OK, welcome, everyone, to today's Webmaster Central Office Hours Hangouts. My name is John Mueller. I am a Webmaster Trends Analyst here at Google in Switzerland. And part of what we do are these Office Hour Hangouts, where folks can join in and ask their questions around SEO and websites and Google Search, of course.  But if any of you want to get started with the question, you're welcome to jump on in now. I would like to get started. So I mentioned it already in the comments. So we see at the moment the huge issues with when it comes to indexing of correct URLs. So for example, for the brand IKEA in Germany at the moment, so when we are searching for IKEA Kitchen in Germany, Google is showing the Austrian version of the URL instead of the German version. And on the second place, an old URL which isn't PDF, which is redirected. So we tried everything to fix this from a technical side. So we were checking all redirects, sitemapxml, hreflanktech, robots.txt. Check technical issues like our times regarding also CDN and so on. But we haven't found any issues, technical side or content side. And also have an old manual action in place, especially now the search engine is showing this issue. So it would be interesting to get your thoughts about this. I saw that question this morning. And I had a chance to briefly look into it. And it feels like something maybe on our side where we're kind of holding on to two particular URLs. So I've passed that on to a team to double check. I don't think there is anything particular on your side that you're doing wrong. Sometimes with different country versions that show the same content, it's a bit confusing on our side. But we should be able to catch that better, especially the PDF example that you gave with the PDF URL. That's something that, to me, just looks like something is stuck on our side. OK. So you will keep us updated on such an issue and we'll give them official update on this. Usually what happens with these kind of things is when I pass them on to the engineering teams, they're able to kind of look at them and find a way to resolve them. And that's something that'll resolve itself over time. Most of the time we don't have any official updates that can pass back. OK. So we should see some updates in the Google Search Console regarding indexing status of the correct subdomain. I imagine you'd do that. Yeah. OK. Yeah. Thanks, John. Sure. I think there was another one who wanted to jump in. Hi, John. I have a question. Hi. The thing is that yesterday I met a client and I'm going to pitch in for him. Like when I saw the website, like a majority of the pages are indexed in non-dub-dub and a few pages are indexed in dub-dub-dub. So is it OK if we just select the preferred domain as a HTTPS-WW or do we need to do 301 for all the non-dub-dub-dub-dub pages to WW version? I'm just scared because the site is around five years old and there are around 20k plus pages indexed with non-WW. So just want to check it out. Usually the preferred domain is good enough for these kind of cases where it's the same content on both of the variations. From a best practice point of view, it's always good to redirect, though, to kind of make sure that you're following up on that. But if you can't set up the redirect, then the preferred domain makes it easier for the data to be in the right version. The other thing you can do is use domain verification in Search Console. If you use domain verification, then it doesn't really matter which of these versions are shown in Search. All of the data will still be in that one account. OK. Thank you. Hi, John. Can I ask a question? Sure. So I have a question regarding Search Console. So in Search Console, I find my normal pages are 66k around, but in the mobile-specific pages, I only see 300k, 3k pages. So I was just wondering why this happened. So how do you mean in the mobile section? So when I see in the main coverage page, I see 66k valid pages, but when I see a mobile usability pages, I see only 3k valid pages. Oh, OK. That's completely normal. So the index coverage report shows essentially all of the index URLs that we have from the site. And the aggregate reports, like the mobile usability report, the structured data reports, also the speed reports, they only focus on a small part of the total index. So that's something where it would be normal to see that difference between the total counts. What you would watch out for in those reports is just that the percentage of errors that we show. So it's not so much that the total number of pages has to match, but that the errors in those reports are fairly low. OK. OK. Cool. Thank you. Sure. Hey, John. Can you hear me? Depends on how complicated the question is. It's not that complicated. Yeah, so I guess this question is sort of like a question off the back of the Knowledge panel featured snippets and how that's counted in Google Search Console for a few of the keywords that we've looked at in Search Console, where after this update has happened, we've basically just seen our position almost go to the bottom of the search result. So is it counted at the bottom, or is it at the top? Is it, like, how is it supposed to function? Nothing really changed there with the way that Search Console tracks the position. So what happens in Search Console is we track the topmost position of either the URL or the site, depending on how you're looking at the report. And we use that for the averages. So if the topmost position hasn't changed, if you're being featured as a featured snippet already, then that would continue to count the same. On the other hand, if your featured snippet moves on the page or if the featured snippet is no longer shown and only your normal, I guess, well, both of them are kind of organic search results, but kind of the traditional search result is shown instead, then that position will be ranking. What I've also seen in some screenshots, I haven't looked at it in detail, is that we also show something on the right sidebar sometimes that looks like a mix between a knowledge panel and a featured snippet. And that would probably count as, I don't know, position 10 or 11, because we kind of number them down and then decide. So if the featured snippet moved from kind of the top of the first column to the top of the second column, essentially, then that would count as a different position. Awesome. That perfectly answers the question. And I guess some Danny was saying that we're going to make some changes potentially this weekend to roll that back, because we've seen quite a big decline in clicks, because I think most people probably focus on the left-hand side rather than the right-hand side. I don't know. I haven't looked into that in detail, but that's certainly possible. I know they're still working out some of the details and making some changes there. So some things are still in flux. Awesome. Thanks, John. Sure. All right. Let me run through some of the submitted questions, and we can get to more live questions as we go along. In Search Console, I see a number of industry-related websites have linked to a number of PDFs I have available on my e-commerce site. However, my PDFs don't have a link with them going back to the relevant product or category page. Should I add one? Would it help from an SEO ranking point of view? So first off, I think this is a really interesting question, because lots of people have PDFs on their website, and probably most people are not thinking about links within the PDFs. From just from a pure usability point of view, I think it makes a lot of sense to have a link back to your products, back to your website, back to maybe the category pages even within these PDFs, because these PDFs might get spread around. People might share the PDFs directly with other people, and making it easy for folks to get from the PDF to your website is a fantastic idea. So that's something I would encourage you to do, regardless of any SEO aspect there, with regards to SEO. Because within PDFs, there is no way to let us know that a link is really a link that you want to use to pass signals, we would generally view these links as text links that we also find in text files, essentially as similar to a no-followed link, in that we recognize a link is there. We can look at where this link is pointing at. But for the most part, we would not be forwarding any signals through those links. So from a pure SEO point of view, I would say it's questionable that you had any advantage from this. But from a usability point of view, I would totally make sure you have those links within your PDFs. There's advice on the internet. Oh my gosh, I'm sure this is bad. Advice on the internet about cleaning HTML code and its effect on SEO. Is it really important to delete old HTML comments, for example? OK. So essentially, you don't need to clean HTML comments within your HTML pages. That's not something that has any effect on search at all, unless you have kind of an extreme amount of HTML comments, in the sense that maybe you're looking at a page that is 100 kilobytes of HTML and you have 100 megabytes of HTML comments in there, then that's going to be really hard for us to figure out where the actual content is. But if you have a normal amount of HTML with kind of a reasonable amount of HTML comments in there, that makes absolutely no difference. And with regards to those extreme cases, that's something you'd also see from a speed point of view. But just from a personal point of view, I have never seen any page that has so many HTML comments that it would cause any problems. So it feels like something where, theoretically, you could create such pages. If you copied, I don't know, Shakespeare and War and Peace as HTML comments into a page, but that's not going to be something you see in practice. Multilingual sites sometimes use the same media library that results in the same image being used on the page in different languages. Do you recommend going through the hassle of duplicating the images so relevant file name can be provided for each language version of the website? No, you absolutely don't need to do that. There are two things here. On the one hand, the file name is a really, really small factor. And we see a lot more information from the rest of the page. If you have text on the page, if your image is embedded in a very prominent way, that helps us a ton more than the file name. And on the other hand, when we recognize that images are duplicated across a website or across the web, we kind of like with HTML pages, we fold them together and just keep one copy in our index anyway. So there's no advantage from just duplicating images for multilingual websites. How long does it take for Google to replace the old contents of a website if the website content has been removed? How long does it take for Google Mobile to index websites? So in general, I think this comes back to how Google crawls and indexes, and we crawl and index pages at different frequencies. So what will happen is that some pages we re-crawl every couple of minutes, other pages we re-crawl every couple of months, and somewhere in between there is kind of most web pages. Usually on a common website, we will re-crawl the important pages, like the home page, maybe the higher-level category pages every couple of days. And from there, it kind of goes down to maybe once every half year or so where we re-crawl pages that we think are really a lot less