They're absolutely wrong because they don't understand what's now known about how polyphenols interact with our gut microbiome, how they feed our gut microbiome, how they change our gut microbiome to a friendly anti-inflammatory microbiome, and who in the world wouldn't want that. Welcome to the Dr. Gendry podcast, dark chocolate, olive oil, red wine. So what do these foods have in common besides the fact that I like them? Well if you guessed polyphenols then you are absolutely right. On today's episode I'm going to talk all about these amazing micronutrients, polyphenols, what they can do for your health, why my critics are wrong about them, and the best and worst sources of polyphenols out there. And I'll invite you to join me in celebrating all the wonderful benefits of polyphenols on National Polyphenol Day, a holiday my team created to educate people about them on July 11th, my birthday. So let's dive right in to discuss the power of polyphenols for feeling and looking your best.  So phenols are a chemical ring structure that's incredibly common in plants primarily, and polyphenols simply refer to lots of these phenol rings joined together. Now plants protect themselves from harm. We often don't think about this but plants have to harvest sunlight, the photons in sunlight, and their mitochondria, yes they actually have mitochondria, take sunlight and convert it into sugars and oxygen. And the process of that production is actually very damaging to the energy producing organelles in plants and they literally protect themselves from this damage by manufacturing polyphenols. And polyphenols are actually the way the plant, actually if you will, sops up the damage from what are called reactive oxygen species, ROSs. Some people know them as free radicals. So as much as a plant needs sunlight, it turns out the plant is damaged by sunlight simultaneously. So the polyphenols are the plant's method, if you like, of sunscreen. Now interestingly, the more a plant is stressed, for instance the closer it is to the sun, the higher the altitude, the more it's stressed by other factors like poor nutrients, not enough water, other harsh conditions, the more polyphenols the plant produces. Now fun fact, most plant polyphenols are actually in the leaves, where in fact the energy production is done. And if you've ever doubted about why polyphenols are so important to a plant, every fall you get to watch a beautiful color display of polyphenols. Now we often talk about the leaves are changing color. In fact, those colors are actually the polyphenols in the leaves that you didn't see because all of the green chlorophyll was hiding those colors. But as the chlorophyll, the energy producing part of the plant dies off, the polyphenols remain. So in this fall, when you're looking at the brilliant color displays, you can actually in your own eyes see the power of polyphenols that the plant was using to protect itself during that exposure to sunlight. Okay, now I mentioned that polyphenols are concentrated in leaves, but the same thing holds true for the fruit of the tree and the fruit can be damaged by sunlight. So many plants concentrate polyphenols particularly in the skin of that fruit to protect it from harm. And for instance, great winemakers have known this for a very long time, that the more the vines are stressed, the higher the elevation, the underwater they are, the more polyphenols will be present in the grapes of that particular vine, and great winemakers have known for some time that it was the polyphenols in the grapes that brought all the characteristics and benefits from the wine that the vintners were looking for. But getting back to the point, for instance, we're going to talk about olive oil. Olive oil happens to be a great delivery device for polyphenols. And the polyphenols were in the olives, and when you eat an olive, you're eating polyphenols, when you squish an olive and extract the oil, the benefit of olive oil is not oleic acid, which is a monoinsaturated fat, the benefit is in the polyphenol content. And one of the best ways to assess polyphenol content in olive oil is that if it makes you cough as you drink it or eat it, that's a very potent sign of the level of polyphenol. But there's actually more polyphenols in olive leaves, and that's why olive leaf extract is actually an incredibly great source of polyphenols. And if you want to munch on a few olive leaves, be my guest. Okay, so polyphenols protect the plant from damage, from free radicals, from reactive oxygen species.  When we're eating red leaf lettuce, we're eating more polyphenols than in green lettuce. In fact, years ago Rutgers University patented a red romaine lettuce that they showed had considerably more polyphenol content than regular romaine lettuce. And I've forgotten the name of it now, but it was something red. But they received a patent because of the polyphenol content. Okay, so polyphenols protect plants from damage. Now years ago we used to think that polyphenols were primarily antioxidants. And for years and years and years, we measured the polyphenol content by what was called an ORAC rating, O-R-A-C. That's the Oxygen Radical Absorbing Capacity and looked at whether these compounds could actually absorb free radicals. And for years and years and years, this was the standard by which we judged polyphenol content. Unfortunately, it turns out that these compounds, when we swallow them, are not doing that at all. And so if you hear people say that the reason to get polyphenols into your diet is that they are antioxidants, number one, don't believe them, and number two, that's not how they work. People actually see exactly the power of polyphenols and it has nothing to do with their ability to absorb free radicals or as antioxidants. That their power is actually far more important. And one of the most recent findings is that polyphenols are actually prebiotics. In other words, if you remember, prebiotics are what your friendly bacteria, the probiotics, like to eat. So first and foremost, whoever says that polyphenols are the plant defense system against being eaten and that polyphenols, because of that, are extremely damaging to your health. First of all, it doesn't know what they're talking about. Number two, that's not how polyphenols work for the plant and they're not a defense system of the plant. That's what lectins are for, that's what phytates are for, not polyphenols. The second thing is, people who say polyphenols are bad for you actually don't realize that polyphenols feed friendly bacteria. And there's a host of evidence about the incredible benefit of polyphenols in actually changing the gut microbiome for the better. In fact, I'll give you a little tease. There's a fascinating study looking at the microbiome and inflammatory markers in three trials in human beings. One group had to drink several glasses of red wine per day. The second group had to drink the same red wine that had the alcohol removed and you can go to a store and find non-alcoholic red wine. And the third group got to drink gin in the same alcoholic amount that the red wine drinkers were drinking. And lo and behold, what they found was that both the red wine with and without alcohol changed the gut microbiome to a much more friendly microbiome. In other words, it increased the gut buddies. And the result was that multiple markers of inflammation fell in both of those red wine drinkers, whereas no effect was found in the gin drinkers. Why? Because the gin, even though it had alcohol, didn't have any polyphenols. So the idea that polyphenols are somehow a plant defense system is absolutely wrong and human studies back up the fact that it's the polyphenols, not the alcohol and red wine, that is the beneficial effect. And its benefit is not the polyphenols directly, but it's the polyphenols being eaten by certain gut bacteria and basically fertilizing good gut bacteria. The other thing we know is that polyphenols in general, when you eat them, are incredibly poorly absorbed. Only only 10% of all the polyphenols that you eat are ever absorbed. But again, the good news is that these polyphenols are eaten by your gut buddies. And it's the products that your gut buddies make from these polyphenols in the form of postbiotics that I talk extensively about in the Energy Paradox that is one of the main ways that polyphenols benefit our health. So that's actually the exciting new science of polyphenols and how they work. All right, so let's play devil's advocate. Some critics, like Dr. Paul Saladino, say that the health benefits of polyphenols are overrated. Here's why they say that, because polyphenols aren't absorbed and that polyphenols are dangerous, they're a plant defense system. Well, they're right that polyphenols aren't absorbed very well. And who in the world wouldn't want that? I don't know. I certainly would. The other thing that's obvious when we look at any of the blue zones, those areas of the world popularized by the National Geographic journalist Dan Butner, and Loma Linda is the only blue zone in the United States, by the way, where I was a professor for much of my career. Blue zones are notorious for having an incredibly high intake of polyphenol rich foods. And we could break them down individually, but let me assure you that each blue zone has its own set and different sets of polyphenol rich foods. We'll just take one example. The Okinawans, the older Okinawans, 85% of their diet was a purple sweet potato. And the purple sweet potato has an incredible concentration of one particular polyphenol called an anthocyanin. It's actually the same polyphenol family that gives the dark blue color to blueberries and blackberries. This is just concentrated in the flesh of a purple sweet potato. And luckily, we're seeing purple sweet potatoes in a lot of our grocery stores now. They're now being grown commercially. So 85% of the Okinawan diet was a purple sweet potato. It wasn't beans, it wasn't rice, it wasn't soy, it was a purple sweet potato. So to think that that horrible dangerous polyphenol was somehow impacting the health of the Okinawans in a negative way, certainly goes against the evidence. Okay, so that's probably the strongest, if you look at societies who have great health and longevity, that's probably the biggest signal argument about why we should be getting more polyphenols in our diet. And I could go on and