Hey folks, welcome to the podcast. So we're doing a special series of podcasts which I'm recording over Google Hangouts. So we're doing audio and video because for some unknown reason people don't want to come see me face to face right now. But there's always opportunity and the cool thing is I'm able to now podcast with people from all over the world. So we're going to get an amazing eclectic mix of people from different industries, different perspectives to share their story and tell us you know their thoughts and feelings on what's going on right now and all of that cool stuff. Hope you enjoy it. Please subscribe in all the usual places and enjoy. I'm joined by a very good friend of mine Karen Graves who is an outstanding insurance professional and we're going to talk about what happens to the what do you do with the false teeth? That's it and Karen's going to play in everything. So Karen thanks for joining me. Thanks Lewis, it's great to be here and I've never done it this you know we've done podcasts before but never via the word so it's great to actually do this because yeah it means that we can still keep things moving and things happen in this weird time that we find ourselves in so thanks. Definitely no definitely how are you finding it being at home before we start? It's just slightly unreal isn't it? It feels a bit you know apart from the panic buying which I just can't get my head around. It just feels like it's it doesn't feel real I think, certainly for me it doesn't feel real and I know by the end of next week I'll be bored what's yeah I'll be totally bored I think and that's a problem I think that everybody's going to have to get their heads around. Get bored you start to not do the stuff you're supposed to you know. I know and I think most people at the moment are being really following the government guidelines I think and trying to do their best to adhere to that and yeah which which is great. It's murder or suicide isn't it really? I know I know well hopefully we won't end up by it being a bunch of depressed out of shape people but I've gone diarised I mean I'm like putting stuff in my diary for when I'm working when I'm exercising. My amazing gym in Tuffner Park called CrossFit Tuffner Park shout out to them they're they're loaning equipment to their members so we can take it home. Yeah they post a daily workout on Facebook so like the community is pulling together to help each other through. It is great and I think the thing that made me chuckle this morning in the paper was I read an article or a piece by Fiona Shackleton the divorce lawyer and I think the divorce lawyer is very expecting divorce rates to go soaring at the end of this self-isolation period so that'll be really interesting to see. I'd be interested if the divorce rate goes higher or a birth rate shoots up. Well it's going to be probably both of them will go go mad because there's different sets of people aren't there well maybe but yeah yeah so there'll be two things loads of loads of loads of newborns and loads of divorces I think. So what do you mean by a false teeth? Okay so I thank you very much for asking me to come and talk about this because I wanted to just sort of talk to you and some of your listeners and viewers now about some of the stuff that's been happening to me over the last three months and it's about dementia and my father and my dad and the the kind of process and journey that we've been on and so I wanted to talk about what do you do with the false teeth because actually I did find us standing in a room thinking well what do you do with the false teeth after he passed away on the 1st of February which I like to think of as my dad's very personal Brexit action really the fact that it was the 1st of February and we were no longer as part of Europe we just thought well that's it now then so I like to think it was his last Brexit protest but never mind so but so hopefully this is not going to be a depressing chat about dementia but I've learned a load of stuff over the last eight months and I just wanted to try and share some of that and if anything of your viewers and listeners chimes with them that they may do I just think that will be great because I've learned an awful lot over the last eight months so as a kind of very brief sort of intro to this my dad was 88 when he passed away in February but the previous eight months prior to that in December 2018 he'd been diagnosed with vascular dementia but he'd probably had it a little bit before then and so there's lots of things that I've learned and trying to realize over the last few months that we could do better and my parents live in Leicester I live in London and you know we had a great relationship but not one where we were on each other's doorsteps and I think that that also played a part in some of the stuff that I've had to do lately and also I don't have any brothers and sisters so I've gone through the whole thing you know with great support from family and some very close friends but actually you end up it's good and bad because at least you can make decisions and make them but you don't have anybody else that can help you make them or do the running around or share part of the burden of doing all this so it's a it's a bit of a fine balance so my so my wonderful dad got vascular dementia and as a just a very brief where where I got to I was away in the states for business trip and found that my mother who is 86 and decided to crash a car marvellous broken cat excellent spent a week in hospital came out with a comedy normal wisdom cast legs straight in front of her foot in the air and then when she came home and she then probably had a stress heart attack because obviously my dad was still living at home and we can talk about the care in a minute but and she was his main carer really and they've been married for 66 years so a long time a long time to be together really you think you get less is a prison sentence in some cases but there you go so long time to be together and so she then spent a month in a convalescent hospital recovering from the you know her leg and heart attack and that left me in a position of working out what to do with my dad now and I think one of the reasons I think it's important to talk about this is that we prepare ourselves for so many things whether it's work a new job even our holidays we prepare and plan for things children whatever it might be but I'm not entirely sure because I did not do this I didn't plan for what I had to do for my parents when they became old and needed my help and needed you know and became incapable of making their own decisions for my dad my mom is still my mom is fantastic very bright fit now no longer driving thank the lord but back at home and is getting on really well and so she's she's having a sense of enjoyment about it in her life now because a lot of the burden is gone of looking after my father under stress levels and while she misses him she's great so that's good so I find myself in a position of suddenly having to trust all of the services that that you you you read in that you hear about and my my parent mum and I are very normal I don't have a particularly privileged background or anything so you know it there wasn't necessarily a lot of money for care and I can tell you one thing now care for elderly is incredibly expensive so going along that and and also how you both like homes and and people coming in people coming in so and you can get the help from the your your your council and your local social service and adult social services and so on but it is and unfortunately I was in position to be able to help them but it is quite if you don't plan for it it can be quite it's a very unplanned high expense and so I think what I I wanted to talk about to people where there are some things I've learned along the way and who to go to for help if you find yourself in a position and so we can talk about the finances I think first of all because I have a one thing I would encourage people to do is one of Karen's top tips here is get a house of tourney for your parents they only ever get used if they need to be used you can't do that as early as possible as early as possible because you don't use them until you need to use them you know you can't just suddenly get one and then decide to use it the next day if your parents have you know have all their faculties there are two there's health and welfare and then there's finances so get pairs of attorney for both of those for your parents because I have that for my mum but didn't have it for my dad and so when he when he was diagnosed with dementia formally it then changes the whole landscape of what you can and you can't do for somebody and you have to look after the interests of both of them and this is something else I've come to realise as well that when one person you can't make decisions for them they become award if you like of the the court of protection and the social services that they make decisions with you but ultimately they make decisions in the best interest of the person that they are in effect caring for and they may be very different they may be different decisions from yours fortunately that didn't happen to me but you could find yourself in an interesting position so in terms of looking at financing these these um these options how do you do you have to ask permission you have to ask permission from your parents presumably to do that so it's gets us a conversation they have to agree to it they have to they have to agree to it and you know it's a couple of grand a part really to get them into play so it but it's so worth doing because it allows you to make decisions because I find myself in a position where we were looking at you know could we sell the house to to then pay for care but of course at that point then when they jointly own the house you can't do anything because they won't allow you to make decisions to sell a house which partly my dad's name and partly my mom's to protect his his interest in the house and so I would have had to have made an application to the court um to apply to sell the home on his behalf and my mother's behalf and they don't give that willingly and that's a by the time you've done that that's another five or six thousand pounds to make an application for something that's very likely not going to succeed so right you need to you need to kind of balance that out with with doing something fairly simple and getting a power of attorney because it does give you the ability to make decisions for them um and once you get the council involved who are fantastic in Leicester by the way um it you become to have very different conversations and when this happened and I was on a business trip and my mom was in hospital I arranged for full-time care for him at home by the carers he had coming in for half an hour every day to get him up in the morning and dressed and my mom would take care of him for the rest of the day etc so I arranged for them to come in for full time while I was in the States and until I got back and then we found another solution see what was going to happen to my mom etc because at that point she was broken her leg was was out for a week or so but then of course she was then out for much longer and we started to go through money having full-time carers at home because you have to have nighttime care for my dad as well it just started to eat through their savings at a rate of knots and so I had to come up with a solution to protect everybody's interest and I then sort of put him into respite care for a month everybody is entitled to a free month's respite care over a certain time and he had and so I found a home close to where they live where he went for it's you know in the beginning just for a month to give everybody a break and while my mom was away he could be there being well looked after she could not have to worry about him he could concentrate on getting well and then we would see where it was ultimately he ended up staying in