critical on this home page, or especially pages that we think don't change a lot. So depending on which page you changed, if you changed your home page, we'd probably notice that within a couple of days, if you changed some random page way in the bottom of your website, then probably it would take a couple of months for us to recognize that. And if you changed your whole website, then what will generally happen is the more important pages, the ones that are visibly shown in search, they'll be updated fairly quickly within a couple of days, maybe a week or so. And the kind of less visible pages in search, they'll be updated over a longer period of time. So you'll see kind of this curve of it really updates quickly, and then it kind of slows down with the update speed. If a user right-clicks an element on the search result page and opens a new tab, will it be counted as a click? Because the definition says, any click that sends a user to a page outside of Google Search is counted as a click. But in this case, the Google Search is still on. Good point. Maybe we should clarify that in our documentation, but it feels like a really weird edge case. Any click like that is counted as a click. So if you right-click, or if you middle-click, or if you have some other mechanism for opening a URL in a separate tab or in a separate window in a browser, we count that as a click. Essentially anything where you're going to that page, you're loading that page directly. Is it important that all pages of the site are accessible within N transitions from the main page? For example, some news from 2015 before, say, is accessible only in 10 plus steps. Is that OK? That's perfectly fine. Usually what happens here, or where this comes from, is that on a lot of websites, the home page is the most important part of the website. So we recrawl that fairly often. And from there, we try to find new and updated pages or other important pages. So what will happen is we'll see the home page is really important, things linked from the home page are generally pretty important as well. And then as it moves away from the home page, we'll think, well, probably this is less critical. So that's something where you might see things like this, where someone will say, well, some amount of steps is the minimum steps from the home page. From our point of view, that's less about SEO and more about, well, we have to discover all of these pages somehow. So if news articles from 2015 are behind some archive where you have to find the archive, find the year, and then look at the month and look at maybe a category and then find the news article, usually that's perfectly fine. On the other hand, if there's something that you really, really care about and you think is really important and you hide it away like that, then probably we'll think it's not as important. So if you think it's important, then make sure it's really easily findable within your website. I am seriously considering improving the usability of some of our pages by adopting an accordion page presentation. My concern is, as the user will have to physically open tabs or windows to see the content within, will this affect Googlebot's ability to read and assess the content? Please advise how accordions affect crawlability in subsequent or ranking. Now, I don't know exactly what kind of setup you're looking at. So it's hard for me to say, for sure. A really common kind of accordion that we see is kind of like a carousel that's kind of similar, I guess, is where you use this UI element to essentially navigate to other pages. And in cases like that, usually the content within the accordion or within a carousel is still within the HTML page. So what would happen in a case like that is we'd be able to pick up this link to the other page, regardless of how it's displayed on your page. And we would just follow that like a normal link. So that's generally a total non-issue. On the other hand, if you're setting something up where the full content is within an accordion, then that's potentially kind of tricky. Maybe that's also kind of OK. If the full content is within your HTML page from the beginning, then that's fine. On the other hand, if clicking on the accordion causes the server to load that content into the accordion content, then we would not be able to figure that out during crawling and indexing. In particular, anything that requires any interaction in order for the content to be loaded, that's something we would probably miss out on. If the content is already loaded by default, then that's generally not a problem. Theoretically, could a website that's only one to two weeks old rank for top positions on Google for ultra-competitive head keywords, say, for example, for shoes? With significantly better content, only considering it's the most important part of the core algorithm. If not, then clearly time is a factor when it comes to ranking pages for highly competitive areas, no matter how good they are, unless new pages are created on already established websites. So I think these kind of theoretical questions are always a bit tricky, because the answer is, well, theoretically, lots of things could happen. But in practice, things are not so theoretical. So I don't really know if there is a good answer that would be useful to give for something like this. We use lots of different factors when it comes to crawling, indexing, and ranking. And sometimes that means that completely new websites show up very visibly in search. Sometimes that also means that it can take a bit of time for things to settle down. In particular, with completely new websites, one of the difficulties that we have is we might not have a lot of signals for those websites, so we have to make estimates. And depending on how we make estimates, that can sometimes mean that in the beginning, we show this website a little bit more visibly than it turns out that the signals tell us in the end. It could also mean that in the beginning, we show this website a little bit more less visibly than the signals might tell us in the end. So that time period of understanding the website and understanding how it fits in with the rest of the web, that's always kind of a factor there. But that can go both ways. It can go in the direction of you're shown very visibly in the beginning. And it can also be that maybe you're shown less visibly in the beginning. And as we understand your website and how it fits in with the rest of the web, then we can kind of adjust that. And we do have different algorithms that pick up on things really quickly. So for example, some news item happens, and we try to pick that up within seconds. Sometimes it's also new websites that show up that we try to pick up really quickly. So it's not that time is the only thing that matters, or time doesn't matter at all. There's lots of nuance. I have a two-year-old property website with more than 400,000 pages. The thing is my URLs are with underscores instead of dashes. As I'm doing an extensive on-page SEO, I just want to ask, is it worth changing all my URLs from underscores to dashes? So no, you don't need to do that. In general, we do understand words separated by dashes a little bit better than words separated by underscores. But that difference is really, really minimal. So that's something where I would not just revamp a whole website to go from one format to the other. The main reason I would not do this is because the positive effect is really tiny and the negative effect from revamping your whole website to a completely new URL structure, that is much stronger. And that's something that you'll have to worry about for quite some time until it really settles down. So any time you completely revamp the URL structure on your website, that means we have to understand all of the connections between all of the old URLs and the new ones. And we have to recrawl the whole website to understand how the internal linking works. And usually that's something that I'd say takes a couple of months, at least. And it can take much longer than that, depending on the website. So from my point of view, the potential upside of having dashes instead of underscores is so tiny compared to the downside of having to revamp a whole website. If you're starting a new website and it's like dashes are underscores, I don't care, I will just pick one, then I would go with dashes. But if you have an existing website, then don't revamp it just because of underscores versus dashes. I'm looking at my home page in Search Console's live test that looks completely unstyled. Inspecting the More Info tab tells me the main CSS file wasn't loaded due to an other error. I'm concerned that Google will evaluate my site's UX negatively because of this. So first of all, we would not evaluate your site's usability negatively because of this. That's something that sometimes happens when we render pages. What might happen in some of these cases is that we would have trouble understanding that it's a mobile-friendly page, but that's something that, for the most part, settles down fairly quickly. The other part of the question is, well, this other error is totally not actionable. I have no idea what is wrong. You're not wrong. That does seem like something that we should make a little bit clearer. A lot of times, other error also just means that we didn't get around to fetching this URL for this particular live test. And that's potentially different from when we actually index the page and render the page on our side because with the live test, we want to focus on speed. We want to make it so that you see a result as quickly as possible, so we will not use caching. And we'll have a much lower time out than we would for indexing, just so we can show you a result as quickly as possible. I don't think it's really that useful if it's like, you do a live test and it's like, oh, we will get back to you in a couple of hours with the results. That's not very useful for you. So we try to optimize for speed rather than for completeness with the live test. And for indexing, it doesn't matter because we can say, well, we'll spend, I don't know, an hour or so to figure out how to get all of these URLs that are embedded and to cache them properly so that we can render all of the pages on your website. We have times. Like, nobody is rushing us when it comes to rendering. So that's something to kind of keep in mind there. I have a sitemap index of 200 plus sitemap files, I guess. Usually when we submit the index in Search Console, it shows all sitemaps index. But on one of my domains, it suddenly stopped showing some sitemap indexes. Now my many URLs have shifted from submitted an index to submitted but not indexed. Errors have also reduced in half. What is happening here is really hard to tell without knowing your website. So I'd recommend maybe starting a forum thread with the details there to double check. In general, a sitemap file helps us to better understand your website, but it's not a requirement for crawling and indexing. So if at any point we're not able to process your sitemap file, we'll still be able to crawl and index your pages normally. And that's essentially fine. The other thing to keep in mind is that we don't guarantee indexing of all pages. That's just physically not possible. There's so many things that are submitted as sitemap files, and we just don't have storage for all of that. So it's completely normal that we only index