on. The famous predimed study from Spain, which some of my critics say is just one of the worst studies in the world, and they're usually low fat critics. The predimed study from Spain that I've written about in most of my books took 65-year-old people who had a heart attack and they randomized them into three groups. One group got a liter of olive oil per week. That's about 10 to 12 tablespoons a day. And they actually had to pick up their liter of olive oil once a week, use it, take the empty bottle back to the clinic and get it refilled. The second group had to have the same number of calories in mixed nuts. And most of the nuts were walnuts and hazelnuts. And if you're guessing walnuts and hazelnuts are great sources of polyphenols, you're correct. The third group had a low fat Mediterranean diet. Now all three, because they lived in Spain, ate a Mediterranean diet. What's impressive is that the walnut and the olive oil group had a 30% reduction in new events, new heart attack, new stents, compared to the low fat group. And the women in the olive oil group had an 87% reduction in breast cancer rate. And what I talk about in the energy paradox is that the olive oil group and the nut group actually had improved memory after five years compared to the low fat group who had actually decreased memory. And the evidence that I present in the energy paradox makes it pretty clear that it was the polyphenol content in the olive oil and the nuts that was responsible for those effects. And again, another stake in the heart of people who say polyphenols are bad for us. Okay, so now maybe you're wondering, okay, so what are the best dietary sources of polyphenols? Well, it turns out that leaves are great sources of polyphenols. So if you're thinking tea, for instance, it turns out that tea is a great source of polyphenols. And tea, whether it's green, whether it's black, whether you grind up tea leaves like in matcha, and just an aside, please, if you're going to use matcha tea, buy it from Japan, not China. The Chinese matcha tea is unfortunately full of pesticides, but that's another subject. Polyphenols are concentrated in fruits, so olives are loaded with polyphenols. Cacao, the fruit and the bean are loaded with polyphenols. Coffee, believe it or not, coffee fruit and coffee fruit extract is available. We use it here at Gundry MD. You can buy coffee fruit powder, but the coffee bean is another great source of polyphenols. Urbimate tea is another great source of polyphenols. So anytime you can get leaves, you're in great shape. And then when you start looking at most of the spices that we think of as leaves, like parsley, like sage, like rosemary and thyme, where have I heard that before? Oh yeah, Simon and Garfunkel. So if you go down to Scarborough Fair, you're actually buying polyphenols. In fact, the Romans were so impressed with the ability of sage to improve their health that the Romans named sage salvia as in salvation. And so when we look at these spices, particularly the leaves, we see that it's the polyphenol content that people were after. Now vegetables, the darker the vegetable, the more the polyphenols. And polyphenols in general have a very bitter flavor. And some of you remember from my first book, Dr. Gundry's Diode Evolution, that one of my favorite phrases was more bitter, more better. And that's because the bitterness is actually the polyphenols. And so if you look at countries and cultures with longevity, one of the fascinating things is that they have a preference for bitter foods. And one of the most interesting things about chocolate is that anybody who has had cocoa nibs or 100% dark chocolate knows it's profoundly bitter. And it was actually the Dutch that figured out that people would consume more chocolate if they took away the polyphenol content by treating it with alkali. So if you see on a label of cocoa powder dutched process or alkali process, you've actually removed the polyphenols from chocolate. And so run from those. There's a number of candy companies, particularly Nestle and Cadbury and Mars, who have actually patented ways of adding polyphenols back into chocolate that they have taken away. In a way, it's kind of like looking at fortification of cereals where all the vitamins and minerals have been removed from cereals and breads. And they're now fortified with eight essential vitamins and minerals. So they're actually patents to add back polyphenols. Why have they done this? Because both animal trials and human trials have shown that the polyphenols in chocolate are actually responsible for improvement in cardiovascular flexibility. I've published papers about polyphenols increasing the flexibility of blood vessels in humans. I've published papers about the ability of polyphenols to stop making blood vessels sticky on the inside. And again, these are human studies of polyphenol extracts improving both vascular health and in other human studies improving brain health. So what a great thing. What else should you look for? Again, talked about olive oil and probably more than you want to hear. More bitter, more better in olive oil. If olive oil makes you cough, you're on the right track. Red wine. If the grape vines are made to suffer, to work for a living by being planted in dense rows, by underwatering them, what's called dry farming, by being planted in rocks, by being planted in high elevations, you're going to increase the polyphenol content. So please, if you can, look for organic grown wines. Look for biodynamic grown wines. There are a number of wineries now in the United States, particularly here in California that are biodynamic wine growers. I'll mention two of my favorites, Beckman in Santa Barbara County, Amplos Vineyards in Santa Barbara County, and also Spears, our organic and biodynamic, the first two biodynamic. A great number of wines in France and Italy and Austria are now biodynamic and a huge number of them are organic. I just had an organic wine from Sicily last night as a matter of fact. Look for the label. You're knowing that, believe it or not, you're going to get more polyphenol content and that's the bang for your buck. Same thing with seasonings. We've had Chef Jimmy Schmidt three times James Beard award winner on our podcast and he will assure you and he assured us that seasonings are going to be loaded with polyphenols. And again, all the great spices of the Middle Ages were actually pursued because of their polyphenol content. And here's a fun fact. What's the highest polyphenol content of any spice? Come on, think about it for a minute. I'll give you a clue. You probably studded your Easter ham with it. If you said close, you're correct. Close have the highest polyphenol content of any food. And if you think I take close supplements, you're right. Because of that, if you saw it, I put all my supplements in the longevity paradox and there's close. And it turns out that close was one of the highest sought after spices in the Middle Ages, right behind black pepper, which is loaded with polyphenols and cinnamon, which is loaded with polyphenols. In fact, as you start looking at the Middle Ages spices, you'll notice that people were willing to pay huge amount of money for polyphenols. And I got news for you, people don't pay huge amounts of money just to make food taste better. They were looking for the health benefits of polyphenols way back then. And we're only now beginning to realize what the ancients knew that we're only now discovering. Okay, are there foods with high polyphenol content that I don't recommend? Yeah. It turns out that there are some really interesting polyphenols in soy. And I do talk about them in the upcoming book. You can make soy safe in two ways. Number one, you can pressure cook it. Number two, you can extrude it under high pressure and high heat as texturized vegetable protein, which is TVP, one of the favorite kind of fake foods of Loma Linda cuisine. Or you can actually use soy protein isolates or soy protein hydrolysates, but you'll eliminate the polyphenols in the latter. Beans, pressure cook your beans, soap beans. You'll still get the polyphenol content in beans, but you won't get the lectins. So those are the two provides of. The other thing that's interesting, believe it or not, whole grains have polyphenols. But as those of you know, the problem with whole grains is twofold. Number one, the lectin content of whole grains, you cannot pressure cook the lectins in oats or wheat or rye or barley. I'm sorry, they can't be destroyed. The other problem with whole grains is that so much of our American food supply in whole grains has been sprayed with Roundup. And glyphosate is one of the biggest disruptors of your gut and your energy that we could have ever invented. So long story short, polyphenols were designed to protect the plant from damage. Polyphenols were the sunscreen for the plant. Polyphenols were not insect insecticides. They were not toxins or poisons. They were to protect the plants energy factories. And when you eat plant polyphenols, low and bold, you're not eating antioxidants. You're feeding your gut buddies the food that they need and they in turn turn those polyphenols into health promoting compounds. All right, before we close, I mentioned at the top of the lecture, I want to invite you to join me in celebrating National Polyphenol Day coming up July 11th. So wow, National Polyphenol Day and Dr. Gundry's birthday all in one. As you probably know, my favorite source of polyphenols is olive oil. So to celebrate, I'm going to ask you to do a shot of high quality olive oil and share your video or photo of taking an olive oil shot on Instagram by tagging me at Dr. Stephen Gundry all one word and using the hashtag polyphenol day just like it sounds P-O-L-Y-P-H-E-N-O-L-D-A-Y day. I'll be sure to repost so we can help others know about the power of polyphenol. This is actually going to be really fun. So I hope you'll join me. Get your shot of olive oil ready on July 11th. My birthday bottoms up to your health, to my health, National Polyphenol Day. So this is going to be really fun. Hashtag polyphenol day. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Dr. Gundry podcast. Make sure to check out the next one here. What kind of chocolate can you eat? The best kind. Bitter sweet chocolate. It's like I always say about leafy greens and other vegetables. More bitter, more better.