that care home but that decision you know the adult social services are the people that you talk to and they will find a home that can take somebody with particular needs and so it had to be a home that was happy to care for somebody with vascular dementia and so he ended up going there on something like the 12th of June of last year that went when you were trying to convince somebody with dementia to leave their house it's very difficult because the world gets quite small and that's possibly the worst conversation I've ever had with anybody to try and convince my dad to to leave the house and go to the care home and he ended up viewing it as a holiday when he got there it was very nice they were lovely to him and so he felt very comfortable and I can't speak highly enough about the care home he did go to and he ended up staying there then so he ended up moving on the 12th of June essentially for a month and then staying there until he he died on the first of Feb but they were fantastic to him um so he ended up staying there but one of the things I have realized in my absence because I think lots of us live our lives like this I think you're different loads because you you you work closely with your mum don't you as well she works with you in your office doesn't she she works in the office yeah see that's a great relationship to have I think a lot of us have long distance relationships and that um you when you're not there all the time another tip that I I realize is that people who are caring for people with dementia are very good at hiding it particularly of a certain generation and so when you turn up for a weekend you know for you go up to see them for a day or take take ed with me his grandson to see him um it's always great because they're pleased to see you it's new and you don't you notice changes but you don't understand the extent of the changes and I think that's if you have elderly parents and one of them is acting as the carer a main carer for the other really take some time to to listen I didn't listen enough I don't think or or observed well enough the kind of stress that my mum was under particularly at night because she would worry that you forget up in the middle of the night and I don't know go for a bit of wonder or fall down the stairs whatever it might be so I think that contributed to her whole issues that she had and so that would be living there it's quite hard to it's quite because there are everybody's always so pleased to see you when you go so you don't really see what it's like and people are very good at hiding it particularly because I think it's getting better these days but particularly certainly for people my mum's and dad's generation you know having something like dementia is something that you just didn't talk about or want people to know about so um yeah so we've got him into this care home thank you to adult social services are the people that you need to speak to and and did it via phone and just let's get him into a place because we need to to start the full time care at home to to protect any savings they had because it was the first month you said the first month was free and then the first month was free and then we looked at um we then looked at um him staying there and what that might look that might look like and so you know my dad went to a nice care home probably it's certainly not the worst probably not the best but it catered for all of his needs there are about 30 people there um three three three men that the rest were women and they were they were geared up to careful people with with dementia and and so on so they gave him excellent care and I have nothing I have no faults with any of the care he had there but what did come as a shock um I think to me is is when you you have to then start to fill in countless forms um and talk to social service and you end up doing things that you never expected to do so you know I formally signed away my dad's liberty because he was not once he got into the system and they realized quite how poorly he was um he was never ever going to come home again and that was a conversation that was difficult to have um with my mom he didn't he didn't he didn't realize that he was never going to come home again but once he was there you know there was that well he's going he will be staying here now and that's you know there comes then a point where you actually can't bring him home because you can't care for him you know and so I formally signed away his liberty um which is an interesting thing to do for your father um what is what does it actually mean it means that he keeps you can't leave the care home without authority from the care home they have to that they know so yeah he's there um for his own protection and his own safety um and his own well-being and one of the things I found is and there is his desire to keep people at home for as long as you can but being in the care home gave him back his dignity um actually because they know how to care for somebody um um you can struggle at home and it might be all right on the surface but there are things that you um you know certainly things that that they can do much better than than than I would ever think my mum would ever be able to do um particularly 80 art sorry yeah it's always that thing because I've got two of my grandmas both of my grandmas live and they're both 98 yeah and one is in Cape Town one is in London yeah it's great but the one in Cape Town always said do never send me to a care home oh don't send me to a care home yeah in the end she said I really would like to go to the care home yeah and so in the end she's in the care home now and um and she loves it actually I mean she hurt luckily her you know her mind's still there um she's got some other problems eyesight and all these things but but she gets really well looked after you know if food gets made for her you know all of all of those things I think she's better like she's better there than she would have done at home my other grandma she is in her own flat and we're going through she hasn't got dementia her mind's there but she still needs a lot of help and care and so my dad and um me and my wider family are all going through this thing of like you know we have to go see her you know you feel responsibility to see her she's like sod coronavirus I'm 98 I'm gonna die anyway come see me you know you're like uh and now she's like more like she's more than not being lonely than correcting coronavirus you know and I think loneliness yeah and loneliness is a big factor and that's the kind of thing that I worry about now as well is that now my mum's on her own you know is she gonna get lonely but she's actually a very um she likes her own company she's very self-sufficient in that way and so I'm becoming less worried about that um once you suddenly end up living on your own yeah I found um I found also that um so both of my grandmas that the magic well the magic but but the b word comes up a lot which is burden and you find that like older people don't want to be a burden that's right they don't yeah and they and that's part of not wanting to talk about things so I sort of felt my way through a system I knew nothing about so if if anybody's listening to this and they're thinking oh I've got parents about the same age get powers of attorney while you can before you're unable to because it does make your life easier about how you make decisions particularly financial decisions the one thing that you know I would also encourage people to do as well is get their grandparents online my mum fortunately is a silver surfer I love her for that because the fact that she has all her bank accounts online and oh yeah you know Jesus the debit card and the whole contactless thing I love because that gave me the ability that she gave me access to their online bank accounts then and that actually gave me some insight into what their incomes were with their with their um pensions from um you know their state pensions and their cover small private pensions so they so I actually have then an insight and understanding of what they had coming in and what to do with it and also you've got access as well so get people online I I love the fact that my mum does that because she's sometimes saying to me oh I've just been checking my bank account can you have a look see if this is right and I think yeah I can so um it's quite and is she on the yeah it's really cool and can you have a video call with her like is she on FaceTime or something like that no I was thinking of getting her an iPad actually that we could have FaceTime yeah um but but she but she's got a little tiny tiny very functional laptop and she does all of her banking and ordering online she orders online and and stuff for her food if she can get it delivered at the minute never mind and so that that's that's a real um that's a real bonus because that gave me some insight rather than having to fly through bits of paper know where bank account details are how do you get into it at least it's there in front of you and I got that so that was a good thing so I would encourage you know get powers of attorney and at least get them online with the bank accounts because you can then see them and that's helpful um when you're trying to sort out the best route forward um and so having got him um into the care home it then becomes a question of um paying for it you know so you know he gets a um an allowance people don't get an allowance from the the um social services they use their pension to pay for it but inevitably there's a top-up fee so as individuals and we're working on planning for things and looking to save on whatever um I found myself um which is fine and you pay it I'm not moaning it's not a moaning conversation it's a practical one I've suddenly contributing you know an extra thousand pounds a month to something I haven't budgeted for at all with no sense or understanding of how long that might go on for all right yeah and that that's and this is it and so you know this is in a a nice care home um but but um is probably um you know probably about the average that people will pay I would say so that's something to be mindful of yeah I also I guess it's something that just hits you straight away like you don't it's not like no um I'm planning for it it's like you don't ever want your parents to get ill obviously you never quite know and these things just happen straight away yeah so it's yeah it's must be quite like um yeah it is and I don't think you then you know the other thing that struck me is in in an around all of this in terms of suddenly being presented with car accident heart attack dad with dementia care home working at what we do um just all right let's go pile it on is any you're also working and thinking about your own career and how you balance that out and and how full your brain gets with stuff um that you you sort of have to process work things and make time for that but your mind is always elsewhere you know particularly waiting for the next phone call because once you know once I found that once my dad was in the care home there would be phone calls you know with the best will in the world you know he would be ill and had fun and talked to you I'd get phone calls in the middle of the night because he'd got up and gone for you know um so it's a very you know it becomes quite an all-consuming part of your day your life and and I don't think I hadn't realized how much of a sort of not stress maybe stress I don't know but it became a thing that was constantly there in my head that I was waiting waiting for the phone call that said um you know either my dad has died or something has happened or whatever it would be um and so it becomes a thing and you you don't know you don't know when it's going to end that's the other thing you know it's a very interesting sort of kind of limbo land it that you that you're in um yeah for that and for my mom as well you know so clearly um yeah yeah I haven't been through it obviously