part of a website. And for smaller websites, we'll generally try to get everything, but especially for really large websites where you're creating hundreds of thousands of URLs, and maybe you have different facets and filters and pagination and other URL parameters, that's something where it's completely normal that we just wouldn't be able to index all of them. Implementing a carousel of product pages with images on the home page or simple text links in normal font doesn't make a difference for crawlers and priorities. Not really. Well, for crawling, we need to find those links. And if we find those links, that's completely fine. For search ranking in general, one of the things to keep in mind is that anchor text does help us to understand pages better. So if you don't have any anchor text leading to internal pages, for example, if you just have an image, then that makes it a little bit harder for us to understand what this page might be about. Whereas if you have a text link, that's a lot easier. With images, you can also use an alt attribute for the image, and that works just as well as an anchor text. Then that question from the beginning talked about that. What happens to internal links, page rank of a page when it's canonicalized to a slightly different page with different internal links? So when it comes to links, we see links as being between canonical pages. So we see any particular link on the web as going from this canonical page to another canonical page. And on both sides, there might be multiple pages or multiple URLs that are associated with that canonical where we say, well, these, I don't know, five variations all belong to this one canonical. On the other hand, maybe you also have multiple URLs that are associated with the canonical on your side. And from our point of view, we combine all of those signals and keep them with that canonical. And then with that link, we point it at the other canonical and we combine all of those signals there, too. So if you're linking from a non-canonical page to a page that is canonical, then that non-canonical page will first be canonicalized to the canonical. And then from there, that link will essentially work. And similarly, on the receiving side, if you have multiple pages that are canonicalized, that's collected in that canonical. So from that point of view, you don't need to do anything special. You don't need to remove links on non-canonical pages or anything like that. We try to just figure that out and make it work. My competitor is sending fake traffic to my website every day. Will that affect my website's SEO and ranking? No, absolutely not. If this is what keeps your competitor busy, then you have more of a chance to kind of focus on real business aspects. So that's something where it's like, well, you can probably just block them by IP address if you wanted to. But it has absolutely no effect on your site's SEO and ranking. So let them do useless things while you do something that makes a lot more sense. Is having search keywords Google translated in other languages on a page a bad thing for SEO? Users don't seem to click my website because my title isn't in that language, but the search keywords are. Does Google consider this bad behavior? So I'm not quite sure what you mean with search keywords. If you mean the keywords meta tag, we completely ignore that. So you can put whatever you want in there. It has absolutely no effect. If you're just dropping these keywords on your pages, then probably that doesn't make a lot of sense. Because if your page isn't really in that language, then users might go to your page, but they just go somewhere else after they look at your pages. So from that point of view, we don't necessarily need to consider it bad behavior because users are just not finding what they need on your website. And that's more like your problem, not our problem. Well, I guess it's also our problem because we're sending people to a page that is not that useful. But for the most part, it's really something where if you're placing misleading content on your pages and hoping that improves your website in search, then that seems like a very, very short term thinking and not something that I would recommend. If I do convert my whole website into another language using Google Translate, will Google treat it as duplicate content? So first, we do not treat translations as duplicate content. Translations are totally unique pages. Secondly, if you're using Google Translate, that translation might not be that great. We would consider this to be automatically generated pages. So that's something where I wouldn't recommend just blindly using Google Translate. Using Google Translate together with manual translation reviews, kind of a normal quality assessment process behind that, that's a totally different thing. You're essentially creating a localized version of your website. But just blindly using any kind of translation tool to automatically create a translated version, that also seems like short term thinking because a local speaker will look at that page and say, well, this is not what I need. I'm not going to stick around on this website. Is it making attachment pages indexable a bad thing for SEO? My users like to get access to attachments separately. I populate the attachment page with the metadata of the file. That seems perfectly fine. I don't see any issues with that. Some people like to go to long form texts. Some people just like to get to a specific piece of content that they're looking for. And depending on what kind of attachments you have, what kind of information you have there, that could be a completely reasonable type of page within a website. I would just watch out for kind of going down the direction of creating pages for the sake of having created pages. The number of pages on your website is not what you should be focusing on. You should really be focusing on the quality of the pages that you're creating. So for example, if you create attachment pages for every image on your website, then for most websites, that doesn't make a lot of sense because you're creating all of these pages and people aren't really using them. On the other hand, if it's a stock photography website, then maybe that does make sense. So that's something you kind of have to figure out on your own. I recently saw a significant drop in ranking. No manual action or security issues. However, some pages are still ranking high in the search results, but most of our service pages have really dropped significantly in ranking along with our blog posts. What could be the problem? Some service pages still ranking high while others have dropped significantly. And there's the URL. I need to take a look at the URL to see what exactly this might be. But in general, changes in ranking can happen. So that's something where just because things have been ranking well for the moment doesn't mean they will always continue to be ranking well. And kind of similar to that question earlier on, new pages can also rank well. So it can also be that suddenly there are maybe lots of other pages that are ranking well because either they're new and they're really good or either our algorithms are thinking that maybe these are more relevant for some of these queries. So these kind of things is not something where there's one particular reason why this is happening. There can be lots of reasons why there might be changes in ranking. In general, what I'd recommend for cases like this where you're kind of unsure, like, is it on my side? Is it something on Google's side? I'd go to the Webmaster Help forums and make sure to mention your website and some of the queries that you are looking at so that the folks there can take a look and give you a little bit more of an honest assessment of where they say, well, your website looks fantastic. Maybe Google did something wrong. And they can also contact us and escalate it to us. Or similarly, they might look at your website and say, well, actually, this doesn't look that great. Maybe you should put more work into improving your website first. And then over time, we'll see if this is something that Google needs to change as well. I've been getting hundreds of 500 errors in Search Console. I check my server logs for the pages that got reported for 500 errors a day that Search Console said it tried to access them. But I could only confirm that Google bought visiting these pages one out of 10 times. Do you know why Search Console would report crawl for a page on a certain day, and it wouldn't show up in the server logs? So I think first off, we don't kind of randomly generate errors and put them in Search Console. If we're seeing crawl errors, then that's pretty straightforward. And that's something that we can report on. It's not something that we have kind of like algorithms that try to guess when crawl errors might take place. But rather, these are pretty direct errors that come from our systems. So I would assume that the errors that you're seeing in Search Console with regards to crawling, in particular, are actual errors that we saw while we tried to crawl your website. The other thing that I have sometimes seen is that a lot of websites have multiple layers before a request actually reaches the server itself. And that could be something like security protections that you have along the way. It could be content delivery networks that you have set up. All of these things can also return errors. And it can certainly happen that a request comes in from Google Votsite and is blocked by some security layer outside of your normal web server. And perhaps that layer either fails and returns a 500 error or blocks us completely so that the request times out. And that might be something that you would not particularly see logged on your server. So that's something where it might make sense to double check with your hosting provider to make sure that you're getting the full picture and that nothing is being blocked or breaking there. Finally, the last thing I think is that 500 errors are things that you really want to take care of. 500 errors are server errors, which means that something along the way is breaking. So it's not like a 404 error where the URL just acts like it doesn't exist and we try again. A 500 error is really something that we tend to take seriously in the sense that we sometimes assume that maybe it's our fault, like something is breaking. So whoops, something weird. OK, so what else happened to be presenting? OK, like I said, 500 error is really something that, whoops, let me just move you. Whoops. Oh man, too many buttons on this laptop. 