kind of this affiliate connection or whatever you're doing with those redirects that you're blocking by robots text. How to deal with pagination when content on page 2, 3, and 4 is largely a duplicate of page 1. More specifically, the content above the fold on page 2 is the same content as page 1. Is rel previous next enough? Should we do more? That's a perfectly fine use case for rel previous next. From our point of view, when we look at pages, we try to split them up into different parts. And we try to recognize which part of a page is the so-called boilerplate. The boilerplate is something that generally stays the same across a lot of pages. And by recognizing the boilerplate on a set of pages, we can also recognize which part of a page is actually relevant. And that way, we can focus on the content that's actually changing on these pages. So from that point of view, if you have paginated series, then that should just kind of work out. I think from a user's point of view, it sounds like you're probably a bit extreme with the amount of boilerplate you have on these pages if you say that everything above the fold is actually the same. Then if I'm thinking of a traditional e-commerce type website where you have some information about the shop on top, and then you have this paginated set of items in a category page, if you can't see those items at all on a category page, then that feels like it might be a bit confusing to users. But essentially, that's an indirect effect. That's something that you kind of have to deal with on your own and think about, how does this affect my conversion rate? Am I really getting the most value out of the users that I am getting? Our site maps I must have. I mean, what about the non-tech savvy people who run websites that don't really know how to put up a site map in the right way? Site maps from our point of view are really useful, especially for larger websites that change, that have a lot of new and modified content over time. For a lot of the smaller websites that essentially mostly have the same content, they're not so critical. So I still always recommend having a site map file because it's a good, good best practice. It's something that also brings the whole kind of mental model of how a search engine works into something more practical in the sense that you have to think about which URLs on your website are actually the ones that you want to have indexed. And if you're using a tool to create a site map file, then which is kind of what I recommend doing. Otherwise, it's a big hassle. If you're using a tool, then you also see how other tools crawl through your website to discover URLs on your website. So it's a great way to kind of understand a little bit better how a search engine works and to provide real information about what you think is actually relevant and useful on your website. For a lot of content management systems, if you're making a website using some existing platform or some existing tools, then pretty much all of them support site map files by default in the sense that you pretty much just have to do a check box or at most install a plug-in. And then you automatically have site map files without even knowing what the details are of the site map files. So that's something where if you're non-technical and you're using something like WordPress or Blogger or any of the other kind of CMS and hosting systems out there, then it's often a matter of just doing that check box or maybe it's even installed by default and providing the site map file for you. I'd love to know about recommendations for foreign language characters and special characters and URLs. Does Google have a preference? That's a great question. That comes up a lot of times, I've noticed. From our point of view, you can use either your kind of local language URLs or you can use Latin letters and URLs, both of those work for us. We don't have a preference. It's mostly an identifier for a website. So you use what makes sense. If you're using these in the domain name, then obviously they're in puny code in the end. So you kind of have to watch out for how that's actually set up. That's usually with the XP and then a dash and then some weird characters in between. You can kind of see what that looks like. If these are characters in the path or in the query part of the URL, then they just have to be in UTI of 8. And that'll just work. From our point of view, from a search point of view, we do use some content from URLs for ranking, but it's very minimal. So I would mostly focus on what you think makes sense for your users and use those. So one thing that I have noticed sometimes is that websites sometimes use English words in URLs because they think that's what search engines understand best. But the content is actually written for non-English speakers. And sometimes that can be confusing for people. If they see URL in the search results that's in English, clearly in English, but actually the content is not in English, then they kind of don't know, is this a website that's actually speaking my language or is this a website that's essentially in English? So if possible, I'd really recommend using local words, the right language, the right characters in your URLs. Is it OK to use a different nav bar or component with duplicate links for mobile users and hide it for desktop users with display none? Sure, that's completely normal. A lot of responsive sites do that by default, essentially. They have different navigational elements depending on the size of the viewport. So if it's on a mobile or not, or maybe in the wide mode or in the tall mode, then it might use different navigational elements on a page, and that's completely normal. That's usually a pretty good practice. Is there a way to check if a site is blacklisted or in a sandbox temporal status? So blacklisted would mean that there's a manual action on the site, and manual actions are visible in Search Console. So that's where I would double check. We have an extra section for manual actions in Search Console that gives you information on what is currently happening with that website. With regards to sandbox, we don't really have this traditional sandbox that a lot of SEOs used to be talking about in the years past. We have a number of algorithms that might look similar, but these are essentially just algorithms trying to understand how this website fits in with the rest of the websites trying to rank for those queries. And sometimes what happens is our algorithms will start at one place and see how that works out and try to get a confirmation through all of the other signals that this is actually working out. And sometimes that results in things going up afterwards, which is kind of like the sandbox that you're talking about here. Sometimes that results in things dropping down a little bit, which is I think the honeymoon period that people sometimes talk about. So it's always kind of tricky in the beginning when we have a new website, and we don't quite know where we should put it. You kind of see some changes in search happening there, because when you have to make some assumptions and figure out, like, does it make sense to put it here? Are we seeing enough support after a while that it's actually the right place, or should we have ranked it higher? Should we have ranked it lower? These things are kind of tricky with new content. How to avoid duplicate content in download websites that have a similar content to other download websites? So I think, first of all, if this is a download website and you're just providing content for download that's available everywhere else, trying to obfuscate that this is the same as everywhere else is probably not really the best use of your time. Probably what the main problem is here is that actually your content is the same as everyone else. So even if you change the words a little bit, it's still the same content. And that's something where probably it would make sense to find something that would allow you to be significantly different than all of the rest, so that when someone is searching for, I don't know, depending on what you have there, if you have, let's say, CSS templates on your website for download, that you really provide a unique and compelling experience that's significantly different than everything else and that you provide really top of the notch absolutely number one content on your website and a great user experience, great functionality. So instead of just doing the same as everyone else and just trying to tweak the words here and there, I'd really think about what you can do to be significantly different. And sometimes it's hard to be significantly different and sometimes it's impossible to be significantly different. If your main model is essentially providing the same downloads as everyone else has, then that's kind of a tricky situation and I don't really see a simple tweak that will make that different. So in a case like that, if you want to focus on search, maybe it makes sense to think about a different kind of website instead. It's been a year now and we have a no index and a redirected URL, but Google still shows the old URL and the search results with no information is