It was a warm summer evening, and Klausner walked quickly through the front gate and around the side of the house and into the garden at the back. He went on down the garden until he came to a wooden shed, and he unlocked the door, went inside, and closed the door behind him. The interior of the shed was an unpainted room. Just one wall on the left there was a long wooden workbench, and on it, among a littering of wires and batteries and small, sharp tools, there stood a black box about three feet long, the shape of a child's coffin. Klausner moved across the room to the box. The top of the box was open, and he bent down and began to poke and pier inside it, among a mass of different coloured wires and silver tubes. He picked up a piece of paper that lay beside the box, studded it carefully, put it down, peered inside the box, and started running his fingers along the wires, tugging gently at them to test the connections, glancing back at the paper, then into the box, then at the paper again, checking each wire. He did this for perhaps an hour. Then he put a hand around to the front of the box, where there were three dials, and he began to twiddle them, watching at the same time the movement of the mechanism inside the box. All the while he kept speaking softly to himself, nodding his head, smiling sometimes, his hands always moving, the fingers moving swiftly, deftly inside the box, his mouth twisting into curious shapes when a thing was delicate or difficult to do, saying, Yes, yes, and now this one, yes, yes, but is this right, is it, where's my diagram? Ah, yes, of course, yes, yes, that's right, and now, good, good, yes, yes, yes, yes. His concentration was intense, his movements were quick, there was an air of urgency about the way he worked, of breathlessness, of strong suppressed excitement. Suddenly he heard footsteps on the gravel path outside, and he straightened and turned swiftly as the door opened, and a tall man came in. It was Scott, it was only Scott, the doctor. Well, well, well, the doctor said, So this is where you hide yourself in the evenings. Hello, Scott, Clausner said. I happen to be passing, the doctor told him, so I dropped in to see how you were. Sample complete. Ready to continue?


We continue today with Chapter 12, Seeking and Finding. The ego is certain that love is dangerous, and this is always its central teaching. It never put it in this way. On the contrary, everyone who believes that the ego is salvation seems to be intensely engaged in the search for love. Yet the ego, though encouraging the search for love very actively, makes one provision. Do not find it. Its dictates, then, can be summed up as seek and do not find. This is the one promise the ego holds out to you, and the one promise it will keep. For the ego pursues its goal with fanatic insistence and its judgment, though severely impaired, is completely consistent. The search the ego undertakes is therefore bound to be defeated. And since it also teaches that it is your identification, its guidance leads you to a journey which must end in perceived self-defeat. For the ego cannot love, and in its frantic search for love, it is seeking what it is afraid to find. The search is inevitable because the ego is part of your mind. And because of its source, the ego is not wholly split off, or it could not be believed at all. For it is your mind that believes in it and gives existence to it. Yet it is also your mind that has the power to deny the ego's existence, and you will surely do so when you realize exactly what the journey is on which the ego sets you. It is surely obvious that no one wants to find what would utterly defeat him. Being unable to love, the ego would be totally inadequate in love's presence, for it could not respond at all. Then you would have to abandon the ego's guidance, for it would be quite apparent that it had not taught you the response you need. The ego will therefore distort love and teach you that love really calls forth the responses the ego can teach. Follow its teaching then, and you will surely search for love, but will not recognize it. Do you realize that the ego must set you on a journey which cannot but lead to a sense of futility and depression? To seek and not find is hardly joyous. It is this the promise you would keep? The Holy Spirit offers you another promise and one that would lead to joy. For His promise is always seek, and you will find. And under His guidance, you cannot be defeated. His is the journey to accomplishment, and the goal He sets forth before you, He will give you. For He will never deceive God's Son whom He loves with the love of the Father. You will undertake a journey because you are not at home in this world, and you will search for your home whether you realize where it is or not. If you believe it is outside you, the search will be futile, for you will be seeking it where it is not. You do not remember how to look within, for you do not believe your home is there. Yet the Holy Spirit remembers it for you, and He will guide you to your home because that is His mission. As He fulfills His mission, He will teach you yours, for your mission is the same as His. By guiding your brother's home, you are but following Him.  For death is not your Father's will, nor yours, and whatever is true is the will of the Father.  But you do pay a price for death, and a very heavy one. If death is your treasure, you will sell everything else to purchase it. And you will believe that you have purchased it because you have sold everything else. Yet you cannot sell the kingdom of heaven. Your inheritance can neither be bought nor sold. There can be no disinherited parts of the sonship, for God is whole, and all His extensions are like Him. The atonement is not the price of your wholeness, but it is the price of your awareness of your wholeness. For what you chose to sell had to be kept for you, since you could not buy it back. Yet you must invest in it, not with money, but with spirit. For spirit is will, and will is the price of the kingdom. Your inheritance awaits only the recognition that you have been redeemed. The Holy Spirit guides you into eternal life, but you must relinquish your investment in death.  And from the workbook, Lesson 89. These are our review ideas for today. I am entitled to miracles. I am entitled to miracles because I am under no laws but God's. His laws release me from all grievances and replace them with miracles. And I would accept the miracles in place of the grievances, which are but illusions that hide the miracles beyond. Now I would accept only what the laws of God entitle me to have, that I may use it on behalf of the function He has given me. You might use these suggestions for specific applications of this idea. Behind this is a miracle to which I am entitled. Let me not hold a grievance against you, but offer you the miracle that belongs to you instead. Seen truly, this offers me a miracle. Let miracles replace all grievances. By this idea, do I unite my will with the Holy Spirits and perceive them as one? By this idea, do I accept my release from hell? By this idea, do I express my willingness to have all my illusions be replaced with truth, according to God's plan for my salvation? I would make no exceptions and no substitutions. I want all of heaven and only heaven, as God wills me to have. Useful specific forms for applying this idea would be, I would not hold this grievance apart from my salvation. Let our grievances be replaced by miracles. Beyond this is the miracle by which all my grievances are replaced. I am entitled to miracles. Let miracles replace all grievances. Today I would seek and find what the Holy Spirit offers me, the correction for the error of separation, the salvation of the mind, the gateway to the kingdom of heaven within. I will no longer follow the ego and seek and not find. Looking for love in all kinds of forms and places and faces in different situations, looking for scraps of love in time and space when love can never be found where it is not. Today I would sink within to the holiness that abides in my heart. I will no longer be tricked by the belief that love can be found outside of myself. I would succeed in recognizing the Christ rather than fail by following the ego's dictates. Today I will search for the obstacles to the awareness of love's presence that they may be released. The journey to God is a journey without distance to a goal that has never changed. To seek and not find is hardly joyous. The Holy Spirit says seek and you will find. And so today I follow His guidance deep within the mind. Today my desire is to go home, experience my identity as home in God. Today I open to accept the atonement, the awareness of my wholeness and completeness, the awareness of innocence, divine innocence. I practice with all variations of the ideas in the review today. When I am tempted I can say, behind this is a miracle to which I am entitled. Let me not hold a grievance against you, but offer you the miracle that belongs to you instead. Seen truly this offers me a miracle. I would not hold this grievance apart from my salvation. Let our grievances be replaced by miracles. Beyond this is the miracle by which all my grievances are replaced. We practiced in deep sincerity. I am entitled to miracles. Let miracles replace all grievances. Amen.


Dear students, in this module, we are going to discuss the feminist perspective that how it treats and deals with the process of social stratification. Feminist theory is a sociological perspective that emphasizes the ways in which gender inequality and patriarchy contribute to the social stratification and oppression. Feminism looks at this stratification process from a specific point of view. From the point of view of feminists, any system of gender equality should be seen in how this system of gender equality is distributed to women and men. In their opinion, this system of gender equality only focuses on gender relationships. In gender relationships, men are always given preference and men are seen on a higher position. In this patriarchal system of gender equality, in this patriarchal system of gender equality, the system of stratification is established in order to keep the man's hagemony in place. According to feminist theory, social stratification is not just based on economic factors but also gender, race and other forms of social differences. The particular focus of feminists is on this point of view that other factors are important but the focus of the stratification process is on gender-based hierarchical distribution of social positions. So, they argue that social class and gender are intertwined with women often experiencing double oppression based on both their gender and their economic status. So, the primary focus is on gender-based hierarchical relationships. In their opinion, women are divided into two parts in this stratified system. First of all, because they are women and men are considered to be inferior to them. Along with this, other factors are also influenced by their inequality. For example, their economic status, their social class or their caste. All these factors are also influenced by their social status. So, it creates an impression or an impact of double oppression. So, in Pakistan, if we talk about the feminist perspective on stratification, they are often associated with the ways in which women are marginalized and excluded from the important social, economic and political spheres. Even in Pakistan, if we look at the women's character from the feminist point of view and the relationship between women and men, we can see that this system is based on inequality between men and women. Yes, this inequality leads to injustice. This is the next question. For women, food for thought should be taken for granted without the feminist perspective. You should objectively observe this, because in Pakistan, the women's experience is the same as the feminist perspective claims.