but it's obviously it must be quite strange because it's your parents your parents most of your life that came for you yeah right that's what you do and then you suddenly be then the tables are twitched and you become their carer and that's not something that I was I guess that kind of I think we all know well that's going to happen we never really concentrate on what that might mean and it's a very it's a very um very interesting position to find yourself in really uh that you begin to end up being the carer of your parents and the one that they you know suddenly want you to make all the decisions about and it's like oh you know um so another Karen's tip so when my dad was in the care home and he with his dementia so those people that have family members will probably with dementia know this but if you don't it can be quite so when my dad had dementia I learned very quickly that I may not be Karen when I used to go in that I could be somebody else maybe his sister um he'd get confused with the lady that ran the care home who's lovely um so I don't don't waste your time telling trying to tell somebody with dementia who you are if they think you're somebody else because it just gets everybody upset go with it I just went with it you know and it was and it you know the moments where there is clarity and and he knew who I was were fantastic um there was a time when I when I popped up down to see him um on my own and uh he was asleep when I turned up so um he woke up darling it's you I said yeah it is he sounds really lovely to see you I was priming newspaper he loved a newspaper we could read it he read it about eight times a day it's fine it's like so so um he's oh darling it's lovely to see you and then we'd fall asleep again so I'd sit there and kind of do my emails or you know just read the paper whatever and he'd wake up and he'd be so pleased to see me all over again that's true it's actually from my perspective quite pleasurable that somebody was pleased to see me twice that that you know in a day it was lovely so you kind of have to have to kind of go with things like that thinking no at least when he wakes up he's going to be really pleased to see me all over again I'd sit there going go to sleep again go to sleep again because you're going to it's actually quite nice when you are when somebody is so pleased to see you so I used to get that that was lovely um but it just it becomes a different environment to see to see your parenting often quite in person because they sit in community rooms and um which is lovely because I think living with other people when you have dementia is a good thing actually there's a lot more stimulus than there is at home with just my mum and dad on their own together being in a community in a care home is a much better environment I think you know mental stimulation so if you go and and somebody in your family gets dementia go whoever they think you are go with it it's just fine it's just fine does it take a while to like accept that no not for me I went with it quite quickly I went with it quite quickly actually so um yeah yeah so um and so back onto Karen's tip list so there's that go with that and back just to finish off the finances side of things clearly most of these days have a will just make sure they're up to date okay my arms were very simple my mum and dad's are very simple you know to each other um and it's just easier if you have all that in place um 100 you know just very simple thing but can make a huge difference um so as you go through all this I then have the um worry not the worry yeah the worry of my mum now being at home on her own um and ensuring that they get what they're entitled to in our in our um society that we live in we have um you know they've been playing national insurance all their lives etc to make sure that they got what they're entitled to is no mean feat so another tip is age UK they are a fantastic organization so age UK is not just there to or as other as other organizations are it's not just to live a hot food in a whatever age UK have financial lists that go around to talk to in this case my mum to all your parents and talk to them about the money they have what their entitlements are you know what their income is and then they will then with you and with your with my mum in this particular case go through and make sure they are receiving everything that they're entitled to within our social welfare system and that was a huge huge weight off my mind that a financial service professional for free of charge it is free of charge all right goes around and assesses all of the incomes look at the outgoings works out if my mum's entitled now to any um uh sort of extra care you know in sort of um an attendance allowance that kind of thing is she getting the right pension that she's getting is she receiving the widows pension bit from my dad they've run through and done all of that and make the application for you to the social services so they fill in these myriad forms that amazing you have to fill in and you and they know the right answers to put in we don't so when there are some particular questions they ask are quite nuanced and we we probably would fill them in in a slightly different way but they fill them in a way that they know the social services will understand and and I think um that was a huge help in making sure that my mum then when she's on her own has received all of her entitlements that she's that she's due and that's taken the worry of her worrying about being able to afford stuff when my dad sort of you know pension and etc um has gone and she's just back at her own stuff so that's that I cannot it's a good tip because a lot of people forget this like there are people who have been absolutely fantastic and um the person that goes to see my mum will email me and tell me what she's doing um and see your mum and stuff and yeah she goes around to see her and and then she has an appointment with her goes around and checks the application but they but what they do is they submit it and they follow it through the system for you as well they don't just fill it in walk off they fill it in take it submit it and monitor it all the way through and be there to help answer all the questions or anything that may come back it they are fantastic um and just found them I hadn't had a plan to go and talk to age UK it was my mum phoned them for to ask a question or something rather I can't remember what it was so um just by chance um and then she just clicked into this system and they were absolutely amazing as a charity incredible so that would be another tip get help and somebody somebody like age UK are are amazing absolutely amazing yeah what do you think what would your tip be now with like a lot of people not being able to go see their their elderly relatives now with um well like that's gonna be tough right it's very true you know and I have to say if this doesn't sound a bit like not weird you know my dad died on the 1st of Feb and his funeral was on the 18th of February do you know what I'm glad it's not now a month down the line you know um because I'm not quite I'm not entirely sure how this is going to work because I wouldn't have been able to go and see him no yeah I wouldn't have been so I you know tough now I'm thinking about getting my my grandma um a dongle and an iPad so she we can do this yeah like we don't really want to go around and infect her even though she wants us around it's Mother's Day this weekend and my mum said to me she's not coming are you thinking about it don't bother she's not really fit and healthy she doesn't know you are but don't bother coming around I thought all right then but but I think so for my mum on you know I think care homes are different places where they have to protect all of the residents I was going to say inmates but that's we're doing so politically incorrect so please can we take that off the recording you have to have some humor we can't edit it we can't edit it so the residents so they have to protect them as well but but in terms of um of my mum so she's she's got she's online and so um my phone is nearly every day and as does as does Ed my my son he phones her nearly every day I go and see her when I can um she's got I think it's the one thing that that um I have noticed um which is is heartening um is how um the neighbors are playing their part in in looking after I mean they've lived in this particular where they've lived for 40 plus years and so um she's got you know four or five neighbors that just go around and knock on the door anyway forget this current amazing and say is there anything we can get you to take you out and so she's um it becomes a very interesting balance I think because you know she's she's fit um as an 86 year old lady can be um but she's quite frail so it becomes but she's got all of her marbles entirely and so it's a very difficult thing having just done it with my dad who who was you know who has had dementia and clearly um was not able to make decisions for himself um yeah yeah so my mum's sharp but physically are getting a little frail if you see what I mean yeah yeah so it it's not worrying about that a bit but so no and then we've got challenge of uh yeah of course going around but I mean the community sounds great and I think a lot of uh of community is pulled together I mean I know in our area there's a Facebook group and we've we're messaging um people that are living on their own who are who are older to help them out and stuff yeah um and then with this technology so the video stuff and yeah if older people can get into it then it's one of those things that you know I like technology and I've always been a fan of it and I know it's got the downside with social media but actually at times like this um it is in it's a very powerful tool if you can get people hooked into it because it that face-to-face conversation and contact even though it might be through the screen is really important isn't it that that's sort of being able to see somebody as well as just hear them um and so you know I've got an older iPad knocking around here actually and I thought you know what when I look in next turn up which will be post this event clearly um I might go and get a hooked up on FaceTime because that'll be easy for others then um definitely I mean I'm thinking I might go and I might need to do my grandma like tonight or tomorrow um yeah and uh but we'll say yeah no it's it's great to use technology so I think that that's so it is a question of getting ready for stuff to be thrown at you so make sure they've got wills get powers of turning in place for them um um you know listen look hard look hard at what's happening in in your parents' household you know I'm I had a great relationship with them but didn't probably look hard enough as to how stressful and difficult it was for my mum yeah and I I'm I'm a bit peeved with myself for that if I'm honest um because people's behaviors change and um I think that I noticed that um there was always that desire to make sure that people saw my dad as he as he always had been seen um in terms of being a very very handsome little tall guy um and that kind of that gentlemanly facade that he had um my mom wanted to maintain and and that stopped her asking for help so you have to be really careful that you you make sure that you that they you watch and listen um because I don't think I did that hard that well enough if I'm honest you know so I think yeah yeah the signs and clues there that now I would have picked up on and and um uh so that that's and you know throw yourself onto the it must be when you're going through it it's uh yeah but it's also but you know and and also I think you people need to if this starts to happen to them they need to be very honest with their work colleagues um about that they're going through it okay so because it mentally your brain gets full of stuff stuff that you might never have to have dealt with before and and and actually you have to sort