available. So I don't really know how the setup is here because if you have a redirect and a no index, you can't have a no index on the page that is redirecting. So it feels like there's some part missing here. What I would recommend here is starting a thread in the Webmaster Help Forum with the details that you have and then other people can double check that and take a look to see if there's something that you're missing. Sometimes or oftentimes what I see happening is that one of these URLs is blocked by robots text and then we can't see the redirect or we can't see the no index, for example. Sometimes what might be happening is similar to the case a while back here where we just have multiple URLs and we just have to pick one of these as canonicals and we pick one as canonical that you don't really want as a canonical. And in cases like that, it's useful to get some tips on what you can do to really tell Google that this is really what I want as a canonical. Will using link shorteners instead of canonical URLs to share my website's pages impact my rankings negatively? No. If we can go all through a URL shortener, if it's a clean redirect, the short URL to the actual URL, the actual URL should just continue to work. Some noise where we just keep reducing amount of background noise a little bit. AMP Removal and M.NewPage instead of AMP in such a case should AMP be redirected to desktop or the M.page. So for the most part, from a theoretical point of view, to redirect the AMP URL because the AMP URL is only associated with one of the other pages. So it's not that there are any signals attached to the AMP URL. The AMP URL already has a canonical set to the desktop page. If you do want to redirect the AMP URL because you see users going to the AMP URL, then I would redirect to the mobile version because usually users that go to the AMP page are probably on mobile. But from an SEO point of view, the AMP page is already canonicalized to one of the other pages. So it's not that you would lose out on any SEO value if you didn't redirect. Links in hidden tab or collapsed content are only followed and PageRank isn't passed or PageRank is also passed. Kind of similar to Glenn's question in the beginning, we do pick up the content in hidden parts of a page and we do try to treat it appropriately. Sometimes that means we treat it like completely normal content. Sometimes that means we treat it kind of like other stuff content that people have on a page and we have to figure out how to handle that. So if something is, in general, if something is important to you, I would make sure that it's visibly important to users as well. Google Small Business made an announcement two and a half years ago saying if your account remains inactive by not logging in, it could run risk of being de-verified or removed. So I guess it goes on with like what will happen with the search results. So I don't know what the Google My Business team does in cases like this. I don't know if that's still relevant. If you're wondering about that, I'd recommend posting in the Google My Business Help Forum. The folks there are generally pretty helpful and can probably point you at some document that says this is what happens or this is what happens. With regards to search, we treat websites independently. It's not that we try to recognize which website belongs to which Google My Business listing and to double check who owns that Google My Business listing and then show the website in search. But rather in organic search results, we rank those websites the way that we rank any other website. So just because a Google My Business listing exists or doesn't exist wouldn't change the organic rankings of that page. This is a bit different when it comes to the local, local one box I believe it's called where you have a map and you have kind of the local listings on the bottom or on the side. Those local listings are based on the Google My Business listings. So if those Google My Business listings don't exist then they wouldn't be shown. Is structured data like a JSON LD a must for a blog or for micro site. Essentially nothing is a must for a blog or micro site. It's probably you could use robots text and block crawling of the whole website completely and it could still show up in the search results. It's obviously not optimal to do that. And similarly structured data does provide a little additional value and little additional information about those pages which helps us to better understand the content in the context of what you have on those pages. So in that regard it's definitely not a must but I think it's a good practice and it's something that helps us to better understand things on your site and sometimes that leads to us being able to rank you for more relevant queries in case that it automatically makes your website rank higher by default. We're currently working on schema markup for our product detail pages breadcrumbs. After reviewing other sites there seem to be a 50-50 split between sites that include the actual detail URL in the breadcrumb and sites that leave stop with a parent URL. Does Google prefer one way or the other? I don't actually know. So I suspect if you're seeing these in both ways in the search results then both of these options are viable and something that you could use. I personally, I'd focus more on where you have a reasonable length of breadcrumb items there in the sense that if you have too many items as breadcrumbs then obviously we trim some of those out and show like the dot dot dot in the breadcrumb area and that might make it look a little bit confusing to me. So that's more what I would focus on rather than whether or not to include the last URL as well. It sounds like we don't have a policy in that regard but I'm not 100% sure. Do duplicate articles with the same links get ignored by Google or does have a negative effect on rankings? Do you suggest disavowing duplicate article links as they're copied without our authorization? Not really sure in which direction you mean. Is this like other people are copying your content and you're wondering if that's having a negative effect on your site or is your site providing the same content as other people already have and you're wondering if your site will kind of disappear. So assuming that other people are copying your content for the most part that's something we deal with fairly well. Sometimes they're edge cases that make it a little bit harder for us to deal with. One thing you might want to consider doing if you see this as something that's problematic in the search results for your website in that people are taking your copyrighted content and republishing it in a way that you don't agree with then you may be able to take legal action on that by using the DMCA process. That's something where you'd want to get legal advice from from a lawyer or someone who knows this process for fairly well at least. We can't give you legal advice on this. I'll tell you if you should use DMCA to deal with something like that or not, it's an option that is available there. If that makes sense in your case that might be something to do. We're a media company currently in Google News and let's see, really long question. I think I channel with you guys on Twitter as well and you have a bunch of forum threads. I did look at this with the team specifically around the top stories carousel there. And from what we saw there, this is essentially just normal organic ranking in the sense that there's nothing manual kind of stuck with your website or otherwise causing like a problem or holding it back. It's essentially just normal organic ranking and the top stories carousel is something that is put together organically and based on normal ranking factors. So it's not the case that there's like any list on our side where we're like, oh, this website is bad. We should not show it in the top stories carousel. This is essentially just organic ranking. So I did double check with the team on this again after you posted on Twitter recently. And I haven't heard back from them with regards to kind of a new update but from previous times I've talked to them about this. They say this is essentially working the way it normally would work. We're a large Dutch travel portal. We migrated our listing pages mid December. Since my, since the migration, we see some of our bigger listing pages not ranking anymore from the most logical high volume keyword but now ranking for lower volume, long tail keywords. URLs and content haven't changed. Google can crawl all of the content. What could be happening here? So in general, it kind of matters what you did with your migration there. That's something where even if you keep the same URL and have the same main content on a page, if you significantly change the layout of your pages then that can have an effect on the search results as well. Sometimes it has a positive effect. If we can crawl your site a little bit better. Sometimes that can also have a negative effect in that maybe we can crawl your site less well. So that's something where I would kind of think about all of the changes that you did with that migration and double check what things looked like