500 errors, back to 500 errors. So we assume that these are actual things that are causing problems. So what will happen is we will crawl less frequently. So that's kind of why fixing and finding the source of 500 errors makes a lot of sense. So usually it's a sign that something is really breaking and usually the results will be that Google crawls a lot less frequently. So it's really worthwhile to get to the bottom of those. We're using the latest version of the Yoast SEO plugin for a blog, which in theory should take care of implementing structured data automatically for all of our articles. Do you think that's enough or should we implement structured data on each article if we want them to show up for featured snippets? So featured snippets don't need any structured data. So that's kind of the first thing there. So you're probably already on the good side there. With regards to the structured data, I wouldn't just blindly focus on one plug-in and say, I installed a plug-in. It should be OK. But rather, I'd use the testing tools to make sure that the type of markup, the type of structured data markup that you're using matches what you would like to have kind of picked up from these pages. So using things like the rich results test in Search Console or double checking the aggregate reports in Search Console, that's generally the direction I would head there. The Yoast plug-in does a lot of things really, really well. So I think that's definitely a good thing to have there. But it's not like this one thing that you install and it fixes everything. You still should double check to make sure that things are working the way that you want it. And it's not so much that maybe the plug-in doesn't do it, but maybe there are options that you can activate or disable. So just double check to make sure that things are working the way that you want it rather than just blindly saying, well, I have this installed. This will fix everything. Will Google ever offer a CDN solution of its own? So we do have a CDN. It's the AMP cache, essentially. So for AMP pages, that's something where we cache these pages on our side. We serve them directly from the CDN. Two users in the search results, they're even preloaded, depending on how that's set up. So that's something we have there. If you want something fancier or something separate from AMP, I don't know if they're potentially offerings on Google Cloud or maybe you can set up your own CDN like that. But there are also lots of third-party CDNs out there that are really, really well made. So I wouldn't just say, if I want to sell the CDN, I have to use Google CDN. There are some really, really good solutions out there that can provide a lot of functionality for you as well. And some of these are not crazy expensive, so it's worth looking around. OK, wow. And a complicated long one. Let's see if we can get through this. Due to copyright issue in Europe, the company I work for has almost the same English language website on two different domains, with the exception of some branding differences, basically the same website on two domains. There's one domain for Europe and one for the rest of the world. We differentiate the two from here on by calling one the EU domain, the other the ROTW domain. The issue, in addition to concerns over duplicate content, is that it seems like Google may be confused as to which is the proper site to show in the search results depending on the location of the searcher. This gets more complicated as Europe has many languages, and thus we have many different language versions of the EU domain. However, we obviously do not cover every single language in Europe. Thus we want the English version of the EU domain to be sort of default for European users that do not fit in with other various language versions of the website. How do we tell Google that the default site for Europe is the English language EU domain, but the default domain for the rest of the world is the other one? I thought about using regional language, hreflang tags, and using the other as an X default, but this would be an issue for two reasons. One would be that we'd have about 5 billion hreflang tags on each page. That seems a little bit exaggerated, but OK. We'd have to have an English language tag for each region in Europe, in addition to hreflang tags for each non-English versions of the site. The second would be to do with the copyright issue I mentioned in the beginning. We cannot send European users to the rest of the world domain. Hopefully there is a more elegant solution. So unfortunately, I don't see an elegant solution here. I think this is something you'd probably need to set up with hreflang, and you'd probably need to go into that with the assumption that the hreflang markup on its own won't fix this completely. So the hreflang setup, I think you roughly understood how that works. So basically, you'd have to have for every country the English version marked up within hreflang, and you'd have an X default version which would cover the rest of the world. So that's something that you can set up there, and that helps us to understand the connection between all of these variations. Obviously, that can get fairly complicated. So what I would recommend doing here is, first of all, making sure that you're really implementing it on the pages that matter, where you're actually seeing problems. It might be, for example, that this is just something that you need to do on your home page and maybe on a handful of other pages within your website and not on thousands of individual product pages. So if you can reduce the scope by focusing on pages where it really matters, that sometimes makes it from a crazy impossible thing to implement to something that's more reasonably possible. The other thing is how I mentioned, it's not guaranteed that hreflang will fix this, especially with a really complicated hreflang setup. It's easy to introduce mistakes, and it's easy for things just not to be crawled in time for us to pick them up properly. That's something where it can still happen that we show the wrong country version in the search results, and you need to have an elegant way of handling that on your side. So the solution that we usually recommend is using a banner on top of the pages when you can recognize that a user is looking at the wrong version of the page. That means that users who are purposely looking at the wrong version of the page, they can still look at that page, which makes a lot of sense because users might be in one region, but actually, they're based in a different region. And maybe they'd like to see this page in French, even though they're based in maybe the UK at the moment. Like all of these things, that's something where a banner makes it possible for users to continue to use the page, but they're still guided to the right version. And the additional effect of a banner is that when it comes to crawling and indexing, we can crawl and index those different variations. We're not forced into the US path within your website. So in your setup here, if you're redirecting European users to the European website and everyone else website, then a user from the US would be redirected to the everyone else website. That means Googlebot, when we crawl and index your website, we would never be able to see your European website. So we would never recognize that, oh, you have content in French, and you have content in Italian. We'd never even get there because you'd always redirect us to the rest of the world English website. So those are the two aspects there. On the one hand, I'd definitely look at Ahreflang, and I'd focus on the pages where it's most critical. And I'd also find a clean solution for cases where people still get to the wrong version. All right, next question. Can you name the top 50 ranking factors? OK, we're running kind of short on time, so maybe we can just shift to more live questions from any of you. I imagine that's more insightful. Hi, John. Hi. Hi, John. I have a question regarding updating old content. OK. So what would be the best thing to do when you have an old content and you're trying to update it to something very broader than the original content? And would it be wise for me to delete the old content because it was very narrow? And now, I'm trying to make it a lot wider. So my question would be, is it wise to update the old content or delete it and make new articles so that, because personally, what I've seen or experienced with Google is that it is always advantageous for me to have new content published rather than updating it. Because it takes time for the old content to rank but, you know, the objective that I have is vicious. So what I would do in a case like that, if the new content kind of matches the old content, it's like the same topic, and you're just creating a much better article there, then I would rewrite the old content. I would keep the old URLs and kind of expand on them. The advantage of that is you keep all of the signals that are associated with that page so far. And that could be things like people who are linking to that article or even just your internal navigation, where we already understand this page is kind of about this topic, and we have some anchor text associated with that page. So if you're just expanding it, I would definitely keep the same URL. If you're writing something completely different, then I would just use a different URL. And just one more question. What are your views on activated mobile pages? Because across the web, even communities, I don't see a lot of people endorsing it. And I certainly had to handle it and then go hide it. I think it's a good trend for 2020. The blog can be re-released. Let's look at it in a long list, with blogs or forms. OK, sorry. Go ahead. So accelerated mobile pages. I think accelerated mobile pages are a great way to really make fast mobile sites. So from that point of view, I don't have anything kind of against them. I think, depending on the type of site that you have, sometimes it takes a lot of work to make a really fast mobile site. And AMP is a nice framework that makes it easy to create new pages that are mobile-friendly and really fast. But there are also other ways to create fast mobile-friendly pages. Depending on the setup that you have, maybe using AMP is a great way to get started and to make these pages. Maybe there are other ways that work just as well. For a lot of the more common CMSs, I've seen plugins that just enable AMP by default. And sometimes that's a really quick way to make your website significantly faster. So that's something it's worth looking at to see if that's an option for your website. So thanks, John. Sure. John, I have an analytics question, if you don't mind. OK, I'll try. Why would my insights in analytics show me, I'm going to paste an image into the chat, show me an insight that tells me my revenue is up in dollars when it's a UK site in pounds? I have no idea. You probably need to ask someone from the analytics side, or maybe check with Daniel. Daniel Weisberg on my team, I think he's also on Twitter, so I will just ping him and see. So it's pulling the right property. They're linked correctly within Webmaster Tools and Analytics. And the image has got the income on the left in pounds and on the right in... Oh, wow. I have no idea. I don't know. Maybe it's like a separate bank account that you don't know about. Hmm. Daniel can tell me where the money is. I have no idea. Yeah. OK, yeah. And for Webmaster Tools, we're setting up a new site. This new site we're launching. It will have lots of different currencies. Are we best off setting up sub-properties or not sub-domains but sub-folders in Webmaster Tools for each country? Usually, that's a good idea. Like, if you really have country-specific content to separate it out in a clearly visible way, so that could be sub-domains. It could be sub-directories. Sub-folders, yeah, sub-directories. Yeah, yeah. So the one thing I wouldn't do is to use URL parameters for countries because that's something that's really hard for us to figure out. URL parameters work great for different languages because we look at the languages on a per-page basis. But for countries, we try to figure out this block of the website. When