of start to be a bit um judgmental about what's more important and and we all tend to put work first I think we have this desire I think um to to make sure that we maintain um our working lives in the facade that we have in our working lives and that and that becomes a um quite important part of what we do every day but when you get something coming at you at the side like this and you're coping it's trying to learn about dementia you're trying to navigate your way through social services um you're trying to deal with you know other people in the families of nieces and nephews and my mum not really coming to terms with the fact what they can and can't do after a certain point for my dad because he's no longer there to do things for you know he's in a different space um and that his best interest may not be what they see as being his best interest and that's a very difficult scenario sometimes and so I treated this like a um an operational exercise it's the only way I could deal with it was to treat it like a business problem and and and punch it down into things and problems that I could solve problem solving that I could go and solve those problems and then try to not let them get to me so that meant that I could then do everything else we're still supposed to be doing so um at some point you do get the chance to be a bit more emotional about everything but but I found to cope with stuff and then was to problem solve it all and try not to feel too much when you're going through the process because the other thing I've never done before was then um you know when when he did um die was was it was then very much my mum said well you know you can sort out the funeral now I'm like great never had to do that before either so and again you know that's a how does that work so um I hadn't I hadn't done this before which is where I came to with the false teeth was when I cleared my dad's room out you know after he died and gone to the undertakers um you know the things get left in the room and you know and you are confronted with a set of false teeth wrapped in a in tissue and it's like Jesus I know of all the things I was expecting to do was not necessarily throwing my dad's false teeth away but that's why I did but so it's kind of for me it's one of those things that you know is quite um it's not funny well it is it is funny but it's also like oh god really and you just have there are things that you you have to do and um face and and work out and one of them is sorting out you know funeral arrangements um and so the good old co-op in Leicester on counter silver in Leicestershire was was where we went average cost of a funeral I think these days is about four grand so that's got to come from somewhere um I think you there is an entitlement I think um depending on where you are and in the social care scale that you can apply um there's a pension credit um there's a a funeral service burial credit I think that you can get um if you apply for it but um but you're looking about four grand an average price I found not being too fancy um and then and then you sort of sort of take it from that the only other thing that really surprised me and this might people might think what is she talking about but I've told a couple of friends and they've gone yeah so when you see movies and TV programs and then somebody's got a mantelpiece and they've got a nice sit learn on it that says who's that that's great uncle Arthur and they kind of pick him up and they hold him whatever it is let me tell you when you pick up because I never expected this I've never clearly done this before I don't know what I was expecting some kind of I don't know dust I don't know sand you know what I mean kind of anyway so I picked up his um remains because he was cremated from the undertaker and I was expecting I don't know Lewis I don't know but crisp back size what do you mean sort of I don't know so what you actually get is something the size of a shoebox um that is sealed clearly um inside it is a paper bag sealed signed as these are the um of your loved ones remains yeah but it's enormous it's like two bags of flour together and it weighs the same so you get given so I kind of thought it was some delicate dust kind of you know thing and so now when people say oh I'm going to go and scatter my dad's remains I'm thinking hang on a minute it's be like for me it's like I've seen from the great escape where you've you've dug in a tunnel and you're letting it you know there's a huge huge bag of remains which is something I was not expecting you know she gave me this box and I'm like I'm a big strong girl what are you seeing here how many people are in here you know who's your dad really really so um it's that that really sort of didn't shock me but it made me think wow who knew who knew that's what you get I mean it is it's something that you you don't expect you don't expect it you expect something delicate and light and I don't know sort of a little uh China you can get that if you're going to have them interred somewhere and stuff but um so I don't know months if we'll go and scatter him somewhere I thought we'll be there all day scattering him it's going to take us hours like so we have to decide what to do with to do with him I love him dearly by the way blessing but it's like really it's an enormous box it's nothing light and fluffy and and powdery it's enormous so be prepared for that one as well because that took me a bit by surprise really you know they're giving me like the whole week's worth but no it's just my dad you have to I found that you you know I found that humor helps me get through this if I'm honest because you just think about it again I mean you think about it in a very positive way and yeah it is and um you know there's been some points over the last few months where I had some very lovely quiet moments with my dad just here and I and then some moments where it's just you know it's just been um you have to stick the humor in it because if not it's just it's just too depressing I think to to when you see somebody that you um have of my my dad was um a sportsman cricketer and uh fantastic as well and some of my friends will know because they've seen me the postings I've done about him and his career um so at a time when sportsman played sport for love and not for money I'm sure they played for these days still there's a lot more money involved and so it was quite well known in his time um but but so and I think it's a very shocking thing with dementia that you can see somebody that was so talented and and and fit and healthy and but he's a six-four big guy lovely um sort of reduced to a a shell of who they were and and the things that they forget and I think for me the saddest thing was when he forgot about cricket he made it all his life and then became an umpire and stuff and he just forgot about cricket and your memories just get reduced to very early days a fact you remembered things from his childhood and when he talked about home he didn't mean the home you know his house he meant the home that he grew up in so you have to kind of kind of keep a bit of head thinking when you see how's the home you think that which one we're talking about so it changes your whole relationship with them changes and um and it's it's incredibly sad to see it's the most cruel disease it's the most cruel disease I think I've ever seen that what it takes away from people yeah well it sounds like you have um dealt with it really well I just wanted to to share with some people that that you know if they're in the position where they've got elderly parents to make your lives easier there are some really simple things you can do and there's power of attorney but will's power of attorney um think about finances as well and think about what their finances look like and where where top-up fees might come from and how you get through that um because uh you know if you think about it now it's going to be easier to put in place when you need to because it um and then have an understanding that you have no idea how long it will go on for it is finite clearly but you just don't know when that point is and I think that um you know need to factor that in and plan for it plan for that because I didn't um plan for it at all really um and and listen and be observant about how behaviors may be changing in in your parents home when you go back even if it's for a day you know or for a couple of days or whatever because there are clues there that I sort of kind of must have blithely sort of ignored maybe I chose to ignore them because it I was trying to push a problem further down the line and if I'm honest I probably did that a bit I stuffed it down the line a bit um yeah because that's really noticeable and then look to where you can get help because there is loads of help out there and I cannot shout out enough how fantastic age UK are so they were great well well let's place them on you know yeah we'll we'll um we'll add them on there on linkedin and stuff and then we'll put it in the uh in the comments yeah because I can't tell you how how fantastic they've been in in in being positive and helping to ensure that that you know certainly for my mum that's left that she is she is um uh receiving what she's entitled to receive within our welfare system um and because we just do not know how to do that I you know it's a mine no actually we don't want to find out yeah you know between the social services department to work on pensions and whoever it might be and it's very easy to get lost in the system um so they were fantastic so a big shout out to them um and then just talk to your friends talk to your friends and your family about what you're going through and work because it will have an impact on your working life and I think we all like to pretend that none of these things matter oh sorry that's not the right word none of these things um are going to um distract you but they do they really do um and and you know no amount of stiff upper lip is is going to sort of get you through you need to talk to your to your work and your colleagues just so that they know if you're in a bad mood or a bit techy or tired or you haven't done something it's not necessarily because you're you don't want to it's just that your brain's full of other stuff so um it's worth it's worth letting people at work know you know in a confidential way if you if you need to um but I have found it massively helpful to talk about dementia um and the other thing I'm now manic at whether it makes any difference or not although a couple of my ex-colleagues in school on the life side assure me that the learning a new language is a fantastic way to reconnect neurons in your brain and whatever um to keep my Italians coming on um but I started to take a bit of an interest in in how our brains work and and um you know fearful that it's made me realize how important having your senses and your faculties are it's an incredibly important you know and and when you get older you know my dad was very fit um but but had dementia whereas my mum is a bit frailer but has all her marbles and I know which category I'd rather be in because at a certain point your enjoyment of life comes out of all the stuff that you interact with the people you see the places you go the things you read and that you look at and you feel and you take in and and uh that's a massive thing so I do brain training every day good good love it love it this is great right like like talking to people is also like they get you know like not just like not just going in front of your phone on the social media but actually engaging look up and look out and and just um yeah and pick up hobbies and stuff that you used to love years ago and and just you know try and get a bit of balance but but use but use your brain not just at work use it differently because once you lose the ability to enjoy the view out the window or the you know I think my dad saw what was outside and that it was sunny but didn't really take pleasure from what he saw outside anymore if that makes sense yeah yeah you know yeah well thank you very much for sharing I really appreciate it it's a bit unstructured which I apologize but we like that and um yeah sit down please and it's all good I mean people love hearing people's stories because it's your personal story your journey you've shared it which is great and it's going to help a lot of people a lot of people go through it you know if it means that one person thinks I've got those power of attorney forms oh sorry I've got those attorney forms must get assigned sign them yeah no definitely because it's going to help thank you guys thank you no thank you um and I wish you well over the uh the um I would say well over the virus but well over being uh at home and all this and you and you know um I'm sure hopefully you know we get to do this again face to face um absolutely this is a great way to do to do something and and hopefully um yeah hopefully some people will listen to it and and and take something away from it really but um I've been wanting to talk about it for a while and thank you very much for giving me a bit of a platform to do that pleasure pleasure okay thank you very much