before, especially with regards to things like internal linking, the internal anchor texts that you use between internal linking, all of this can make it a little bit easier or a little bit harder for us to crawl a website. So those are things that I would go through and kind of double check. Even if you have the same URLs and the same primary content that can play a role there. All right, let's see. Think we are reaching the end here. What SEO services and tools would you recommend using? Search console, of course. Past that, I don't know. I don't have a lot of experience with the traditional SEO tool. I know there are some that people speak really highly of. I've seen some that are really, really neat, but I don't want to make any recommendations here from a Google point of view. So what I would do if you're interested in good SEO tools or services, I would ask the general community and not like someone from Google because we can't really make these recommendations. All right. Wow. I think we made it to the end. What else is on your mind? I could help. I had a question. So in a previous hangout, I posed a question about sometimes we have to use banned words when we report about celebrity. So for instance, I'm wondering whether we should redirect, when we redirect, for instance, on a story, are we passing on this negative aspect to that tag or should we just remove that story from the index? I'm not too wedded to it. I'm more wedded to cleaning up in one particular instance of an actor who was arrested for possessing child pornography. Frankly, my view is I'd rather not happen on my site anymore any reference as an ethical decision. So redirects there shouldn't play a big role. I don't think that that would make a big difference either way. Usually what happens is we try to look at this on several levels. On the one hand, we try to look at the website overall and think about like is this a website we should classify as being an adult content website, which is probably not the case in your situation that there's just like so much normal content here and there are individual places where there might be something where we see adult content type keywords. That shouldn't be a problem there. Sometimes we can recognize sections of a website as being adult content oriented. This might be something, for example, if you, I don't know, have a lingerie store, then maybe you have a section for kind of the more adult type content and maybe you have a section for like everything else. And if we can clearly recognize those sections, that makes it a little bit easier for us as well. When it comes to something like your website where I assume these are just individual articles that are not classified in like one sub-directory for adult content type thing, then we try to do that on a per page basis based on the content that we have on the page. And sometimes individual keywords, they can skew things for us and that we see those keywords and we're like, oh, this is like we have to be really careful here that we don't accidentally double this up in the wrong place. Oftentimes we can still recognize that this is something that's mentioned in the context of a bigger picture. So a common use case there is, for example, medical content where obviously you use a lot of words that you also find on adult content web pages, but you use them in a way that actually are meant to be adult content. And I suspect with your website, it's probably trickier in that we can't clearly recognize like what is the context of these adult content. So if we find them on your pages, then it's possible that we will just say, well, those individual pages are potentially more adult oriented than others. One thing you could do to kind of guess if that's a problem is to search with safe search on and off and we see any differences there. And sometimes it's really clear that like you turn safe search off and actually all of my website is suddenly visible again, then you can kind of guess, well, probably Google is classifying my site as being more adult oriented than not. And then you can think about what you need to do or if anything, to kind of help clean that up. We have a form in the Help Center if we're classifying your website as a whole incorrectly where you can tell us about that. I suspect in your case it's sort of like we see those words on a page, those words disappear at some point, then fine, we move on. Yeah. Thank you. John? Go for it. Not only Webmaster Search Console, you have a lot of useful tools like Google Analytics, Google My Business, mobile tests, test my website, structure data, page speed inside, and mobile friendly tests, AMP test is a lot of tools. Thank you for that, we appreciate it. Thanks, good to hear. Yeah, there are a lot of things that's true. Yeah. They don't all fall into Search Console directly. Lots of stuff. Yeah, yeah. And we use them. It's not only for just like that. Fantastic. Good to hear. Hi, John. Go for it. How do Google consider that site navigation in the right side or the left side? That's totally up to you. That's, it falls into the category of what we call the boilerplate on a page and it doesn't matter for us if that's on the left side or on the right side or on the top or on the bottom. We try to recognize what the primary, the kind of changing things are on a website and the rest is essentially things that don't change and we can deal with that if it's left or right or top or bottom, it doesn't matter. Okay, do you consider it like a text link or you consider it as a navigation for that one? That's totally up to you. As far as I know, we don't look at it from... Okay, if we remove those things, it will impact my ranking or something from the ACP perspective. Maybe. So we do take into account that kind of text on the side, left or right, and the internal links that you have there, they do help us to better understand your website. So we can crawl through your website a little bit better. We see with the anchor text that you have to the link, we recognize a bit better what the connection is between these pages, what is like there. Then that should just continue to work. Hi, John. Hi. Just a quick question. Do you plan to develop an application for mobile devices of Google Search Console in the future? A mobile app for Search Console? Yes. I guess it depends how far in the future you want to think. I don't know of any plans. I know the new version of Search Console, the plan is to make it mobile friendly so that you can use it on a mobile browser. I don't know of any plans to make an app for that. So far, I think the team is happy to focus on just making new and improved features for Search Console and when they make those new features to make them available in a mobile friendly way. But maybe apps will come up again and be something that everyone needs to have and maybe we'll reconsider that. It might also be that maybe the PWA model is something that really grows in popularity and in additional functionality and maybe it makes sense to go down that road. I don't know. Hard to think. Would you do that? It's very convenient to use Google Analytics and TedWords on mobile devices. I think it will be very good if we have an app there. But it's up to you. Yeah. So one of the things that the team was always kind of worried about is that a lot of the things in Search Console are issues that you need to actually change on your server. So if you have a lot of problems or something, then you need to fix that on your server.  How do you feel about that? Does that match what you use Search Console for or the things in Search Console that you think would be really useful from a mobile device? I think it will be more useful from an analytics perspective, just to observe the websites where we are not in front of our computers. OK. So the search analytics, the keywords, people are using to search, those kind of things. Yes. Yes. That sounds cool. OK. We're very often on the plane, for example, in a commuting. And I think it will be useful just to check something and compare. And just for the general idea is from an analytics perspective, as I said. OK. Cool. Yeah. Make sure there's nothing happening or to kind of get some creative ideas on what you could be changing to improve the rankings or the different keywords that you're looking for. Cool. Yeah. Pass that on to the team. OK. Thank you. I think it will be very useful when we have some link, when we have some error to have a link read for this type of errors more. Because you have this, like articles. OK. So more work between the individual parts of Search Console and the help information that we have. Yeah. That's what you're asking. Yeah. OK. Cool. Yeah. Sounds like we need to work on our website, too. OK. Cool. All right. So maybe we can take a break here. Thank you all for joining. We're coming at crazy time, Michael. I hope this was a bit useful in looking forward to hearing more details from you. Thank you so much. And also, thanks for all of the other questions that were here. Thanks for joining in. And hopefully, we'll see you again one of the next times. Have a good day, everyone. Thanks, John. Thanks, John. I think we got to the top of our heads.