you say URL parameters, do you mean just appending? Yeah, like if you have an actual URL. Yeah, if you have question mark, country equals droning, then that's a lot harder for us to figure out. OK, cool. Cool. OK, let's take a break here. I have a bit more time, so if any of you want to stick around and chat off the record, we can do that. I think we got through a bunch of the questions. There's still a lot more. So if there's something critical that I didn't get to, feel free to just copy it in to the next of our Hangouts. And we can look at it there. Basically, I have a small question. Sure, feel free to stick around. I'll just pause the recording, and we can continue. It's good to pause the recording at some point so that we don't have an infinite line of things. OK. All right. So my question is that nowadays I'm facing lots of problems in my Google Analytics. That my Google Analytics account is not providing me exact data. Like, there is a real time of more than 500 on my website. But when I checked the total number of visitors, they only provide info of like 10,000 people per day or 8,000 people per day, according to Google Analytics. If we have a real time of 4 to 500, then there must be the traffic of 30,000 plus in a day. So on the one hand, I don't know about Google Analytics. You'd need to check in with the Google Analytics folks on that, so maybe in their help center or help form. The other thing that is something that I know we have in Search Console as well, and some of the other tools, is that the live data is often unfiltered in that it includes all kinds of traffic and things that tend not to be real users. So it can happen that the live numbers are much higher than what is actually recorded, because the live numbers include things like fake traffic and bots and things like that. So that might be a difference that you're seeing there. But I would really check in with the Analytics team directly. John, where can I get the solution for this problem? I would go to the Analytics Help Forum. So there's a special forum for most of our products. I can pull it out and drop it in the chat here in a minute. Please do this. Sure. All right, so let's take a break here. Thank you all for joining in. It's been great to have you all here. And if you want to stick around for a bit, feel free to do that. I'll set up the next batch of Hangouts soon. And until then, I wish you all a great weekend and a great week. Thank you, John.


Let's do another example. If you know a cricket field, how much will the cut grass weigh? Okay, so once again, we have to guess several things in this problem. So we have a cricket field, large amounts of grass in it. And the tricky thing with any kind of estimation problem is trying to figure out something you can guess reasonably well.  So a blade of grass is maybe that long once you cut off. It's about that wide. And how thick will it be? Let's say it's about a millimeter thick. So our lengths will be something like three centimeters, maybe four millimeters, and maybe thick, we'll just make it one millimeter. Okay, so we have the rough dimensions of a piece of grass. And so if I look at the volume of that grass, I'm going to have, I've got centimeters, millimeters and millimeters there. And that's going to be rather confused. So I'll turn all of that into meters. And that'll let me cancel my millimeters by millimeters, my centimeters of these centimeters. And I've got my answer, 12 by 10 to the minus eight meters cubed, or more conventionally, 1.2 by 10 to the minus seven cubic meters. That's per leaf of grass. Now, if I want to know how much that weighs, I'm going to know its mass and its mass I can get from the density in the volume, which is just the definition of density really. And I'm going to assume that the density of grass is about the same as the density of water. So that's about 1000 kilograms per cubic meter. So that says that a blade of grass weighs something like 0.1 of a gram, which sounds vaguely in the right ballpark. It's very hard to be accurate about these things. But if I get that within a factor of 10, I should be okay. So now I have to figure out how many blades of grass do I have in my cricket field. Now I don't know how many blades of grass that might be in a huge area, but I can probably guess with some kind of accuracy for a small area. So let's imagine we have an area maybe just five centimeters on the side. So in a patch that big, I would expect there to be something like 50 blades of grass. But of course, a cricket field is much bigger than that. This is something more like 200 meters. And so if we think of it as maybe 200 meters by 120 meters, then the area of a cricket field is 24,000 square meters. The area of our little patch here, which remember we said had about 50 blades of grass, that area was five centimeters by five centimeters, which remember we're going to have to convert into square meters. So I'm going to get a factor of 100 from the centimeter and then another factor of 100. So it's going to be by 10 to the minus four square meters, which in the more normal way of running is 2.5 by 10 to the minus three. So if I have 50 blades of grass in this amount of area, then in that amount of area, I'm going to have a really very large number of blades of grass. And so if I want to find the total mass of those, I simply multiply the number of blades by the mass per blade. So you get 60,000 kilograms, 60 tons of grass. That sounds high to me. So it's not clear that we've done that well. We might find that we've overestimated the blade of grass's size significantly, or that we've overestimated how many blades of grass are in that patch significantly. Or it might be telling us that we really do need a truck in order to carry all that grass away. And so what we've discovered is that this is a potentially serious amount of grass. And then we should be more careful about our numbers. And so it didn't give us a tiny number or a huge number.  Okay, let's go back and get our numbers accurate.


So we're going to do the National Inventory of Legal Materials next, and we've got five people who are going to be speaking. Who wants to start? I've got Matt Novak listed. First, Matt, you want to start? Sure. Come on up here. Who's going to have computers? We have Matt, Susanna, Sarah, Stephanie, and Andrew. Anybody have presentations? I have a little one. Okay, so what I'm going to ask is that we keep this short and snappy, right, that we do five minutes on your chosen jurisdiction. Just give us a quick overview of what you got there, and hopefully there'll be some time left over for more general discussion. Okay, so we're going to start with Matt, University of Nebraska. Correct, Carl, he introduced this as five prominent librarians. I'll say it's four prominent librarians than myself. We had, I think, Rich Leiter, the director at our University of Nebraska, who was kind of constantly being here, but last minute he appointed me to be here, so he got me. I can keep this real snappy. Carl asked us to address what's interesting about your state, and I would say, really, there's not a whole lot of anything interesting going on in Nebraska in terms of putting stuff online, that sort of thing. Anything that's online is, you know, PDF don't sort of thing, so there's no big digital download like that.gov type of content out there. We just download the XML file and go to town with that. Nothing is authenticated. Nothing online is considered the official version. What other topics I had to see here? Coverage is very sparse for Supreme Court, and, of course, appeals and material is strictly slip opinions, last 90 days, pull that off, and then it's gone. So there's, again, not official, not authenticated in any way, shape, or form. Disclaimers are pretty uniform, but it's all useless claimers. There's no kind of click-through contract to use. It's just, you know, use it at your own risk, sort of thing. I'll answer any questions afterwards, but again, I guess quick summations. Nothing really super exciting going on. It's just pretty run-of-the-mill, online stuff. Okay. Thank you very much. For each of our five presenters, we've made up some national inventory of legal materials, plain cards, that have each of the 50 states on them, so that this is for you. So who's next? Shuzanna? I'm here.  So I want to say, Shuzanna is coming up, this is part of a national effort that was started by Stanford Law Library, follow me on airplane and the law librarians there. The American Association of Law Libraries has been instrumental in helping get this effort off the ground. They've been very helpful in using many of their 50 state organizations. They're right there. And the 1.0 meter PGA board. There you go. And this is an effort that's also been going on through the AALL, Marielle Spacious in organizing it in each state. I believe that has a committee of law librarians who are working on trying to gather the law for each state. I'm on the committee for Pennsylvania, although I'm not the chairman of the committee, and I was just going to go for Pennsylvania real quickly, even though I served in the county. Pennsylvania is fine. I'm not from Illinois. Pennsylvania. And if you want to read all about where Pennsylvania law can be found, my boss wrote this fabulous essay that he updates all the time that gives you, like, low by low details about every possible sort of law in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania is basically the setup like the U.S. with the judiciary, legislative and administrative. This is our judiciary system. Those minor courts at the bottom are the ones that are decided by magistrates who aren't necessarily lawyers or judges. They're just sort of guys elected. And they handle two million cases a year, but they don't publish anything. Our common police courts are the basic courts that people start out in, and they're just starting to go on the bottom of their information. And it's sort of like a county by county basis. Some of the counties have a lot of information. Some of them don't have any. This is the Magisterial Courts. Terms and conditions seem to get more and more dire as you go into the smaller courts. I mean, this one is like, if we use our systems, this is the Magisterial Courts.  