All right, welcome, everyone, to today's Google Webmaster Central Office Hours Hangouts. My name is John Mueller. I'm a Webmaster Trends Analyst here at Google in Switzerland. And part of what we do are these Office Hours Hangouts, where webmasters and publishers can jump in and ask questions regardless of what's interesting for them and their sites with regards to web search.  But as always, if any of you who are here live want to take a shot at the first couple of questions, feel free to jump on it.  OK, so I have a question if nobody else wants to jump in. All right, go for it. All right, so congratulations on officially rolling out the mobile first indexing process. There are some people asking if what people saw over the weekend regarding like a March 23 algorithm update or something like that, if that was any way related to maybe what was being rolled out with the mobile first index or with the mobile first index, you probably wouldn't notice any ranking fluctuations. I don't know if you wouldn't notice anything. In general overall, it should be fairly smooth. But I believe they only started rolling this out like, I don't know, today, tomorrow, this week, sometime, not before the blog post went live. OK, so you're confirming the rollout really then, because nobody's really seeing any examples of this happen in search results. So you're saying when you launch the blog post first and then after that, you're pushing it out. Yeah, I mean, we already had some sites rolled over to mobile first indexing. This is just, I guess, a next bigger batch of sites that is happening. The plan is also to send the messages through Search Console. I believe they're a little behind there, so it might be that we roll some sites over this week and send them a message next week or something like that. But in general, you should get a message for that. OK, so most likely, the stuff we saw over the weekend was probably completely unrelated to this. And Google's not confirming anything that happened over the weekend as far as you know. As far as I know, so my guess is that's unrelated to the mobile first indexing change. Excellent, thank you. I have one more question. But if anybody else wants to ask a question, feel free. I had a question about Google for Jobs, which I've posted in the Google Plus page. All right. I'm not sure if it's quite a specific question. I'm not sure if you can answer it or it's for another team. Do you want to take a minute and read the question, or should I try and summarize here? Yeah, what would be the summary? So it sounds like you don't have a fixed location for the jobs? So we've got a fixed location. But what I'm finding is when I put that location in the markup and then preview it in the tool that Google provides, in some cases, in most cases, I'm not seeing that location appear in the preview. And I'm just wondering what the reason is for that, because it doesn't give me feedback as to why it doesn't appear. So from what I saw in the question, it sounds like you just have a name instead of a street address. Is that correct? So is that like a specific location that's called like that? Or is that more like a regional thing? So it's a specific location, like a town or a city, where that job is located. And we often don't have any more rich data than any more specific data. We just have a string, like London or Paris or? OK, so I believe that the team prefers to have an exact address for this markup. But what I saw somewhere recently is that they're treating this more as a warning now, rather than an actual failure for us to kind of implement or understand the markup. But what I would do there is definitely post in the Webmaster Help Forum about this. If you want to, you can send me the link to your question afterwards. And I'll point someone from the jobs team directly there so that they can take a look to see what exactly we could recommend there. OK, brilliant. I'll definitely do that. Thank you. All right, thanks. All right. Any other live question before we head off to the submitted ones? Actually, I have a question. If you'd like. I notice in my Webmaster Tools, the HTML improvements, that we have notifications of errors for duplicate, not errors, but their duplicate meta descriptions and long meta descriptions. And in all those instances, it happens to be that they're related to our landing page for tags. How does one avoid that? So how do you mean landing page? So it's a long post about a specific individual that's related to the tag. So if it's a celebrity for it. So in that, somehow or another is resulting in these notifications. But it's only those pages. It's not the actual posts themselves. So it's more like a category page, I guess. Correct, correct. OK, yeah. So that's perfectly fine. I think that's completely normal. We bring these notifications in Search Console, specifically the HTML improvements out so that if you aren't aware of putting unique titles on your pages, then that's something we'd like to point out there. But if otherwise, your site has unique titles and these are just a handful of pages that happen at the same title, or especially if they're category pages and they're paginated category page, like you're on page five of, I don't know, garden furniture, for example, then you'd still have the title garden furniture. You wouldn't necessarily need to make a different title on every page of this paginated set, for example. So from that point of view, that's perfectly fine to have like that. Thank you. All right. Barry, go for it. Last question that I'll stop asking things for today. So a lot of people have been reporting in the past actually a couple of weeks about new URLs not being indexed by Google, even using the fetch as Google, which has their issues now. I honestly thought it was just people complaining and just typical general indexing issues of new Google just choosing not to index that content. But I'm seeing a really large number of complaints, not just in the Google forums on Twitter, but from SEOs that do know their stuff. So I'm wondering if it's something you guys are looking into or if you found any issues around this. I've been looking into a bunch of those, but for the most part, it really seems like it's just working as normal. And sometimes we do index stuff very, very quickly. Sometimes we don't index stuff very quickly. I believe we're crawling a bit more than usual at the moment, so usually we pick these things up. One of the things that I've kind of noticed in looking into a lot of these issues is that a lot of people relied on the submit to indexing tool in Search Console where you manually submit URLs to be indexed. And that's something that kind of surprised me because I thought that the normal methods of submitting content into Google should just work. So I imagine, for example, you, with your site, you wouldn't manually submit every page that you write and say, hey, Google, I wrote this new article. It's like, pick it up quickly.  So that's kind of what we expect a normal setup to do. So that you wouldn't need to rely on any kind of manual work to get your day-to-day work done, essentially. But it's interesting that people relied on this so much. So I'm kind of wondering if there are things in the automated processes that we need to tune. So I have been looking into a bunch of these cases to see what kind of has been happening there in the past, why they might be seeing a difference there to figure out what we can do there to improve that. Yeah, I've been surprised also how many people are complaining that they can't submit URLs through the Fetch as Google tool, even like large publishers. And I'm like, I'm just surprised. So it's interesting to see that from the community. Yeah. I mean, it's good to see that the tools are being used. So that's on the other hand. So when talking with a team, we're like, no, you can't turn this off. All right, Don, I thought you had a question. Or you posted it. Yeah, I'm in a reception area at a friend's. So I don't really want to talk very loudly in case everybody turns around. So I've posted it. I think that's all right. Yeah, yeah. OK. So you're saying, I'm finding Google by crawling into areas which are blocked in URL parameters and also blocked in robots text. We should not be crawling anything that's blocked by robots text. So that's kind of strictly off limits for Googlebot, where if we understand a robots text file and we can parse the directives there, we will not go off and crawl that. The one edge case there is if you change a robots text file today, it might be that we just re-crawl the robots text file tomorrow and then we notice the change in directives. But otherwise, we shouldn't be crawling into those areas. But I've also defined quite a lot of rules in URL parameters, and they're still being crawled. And they're really clear. So yeah. That's more of a signal for us. So that's something where we do occasionally double check to make sure that we're not missing anything, that we're not skipping content that actually we could be indexing. So that's something where I wouldn't say it's on the same level as a robots text file. If it's in robots text, we definitely should not be crawling. OK. I'll double check. Am I able to send you a link if I find that it is still being crawled in the robots text? Yeah. Definitely. So I try to look into these as much as possible, especially with the robots text, because that's something that's really critical for us. If you put something in a robots text file and say, don't crawl this, then we should definitely respect that. OK. All right, then. That's great. OK. Hold on one sec, though. Sorry. It's actually, sorry, it's only certain parameters. So I'll have to think about how to do that, to be honest. Yeah, OK, because it's not that. Yeah, I'll have a think about it. OK. Perfect. All right. So now we have the simple question of what signals does Google's algorithm look into to calculate the amount of page rank passed through a link? For that, I don't really have an absolute answer. So we do look for the realm of follow to say we are not going to pass any signals through a link. But otherwise, it's something where we take into account a lot of things. And it's not something where I think it wouldn't make sense for a normal site to try to calculate how the page rank flows within a website, because there's just so many ways that links can go into a site and how URLs can be folded together and duplicated. And we're crawling, kind of goes off into dead ends and things like that. So that seems like something that's not really a good use of time. The use of background images instead of regular image tags, does it have any negative SEO impacts for web and image search? What's the recommended? What are the negative sides of using background images? Besides the fact that you can't add title or alt attributes. So I believe this is specific to using CSS to add kind of an background image within a tag in HTML. And from what I understand, we wouldn't pick up those images at all. So this is something where we'd say, well, this is part of your CSS, your design, and not actually an element on the page that is useful for something like web search or for image search. So my understanding is we would skip those completely. Also, we wouldn't have any information from title tags or alt attributes on those images. So for web search, that probably doesn't matter so much, because if we index an image or not, doesn't change anything for web search. But for image search, if we don't index that image, then, of course, that image can't be shown in image search. So if you do want your images shown in image search, I'd recommend using normal image tags so that we can pick up those images normally so that we can also understand the context of that image a little