Hi, this is Dr. Don. I want to show you a quick and easy way to add a target line or goal line to a column chart. Now this is often useful when you have a column chart and you want to see how individuals stand compared to the goal. So the way I like to do it, here's my basic data, there's my goal of $6,200. I'm going to click in this first cell and equal and click down here on $6,200. Now before I do anything else, I want to lock that with F4 on a Windows machine. Now I've got my goal there and I can drag it down to the other teams. With that data, I can just highlight the entire range and insert my column chart. And of course, that's not what I want, so I'm going to click inside the chart area, change chart type, go to Combo, and it will default to the clustered column in a line. I'm going to click OK. And so there's my basic goal line. Now I want to label that, make it a little bit clearer, so I'm going to click to select that and then click again just to have that end data point and then right click and add the data label. And of course, I can format that if I want. I like to get rid of these horizontal lines, so I'm going to click on them and just delete that. And then I can pretty up my chart as I want. And for example, if your data changes and your goal changes, you can just enter it in and everything will update. I hope this helps.


It is 11 o'clock on Thursday folks downtown Honolulu Ted Ralston here in our Think Tech studios overlooking Honolulu we have Jonathan Ruprich on with us from the complete underside of the US time zone about as far as you can get away from us six hours earlier in West Palm Beach Florida welcome on board our show where the drone leads Jonathan hey thank you so much for having me I truly appreciate this opportunity that's great and it's great to have you on the show and the rules of the show are once you're on once you get to come back a lot and if you really like it you can buy the thing in fact I'll even negotiate the price for you on the on the show but anyway we're where the drone leads and we talk about subjects that are associated and important in the emerging world of drones especially as they apply here in Hawaii and the Pacific we are somewhat unique in certain of our circumstances but we bring people on like you who have great knowledge and insight and really thank you for coming on we because it is show about drones we have one on the table here we always have to have our our place setting and table decoration properly in the world of drones this is an instant I Jen for out of PSI in Boston Massachusetts in any case the the world we're facing is one of needing great information and education in clear form about this whole emerging drone world and you represent a really interesting part of this the drone and aviation law and if I can advertise for you and we have to give people information about how to get a hold of you have to pull up Jonathan's website and phone numbers and things like that Ray but you come at this from an aviation and aeronautics mindset which is really unusual it seems to me most people are entering this business from the video game or the cell phone or the RC airplane domain and having that knowledge of the true aeronautics domain what people are thinking about when they're in a cockpit entering an airport control area something like that is really not important information to guide our future of guidance so tell us about your your company tell us about what you do and tell us about how you can help with this large-scale need for education sure what I can help people with primarily dealing with the FAA so it kind of in short help people get a piece of paper with their name on it with the FAA's name on it as well saying that you can do XYZ operations that's probably the easiest way to understand it so helping people with night away night waivers or authorizations to fly near airports stuff like that or just general understanding of the potential risks that are out there liability wise for the drone operators as well as companies that hire the drone operators because there's liability all over the place and so that's primarily what I do and how I help people and it's I guess in regards to helping businesses going forward I think that anybody operating this area needs to realize that this is a east coast business okay it's out of DC not Silicon Valley so there's a lot of people in the drone industry that have that Silicon Valley mindset where if you chuck a lot of technology at the problem that they think it'll go away in reality it's a legal industry it's heavily regulated the quicker you learn that the better off your business will be position yourself for the future you know there's a couple aspects of the nation the notion of business there's also the whole public aircraft upside which is more in the world of public safety law enforcement and public service areas and so their business like and that they're structured by a business but they don't have the same goals and objectives as such so certainly we find here in Hawaii that the Department of Land and Natural Resources police departments fire departments they're struggling with the same way that the companies are to figure out exactly what that pathway forward is you could help us in that area too I suspect well right there there there's definitely a need there and I'm not exactly sure as to what the reasons are every situation is different as to why they're having a difficulty in actually implementing drone operations I mean the public sector has been doing drone operations for like decades you know from the military and then it is also progressed into you know federal agencies and down into the state agencies and they have the ability to operate as public aircraft under a public coa they could obtain a section three through three exemption they also have the ability to fly under part 107 so that they have a lot of tools in their tool belt to accomplish the tasks at hand so that's actually they have the most options out of out of everyone right and what we have to do is associate the emerging technology of drones with the incident command system and the other frameworks of operation that exists and find where the attachment point is find where the gaps need to be filled by information or training or something and then find where any legislative limitations we have have to be understood and converted into bills and then taken forward one of the factors out here that is a major concern is the is the what you might call the nuisance factor of the people who simply don't know what the regulations are we have the wiki he beach lined with hotels and a lot of people show up from different parts of the world that bring their drone with them and then go want to operate in an area that is actually occupied also by the helicopter traffic quarter going out of Honolulu airport so we have drones and man helicopters in the same space they kind of don't know each other's there so we have this need to somehow pull us into an understandable form and then pass it around and and have people debate it and understand it coming from again bringing in aeronautics perspective into the picture and I like the way you put it that this is a Washington DC centric thing but it's dealing with a lot of pressure from Silicon Valley so a lot of social issues here Jonathan that you have to cross and you're sitting in the middle of all this with the the proper paperwork that has to occur well yeah and then there there's a lot of inner lot of people that are playing in the area that are all influencing it in some way or another so you have the federal government that FAA putting out regulations as well as policy and then in addition to that you have the states that have come in and have started trying to regulate this area some put out helpful that you as well as other ones have put out that's a helpful so that's further cost and problems because then it becomes very difficult we want to fly to another state and because you're pretty much everybody has at least four levels of government over them at any given time you have the federal government the state government accounting your city or town and then you have to comply with all of those it gets difficult because you have to