All right. Welcome, everyone, to today's Webmaster Central Office Hours Hangouts. My name is John Mueller. I'm a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google in Switzerland. And part of what we do are these Office Hour Hangouts, where people can join in and ask any question related to the website and web search. And we can try to find some answers. Looks like people are still jumping in, which is cool.  But as always, if any of you want to get started with the first question, you're welcome to jump in now. Hi, John. Hi. How are you? Pretty good. How are you? I'm good. John, I have two questions. So one of the question is about one of our clients. We are trying to build a new website for them. Now, when we did some computer research, we have found some of our computer. They build a website that will be different to it. For example, they create every single page for every single type of search term. For example, GardenShift Sydney, they create one page. Then GardenShift Cell Sydney, they create another page. And those pages actually rank on Google. And each page has a lot of content. Now, I don't know whether it is the best practice to do or not, because if we try to create a page in this way, the website will have more than 5,000 pages. So what is the best practice? What we can do? Yeah. So in general, if you're just creating pages for variations of keywords and you're all guiding people to the same content, then we would consider that doorway pages. And that would generally be something that the web spam team and the search quality team wouldn't be very fond of. So that's something I would try to avoid. On the other hand, if you really have unique content that you can bring for individual variations of keywords, then that might be something you can do. In general, my recommendation is to try to limit the number of pages that you have on a website to focus more on quality and to make those pages that you do have much stronger. So instead of taking a website that's ranking OK and diluting it by creating 10 times or 20 times the amount of pages out of the same content, make those pages that you do have much stronger instead so that they rank better. So that's the balance where I would tend to go more towards concentrating the value on those pages, making them stronger. So that they can rank better for the more competitive queries. And if you want to expand from that, then I think that's generally fine. I just wouldn't go the extreme of saying, I will create pages for all variations of keywords, because probably you're just making it so that a page that ranks kind of in the middle of the pack, I guess, would suddenly, because it's so diluted, just not rank at all in the search results. So you might appear in the search queries for some of those keywords, but nobody's searching for those long tail variations that often. So it's not really that valuable. And the last question is, this is also for the same client. So they actually sell GardenShade. So when we search GardenShade on Google, we have noticed that fast 15 websites are e-commerce websites, except our one. So is this something Google decide, OK, for this keyword, they will only give importance to the e-commerce website? Because my client's website is a little bit different. What they do, if people see their product, they can use the created quote option. They contact with them and give them code. They don't give the price on their website. So it is a little bit different from all the e-commerce website. So is this something Google always decide, OK, for this keyword, the e-commerce website will get the most benefit? Is there something like this? It's not so much that we would say, for individual keywords, we would prefer e-commerce websites, but we do try to understand what the intent behind the query is. And if we can tell that the intent is something where the user wants more information, then maybe we'll show more informational pages. If we can tell that the intent is more commercial, more transactional, that they want to buy one of these things, then maybe we'll show commercial pages more. But I think the difference that you're looking at is more that both of these types of pages are commercial pages. It's just one that lets you buy it right away, and the other one has maybe a more detailed process to buy the product, which, from my point of view, those could be equally valuable. It's really hard for me to say that I would assume our algorithms wouldn't differentiate between those two. They would say, these are both e-commerce websites. One is just you call them, or you send them an email or fill out a form to get to buy the product. And the other one, you go and click the button to add it to your cart to buy the product. But they're both e-commerce websites. So if someone is looking for something with a commercial intent, then both of those kinds of sites would be relevant to show. Thank you. I think the bigger effect is probably more what happens afterwards when people come to your site, if they're able to convert well. That's something that's more, I guess, within the control of the site owner, and less something from the SEO side that they have to worry about them. So you are trying to tell that the algorithm decide based on the intention of the user. So if user prefers e-commerce website for that keyword, that means you are trying to rank e-commerce website for that keyword. It's not so much e-commerce websites, but we try to understand what the intent is. And if the intent is really to buy something, then we will try to show something where they can buy something. And a lot of times that intent can shift. For example, if a completely new kind of product comes out on the market, then if you search for that, initially, you want information. And then maybe a couple months later, when it's available broadly, then people want to buy it. So the same query can, at one point, be informational. And at some later time, be more transactional, more commercial oriented. Thank you. All right. Any other questions before we jump into the submitted ones? Sure, I just had one, actually. So I have a few clients in the same industry. And over time, they've actually started working with each other like naturally. But as the webmaster of these multiple sites and that network is starting to grow a bit more, is there anything in particular I need to do so that Google doesn't think I'm doing a PBN or something because they're all closely related, for example, a hotel that sells the tours of the other company I work with? I think, in general, that's less of an issue. We're able to understand when sites work together, when sites belong to the same company, all of that. And that's generally less of an issue. If you're cross-linking between these kind of sites, that sounds pretty reasonable. On the other hand, if it comes across as something that's clearly an advertisement, then that might be something where you just use a no-follow link. So if you have something that looks like a banner on top that says, you can book, I don't know, special tours here, and it looks like an advertisement, then I would just treat it like an advertisement. OK, yeah, we don't really use any banners like that, but we do have, say, like a ticket product page on the hotel's website. And that goes to the tour provider, for example. But it sounds like Google's good enough now.  Yeah, I think, for the most part, we can figure that out. And especially if it's something that's kind of on the edge like this, then I wouldn't worry about it too much, because if we figure out that this is something we need to ignore, then we will ignore it. It's not that we will go in and penalize these websites from a web spam point of view. It would be different if this were something that were done in a really large scale. It was like if you're going to all other tourism sites and you're essentially buying links from them and you're doing some partnerships with individual sites, then that would be something where if the web spam team looks at it, they're like, the whole nature of this website is around unnatural links. Therefore, we will take action on all of these unnatural links. But if it's like this small part where you're just working together with other companies and the rest of your website is kind of ranking naturally, then that's not something I would spend too much time worrying about. OK, cool. Yeah, thanks a lot. That's good to know, because one of them is a hotel chain, and they need separate websites for each location. So yeah, I just wasn't sure how to handle that. Yeah, that works great. Cool. All right, let's go through some of the submitted questions. And as always, if there's something on your mind that's kind of related, feel free to jump on in. And we should have some time towards the end as well to catch up on other things. When we search a brand name, Google shows our terms and conditions type page and site links. Is there any way not to show it? So the simple answer is if you don't want this page to be shown in search, you can use an Oindex on that page that does remove the page completely from search, though. So that's kind of the extreme variation if you don't want it shown at all. But that's how you can do it. The other approach here might be to think about what you can do to make it clear that other pages within your website are more relevant. So to make it so that the terms and condition page is still indexed, but to make it clear perhaps that maybe some related products are more relevant rather than the terms and conditions page. And the general approach when it comes to site links is to have a clear hierarchy on the website so that we can clearly understand, like, this is the primary page. This is the top level categories. These are pages associated with that category, those category pages, to have kind of a clear structure on your website, rather than just everything on the same level. So instead of focusing on kind of reducing crawl depth to make everything as flat as possible, which is sometimes something that people focus on, make sure that there's a really clear structure on your site, and that structure is mirrored across your whole site. So wherever we look at your site, we can understand, this is the home page. These are the top level categories. These are the important parts of the site. And these are pages that are related to individual parts of the site. And by doing that, usually we can figure out which pages are more relevant to show as site links. As recommended, we switched our breadcrumb markup from data vocabulary to schema. The website in question is redirecting users from the root domain to the corresponding language folder. So domain.com redirects to slash en or slash de, depending on IP address. Search Console