bit better, things like the alt attributes for the image, the captions on the image, text around the image. All of that really helps us to understand the images a little bit better. So if you want to make sure that your images are available for image search, I would not recommend using CSS background attributes to embed them into your pages. Does Google consider too many folder directories thin content? So the example given there is wp-content-plugin-plugin-name. There was an issue with one of our sites, and apparently approximately 30 pages are index folders. What kind of issue will this cause? What's the best way to get these pages de-indexed? Oh, OK. So I think it's not a matter of too many folders, essentially, but kind of these directory file pages where it essentially just lists the URLs or the files within a directory. From our point of view, we probably ignore that for the most part. We do index these if we run across them, but I wouldn't worry that this is something that we'll say your site is seen as low quality content for, because we probably recognize fairly quickly that these pages aren't relevant for anything, and we can just skip over them when it comes to search. So I kind of recommend blocking those directories in general, mostly for security reasons so that people don't stumble into, essentially, your plug-in directories and figure out which plugins you're using and which files they're using, what the configuration settings might be, all of that. Kind of blocking those for those reasons, but I wouldn't worry so much about it with regards to the quality of the website. It's essentially just like a simple HTML page that we're picking up there that shouldn't really cause any problems. I accidentally created a site move to a penalized domain, one that I had parked for a year. Now my site is no longer on the first page for anything. What steps should I take to recover my Google traffic? Also, is it possible because I didn't use a new domain that caused a manual action or manual penalty? So I guess there are multiple approaches that you can do here. On the one hand, you can cancel the site move. That's probably the first thing that I would do. I assume you already did that. You could also redirect back from the other site, if that's something that you can set up. You can also think about what it would take to clean up the manual action for the other site. So in particular, if you're now hosting content on the other domain, then maybe any kind of manual action that you previously had for that domain would be irrelevant, and you could just do a reconsideration request. And then suddenly, things are back to normal. So those are kind of the approaches I would take there. I think it's kind of tricky with the site move tool because it does check a lot of things before it actually accepts a site move. So you kind of have to redirect and all of that. So cleaning that up is usually a matter of redirecting back and canceling the site move. But it's probably something you want to avoid in the future. So if you have a domain that you know has a manual action on it, I would just get that cleaned up, even if you're currently not using that domain. Let me see. Seems like some questions are showing up in the chat here as well. Is there any term like text to code ratio in SEO? No. We don't use anything like text to code when it comes to Google search. We essentially pick up the visible content on the page and we use that. Some pages have a lot more HTML. Some pages have a lot less HTML. That's more a matter of your kind of design preferences, how you set things up on your side. How to do landing pages to the site by product type, but one main page is still ranked in Search. New pages are ranked by the query keyword, first brand, how can I fix the situation, how to rank pages by product type, and not the one main page. So usually this is something that just settles down over time in the sense that if you've significantly changed the structure of your website, then we need to recrawl all of that. We need to reprocess all of those URLs and understand kind of the context of those new pages within the rest of your website. And over time, that's something that will generally work itself out. So if you have normal linking in your site with a clean category structure, a hierarchy on the website, then all of that kind of just cleans itself up. So no need to do anything special there. All right. And now we have a question with a bunch of sub-questions. So let's see. On my marketplace, I'd like to add the vendor description on each product page. Will this be considered duplicate content by Googlebot? So technically, yes, that would be duplicate content. For the most part, if you have other unique content on those pages, that wouldn't be a problem, though, because then we'd still be able to understand that your page has some unique value of its own. And what kind of is the unique story there, the unique twist that means we should show it to a set of users who are looking for that specifically. And that would generally be fine. If you do want to take it a step further and just not be the same as all of the others that use the same description, then obviously having a unique description is certainly a good idea. On the same marketplace, I have 6 to 700 pages that were created a long time ago to improve SEO through massive amount of descriptive content about the different types of product and so on. The content turns out to be really poor quality, and these pages drive almost no traffic. I've heard such poor quality content could harm the entire website in terms of SEO. Is this true? Yes, we do sometimes look at the website overall to figure out how it kind of fits in with the rest of the web and where it would be relevant to show. And if we can tell that a website is primarily low quality content, that's kind of like spun content, rewritten content from other sources, then that might be something that we take into account with regards to how we show your website in search. OK, question goes on. I'd like to delete all of these pages and recreate new ones with higher quality content. Could I implement 301 redirect from the old pages to new ones? Will it harm my entire website in terms of SEO since they don't drive a lot of traffic? So I would recommend either deleting these pages or just updating them. I think redirecting them to new pages that you create is kind of an unnecessary extra step. But if you feel that you can add significant unique and compelling value to these pages, then I would just update them. Or if you think that these pages have actually no sense to keep for the long run within your website, then maybe just delete them. OK, still more to this question. I'd like to index all the product pages I mentioned as soon as possible, about 2,000 pages. Should I do both at the same time or wait until the product pages are crawled and indexed to start deleting content pages? You can do this in whatever order you want. There is no algorithm on our side that says you have to do everything at the same time. Otherwise, it doesn't count. We reprocess the website over time, and we try to take that into account as we see it happening. And then one last question. Last week, I attended a Google event in Paris, and the speaker mentioned that neither traffic nor bounce rate were taken into account to rank the search results. How can it be possible? It's possible. I don't know how to say how, but it's certainly possible. It's not something that we would take into account when looking at individual search results pages. Sometimes we do take things like user behavior into account when we evaluate algorithms overall, but then we're looking at millions of search results, and we try to compare how these algorithms are competing with each other and which of these algorithms is working best or which of these settings with algorithms is working best. But on a small level, that doesn't really make sense, at least in our experience. What about short clicks? Short clicks. That's essentially the same thing. So that's something that we would probably take into account when it comes to evaluating algorithms overall. But on a smaller level, that's really tricky. I don't think it provides a lot of value there. Oh, it's more user satisfaction with the results overall. Yeah. OK. Does mobile-first indexing mean Google will give a full weight to hidden content, even if it's never accessible to users? Or is there a difference between not visible in the initial view and not accessible at all? How does Google handle a page with 5,000 words of hidden and only showing a call to action to the user? It reminds me of spam and white text on white background, kind of the old school SEO tactics that used to work. So from my point of view, this is something that we have covered fairly well with regards to understanding which part of the page is relevant to the user and with regards to understanding where keyword stuffing starts. So from that point of view, I'm not necessarily that worried about the situation. I'm sure there will be some people that will try to stuff as much keywords onto a page as possible. But for the most part, we figure that out fairly well. And even on desktop, it's not the case that we would send a manual action to a website that does this keyword stuffing. We have algorithms that just try to ignore it and focus on the rest of the page. So from that point of view, I'm not necessarily worried. I don't think it's a great practice to just hide content on a page and assume that search engines will treat it as being valuable and users will never be interested in it. Because if we show it to users in the search results and they go to your site and they're like, oh, there's nothing here that I want, in the future, they're probably going to avoid your site because they feel they were misled by being sent there. But actually, they can't find any information to what they were looking for. Let's see. I'm trying to integrate Google for Jobs. OK, this is the one I think we touched on in the beginning. Struggling to find someone at Google to provide an example of a website which successfully manipulates Google's algorithms by simply mixing paragraphs of content as it is from different well-established sites. We've submitted a DMCA for a sample of 10 pages and Google removed those. And I think it goes on that we don't want to submit hundreds of DMCA requests. So essentially, this is something where you probably need to go through the web spam form if you think that this website is manipulating things with regards to search results. Or if it's copying your content, then this DMCA process is kind of the right one to do for that, at least in most cases. So I'm not really sure what else we could do there. So you're welcome to see me examples of something that you see like this. And I can take a look at that with the team. But in general, we wouldn't remove a website just because there's some copied content on this website. That's something where you'd have to go through the normal process with the DMCA, where that would be done on a per page basis. And if there are issues with other pages that are kind of OK on this website, then those would remain in the search results. But again, you're welcome to see me some examples so that I can take a look at that with the team here to see if maybe there's something that I'm missing. We have a new, brand new website with much better content than the competition, much better backlinks, and much many more backlinks totally optimized for technicals and speed and structure. But still, we're not ranking for important keywords. Is there really any sandbox or what could be happening here? So I guess first off, I'm really kind of worried the way you phrase this question in the sense that you're