line up if almost think of it like tire swings and you're trying to throw a football between all four of them it's kind of hard to be profitable when you have to do that for every flight and so there's going to be a big need there going forward trying to answer what is the federal government's domain and what is preempted by the federal government when regards to the state laws because it's becoming very difficult to try to actually scout out what what are the terms people using in that particular state that county that town for this thing we call a drone do they use the term drum some do some don't some call it model craft over there in Hawaii I was like model craft who uses this term you know some poor unsuspecting person is gonna be flying in the wrong place the wrong time some park you know recreation guys gonna come up and be like hey did you know about the model craft you know ordinance people like not really maybe would have helped if you use the word drone because everyone else in the world uses especially overseas you know this each and every country has a different term to have remotely piloted aircraft and so remarkably piloted aircraft system our pass and then so you have a bunch of them drone seems to be somewhat ubiquitous between everybody everyone kind of understands it's like the coca-cola town of terminology it's like we know what you mean okay and so you face these multi-dimensional problems all the time but you got to sort through and end up with some structured response that conforms to the various rules of laws or in your case challenge the laws as the case may be and I do want to thank you for the what you do to benefit all of us through your information service which is probably non billable hours I would guess coming in your domain but I think people benefit from all of that they work you circulate in fact when you were beginning to touch on it here but coming together with some standard you least throughout the United States commonly understood terminology and approach to the laws and such you published the recently the list of all the rules that exist in all the states and some are making a lot of sense it seems to me Arizona and it looks like just like Florida's law in terms of the setback requirements and the non non-risking aspects and the the safety aspects there there seems to be a sense of commonization coming forward do you see that as well yes and there there's on my website I actually have some resources that are listed there one of them by the Amanda Essex is the publisher of it she term or what organization she is with but she published a survey of the state laws around the country and it's helpful to kind of like read through those even the previous ones you can kind of see an overall trend so like back in 2013 the laws were originally kind of addressing state use of the drones because they're they're afraid that drones would be used for like persistent surveillance invasion of privacy in a fourth amendment type of stuff and then as time went on it kind of like spilled over into well let's go after the the civilians as well and then it kind of morphed from you know don't fly in a careless reckless manner to spilling over into hey stay away from critical infrastructure stay away from this and then some are trying to actually get a little unconstitutional is probably the best way to put it and you know like North Carolina and others where hey now you have to have our state registration and our state drone license drone permit whatever they want to call it so they're dancing around this this area that has been traditionally held to be field-prampted under case law and so this is a big problem coming up of who can control the lower portions of the sky and there's certain areas of the law they can and cannot because traditionally the state powers can regulate to protect the health safety and welfare of their citizenry and the skies primarily put in the national actually in the federal jurisdiction of from the Federal Aviation Act 1958 so how does that work in regards to people trying to use drones to violate people's privacy well who do we prosecute them under can you know preemption be a defense I mean that's that's one issue there but the states have not just gone into that area where it's traditional kind of criminal laws I mean they already have the criminal laws in the book they could just charge them anyway they've gone one step further and hey now we're actually going to start regulating what you do in the sky and coming up with all sorts of creative cat and mouse games with oh well we can't touch you in the sky but we'll get you from where you can take off and land and then it's like oh great now I have to find a place that you don't control to then like launch it to take my pictures to then come back and so it's becoming a big problem here as a patchwork of laws that overall in his business going back to the city of Burbank case back in 1973 US Supreme Court was discussing that in regards to noise ordinances that were created specifically that the case had a noise ordinance in the city of Burbank California that prohibited aircraft from taking off it was 11 p.m. and it was this one flight that was affected and the court was discussing like the overall net effect of this if it's allowed to stand is going to affect the entire United States that's what's pretty much happening here and it needs to get settled once and for all you've got the federal level both Congress they might might not or at the United States Supreme Court you know what let's do we gotta take a break here for the halfway through our show but let's come back and talk about what we can do collectively to pull this information together format it in such a way that our legislators which all are starting in January for the next session can be one or five steps ahead of where they were last time we get back from our first one minute first and last one minute break Aloha I'm Tim Appachaw host for Moving Hawaii forward a show dedicated to transportation issues and traffic we identify those areas where we do have problems in the state but also the show is dedicated to trying to find solutions not just detail our problems so join me every other Tuesday on Moving Hawaii forward I'm Tim Appachaw thank you Aloha my name is Raya Salter and I'm the host of Power Up Hawaii which you can see live from 1 to 130 every Tuesday at thinktechhawaii.com and then later on YouTube I am an energy attorney clean energy advocate and community outreach specialist and on Power Up Hawaii we come together to talk about how can Hawaii walk towards a clean renewable and just energy future to do that we talk to stakeholders all over the spectrum from clean energy technology folks to community groups to politicians to regulators to the utility so please join us Tuesdays at one o'clock for Power Up Hawaii we are back for the second part of our show here Ted Ralston in our downtown Honolulu studios of thinktech Hawaii with our show where the drone leads and a fascinating guest the first time around the show Jonathan Ruprich Ruprich from West Palm Beach Florida who runs Jonathan Ruprich law and deals in all forms of aviation law but now a lot in drone law and we welcome you on John thanks for spending the time late in the day on your end of the country thank you so much I appreciate it okay and we were just in enjoying a a incredible conversation you were leading us through just before the break about all the variation of rules and laws and inconsistencies and consistencies and the separation between federal state and local or the lack of separation as it may be and the difficulty people have seen their way through this if they're a company or if they're an agency that wants to operate or if they're a legislator who's trying to make rational decisions about bills presented to them so collectively we have six months between now and December when the legislature at least out here kicks in and we have some some some time here a little bit a little bit of time to get some significant mountains to get a climb in terms of putting information together but if you were if that was your job what would what would you suggest as a way forward to get by December a well understood common-sense view of of what