now shows an error under navigation for the root folder. This seems to happen because a crawler follows a redirect, in this case to en, and then tries to use the data found on en for breadcrumb markup of the home page, which of course is not working. Shall we remove the breadcrumb markup from first level language folders or D of other ways of getting rid of this error in Search Console? So I don't really know which error you're seeing in Search Console, so it's really hard to say what you should do next. In general, though, if you're talking about your home page, probably there's not a lot of breadcrumb markup that you need to put on your home page because there's no trail leading to your home page. So from that point of view, that might be an easy solution. The other thing to keep in mind is that if you're always redirecting Googlebot's IP addresses to slash en because we crawled from the US, then we might have trouble indexing your DE folder at all. So that's something to kind of watch out for. Usually my recommendation is more to use a banner and let people go to the right language version rather than to automatically redirect them because by automatically redirecting, you're kind of running into situations like this across the whole site where you link to one version and then it redirects to a different version. And then if you check it at home, like if you're based in Germany, you check it at home, it looks completely different than what Googlebot would see when it crawls from the US. So because of all of these things, usually I recommend just using a banner and showing that when you think a user is in the wrong location. We do a lot of Google Ads marketing, and we're running millions of ads. Usually it results in waves of requests from Google Adsbot. To have a stable user experience for customers, we dramatically scale our infrastructure once these waves are coming. Is there any way to nicely throttle Adsbot? Will it affect us negatively if we respond with 429? Just a second. Will it affect us negatively if we respond with 429 or 503 to some Adsbot's request? So in general, there are two approaches that you can do with regards to crawling activity overall. So Adsbot runs on the same infrastructure as Googlebot, so you can use the same tools as normal Googlebot for that. On the one hand, serving at these kind of temporary errors like 503 is a good way to automatically kind of throttle Googlebot and let it kind of crawl less. Another option is a setting in Search Console. The setting in Search Console for the crawl rate is something that we respect across all crawlers. And we prioritize crawlers a little bit. So if you throttle things and you have a lot of kind of irrelevant requests, then probably what will happen is we will still do our important crawls first. And then we'll just do fewer of these less relevant requests. And generally speaking, that might probably include the Adsbot landing page checks that are done. So that's another option that you can do. And finally, what you can also do, if you're seeing that things are consistently confusing and crazy with regards to crawling, and especially if you're seeing really high crawl rates in your site, generally is able to deal with that. Better cost a lot of money in all of these things. Then from the crawl stats page, help page in the Help Center, there's a link to a special form that you can fill out, which goes to the Googlebot team, where they can take a look and see if there's something on their side that they need to tune specifically for your site. All of these methods take a bit of time. So 503s are probably the fastest way to get Googlebot to crawl a little bit less frequently. But usually the reduction in crawl rate will happen on the next day, or the day after that. It happens automatically over time. The setting in Search Console also takes at least a day to be effective.  So those are kind of the options there. I'm working in travel, and we're massively affected by COVID-19. We had to stop all marketing campaigns, and that resulted in no traffic from Googlebot. To reduce cross, we also scaled down infrastructure. A week ago, we started a campaign on two of the 20 domains that resulted in huge traffic from Googlebot to all of our domains, and to the pages which are not currently advertised. The adbot also checks the same page on every domain every five seconds for four to five hours. So that last bit sounds kind of strange. I don't know why that would happen, but I also don't know how the adspot setup is. But generally, the advice here is kind of the same as before in that you essentially limit the amount of crawling that Googlebot can do. You can do that in Search Console. Probably is part of the easiest way to do that ahead of time if you're kind of in the state of less crawling happening at the moment. So that's probably the direction that I would head there. During the course of the last four years, we migrated our website to a new domain five times. Wow, OK. After the last migration, our most important page has dropped in rankings for all its keywords. Other pages on the same website have recovered their rankings without problems. The important page was ranking for top five for several years and during the previous domain migrations also recovered without problems. Indicates that the page is meeting the needs and the search queries of our target audience. The migration was done technically. This ranking drop feels more like an algorithmic penalty. The website doesn't have any manual actions. We have a feeling that we might be affected by a page level algorithmic penalty. Do you have any idea, thoughts on what might have happened to our website? So overall, it's really hard if you do this many migrations over such a short period of time. So that makes it a lot harder to kind of come to a situation where you have clear expectations of what would be normal in a case like this with a website and what, I don't know, broke along the way. If you're doing this many migrations, oftentimes it's also a sign that something kind of shady is around the website. I really don't know your website. I don't know why you're doing so many migrations, but this is something that we really commonly see. For example, when a site is kind of in a spammy area and they do some things on one domain and then suddenly that domain doesn't rank that well anymore and then they move to the next domain and they kind of do the same things and it doesn't work that well anymore and then they move to the next domain. So that's kind of something that personally I've seen quite a bit happen. I don't know if that's the case with your website. Maybe there are other reasons why you're doing so many migrations. But that's kind of the first thing where if I came across something like this with regards to a website, I would be kind of cautious. In general, we have algorithms that do all kinds of things. It's not the case that we would have an algorithm that would try to manually penalize a single page on a website. But it's certainly possible that over time that the algorithms will look at your website and rank it differently and kind of adjust its visibility over time. Whoops, now we have a coffee grinder in the other room. The fun parts of working at home. So from my point of view, I don't think that's something that is kind of tied to a penalty specific to a page. That's something where personally I would try to take a step back and think about what you can do overall to improve those pages. Can I just ask a follow-up question? Because this is my question. Oh, fantastic. Yeah. So the reason for migration is not some kind of spam lanes or something like that. The reason is we don't really want to migrate our domain. But there has been a problem with the legislation in the country we have our domain in. And so we are forced to migrate our website so many times. And the website is generally doing very good. But when the government comes in court, there is some kind of problem we need to resolve this way because there is no other way to resolve it. So we really don't know what we are supposed to do right now. We know that it's not ideal to have these many migrations. But since there is no other way, is there something we can do to improve it or to recover from these massive drops? Yeah, I think there's always a tricky situation I'm happy to take a look if you want to post the URL that you're seeing these problems with, maybe in the chat. I can pass that on to the search quality team as well to double-check. But usually, if you're seeing this kind of an effect on a single page across a bigger website, then that sounds like something where the algorithms are just generally unsure about the website overall. And that might be a side effect of all these migrations where we have to pass the signals from one domain to the next one. And at some point, it can happen that something along the way doesn't forward that well anymore. So if some of the redirects along the way don't work anymore, if some of the old domains don't work anymore, then suddenly we lose a little bit of context that we might have had collected with more persistent setup. But I'm happy to take a look and pass that on to the team. You can post it here. And I can check that out after the Hangout. Yeah, that would be great. It would be very helpful. Thank you very much. OK, cool. Thanks. I have a client in a highly competitive market where being in the Mapbox can mean the difference between success and failure. How does the quality of the website affect the position in the Mapbox? So I think Mapbox probably refers to the Google My Business listings. From our point of view, I don't really have a lot of insight into how Google My Business does the ranking within their local search results. I don't really have that much insight that I can give you there. But I do know there are special forums for Google My Business owners. I would double check there. It's very possible that some of the folks active in these forums have some tips and tricks and things that work well, things that don't work well. I doubt that there is a clear list of ranking. So many people. Yeah, I doubt that there is a clear list of ranking factors when it comes to Google My Business that the Google My Business team would be able to just get. So on March 23rd, we used the indexing API to submit 50,000 salary pages that didn't contain job posting data to Google. During the indexing API beta, we were told that we could use the API to submit salary pages for purposes of the estimated salary. On the same day, we saw our pages with job posting schema get de-indexed. You recently mentioned on Twitter that the indexing API is only for job posting and live stream structured data. For everything else, just use sitemaps. Could this be the root cause of our job posting schema pages getting de-indexed? Going forward, we will not use the indexing API for salary pages. Can you confirm that if this is the root cause of the job posting schema pages being de-indexed? Oh, that's awesome. So first of all, no, this wouldn't be the reason for existing pages to be dropped from the index. So when it comes to indexing API, essentially what happens is we have to crawl those pages to see what is on those pages, to see if the right structured data is on those pages. And if the right structured data is on those pages, then we can process those pages. Whereas if we look at those pages and don't find the right kind of structured data, then that's something where, essentially, we would just ignore what we just crawled. We wouldn't pass that on. We wouldn't use that for indexing. So in a case like this, where if you're submitting pages with the indexing API that don't have the right kind of structured data, we would just ignore that. It wouldn't negatively affect the other pages on your site that we already have indexed. So that's something where probably this kind of thing that you're seeing is completely unrelated. I have two sites that sell very similar