Just forget about it. We have no responsibility for anything at all, ever. Was it revenues? This is how you get to the common police sites, but then they quickly go to these local sites that each county has put together, and they're all different. Most of them don't have anything that you can actually cite to an authoritative. This is another one. Then the appellate courts, the three appellate courts on the top are the Superior Court, the Commonwealth Court, and the Supreme Court. And they are all now coasting authoritative PDFs of their communities quite rapidly online. So that's good news. Our legislature is putting some stuff online. They have bills. You can now get emails every day about bill progress as it goes through the houses, which I think is a good thing. Bill information. And then our codification. For a number of years, the only codification we had was done by this retired lawyer who was like in Philadelphia or something. And it wasn't authoritative at all. And finally, the state talked West that publishes Perth and Pennsylvania statutes to let them link to their unannotated Pennsylvania statutes. So that's provided by West. But again, I think they have a disclaimer. And as for our administrative branch, our code is online, which is just the rules and rules. And it's not very searchable, not very accessible. Hopefully they can approve that. Any questions about Pennsylvania? Let me know. Great, thanks. And are there copyright assertions on the administrative regulations? I didn't see any copyright assertions. Your official blank card. Thank you very much. Thank you. All right, Jared last night from Valparaiso. Indiana, Kentucky. Indiana, Kentucky, Illinois, state level. I just looked at the big six from these three states. So a complication of legislation acts. Three court cases, appellate court cases, administrative code and administrative register. And also, I am now the Indiana chair for the double-edible national inventory of the materials. I just, my co-worker, Sally Holgerhoff was the chair and I went out asking her just for some basic information. So I didn't have to do too much research for this, for the Indiana. Turns out we haven't done anything. And then, I don't know, one thing led to another and I'm going to call Marielle, she said, now you're in charge. So, if you would like to participate with the Indiana, please see me and I will gladly accept your call. Just in general, this is the first time I've used these materials, especially the Kentucky ones. I'm recently from the University of Kentucky. And so I kind of knew what to expect, but I was still stunned. Some general problems. The one there is no one-stop shop in any of these three jurisdictions. You have to go to the, usually the legislatures page for the laws that way. Courts pages for the case law and then the admin codes are hidden. It's an Easter egg hunt, really trying to find these often. And then just kind of faking microproce, which is always a fun adventure. I just Googled, you know, like Kentucky law just to see what would happen. And all these jurisdictions, you often got the legislatures page, but the court pages never appeared on the first page of any Google results. That is a problem. Usability, again, a nightmare. Just the Kentucky court pages, I don't, we can Google it. Great, my friend, just Google it, don't mind it. But the Kentucky courts case searching, they use weird terms like stemming and fuzzy searching and things that I have never heard of before. I may even double check them through my library of colleagues. Like, am I just, just that day in class that we talked about fuzzy searching? They said no, they've never heard of that either. So usability is kind of odd. And again, it's not professional, I'm having trouble. Joe Q. Public is not going to be able to find this. Trying to determine whether or not it's official or authentic, it's very hard to find that. I mean, I've been working on this pretty much, I'm doing my jobs, I don't really have a lot to do. So I've been able to really devote the past two weeks to this. And it took me a really long time to really figure this out. And again, PDFs worked perfect at HTML in the predominant formats of these laws. And then, in many cases, the official version is only obtainable from a commercial publisher. Just some weird specifics. There are copyright assertions in Indiana. The head notes for the codes are copyright assertions by Thompson. Older cases have copyright stated in Indiana. And then we have the official reporters for the Indiana case law on the northeastern reporter. And they just have a blanket at the beginning, copyright Thompson writers. So again, you're not really sure that they just need the key numbers of the head notes or the actual text of the law has never explicitly spelled out. Kentucky does a kind of a weird thing. And this is one of the things that was really funny. I thought basically research for regular research for three years always told my students there are two official versions of the Kentucky Code. One published by West, one published by Lexus. That's actually not true. The only official version of Kentucky Code is electronic. It's in this database that's kept somewhere in Frankfurt. Not only the LRC staff has access to really, but you can purchase a copy. The version on the web is not official. Kentucky was the most explicit about having a disclaimer saying, go with God if you want to use this wheel. But you don't care. So I just thought it was very weird. There's no statements about preservation or anything like that. But also I know it's electronically. And again, Illinois. This one, I expected Illinois people to better just be one of the bigger states in the union. And may Steph explain. I'm still a little unclear about the status of the Indiana or the Illinois Code as far as what's official, what's not. So hopefully any Illinois people, there's an official compilation of that official code. That's my opinion. Most practicing Illinois attorneys think that the Illinois State Bar edition of the Illinois Compound Stat Chiefs is official and it is not. And it's what they will cite too. But it's published by West on behalf of the ISP. That's pretty much just a summary. And there's some things just like the Indiana Register, which are no longer printed at all officially. It's only electronic and we get monthly CD-ROMs for that one. So again, just that's the status of these three states. Thank you very much. There you go, official playing cards. Stephanie, I think you received an Illinois law library. We're doing this very quickly, by the way, but you'll find spreadsheets and other things online. If you did use presentations, I would very much appreciate an email copy of those so we can use that for our record for this law doc process. Stephanie, for yours. Thank you. So I just looked at municipal codes for Illinois. I sort of intended to go through in kind of reverse population order. I wanted to get down around the 5,000 range. I only got down to 10,000. That's about 200 municipalities. And I looked at the main code for each. A lot have separate zoning codes, building codes that are contained in the main codification. And some of them have them unified. So the sort of overview of all of the municipalities in the 10,000 plus population group, 87% have a code online that I can find. So that might be a little bit low, because some of them are really incredibly varied on the city's website. And there's no correlation between size of the city and how easy the code is to find, or whether it's online or whether it's more available and easier to access. So the tiniest villages have really great access to their code and actually make them more available, make them available right on their site. But they're difficult to find sort of across the board. So out of the 180 out of that group that have online codes, a quarter of them are self-hosted. That was a surprise to me. So the city is actually putting them up on their own website. Mostly PDF, some Word Docs, some HTML. Some are actually linking, deep linking, into a publisher's website, but at least they're providing the sort of table of contents on the city's own website. So spread between MCC, Municode, Sterling codifiers, and Amly, or the three big ones that people are using. And that has a big sort of effect connection between that and then whether there's a disclaimer, a general disclaimer, whether there's a copyright assertion that's connected to, in many cases, the publisher or the codifier that they're using. So there's some kind of disclaimer about currency, completeness, authoritativeness, in most of the things that I spot checked. I didn't check every single one. And the language varied. Some of it was there were click-throughs.  This is for informational use only, and that only the print copy kept to the clerk's office is official. A lot of language in the codes themselves about, you know, very 1950s sort of language that the official copy is kept to the clerk's office, and the clerk shall, you know, inter-file the new ordinances as they're passed, and that's the only official copy. And anybody else who has a copy belongs to the city, and you must bring it back in order to get it updated.  Not a lot of really specific copyright assertions. A lot of blanket copyright, you know, whatever the publisher or codifier on the site. There are some kind of preparatory chapters before the code starts, where there is language that says copyright of the cop bar and the state in joint. I want to really get in deeper to see how many of those can get that specific. And, but again, with 75% of these codes on a publisher's website, I think it's fair to say there are a lot of copyright assertions on. And then the other random, the only really random, completely random odd thing that I found was that at least three of these, and I know that I was starting to get a little very high, but at least three of these cities have the exact same website. The same header with the same bill of long term, the same person playing the flute, and some whole couple sitting on a bench laughing. It's the same site. It's really bizarre. There's no statement on why. Here you go. Thank you. Thank you. We have Andrew Palmer from Case Western. That's pretty good. I'm going to talk about Ohio, which the other states does have a working group that's contributing to the International Inventory. That group has not really gotten anything yet, and I was just notified by email that that's exactly it. I didn't mean to chair a working group, but it's a member of it. So, you know, this is the beginning of the information that will hopefully go farther. I'm also new to the jurisdiction, I mean, the local community art. So, the knowledge that I have is largely from a couple days of asking a lot of questions from my colleagues in the library and colleagues elsewhere in the state. The short answer is that there is a lot of information in a general sense available publicly on the web, on the outside of the large entry with the research systems. Essentially, none of it is official. Essentially, none of it is authenticated in any fashion. We looked at municipalities and actually, in contrast to Illinois, with the sort of asterisk possible, mysterious exception of Cleveland, none of it is sort of self-hosted or directly provided by the cities. It's really all done through these third-party codification firms and then a third-party hosting the material online. These are rife with copyright assertion, either in the city or in the firm that provides the codification and publishing services in the mix of that. These aren't large or do some strikingness, especially sophisticated health fits. A lot of HTML products that are served up in these frame-based table layout pages, not the kind of thing where I have a lot of confidence that there's a partner there or I do begin with the third parties that are doing codification services to be at the point where, hey, you want a stream of clean, semantically marked up information. We know how to do that. The possible weird asterisk assumption is that the Cleveland codes are actually a lot of fine law, not in the link, you know, the outward links to outside material, serves true in fine law, but on fine law, the city clerk of council, the clerk of the city council, couldn't tell me why they were there, how they got there, referred me to the city attorneys, we'll speak to soon. On the other hand, the publication that is essentially the local law's publication for Cleveland City Record was the one example of the municipal level legal authority in Ohio that I did find actually