makes sense form from a drone regulation perspective that legislature should care about to promote business promote education promote workforce development and better use of these systems in public safety and in law enforcement don't feel any pressure but what you think sure in regards to I guess talking to the state legislators that they need to ask the question do they actually need to actually create some type of law regarding drones because it's kind of discussion here like oh we want to promote business well creating laws really don't promote business for the more it actually hinders a lot of the people that are actually honest because now we have to appease our conscience and actually look up the laws would take how many of our hours of our time meanwhile the legal we're on around doing whatever they want and so there needs to be a discussion there like do we really need this is that really that much of a problem is this you know do we have any facts to support the alleged incidents of drones doing XYZ you know so kind of establish the facts and then narrow narrowly tailor the law in order to actually go to those facts but start out at need then I'd probably work back to do you have the actual lawful authority to do that and then narrowly tailor those are the three ways I would do that because a lot of the states I mean they see of I see some problems and I think there are some problems with people operating the drones in a careless and reckless fashion and they're like they want to legitimately protect the their citizenry from people doing stupid things but is that really the state's jurisdiction at that point to start regulating the sky or is that primarily the FAA and so I mean just because I see someone doing something doesn't give me the justification to actually just go out and correct wrongs wherever I see it you know we all have certain jurisdictional you know we have jurisdictional boundaries that we need to stay inside of and so it's kind of hard to say I'm going to tell you how to follow the law while I myself I'm actually violating the law and exceeding authority granted to me right either under the state's in the Constitution or from the state state authority and so be very careful that you are not saying basically as I say you know do as I say not as I do right yeah that's a really good point so start with what the real problems are the problems that can't be solved by current limits laws rules or regulations whatever they may be and work from there because I as you saying that I'm thinking of what our process is here people generate bills and submit them by the time a bill gets submitted now you get to deal with it it's out there so now all the testimony comes in which is going to be ranging all over the place and the confusion sets in on day one if we could work backwards from what the real compelling problems are even rank them from those that are really important problems to those that are more in the nuisance category that might it might focus better on what the what the window of need really is right and always question who's telling you something regarding the problems right at the end of the day of there's there's not a lot of discussion regarding that like I'm pro business I help out drunk businesses so I'm all like hey stop creating the regulations flip side people are like hey we need to create some regulations law enforcement are like we need something to do here well interestingly why are you suggesting that is so maybe you can actually be the head of said department that's going to then do all this right because a knight needs a dragon to fight otherwise no one's going to pay for his armor speaking of paying for armor you got to get paid for this work you do this is not billable 30 minutes to think tech studios I recognize that but but how do you how do you actually promote your business or get clients and this sort of thing speaking of the actual aspect of business a primary a lot of its word of mouth as well as just people to find my website and then contact me from there okay so you're full-time occupied in I'm thinking of this from a workforce development perspective there is a world there is a role for drone specific but aeronautics framed thinking legal activity well exactly the FAA speaks aviation ease yeah and people need to learn that this is a Washington DC type of industry and then we talked to the FAA while they are normal human beings that live in America that speak English they speak aviation ease which has each of those words is very specific meaning and sometimes they have their own meaning and so you'd read the same word and come to a kind of different idea what I mean but they really mean something completely different great example is where we had section 333 exemptions and they said hey please explain to us how your exemption well benefit the public and many people would reply well this benefits the public because we can now purchase this drone and it's much cheaper than taking a helicopter and going out flying FAA does not care about economics they care about safety so when they say benefit what they mean is but the benefit and only answer that in regards to how does it actually like increase safety you know protecting the the public and so there's an aviation translator need out there in the drone community and that's probably what you provide a lot of isn't it explaining what the frame of reference is that the rules are created under and how then you fit your business need or your law enforcement need within that right I mean and then they're changing their policy here and there and depending on what the case law and stuff the laws and stuff coming out it stuff shifts around as time goes on it's not stagnant and then on top of that people really didn't invest much time into actually studying out what drone law is which further caused even more confusion because a lot of the stuff you see on the internet I would say is it's a click bait headlines of times that are written to get readers to read their articles but but real good takeaway from this whole this whole discussion here is whoever you are watching this ask the question why is this person saying is what are their motivations because there are a lot of people in the industry which have a lot of motivations that are inflaming the situation hyper you know over embellishing the facts hyper inflating those or trying to deflate those so ask the question where is this person coming from why are they saying that you know I think we could take a really neutral sense of this at the university and think through from that perspective what the real problems might be and begin structuring a way to provide education information and the upside downside of various issues to our legislature between now and December and actually make things move forward much more smoothly next year we are one of the FAA test ranges out here which is adds to the complication because we're associated with Oregon and Alaska Mississippi and Kansas in this lash up so that's yet as a whole nother dimension that you won't find in certain states and many of them so we have the additional complication of that but you know there's there's so many aspects here would be interesting to have you on again and longer we have issues of workforce development we don't have enough trained workforce here if the power company wants to hire one more drone pilot they're gonna have to go to California to get them because we don't have a machine that produces certified and qualified not just certified 107 is wonderful but it didn't qualify you for anything it just means you passed a test really being qualified means you know what you're doing and you can interact with the air environment in a really successful and positive way we don't have that and so where we go we go to California we go to Texas or something like that to get people so we really have a workforce issue here as well as as well as just getting the regulations all straightened out so we'll take your your lead on that we've had Jim Williams on and Charles Warren some other guys recently and there's a lot of ideas percolating here at the time is right for us to pull something together Jim would like to take whatever we do and run it back through the