products. But all the branding content and product descriptions are unique and written in a tone of the voice for that brand. However, the back end code and the website structure is the same for both sites. Would this cause duplication issues between the sites? It might. My feeling is that these, if you have two websites that are just slightly different, then that's not something where I would worry about that too much with regards to duplication, especially if they're focused on kind of a unique audience. So from that point of view, I don't really see a big problem here. I think it would be different if you have a lot of different websites that are essentially selling the same products. And that's something where obviously it makes it a little bit trickier for us to figure out which one of those pages to show. So again, going back to the multiple websites, if you have things that are essentially unique on their own, so if you have these two types of websites that are slightly targeting different things, I wouldn't worry about it. If you have a large number of them, then that's something that would probably be a bit different. Would it be considered abnormal for a relatively established site to no longer appear or receive impressions in Discover? Search Console is showing zero impressions clicks after getting hundreds of clicks and thousands of impressions daily. This happened immediately after a rather large and early November update that caused a stir, which would suggest a correlation, though not necessarily causation. So changes in visibility in Discover can happen over time. And we have lots of algorithms that essentially affect large parts of search and that would include Discover. So it's very possible that a site might for some time get a lot of traffic and visibility in Discover and over time our algorithms change and that visibility essentially goes away. Or it changes over time. It can also happen that your site currently doesn't have any traffic from Discover and over time we recognize that actually does make sense to show a little bit differently like that. We're thinking of changing the main nav anchors by removing gender specific terms and listing them as clean text under a dropdown for gender. For example, we currently have men's citizen watches. This would change to citizen's watches placed under a dropdown menu for men's watches. Would this affect the ranking of men's citizen watches? Or can the crawler understand the sub-nav dropdown? So usually we can understand the context of pages fairly well. And if you're just moving things around from direct anchor text to more indirect anchor text and that you're kind of shuffling the cabin queries around a little bit, then from my point of view, that seems like a reasonable thing to do. And it wouldn't necessarily be something where I'd assume like something negatively would come out of that. That said, anytime you do restructure your website, it does mean that we have to relearn the setup of your website a bit. And that can result in some ranking changes. So that's something where my general recommendation for these kind of things, if you're a little bit worried about that, would be to test it out and try it out on a small part of your website where you get significant traffic, but it's not a crazy amount of traffic. I'm running a website that deals in beauty care products for Thailand. After the last Google update, I noticed that the site ranking has dropped and noticed that all informative review-based YouTube, Facebook profiles started to show up on the first line of search results for a lot of research queries. My website was ranking almost all of the product pages, category of pages, and other pages. What's the issue is Google ignoring beauty products related to e-commerce websites and prioritizes informative sites if it is, and how can we bring back the ranking, or can you help me take a look? So in general, these kind of ranking changes can happen over time. That's not something where I would say Google's algorithms have decided to only start showing these kinds of pages, but rather we try to figure out which pages to show appropriately in search, and that can change over time. So that's something where it can certainly happen that a page, or a type of page, or a set of pages is ranking really well in search, and then over time, our algorithms try to figure out that maybe this set of pages isn't as relevant to these user queries as we initially thought, and we have to rethink that. Similarly, it can happen the other way around that our algorithm think, well, these set of pages actually are much more relevant now than we thought they were before, and maybe we should show them a little bit more, frequently, more visibly. We have the same database for two price comparison sites in two different countries, which we have shown in their native language. One site is extremely popular in its country, while the other is just a veteran in its respective country. Will it change anything if we implement HREF Lang? They're about 15 or 20-year-old domains. So I think from the age itself, I wouldn't see that as a factor here at all. With regards to just using HREF Lang to make one site more visible in the search result, that wouldn't work, primarily because what happens with HREF Lang is if we show the other version of the site in the search results, then we will swap it out based on the HREF Lang. If we're showing neither of these sites in the search results at the moment, then there's nothing for us to swap out. So you can't use HREF Lang to make a site more popular in a country based on the popularity of a similar site or the same site in another country. So essentially, what you would need to do here is really work to improve the standing of that one website in that specific country. And it's not something where you can just use technical methods to kind of tell Google, like, hey, I'm really popular in one country. You should make me really popular in all countries. That doesn't really work. That's not something that users expect either. It's something where you really need to make sure that your website is really well received in that country on its own. I've been waiting for two months to hear back from a reconsideration request. I submitted in February. Is this normal? How long should I wait? And when should I submit again? So sometimes reconsideration requests do take quite a bit of time. I think two months seems like a pretty long time. So I don't know if that's kind of still within the normal range, but it's still something where I'd say it can certainly happen, that it takes this amount of time to be reviewed. What I would do also in a case like this with the reconsideration request is to check in with the help forum to make sure that at least the site that you have, the way that you have it set up now, is as correct as possible with regards to the issues from the web spam site that came up. And oftentimes, the folks in the Webmaster Help forums, they have a lot of practice with all kinds of different sites. And they can help you to figure out how to make that actually work a little bit better. I have anchor text and backlinks from adult content sites. And some of my pages rank as highest position one for clearly adult content queries. As evidenced by the search results, is disavowing the adult content sites the best thing to do. I don't have any manual actions. You can definitely disavow these links if you want. In general, just because you have links from adult sites and just because you might be ranking for some of those queries doesn't mean that you would not be ranking for the normal queries on your website. So this is something where people often feel that this is kind of like negative SEO because I rank for these queries I don't want to rank for. But at the same time, if this wouldn't negatively be affecting the queries that you do want to rank for, which probably aren't these kind of queries. So from that point of view, that's something disavowing them probably makes sense. It kind of reduces the possibility that your site would rank for those queries. But just because it's ranking for one set of queries doesn't mean that it won't rank for other kinds of queries. It's not that we suddenly assume that your website is an adult website, too. Looking to get access to the 3D AR for Google Search and Google Ads program have applied through the forum, but I haven't heard back. I have nearly 1,000 products that we can upload for retailers who really need the extra help at this time. That's really cool. If you can send me a link to your site, I can double check with the team. I know the team that works on structured data has been really busy with a lot of the coronavirus launches that have happened recently. So it might be that they're a little bit stretched thin in this regard. But I'm happy to take a look and see if there's something that we can do to speed things up. In general, there maybe that's also something where we can just help the team with better documentation to set the expectations a little bit clearly. Are there ever webmaster events that are in North American time zones? They always seem to happen at 3 AM for me. I do two of these during the week, one of them towards evening my time, which is more US time, time zone friendly, and the other one here on Friday mornings, which is more time zone friendly for the Asia APAC folks. So depending on your location, one or the other is probably a good match. Is redirecting a root domain a bad practice? I found it's kind of common for multilingual sites since every language has their own subfolder. They have one for ENUS too. So they usually redirect the root folder to ENUS homepage. For example, IBM.com will redirect to IBM.com slash USEM. Is that a bad practice? So how should we handle this? Also, IBM seems to put their root domains as X default, even if it's a page that's being redirected. Is that a bad idea? So actually, the X default setup for something like this is something that we have documented and recommended. So if you have a redirecting homepage, then that is generally a good match for people who aren't within the hreflang set that you currently have. So for example, if you have pages for English, French, and German, and so on, with a Spanish browser comes to you, then it's usually a good idea for us to send them to your redirecting homepage. Because from there, you can best make that choice between where they should be guided to. So that X default part is essentially something that we would recommend there. Redirecting homepages, in general, like I mentioned before, is something that personally I don't like that much because it makes it a lot harder to diagnose issues. Technically, you can do it. You just need to keep in mind that if you're redirecting Googlebot from the language versions themselves as well, then it's possible that we would not see any of the non-English versions. So if you just redirect the root of the homepage to different language locations, like slash d-e and slash e-n, and if people go directly to any of these language versions, then they're not redirected, then that's generally OK. The hard part is really if you redirect people from the German version to the English version because you think that the English version is a better match for them, then it's very possible that Googlebot would have a lot of trouble finding and being able to index any of the non-English content. But that's kind of the second step there from the redirecting home page. What I usually recommend instead is to have a country picker either as a country picker page, which is also kind of tricky with regards to usability, or if you can recognize that a user is coming from a different location to show a banner on top and say, hey, it looks like you're coming from an English-speaking country. Here's a link to our English home page, or here's a link to the English version of this current page, and let the user make that decision. That usually