hosted by the municipality itself on the city website, as a periodic PDF of a retained or significant period back in time. The state, statutory and administrative codes are both available freely on the web through Law Writer, which is the technical partner for a case speaker, that makes a case speaker run. My understanding is that there is an exclusive arrangement so that Law Writer is the exclusive, online, you know, public internet source for, again, both the statutory and administrative code material for the state of Ohio. It's there. It's there. It's again, it's HTML. It's avidly disclaims its official status. The official publication is a West publication, but it's there to be seen. The state administrative register is online again, backfiled PDF dump. This is a publication that's only existed from 2000 and it's online from 2003. I don't know what happened for the intervening year. I suspect you're doing a really very informal, energy-led kind of publication for those years. The legislative service commission, on the other hand, the legislative material does make bill analyses, bill status reports available online. There's actually a relatively deep backfile for those, both in text files and in PDF files, and they're text-based PDFs, so it's incaseable, minable. And the house and senate journals are on the legislative websites, as PDF files. The courts, by cons, are actually relatively sophisticated. Slip opinions are available as PDF files from 1992, and they are also available from the 90s forward with what they call, referred to as a website, and this is a platform-neutral new name identifier for the case. But again, those are the slip opinions. Once again, the Ohio judicial reports is a West publication. And the material from the state Supreme Court, from the state intermediate appellate courts is that there's a pacer-esque electronic case management system that can be used relatively effectively and a number of the county courts, so the major case trial courts, also have online talking systems and in some cases, filing and actual materials are available through those office systems. Great, thank you very much. Again, your official point of view. If you are a certified librarian, we also have buttons for books. Who's the certifying authority? I'll do that for sure. I come out of an engineering world and we used to work for t-shirts, not money. I want to take a step back and explain at least three reasons I think this exercise is important. Now, you'll notice this is not a totally rigorous process and that's actually on purpose, rather than sit down and design the ultimate form and ask people to fill that out. The hope was to do a ground-up assessment of a variety of jurisdictions and that over time this might get more rigorous and more formal, but there's really three reasons that this is useful. Reason number one is aggregate statistics. I went and saw the chief judge of a district court who shall remain unnamed and I explained to this gentleman that several states, eight at last count, asserted copyright over their state statutes and this federal judge is jaw-dropped. He was amazed because he understands the Supreme Court decisions that are very clear. There is no copyright on state statutes and this is not copyright over head notes over page numbers. This is copyright over the statutes themselves. So these aggregate statistics are very, very helpful in convincing policymakers that there's potentially an issue here that needs to be addressed. The second reason is for comparison among jurisdictions. It's real easy if we're in one state or another state to say simply this is the way things are. I was surprised when we were down in Texas where Terry Martin was hosting the workshop and we had a lot of state officials from Texas there, the CIO of the courts and the clerk of the court and they have all their documents online for their courts. I think there's one that is a holdout that doesn't do that but it's a general rule. If you want to go in and get information in a truthful fashion of the level for bulk download, it's there. And that's compared to, for example, California where it's not the case and we think by documenting these issues of is there copyright on municipal codes, are they outsourced or are they in-house? Are they available in bulk? Can you use them? Do they cost money? And being able to compare them on different jurisdictions, that's going to be a very useful lever as we go brief state officials. And then the third reason is to document barriers to entry because one of the primary contentions of law.acca, remember law.acca is not about taking West out. It's not about building the ultimate website. It's not about replacing legal education with some new thing. All those might happen, might not happen, but this is really about issuing documents that have the force of law. And this is about convincing government that if they were to issue those documents, be they executive, legislative, or judicial, they should be available in bulk. And they should be authenticated. And to the extent possible, it should be the full archive. And I understand if we're looking at all congressional hearings or other things, that's not easy to do today. But that over time, one should strive for that goal. And the reason is because you want to be able to get into the business of accessing these documents. And we've given several examples. I've used a number of $10 to $50 million to get into the business of serving case law for the states and the federal government. That's based on some agreements that I had with the major publisher and was offered to sell us the equivalent of that stuff in the federal reporter and the Supreme Court decisions. And I've had that number verified several times. But it's also for nonprofit uses. If you are Cali or public.resource.org or the civil rights clearinghouse of the University of Washington, you cannot afford to download these materials and do things with them. And we've seen time and time again that when those barriers are taken away, in the case of the state of Oregon, for example, which asserted copyright over their revised statutes. All you had was one website and it was the one run by the legislative council and it was pretty bad. And the minute they took their copyright assertion over, a couple months later, a 2L at Lewis and Clark who happened to have a computer science undergrad took the order and revised statutes and built this amazing version that has correct HTML and a UI and you can navigate it and it's available in bulk. And that's one of the things we're trying to document with this national inventory. That if some of these copyright assertions and paywalls and lack of an inventory and official reporters and lack of official reports, if some of these barriers are taken away, that a huge amount of innovation and public interest legal education will happen. So I'm going to turn it over now to other people so we can hear comments starting with the national inventory. If there's any questions or comments on that. I will ask our camera person here to start manning the camera if you will. So as other people are talking, we can get them on film. So do we have any comments on the national inventory to start off with? Any questions for any of our commenters? Any feelings on whether this is a useful exercise or not? We have a lot of librarians here. Hi, Suzanne. One of the things that I noticed is I was kind of looking at all these various websites that it might be helpful if we end up sort of ranking them or giving them a grade, like how good your, how available your law is. I mean, some of the sites are just horrible and they're going to be in the same state where they'll have a good website and a bad website. So they might sort of sit up and take attention more. We started to say, well, you know, you have a D in your, we give you a D in grading or, you know, even rank them like US News or something like that. Sit up and take notice. Yeah, when we did the privacy audit of the district courts, one of the things I did is I graded all the district courts on a curve based on the number of social security numbers per gigabyte and the ones that got Ds and Fs are the ones that got the letters going to the chief judges. That's a good suggestion. Somebody else? Well, I'm following up on that idea. In terms of, you know, once it would be the T's out, what are the, you know, what are the criteria? Is it, you know, depth of the backfile, absence of a copyright assertion, some kind of credentialing quality of the markup? I think this would probably go on for that. Just sitting down something. And that would be a national effort. That's something that we need to go outside of these, you know, if it's different in each of the state committees. It doesn't work. Kevin McClure, I'm from the Chicago County College of Law right here. Somebody, and I can't remember calling out who it was, did a ranking of federal government websites at all three levels of government. And the court sites consistently came out at the bottom. So I don't know what it is about courts, but they seem to have the most trouble. Part of it is staffing. And we do have to remember the courts are very much when they're funded. And again, as has been pointed out several times, remember the clerk of the court and the CIO of the court does not work for us as the public. So we have to remember that we have to remember that we have to do our job as to administer the court workflow process and make it effective. Again, getting back to the privacy on it, one of the things we pointed out to Judge Rosenthal of the Rules Committee was that when the piece of documents were only available to on-pacer for court employees who had no incentive to be searching for social security numbers because it was not their job. And it was also available on the commercial services on West and Lexus, and they had no incentive to search perhaps for data mining purposes for their products. It was only when the public got access to pacer that we were able to find those social security numbers and begin cleaning up the data. So public access and privacy actually come together. Same thing with bulk access. A lot of the innovation and public access requirements, I think, are only going to happen when we solve some of these bulk and access problems. Yeah, actually, in some respects, it's an interesting contrast that some of what I saw, just a couple of days looking at material in my state, in some ways the courts were actually perhaps best of the institutions of government. There was still a lot of headaches just in terms of really interface design things, form validation on crazy entries that had to be there. So it made it very difficult to do searches that were anywhere in the middle ground and I mean a real rough keyword throwing everything and I know exactly the case I'm looking for and I'm going to give you the docket number. But the data being there, being there with a sort of clarity of what it was we were looking for, I mean there were slip opinions, but I could tell that they were slip opinions and I could work with them. It was actually that error I felt in the courts that were some of the other institutions. I mentioned the problem of redaction and a key issue with some of the PACER materials and it seems like nobody wants to take responsibility for it. I guess so that's actually somebody's responsibility to actually accomplish that barrier that's