the drone advisory committee and get them to exit to sign off on it so to speak and maybe we can generate some kind of a national frame of thinking here that is useful for all as we go forward and we'll count on you to critique it and help it and and push it forward and bring your great insight into the picture as we go forward here sure definitely yeah send it over and ask the question why did that person say that that's definitely a big takeaway from this dealing with the drone industry I can tell you ask that question okay that's cool that's the greatest summary out of this so say that one more time for our wonderful audience here in terms of ask the question ask ask yourself the question why is that person saying that so legislator why did that legislator say that why did that person propose that information to the legislator police officer wanting to start a new program doing it why did they do that of an attorney on a program why did they say that right ask those questions what was their underlying motivation and how does that motivation potentially influence the facts that they have presented okay so we're backwards in the individual motivations which are agendas and the actual real problems which may not connect and come up with a realistic threat based circumstance to work from we'll do that we'll take you on on that Jonathan and look for you as a partner in this activity then you got to move your office out here to Hawaii make it all happen I mean I have to get back to you on that all right very good hey we'll get you on again sometimes thanks so much Jonathan for joining us Jonathan Rupert's of Rupert's law dealing with aviation in any form but specifically on drones in West Palm Beach Florida


Right, so today we are going to discuss on few important topics which are not only relevant to DHS2 tracker but these concepts you will come across whenever you are customizing DHS2 in general for aggregate as well as sometimes when you are analyzing data and especially when you as an implementer support your DHS2 instances in the country these topics are going to be very crucial. So they are going to be interesting and as well they are going to be sometimes complicated because here you will be discussing about I mean few of these minor I mean some complicated concepts like the authorities. So we will try as much as possible to make them clear to you during the presentation as well as in the demo session but if you have any queries please feel free to ask them in Slack and also we request you to refer the DHS2 documentation as usual. Right, so today we are going to discuss about users, user roles and user groups. The objectives of this session include describing the individual concepts that make up a user and then configure these concepts in DHS2 instance and also how to create a user in DHS2 incorporating all these concepts. So what actually constitute a user in DHS2. So the first concept is we have something called user authorities. So what we mean by user authorities is a permission to perform one or several specific tasks within DHS2. And then we have another concept called user role. So what is meant by user role is a group of authorities created for a specific type of user. So we are going to discuss about each of these concepts in detail so in this slide we are kind of giving you a basic overview of different concepts. And then we also have another concept which we have already come across when we were sharing our design tracker program called user groups. So user groups is a group of user that have access to a specific object in DHS2. So there are so many objects, different types of objects in DHS2 and to provide access to these objects we use this concept called user groups. And then we have organization units. So I mean this term is something that you are really familiar with we have been discussing about organization units from the DHS2 fundamentals it is one of the three dimensions in DHS2. So what do we mean by organization units. Basically organization unit controls a user access to administrative units in data entry or data analysis and search. And finally we have users. So all of us who are accessing DHS2 are DHS2 users. So a DHS2 user is an individual DHS2 account assigned to user roles, user groups and organization units. So now let's look at each of these concepts in a little bit more detail. User authorities. Now DHS2 uses something called an authority to allow users access to various components of the system. These authorities are very granular in nature you will see when we are doing the demonstration and they control detailed operations of what can be done in DHS2. So it's basically like we will show you what are the different authorities we have we have a comprehensive list of authorities so it's kind of limits, restricts individual tasks the user can do within the broader DHS2 system. A user authority can provide a default behavior when creating objects in the system. So we have like kind of two concepts under this we are like public versus private. So what we mean by public objects like they can be seen by anyone who logs into the DHS2 system. So if you create a DHS2 public object. For example, there are some metadata items we create as public in DHS2 system for example this programs that you created are configured as public, which means it can be seen by anyone who logs into the DHS2 system. And at the meantime, we can also create private objects in DHS2. So the attributes that you created, for example, when you are customizing are configured as private objects by default. And that is how we have configured the DHS2 instance for this academy. So these private objects must be shared in order for others to see them because it is private to that particular user. So in any case if you want these privately created objects to be shared by others, you have to share it with the specific user. Okay. Right. And now let us again discuss a bit more about different authorities which are there. So for example, you will see that we have authority called all. When we grant this all authority in a DHS2 system, it grants authority to do everything in the system. So for example, whenever we grant this authority, usually this authority is granted to the super users, they can do anything. So they have all permissions, unlimited permissions to do anything within a DHS2 instance. And authority called tracker capture application. So this what it does is it allows the user to access the tracker capture app. So if we do not grant the authority to weave the tracker capture application, that particular user will not be able to see the tracker capture application in this in that users apps menu, it will be disabled. And we have, for example, authority call update track entities, which allows a user to modify a track entity value of the enrollment. And we have another one which will show today called uncomplete events. So this allows the user to reopen a previously completed event. So if we complete the event to make it incomplete, incomplete, we have to use this particular authority. Then we also have authority for, for example, search a track entity instances across all low units. So this allows the user to search beyond the organization units that they are assigned to. So generally, we assign some more unit to a particular user. But if this user has access to weave across all low units, then that means like whenever he searches, he is able to search whoever who's registered in any of the org units in our DHS2 system. Right, so what do we mean by user role. Now previously we talked about authorities in DHS2. So these are individual permissions. So basically what we mean mean by user role is a collection of such authorities. So we discussed like for example in the previous slide we mentioned five different authorities. So if they kind of, if we group them together, we can make something called DHS2 user role.  