saying this is a brand new website and it has much better links and many more links than all of your competitors. That sounds, I don't know, kind of problematic. Like how would this happen with a new website? So that's just kind of an aside there. In general, when it comes to new websites, it is tricky for us to figure out how we should be showing these in search. And in some cases, we don't have a lot of signals and we have to kind of guess at where we think this website would be relevant in the search results. And over time, that will settle down. And that could be that we start off fairly conservative and it settles down at a higher state. It could also be that we start fairly high and it settles down a little bit lower in the search results over time. So this process is completely normal. It's not something that I would call a sandbox or that we're artificially holding back new sites or anything like that. It's really just a matter of us not really knowing in the beginning where exactly we should be showing the site in search. And it takes a bit of time for the algorithms to figure all of this out. But again, kind of going back to your initial question, I really kind of be worried that maybe you're doing some things here with your new website that you shouldn't be doing. So I really kind of rethink what you have set up there with regards to your new website if that's really something that's performing extremely well in an organic way or if you've been doing things that in the long term will cause more trouble than actually helping your website. So that might be something worth getting some tips from some other people who've worked in similar areas before. OK, so two questions. I want to know if Google have any plans to send no result pages, again, with some keywords or if that was only a test. I don't know what the plans are. So I think in general, we at Google move fairly quickly sometimes. And sometimes we try new things out. Sometimes they don't work out. Sometimes we try them out in a different way, and they work out a little bit better. This is something that I think every website should be doing. They should constantly be rethinking what it is they're providing, listening to feedback, and adjusting what they're doing based on feedback, constantly testing something new and seeing if that works better. So I would be surprised if we kind of took this test and said, oh, we'll never do anything like this again in the future ever, but rather we'll try to learn from it and see where the problems were, where things could have been improved, and how it makes sense to perhaps find ways to improve the user experience for users in general in a way that works well for all participants on the web. Second question, what types of pages do you recommend to use AMP for on mobile websites? AMP has a lot more functionality than when it was initially launched. So while in the beginning it made sense to focus more on content-type pages for AMP, nowadays you can do a lot of really fancy stuff with AMP. So I wouldn't necessarily try to limit where you use AMP, but maybe think about what kind of content you have on your website, what kind of functionality you have on your website and where you think AMP might be able to help you with that. And that's something that I think kind of differs from website to website and also differs a bit based on your experience, your resources, what kind of a team you have that can implement things. For example, it probably doesn't make sense to just drop all work on your website and only implement AMP. Probably you want to find some kind of a split and figure out this is the team generally working on the website overall, moving things forward, and maybe some people that are trying new things out and seeing how they work and how that evolves over time. So with that said, I don't really have an answer of where you should be implementing AMP, but I do know there are lots of places you can make really fast websites or really fast pages using AMP technologies that you probably profit from in the long run. Are there negative consequences to adding a lot of links to other sites within one article? My site would like to offer as much transparency as possible as to how we arrived at our conclusions with fact checking other outlets, but we also don't want to hurt our own page rank in the process. That's perfectly fine. You can link to lots of sites on your website. That's something that definitely works for us to also understand better the context of your website within kind of the bigger web itself. The one thing I try to watch out for is if there are any links that could be perceived as being kind of paid or kind of being placed there with regards to maybe some exchanges that are happening in the back, that's something where you'd probably want to use the realm of follow microformat on those links. But otherwise, if these are organic links, normal links within the articles on your website, I would just go for it. I think that makes perfect sense to link to other sites. The only follow-up I have on that is that my understanding is that in the fact checking community, it would like us to do sort of like footnotes on the bottom of where the sources came from. In that instance, I would sort of almost have to do that link again in the footnotes. Do you have any suggestions of how, you know, if I were to say that this came from, let's say, People Magazine and then on the bottom say this quote was from People Magazine more transparently, is that a problem? Because now I have duplicate of the same sort of link. That's perfectly fine. That's definitely not a problem. OK, thank you. OK, let's see. Long question in the chat. If we have a site that was hit by the March 7th to March 9th quality updates, that is a legitimate site that is generating world-class content and getting high-quality links to the content, but the content gets scraped. And now the content after the update is ranking for other scraper websites first before our own. I guess trying to figure out what is going wrong here or what could be happening there. I guess what I would recommend doing there, first of all, is posting in the Webmaster Help Forum to try to get general advice from other people to see if there's something specific that they could be pointing out, something maybe that you've overlooked that you can either change on your side or react to the way other sites are acting on your website to try to handle that a little bit better. In general, I think the update you're referring to is one of our core algorithm updates where essentially we're just trying to improve the relevance of the search results. It's not the case that we're saying your website is bad. It's just our algorithms essentially saying maybe it's not so relevant for the queries that we used to show your website for. Obviously, as a Webmaster, you probably have strong opinions about that. And that's, I think, perfectly understandable. I would, in a case like this, so maybe go to the Webmaster Help Forums and show some of the queries where you felt your site would be relevant for, so that other people can take a look at that as well to better understand how your site is kind of interacting in the bigger picture of the web. And the folks in the Webmaster Help Forum can also escalate issues to us if they see things or they say, well, this looks really weird. This shouldn't be happening like this. They can escalate that to Googlers and Googlers will be able to take a look at that as well and figure out if there's anything on our side that we need to change there, or if there's anything maybe technical or kind of from a quality point of view that we could point out to you that you could improve on your website in general. So that's kind of what I would recommend doing there as a first step. Can you please emphasize more on technical SEO? What are the factors of technical SEO? Wow, I think that's like a giant open-ended question. It's like, what is SEO, essentially? So I don't know where I would start. So I guess what I would see as technical SEO is everything that's involved up to maybe indexing when it comes to search. So crawling a website, understanding how we find URLs on a website, how we can extract the content from the pages, extract metadata from the pages, and store all of that in our index. And kind of what happens afterwards is mostly, I guess, a matter of ranking, which takes into account lots of different signals from lots of other places. But from a technical point of view, I feel for the most part it's those first couple of steps in the pipeline. But I am doing and ask me anything on Reddit. I think that's tomorrow, a bit later in the day tomorrow. So maybe jump in there and ask there, because that's specifically around technical SEO there. So check out what kind of questions come. Maybe ask your own questions there, too. And maybe that'll help to kind of give you a little bit more insight into what people generally see as technical SEO. I think another tricky aspect here is, of course, that everyone has different view of what SEO should be and how far it kind of goes. So finding that one perfect answer that tells you exactly what it is is unlikely to have. I've worked on one domain for eight months. After the domain expired, I accidentally bought the wrong domain instead of my premaced one. And all my work was gone. So what can I do to kind of restore my rankings there? I don't think you can do anything really magical to make that come back. You'd have to get the other domain as well and redirect to your new domain, essentially. Because otherwise, what happens is it looks like to us like there was this great content here, and it disappeared, and suddenly the same copy of the content appeared somewhere else. And sometimes we can draw a connection there and say, well, maybe this belongs together and we should treat them as one thing. But it could also be that some random other person just copied your content and put that on. And then wouldn't be the right thing to just say, well, it's probably the same thing. We'll just rank it in the same way as it was before. So I think in a case like that, either you kind of have to bite the bullet and say, well, kind of redo those last eight months, which is not an eternity. So definitely something that's reasonably possible. Or figure out a way to get that old domain name back so that you can redirect properly to your new domain name. I notice in search results that sites who showed up on page one for domain name and a few posts no longer display the posts on page one. It's like the change booted the posts off. I only see the home pages of a lot of sites. Is that normal? I am not aware of anything in that regard, which has been happening. So sounds like maybe these are just normal search changes, or maybe these are changes specific to individual sites. If you feel the quality of the search results has gotten worse because of a change like this, I would definitely go ahead and submit feedback on the bottom of the search results page. There's a feedback link, and you can tell us kind of what you were searching for and why you were unhappy with what happened there in the search results. If you're seeing this across the board for a lot of cases and not just individual sites, but a lot of situations where you think that this is really broken and Google should be doing much better in the search results, then you're welcome to kind of send me that as a pack so that I can take a look at that with the team here. For individual queries, it probably makes more sense to just do that with the feedback link. But if you're seeing something bigger that you can't really pack into individual feedback submissions, then you're welcome to send me that directly. The easiest way to do that is on Google Plus, which