going to be there because it's a valid one. So much personal information, not just social security numbers, but some of those cases and someone has to take their responsibility to clean them up before they're put out generally. We have a long session on privacy at the Berkeley workshop. We had Peter Wendell who's an assistant U.S. attorney and Chris Ufnago. A couple issues on privacy. There actually has begun to be a bit of a change at least in the PACER world because what's beginning to happen is the Judicial Conference has asked the administrative office to proactively scan incoming documents. So they're beginning to actively look at it, not just say it's the role of the lawyer, but it's also the role of the court if there's a particular issue, a particularly rampant number of social security numbers. Lawyers are now being required to affirmatively click every time they log into PACER and some of them really hate that. And it says, you know, I understand my redaction responsibilities and every time they file a document they get a little blinky, heavy redacted. But I think the most important thing that's begun to happen is a lawyer in, I believe the jurisdiction of Wisconsin filed a bunch of social security numbers and was fined several thousand dollars by the judge. And I think if that happens a few more times, I think somebody is responsible and that is the lawyer filing the documents, which is what the rules set. That is in fact what Judge Rosenthal and the Standing Committee on Rules has said is that lawyers are responsible for making sure that happens. Now there's a broader issue, which is that we have not as a society explicitly confronted our privacy obligations. We did privacy by obscurity. The theory was that the documents were inside of a paywall on PACER. And only good people had credit cards so the documents were safe. Now as we know identity keys also have credit cards. In fact, they have more credit cards than we do. They have more credit cards than we do. And I will agree with you that certain documents maybe should not be made available. For example, I had an opportunity to get a lot of bankruptcy court documents out of PACER and put them online. And I said, you know, I don't want that. I'm not convinced that those should necessarily be Google. You know, on Google and available for everyone. And several of us here are on the front lines for that. Tim and Justia, several other folks have these court repeals and PACER docs available. And our phone rings a lot with people getting upset about these documents being there. Now in the past what's happened is these documents have not been private. They've been available on what I call the rich man's Google on West, on Lexus, on Palm PACER. And the courts have simply not decided whether a certain document should be available or should not. And a lot of the arguments of the judges is it is not our job to be deciding what documents should be available and should not. It's society's job through our mechanisms for deciding a privacy. And that means the judicial conference. It means the Congress of the United States. It means the executive branch. And those should be explicit decisions.  And I think one of the aims of Law.gov is to explicitly confront the privacy issues and decide are we unsealing documents improperly, right? And if so, should we put in better checks and balances to make sure that doesn't happen? Are we not enforcing the rules about social security numbers or names of minor children or alien numbers, which right now are allowed to be published on a website. There are no privacy rules that say you can't publish an alien number.  And if you appeal that decision and it goes to the Court of Appeals, the lower court docket number is listed on there. So I got a call from a lot of folks saying you've got my alien number up on your website. We looked at that and went to the Court website and sure enough, it was just full of alien numbers. And the position of the clerks is that they were not told by the judges not to put those on. So when it came to social security numbers, they removed them immediately. But the alien numbers, they said, you know, I'm going to wait until the judge tells me to do this. Yes, we had several more comments. On the issue of the bottom loads, is there a Law.gov right now that's a decision about what the sort of minimum format or what minimum amount of metadata or anything like that requires that to really be a useful load as opposed to just, you know, not to fill the need by posting it, but it's big amounts. So I'll give you my personal opinion. And my personal opinion is I would love to have this done properly. And we did a two-day workshop that Tom Rooster and Cornell hosted. And a lot of the leading figures that have been working with this data are data requirements and document IDs and digital signatures. But at the end of the day, if the judges want to make a bunch of work-perfect files available through an email gateway, we'll take it because that's better than nothing. And so I think what's going to happen in the Law.gov report, and what I'm going to try to do in that is reflect what I've been hearing in all these workshops, is that there's some things that are really important. Copyright assertions on the data is really important. Paywalls on the dissemination side have a huge effect on the public interest. It's a real problem. Other things, I think there needs to be a mechanism in place for coming up with those standards over time that are adaptable. And while there are a lot of good solutions on the table, I think this is something that needs to be internalized. And there are forums such as the Newly Re-Instituted Administrative Conference of the United States which Paul Vercool is now chairing that might be in a position to come up with those kinds of guidelines and standards as to what is the minimal subset of data. The National Center for the Courts, those are the kinds of bodies that I think should be doing those kinds of decisions with a lot of input from the double A double L and the technical community and some of the other folks that are out there. Dennis and Tim. I have a question for those that worked out in the inventory. Did you come across any examples of good available bulk? Is there any administrators out there that say, oh sure, click here and you can get the whole thing. You don't have to search the inventory. Federal Register. Federal Register is going to federal regulations and is doing an amazing job. They took off their paywall, it's an X amount, it's digitally signed, you can FTP all the data and the result has been a whole series of little spit-offs out there that have been taking this data and working with it. Other examples? Not in the state all of a sudden. Are there municipal codes that are PDF, the whole thing and they say go ahead and take it, but none of them are official? Usually they sell it. Right. I just want to throw out a couple of random things. One is, it'd be nice not to mention this prior to that. If the courts put up the final official version of the text of their page, they always see the full convenience that you'd never find a digital version of the official and the manual. I believe they even like the U.S. federal phone courts. It seems that they can't do it. It sets the tone for the rest of the courts. So that's one of the codes. As we track the codes, it'd be nice to track whether they have multiple years like Florida has to code for every single year back to like 12 years or something like that. A lot of folks like Oregon, when we were sort of discussing things with them, they had the latest version of the code. A lot of times your dispute is about the code two or three years ago and that's taken down so if they can keep up their older versions of the code, there's real value there and obviously, you know, it's to have that as well. And then the final things we're talking to across analysis is security numbers and sort of stuff that you and Peter are talking about. You know, you can't just put it on lawyers to do their filings to predict the social security numbers because most of these errors are actually going from proxy litigants. This is the only time they ever file something. They have enough issues going on when they're much less on the sure of hospital security and a lot of times they're quicker there because they think they have them. So there's something that needs to be done on the court level beyond just saying okay, well we'll put it to lawyers and lots of lawyers and that's what we're going to discuss as we go along. I think that was the message of Professor Stout's presentation on Access to Justice that the dissemination side is important but that's integrally tied with the filing side and access to materials and as Tim so rightly points out that if you're worried about social security numbers on the dissemination side you need to worry about the filing side as well and that's why it's not just a lawyer's problem that it really is a systemic problem in our legal system. Did we have more comments? Any closing statements? Yes? I have a question on the federal registry. There's a disclaimer on the FETSIS version that the XML is not the official version. Is there sort of a tension there between the need to authenticate things and the need to have them in formats that are most easily reusable? Well so here's the thing with authentication. I've been working in the area of XML a long time I don't co-author the the XML offering language used for internet standards a long time ago. We don't know how to sign digitally sign an XML document in line, right? We know how to point to an XML document and do what's called an MD5 or a shawl on a phone print. We do know how to digitally sign a PDF document. And so what the government printing office has decided to do and I actually agree with the strategy is you can download it all in XML and you can repurpose that stuff any way you want. And if you really want to verify the authenticity of three words or five words or a hundred words you can pull down this PDF document and look at the digital signature and make sure it's authentic and you can do your comparison. And I think the issue there is that authentication is not a magic switch that gets flipped. It's like security on the internet. It's an ongoing process that's going to have to keep going over time involving so for example if you have a digital signature on a PDF document that's great. But you probably also want to have an HTTPS connection to that server, right? And you probably want to be using secure DNS if not today at least in the future so that you're not having a man in the middle attack, right?  And I think one of the messages on security and authentication is it really is an ongoing problem on everything, right? And not one that we're going to somehow solve with one magic standard. It's something that we're going to have to pay attention to a whole bunch of different places in the food chain. But the reason is a simple one that we just don't have a signature, no documents yet. Not effectively in a way that is widely deployable. Whereas a PDF document we do know how to do that pretty effectively. Any more comments? Professor Golan or John do you have any closing words? Thank you all for coming. There's still some muffins and drinks on them so grab something on the way out. Okay. Thank you everybody. We're going to cut the video of this and I'll try to have it up.