As I mentioned before it could be public or private, and it receives access to various apps and functionalities within DHS2. And these user roles which is a collection of authority once created, we can assign this user role to DHS2 user. And once that user is assigned a user role, he can log into, he can log into DHS2 instance. Right. So basically what we mean by DHS2 users are particularly the people who log into DHS2 instance. Okay, so I guess like DHS2 user is a very simple concept to understand because we all, all of us here are users of the DHS2 instance that we are logging in to customize right. And when we log in, all of us will have different user roles. Right. So here we are kind of explaining further the concept of user role. So as you can see, see here, we have the use we have two different types of user roles here. The first one is the system administrator. The second is tracker data entry. So the system administrator has been granted the permission all meaning he has full access or authorities to do anything within the DHS2 instance. The third is tracker data entry user role. We are only giving some limited permissions or authorities. So for example, he can see tracker capture application, he can update track entity entities, and then he can uncomplete events and he can also search for track entity instances across the organization unit. So here for this particular user, the tracker data entry user, we are only giving four permissions, right, as for this diagram so it's a kind of very limited amount of access that this user is going to have. Right. Then next, in the latter part of today's session, we will be discussing in detail about the concept called user groups. User groups to users can also be assigned to various user groups. User groups are used to set up access and sharing of objects or notifications. So if you can remember the tracker programs that we created the final step was to assign it to a user or user group. We did not like in our demonstration be just assigned to one user, but you may have also seen if you refer the documentation or if you just when you are signing you may have seen that you can assign that basically you can share that tracker program with the user group as well. So once it is shared with the user group, all of them will go are going to have access. User groups, basically a combination of user roles, user groups is what constitutes what a user can do within the DHS to instance. So when we created DHS to user that user is going to get assigned a user role, which means they'll be a set of authorities that user role is assigned to so all these tasks that user is able to do. And then if we assign that user to user group, it'll kind of will determine what are the objects that this particular user is going to have access within the system. So it's a always a combination of user groups and user roles that defines what the user can do and and what is the kind of like, I mean what are the different objects say for example what programs that user is going to have is determined by the user user group. Right, so it's always a combination of these two concepts. Right, so for example, you can see here. We have this user should I did who can be assigned to one or more than one user group. So here he can be assigned to malaria user group admin malaria group. Right, and then we have another user group called TV analysis, as well as TV HIV analysis so this user can be a member of each of these user group. So the implication is like whatever the shareings like for example if we shared access to say the access to TV program if we shared with the TV analysis user. This user should I did this going to have access to that program right and at the same time if malaria is also shared with this group is going to have access to that. And the and if you have shared the HIV program with the analysis HIV user group. This new search rather it is also going to have access to that program as well. So how he has access to all these three programs is because he's a member of each of this user group. So that's how we determine. We I mean what are the objects, it could be like for example, program, a particular user is going to have access. Right, so we will discuss in detail about how this user groups concept is going to affect what the user can do in the later part of the day. Right, so then we will briefly discuss about the organization units. So, we have different. I mean types of organization besides, for example, we talk about data capture and maintenance organization units. So, this kind of determines where a user can capture data. Right, so when you are configuring you when we are when we are creating a user we have to determine we have to define the data capture and maintenance or you need. Now, again, it is going to be like a combination of like say for example now when we are saying is determines where a user can capture data. He must be also part of user group with the setting data can capture and we've data. For example, if you can remember when we were configuring the TV program. We defined in the last part we had to set so that that particular user can capture as well as we did. Right, and also in the same time, when we are talking about this data capture and maintenance organization unit it determines what is the organization unit user will see in the maintenance app. But for that to happen that particular user must have a user role, which grants access to be mean maintenance app. Right, so then again you can understand like you just can't, you know, like by by assigning a user to a capture unit will not give him access to the maintenance app so it's a kind of a combination of the user role, which has the authority to to be the maintenance app, and a user having access to one or unit that will kind of constitute the entire authority or the permission access that user is going to have in the system. And then we also have type of organization unit, but we are defining when we are creating a user called data output and analytic organization units. So here it determines the level of data a user can see based on the organization unit selected. And then we also have search organization unit concept. So this determines what are the organization units a user can search for a track entity instance. So for example, even though a user may have access to to level three capture unit and a view of unit. If that user when we are configuring if we configure the search with the kind of a higher organization unit level, say like level two, he'll be able to search all the track entity instances up to the up to that particular level. So it's it's again kind of overriding or kind of like setting a higher level of access when the track when we are searching the track entity instance. Right. So here we discuss about three different concepts associated with arguing. This one is the tracker data, sorry, the data capture and maintenance or getting the second is data output and analytic work units and third is search and maintenance. Right. Okay, and also it is kind of important to notice that in all cases, a user will automatically be granted to all access to all lower levels within the top most or unit selected. So if we give access to level two in the or unit hierarchy, that means, I mean, whatever the or units coming under level three under that level two or unit, he will have access something like that. Okay. Right. So for example, now, this user should achieve, we can just assign one note unit or more. For example, here as you can see the particular user has been assigned more than one or unit access so he's assigned access to province one, two and three. So that way we can I mean in the organization unit tree that we are seeing when we are configuring the user, we can give multiple levels levels of access. So here you are seeing a summary of what we have discussed so far before we move to the demonstration. So, when we are discussing about users in DHS to a user is assigned to a user role. So a user role restricts what apps a user can access and what operations a user can perform within those apps. And then we also assign users to a two organization unit. So this will restrict access to organization units within the data and pre maintenance and maintenance analysis and searching. And then we can also assign the user to a user group, which restricts access to specific objects. And it also aids in notification separation. Right. So this is kind of summary of what we have discussed so far. Right. So, next, what we are going to do is to do a demo of user roles and followed by that we will discuss about user groups.