is sometimes a bit quirky with regards to how to add me to a thread privately, but probably the best way to get that to me. Mobile first indexing. OK, a mobile version of a website with less internal links. So fewer top menu items is expected to have ranking problems due to less link value passed through internal linking. So if you have different content on mobile than you have on your desktop, in particular, that would be you don't have a responsive web design setup. Then when we switch to mobile first indexing for that site, we will use the mobile version for crawling, indexing, and kind of passing the signals internally within the site. So in an extreme case where you have no links at all on the mobile page, and you have normal linking structure on the desktop page, then we wouldn't be able to crawl that page anymore, or that site anymore, because we wouldn't be able to find all of the pages anymore when we do that with the mobile device. So I would expect, in a case like that, to see some changes in search if you have significantly different internal links on mobile than on desktop. Whereas if you have a responsive web design, even if not all links are immediately visible, that's something that you don't have to worry about at all. That essentially just works. We do take into account how a site is linking when we switch to mobile first indexing, though. So if we see that a site has a terrible internal linking structure on mobile and a reasonable one on desktop, then probably we wouldn't be switching that site over to mobile first indexing just yet. Do you think that SEO is a long-term career? I don't know. All of these SEOs are just so young. They just briefly started work on this. At least they all look so young. So I don't know. We'll have to wait and see if this lasts more than a couple of years, I guess. What do you all think? SEO is like long-term thing. It's dead. SEO is dead. Oh my gosh. No, that's terrible. Don't tell me that. I think there's lots of stuff that can be done. With regards to SEO and understanding how the web works and how things work online. There are a lot of technical things that need to be done, even if search engines were completely artificial intelligence powered and were able to guess all of your URLs. You'd still have to put that content on there somehow and explain to search engines why your content is the best version of that. So I totally don't see that going away. It will evolve. Of course, it has evolved quite a bit over time. When I think back at the beginnings, it's like everything was just a black box. And nowadays, there's so many technical things you can just check off. And you kind of know this is actually something that search engines care about. So it definitely changes over time. So if you want a job that will be the same for the long run, then maybe SEO isn't the right thing for you. But if you're happy with challenges and figuring new things out all the time, then I don't know. Cool area to be active in. Does it matter where the internal link is placed? For SEO purposes, for example, are internal links placed in the sidebar as powerful as in-content links? Or will internal links carry more value if they're placed higher in the content? In general, the location of the link doesn't matter so much for us. We do try to figure out what the context of that link is to better understand how we should connect those pages. For example, if we notice that a link is in the comments on a blog somewhere, then we'll probably assume this belongs to some blog comment. And maybe we'll treat that slightly differently than if it's something that's within the top body of your article. But for the most part, when we crawl through a website, we try to just treat it as a natural link when we come across links and follow them normally. Let's see, Lighthouse audit extension for Chrome. Should I be taking note of the Progressive Web App results for my website? Or is this only for downloadable apps? So Progressive Web App is essentially a way of making a website that fulfills certain attributes, such as being able to run offline, letting you add it to the home screen on mobile, and I think that it uses a service worker. I'm not actually sure now that I think about it. But it's essentially a normal website. And you can use those audits to test for your normal website as well. Some of those audit results will probably be irrelevant to you. So if you don't have any offline functionality, then you probably don't care if the audit says you don't have any offline functionality. But sometimes there is useful information that comes out of these audits where you might see some speed aspect that's highlighted that you forgot about, or maybe some other aspect that you missed. We recently added some SEO audits to the Lighthouse setup as well. I believe they're going to show up in Chrome or already showed up in some Chrome versions as well. So for example, if you're developing a web app for the first time and you want to make sure you have the basics of SEO covered, that might be a good way to get started. The neat thing about Lighthouse is also that you can run it from the command line. So you could theoretically run this on a regular basis and just check your important pages to double check that things are set up properly with regards to the audits that you choose. So that might be a neat option for the more advanced people as well. Let's see. A question about cache that uses a different URL than the actual page. In what way can that affect rankings? So I'm not quite sure which cache you mean there. In many cases, if you have something like a rel canonical on a page and the whole page with that rel canonical is cached, then we'll just, when we crawl that cache page, we'll follow the rel canonical and we'll generally use the canonical version instead. So if you set it up like that, I generally think that wouldn't be a problem. What's the meaning of not set in Google Analytics? So I believe this refers to the data from Search Console when it's transferred to Google Analytics. And there are some queries where we don't provide the query itself, just mostly for privacy reasons. For example, if a query is very rarely used, then we might be kind of cautious about providing that to Search Console directly and from there also to analytics. So that's kind of where that comes from. In the Search Console Help Center for the Search Analytics feature, there's a little bit more about kind of the queries that we filter out there. If we take an example site that operates primarily in English but has a smaller Russian site too, so it sounds like you're just linking between some of the Russian pages and some of the English pages, do you have to do anything special to make that work? So in general, what I'd recommend doing there is trying to figure out if you can set up the hreflang links between those versions. Those help us to understand that these pages are actually equivalent but in different languages. However, for normal kind of content queries, we can usually figure out which language the user is searching in from the query that they use. And we can tell how your Russian pages or maybe your English pages are relevant to that specific query. So for the most part, that probably would just work. What would probably be trickier is when it comes to brand queries. So if someone is searching for your company name, probably your company name is the same name in Russian as it is in English, then from that query, we wouldn't know which of your pages would actually be the most relevant. Because we don't know, are they looking for the English home page or the Russian home page? And in a case like that, maybe we would show both. Maybe we would just show one of the two pages. And that might not be exactly what you want. So if you see that this is happening with some queries, probably more with like brand queries than anything else, then maybe it makes sense to just set up hreflang links for those individual pages if you can't do that across the whole website. So that's kind of what I would aim for there. All right. Wow, these questions keep coming and coming. Let's see how far we can go. I'm seeing a huge traffic coming from AMP URL suddenly. When I check the URL in Google Index from mobile, the article is not appearing. And when I check with the site, the non-AMP version says not indexed. And it's not sharing anywhere. Just the published articles. Is there anything I'm missing here? I don't know. Like getting links and traffic from AMP pages seems like something that wouldn't necessarily be totally out of the question. So it feels like that might be completely normal. What I'd recommend doing here, though, if you're really confused and not sure what is happening is maybe posting in the Webmaster Help Forum to see if other people can give you some more tips on what you could be looking at or can kind of show you how this is or is not something that you need to worry about more. Yesterday, it was observed that the URL error graphs in across all monitored accounts, there are two data points. For one day, is this an error or a glitch or a symptom of mobile-first indexing or something else? So in general, mobile-first indexing, you wouldn't see anything like this. We would just switch from one version of the content to the other across your website. So that wouldn't be reflected in any of these error reports like that. I suspect it's just some weird data glitch. I don't know what the plan is there from the Search Console side if we're just going to fold those together, or maybe they are folded together already. I haven't seen any more reports of that recently, but I'll double check with the team, actually, on that. Let's see. Do you have any advice where I can get most respectable information on how to correctly write about a business who definitely works in different areas? There seem to be lots of misunderstanding here, but this business definitely works in different cities. For example, commercial door installations. So in general, I would write your content as naturally as possible. And if there are individual locations where you're active in, then writing about that, I think it's fine. If you're doing this at a large scale and including hundreds of locations, then probably it makes more sense to use fewer individual locations and talk about regions instead. Because otherwise, you just have this mass of pages that are essentially just all the same thing. So I try to find a reasonable ground with regards to what you would provide to maybe someone visiting your store in person with regards to the content there. All right. Wow, I think we actually made it. Oh my gosh, more questions in the chat. Is there any kind of suppression for long pages of mobile devices? I don't think so. Not that I'm aware of. Some pages are just really long, and we have to figure out how to deal with them. Sometimes, for example, a PDF can be hundreds of pages long, and we still have to figure out how to index that content somehow. Let's see, what's the difference between KnowledgeGraph and Google My Business list in terms of search and search query? Those are kind of different things. So from that regard, it's very different things. Sometimes we do show information from Google My Business in the KnowledgeGraph sidebar as well. But essentially, those are different kind of topics to look at. All right, I think we made it to the end. Is there anything specific on your mind that I missed out, that I need to cover before we head off into the next batch of Hangouts next week or otherwise on Twitter? John, you know on that topic of the longer pages on mobile? So that was something I was just reading in an IR book recently. They are normalized, though, aren't they? Long pages and short pages are all normalized so that they're