makes it a lot easier on the one hand for users, on the other hand for search engines as well, because then we can crawl and index all of these different versions, and we don't kind of get sent in the wrong direction. Ooh, OK. Running towards the end of the Hangout, still a handful of questions left, but maybe I can switch over to questions from your side. If there is anything on your end, that's still pending. Hey, John. Hi. Yeah, I represent a pharma e-commerce brand in India. I had a couple of queries regarding that. So one of the queries is, we see a lot of discrepancy in location-specific keyword rankings. So we are an e-commerce brand. We operate across the country, but we see that for a generic keyword, which is not location-specific, we are ranking probably fourth in one city, but not in top 50 for a different city. Yeah, that can happen. So what are the issues or the causes or the solutions that you would recommend for this? I mean, usually that's a sign that our algorithms believe that users really want local information for those kind of queries in those specific locations. And that's something, if you don't have that kind of local information, that kind of local content, then that makes it possible for us to say, well, maybe we should show more local content instead of this kind of more general version of content. So from that point of view, it's not something where I would say you're doing something wrong, but rather it's like we, our algorithms believe that maybe your site isn't as relevant for those queries in those specific locations. And if you think that it is relevant for those queries and those locations, then that's something where you need to make sure that it's a lot clearer on your website that it is relevant for those queries and locations. OK, one specific thing that we have on the website is that our default location is a particular city. And for that particular city, the rankings are quite good. And that city is actually visible on the website, and that is indexed by Google as well. So do you think that this could be a problem wherein all the cities have all the users from different cities are exposed to this particular city? So should we remove the city and make it generic? Do you think would that solve the problem? That might help. So if there is one kind of city that you're already highlighting, and that's something where I could certainly imagine that that makes it a little bit trickier. So I know, for example, we had similar issues, or I don't know if there were issues. But I saw similar things with some classified sites in the US where they would show different content on their home page based on the location of the user. And they would try to do that on a city level. And that meant every time we crawled the home page, a lot of the content that they were presenting was based on San Francisco and Silicon Valley kind of area. And that essentially made it so that for us, the home page was very San Francisco-oriented. So even though they had content for all other locations, it was something where they were focusing so much on San Francisco with regards to the content that we thought, well, probably this is a website specific for San Francisco. So that's something where similarly, if you really focus on one city on your website, then it might be that we look at your website and say, well, this is really focused for that one city. Maybe it's not so relevant for other cities. And if you can reduce that focus or make it so that, at least by default, that city is not something that's standing in the foreground, then probably that would help to even things out a little bit. Yeah, got it. Thank you. Another question that I had was, so since we are in Pharma vertical, we are focusing a lot on EAT elements to add on the website. So would you say that adding those elements on top of the page compared to the bottom of the page, does it have an impact on the overall rankings that Google might consider? I wouldn't see that as something as a primary ranking factor. But for users, that probably does make a difference. That's something where I would primarily focus on this as usability as a conversion factor and less as an SEO element. All right. Thanks. One last question that I had was, I'm really sorry. This is the last one. So this is regarding duplication on the website. So we have multiple molecules, composition of the medicines. And we have similar content for multiple pages, which has the same constituents and the same elements in them. So say that duplication in these aspects would not cause an issue, or would you recommend that we should try to make it unique or add more elements so that the overall page gets a bit more unique than before? I don't know. I would try to look at it more from the point of view of what people are actually searching for. And I really don't know that area so much with regards to what they're actually searching for. If people are searching for very specific variations, then that might be something where it makes sense to include that on your website. But if you just have all of these variations and people are primarily searching for the category of molecules in this case, then maybe it doesn't make sense to include those smaller lower level pages. This is also something that you can probably test fairly well on your website, where you take one section of your site, where you're receiving enough traffic so that you have some reasonable numbers to compare, and then you make an AB test there, where you take a small set of those pages and you do them in one way and a small set of pages you do them in another way. And then you see what is the overall traffic to this set of pages versus that set of pages. Got it. Thank you so much. Thank you. Sure. That's it. All right. Any other questions from any of you all? Hi, John. Hi. Hi there. Yeah, just a question about duplication of code. So we have two sites. And they both target the same similar or pretty much the same products. But the branding for both sites is different. The content's different. The product descriptions are different. Everything's pretty much unique, other than the code. The back end and the site structures are the same. I just wanted to know if that would pause an issue between the sites in regards to ranking or duplication of code. Usually that would be OK. I mean, especially if you're targeting different types of users, then that's something where I wouldn't really worry about that. That seems reasonable. OK, that's good. One other question. We've got quite a large navigation for both the sites. And we target male and female with different products. We want to clean the navigation so you have the products listed underneath men's. So you have men's watches, men's jewelry. But instead, just have the product terms rather than gender specific with the anchor text. Would that have an impact in rankings for those pages? My guess is we would still figure that out. And probably it would be pretty neutral overall. But it could, like depending on how your site is structured now, it could be a pretty big change in the way that your navigation is set up, that your hierarchy of the site is set up. So that could be something that would have an effect there. My recommendation there would be to kind of try to test that, if at all possible. Like before, to take a significant part of your site where you get enough traffic that you can compare things and try that variation versus the current variation and see if that has any effect there. And my general feeling is probably the overall effect will be minimal. So that's, but it's really hard to say offhand. Sure. That's great. Cheers. Sure. All right. Hi, John. Hi. There you have it. Hi. This is one question I just thought I could get you inside. So we have two pages, one page for a particular keyword. We have the homepage ranking for it as well as the dedicated page ranking for the same keywords. OK, so what we have observed is that the competition that is ranking for that particular keywords have their homepage. And even though they do not have a dedicated page, we somehow seem to rank somewhere. So should we consider targeting our homepage for that particular keyword and redirecting that specific page to the homepage? That's something you can do. It's not something where I would say you would always want to do that. So it's fairly common that both a home page and maybe a category page or a product page rank for the same kind of query. And it can happen that one of these pages ranks more visibly than the other one. But essentially, that's something that you can control a little bit based on the amount of content that you have on your site, based on the hierarchy of your website. And that's something that you can control in a way where you can make the decision on what you would like to have happen there. So if you feel strongly that your homepage is the much better page for this kind of query, then make sure that it's really clear to all search engines when they come to your website that the homepage is the right page to show for that query. And similarly, if you want people to go to a product page or a category page instead, then make it clear that this is really the page that people should go to for that specific query. For example, if you have exactly the same content on your homepage or if you have a full set of the multiple product categories that you have on your homepage as well, then sometimes it's hard for us to tell which of these pages is the better one to show to users. So if this decision is essentially up to you, and if you choose to have one or the other pages to be shown visibly or you prefer to have it more visibly shown for individual queries, then you need to make that as clear as possible. Got it. So the environment, for example, the landscape in which that entire arrangement is there, should that not be a concern for us? Because what we observed was that the competitors, even though they do not have a dedicated page, their home page, one that seems to be of the highest authority or highest strength happens to rank for that. So should in the landscape be something that we need to consider for this? I wouldn't worry about what your competitors are doing, because maybe they're doing it wrong or maybe they don't want to have this happen and it's happening accidentally. I would really think more about what you want to have which one of those pages do you want to have ranked in the search results? And maybe it's your home page. Maybe you want everyone to recognize your brand, your overall company for this query. That's fine. That's your decision. Maybe you prefer to have people go to a product page where they can convert quicker. That's another option. But essentially, that's a decision that you can make. And that's one where you can focus on your metrics. Like what do you really want to have happen? Do you think people need to find out about your company? Maybe the home page is better? Do you think people would be interested in just going off and buying the product? Then maybe the product itself is better. Thanks, John. Thank you very much. Take care and stay safe. Thanks, you too. OK, let's maybe take a break here. I'll set up the next batch of Hangouts. And hopefully, they'll be a little bit less disruptive along the way. If you have any questions along the way, feel free to drop me a note on Twitter or to join us in the Webmaster Help forums as well. Thank you all for joining in. I wish you all a great weekend. And stay safe, stay healthy. Don't do anything crazy. Go outside, I guess. All right, see you, everyone. Bye.


The wave nature of light and particles is of interest to the fundamental quantum mechanics. Here the authors show the double-slit interference effect in the strong field ionization of Neon dimus by employing Koltram's method to record the momentum distribution of the photoelectrons in the molecular frame. This article was authored by Maxim Konitski, Nikolas Eek, Pierre Habba, and others.