having to doesn't necessarily fall over because you're going to have a huge page. You're going to run outrun for short page because of normalization. I mean, we need to figure out how to deal with long pages that have a lot of different content on it, and short pages are very focused. And I don't think you can always say that a long page that has a section in for the same content is on a short page, it would be exactly the same or different or how that should be read. But there's some sort of normalization suppression, isn't there? Probably, yeah, to figure out where it makes sense to include more, where it makes sense to include less. I think that's totally normal. You've been reading a lot of these cool technical books. That's fantastic. More SEO should be doing that. Yeah, definitely. Thanks, John. John. Yeah, John? Couple questions. One, something I've encountered in the past over the years is our sites that are primarily image based or one particular case, it was an HTML5 site and there's a lot of interactive elements on the page. And the question always came about was do we need to supplement this with content, written content? How are those dealt with? Probably, yeah. So if there's very little content on a page, then it's really hard for us to understand what this page is about. And an extreme case that I sometimes see is a photography portfolio websites where essentially each photo is on an individual page and the textual content is like the camera settings. And that's something that for us is really hard to understand, what should we be ranking this page for? Is it relevant in web search somehow? Is it relevant just in image search? And for image search, what should we be showing it for? We don't have a lot of information there. So having some amount of textual information on a page, I think, is really critical. OK, the second question, I'm not sure my questions are going through on the other section that we posted. Oh, you put the first thing? Correct. I don't know. I have a tool to kind of pull them out for me, but I don't see any of your questions left. So maybe they're still there somewhere. Well, I asked last time too, and they were kind of skipped, so I'm thinking there might be some. OK, I'll double check. OK, thank you. Cool. All right. Oh my gosh. Really long question. Oh my gosh. Really long question. Let me see if I can summarize it. I work for a company in health and wellness that has professional writers and a lot of UGC. I guess kind of in direction of how would Google understand the quality of the content based on the subdirectories or different parts of a website where you might have experts writing about things and you might have user-generated content on similar topics. I think that's, in general, a very tricky situation because for the most part, we do try to understand things on a per-page basis, but we don't understand the full context on a per-page basis, and sometimes we will look at the bigger picture. And that often means that we look at the website overall to try to figure out how is the quality of this website overall. So if you're mixing a lot of, let's say, extreme-case low-quality user-generated content with really high-quality expert content on your website, then sometimes our algorithms might not understand where this barrier is between those two sections and that we should be treating these differently. And then it might be tricky for us to show the high-quality expert content in the right place. So that's something where it might make sense to think about what you can do to make it clear which parts are user-generated content, which parts are really your expert editorial content that you're providing. That could be something like maybe a subdomain. It could be maybe in an extreme case, even putting it on a different domain or finding other ways to at least give us more information about the content that you're providing. Other approaches that we've also seen from people who run forums, for example, is that they try to figure out which parts of the UGC content are actually high-quality UGC and which parts are lower-quality UGC. So that could be something where if you have some kind of tracking mechanism on your site that you can track to see which parts of the UGC are good and which parts are bad, where you could say, well, I'll just put the lower-quality UGC on no index to start off with, perhaps. And as I get information that this is actually really useful, then I take that no index away. So this is something that I believe we do in our product forums as well, where if someone just comes in and posts a bunch of stuff in the beginning, then we'll put that on no index. And if people interact with that and say, oh, this is actually a good question and a really insightful thing here, then we take that no index away and have it indexed as normal content. So that might be something to look into as well. But it really depends on the website and what kind of UGC you're talking about. If these are random people from the internet giving medical advice, then probably it's not a good idea to make that in with accredited doctors also giving medical advice. But if these are really high-quality UGC things that are being provided there, maybe that's perfectly fine to keep those more related together. All right, we've kind of run out of time. I have the next batch of Hangout set up, I think, for next week. And so if there's anything left on your mind that you want to add, feel free to jump in there. Also, as I mentioned, the Reddit thread should be going up tomorrow. So if you have any technical SEO questions, feel free to jump in there. I'm sure that'll be interesting. And as always, in the meantime, feel free to ping us on Twitter or post them in the Webmaster Health Forum. Lots of people there who can help out with a lot of the more general questions around web search and escalate the quirky things that people run into as well. All right, thanks a lot again. And hope to see you all in the future again. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much. Thank you. Bye.


Stacy can you give us a sense what's going on now in Japan? Where is the disaster headed the recovery so forth? Well, I think we can break it down into three different areas I mean one we can talk about the disaster as a whole the other we can talk about the nuclear sort of Situation that's going on and the third situation is about electricity and gas shortages. So first off in terms of the disaster I mean the death toll keeps rising There are search and rescue teams There's like 15 different countries who have search and rescue teams on the ground access is difficult in certain parts of the northeast and Miyagi prefecture But I think that people are getting help and definitely that that is happening Apparently there are you know food supplies blankets Medical supplies in the hospitals that are required, but I think that the Japanese government is doing you know a Very commendable job in sort of coordinating those needs a telecom San Frantier is also there to work out sort of the landline issues and the communication issues as family reunification becomes more important and also in terms of the logistics of The response in terms of the nuclear situation as we know there was a second Reactor that exploded today I'm not in a particular position to actually speculate about what that situation is But we know obviously that there were the evacuations of the people in the nearby areas And they've been told to stay indoors for now in terms of the electricity and Gas shortages. I believe that you know basically they were rationing both of these things And which was a smart thing to do in terms of trying to figure out You know how long they might Have these and wanting to really have everything available for the response efforts I also get reports though, you know first we heard over the weekend There were about 6 million households without electricity that went down to like 2.5 I just read a note your report of sort of 1.3 million households without electricity So perhaps, you know, they are getting some cutoffs or actually less Homes now are having to deal with that situation. I need to look into that a little bit further It's also important to say that a UN undack team, which is kind of the disaster Response team that first arrives in an emergency is on the ground in Tokyo and they usually health government in coordination issues They do initial assessments and they also put out a flash appeal so that donor governments know exactly what is needed in terms of Contributions. We've heard language like worst disaster since World War two That it's going to take the Japanese people a lifetime to recover from this How do you compare this disaster with recent disasters? Hurricane Katrina the earthquake in Haiti the earthquake in New Zealand. Well, I was asked on Friday actually Well, how does this compare to the tsunami of 2004 and I'll take that as a first instance and then we can talk about the others obviously The economic damages are going to be much much higher than they were in the tsunami Just because we have a highly industrialized country to give some sort of context Kobe earthquake of 1995 was a hundred and thirty four Billion to build back that city. That's considered Before this disaster to have been the most expensive disaster on record In terms of Katrina it was 81 billion or 81 to 83 billion damages estimated when we talk about Back to the tsunami of 2004 where a lot of the damage happened in sort of rural non industrialized places like Vanda Ache We were down to let me just look at the figures again because I have all of this written down It was about 10 billion Szechuan earthquake 20 billion So definitely this is above and beyond anything we've seen before there have been some very interesting though Not necessarily coherent studies done the World Bank just put out a report on you know Kind of how long does it take for a country to build back Their GDP after a disaster of even a median scale. It's usually at least five years and usually involves a Deficit and sort of external depth external debt and also internal deficits and as we know Japan already had a large deficit So we'll have to watch this carefully How's the international response been so far has it been coordinated? Is it helpful? Is it progressing in the right direction? You know, I think it is well organized I believe that you know obviously the UN and any country that wants to help Japan has to have that Offer accepted by the Japanese government from what I understand the Japanese government is coordinating everything and everyone is there to support them So I believe that we're very much in the certain rescue phase There's going to be a phase of basically collecting identifying and storing Dead bodies and also working out sort of water food medical supplies as sort of a secondary thing Shelter and getting all those food and non-food items to victims of the disaster and then In the next few days, I think you know organizations will really start talking about family reunification and trying to figure out Who is still missing and who is? Deceased and who has survived? What are some of the key lessons that we hope to learn to improve our Techniques in this particular disaster what I find very interesting on a day like today. I mean, it's it's nighttime now in Japan, but these search and rescue teams are going to be learning so much from each other This this is as as all the media have said one of the most videotaped photograph to disasters of all time Scientists are already saying that you know, they they have such a wealth of data in terms of studying tsunamis and how they move and how they They hit coastlines, so I think we're going to learn a lot from the Japanese experience Stacy white. Thank you for your time