All right. Welcome, everyone, to today's Google Webmaster Central Office Hours Hangouts. My name is John Mueller. I'm a Webmaster Trans Analyst in Switzerland and currently in Mountain View with a bunch of really smart SEOs who managed to make it to the Hangouts here. Do y'all want to introduce yourselves quickly? Sure. I'm actually normally from Colorado where there's a bunch of SEOs drinking beer and watching right now. They do. And I work for a local SEO guide and just came here to hang out. Hi, I'm Michael Kwok. I'm the CEO of ZipWorks. We're based in LA in Santa Monica. We do e-commerce through a lot of the SEO, but just kind of drop down by just to check it out and help. I'm Alberto Molina. I am a part of John's team. I am focused on the content management system on the web and looking at everything for four months that practices and many, many, many people with SEO. Hi, my name is Dennis. I'm an SEO specialist at NACIS. I focus on technical SEO, and I have a great group of people who follow the web right now. Hey, everyone. Hi, my name is Vlad. I'm a known and operator of a website called Haya.com, a consumer review website that serves all of the US. We're based in Seattle in Sacramento. We focus on content and providing a platform for users to voice their opinions. And that's it. My name is Massimo Paolini. I'm the CEO of the Spectrum Group online, where Silicon Valley based digital marketing agency. OK. So many different people. And who's watching live, or who's here in the Hangout Live? Barry, I see you. Barry. Nobody know I'm lurking. Oh, you're lurking. You're not here. OK. All right. So we have a handful of people here. So that's good. Do any of you want to introduce yourself? I guess that's a no. Oh. All right. We work. Can you hear us? Yes. Yes, OK. We're not SEO professionals, so I hope we're in the right place here. We're just the owner of a website that we've had some issues with. We've consulted lots of SEO professionals and can't get to the bottom of our problems. So we thought we'd come to the best people and see if we can ask our question later. So thank you for having us. We're from Australia. Wow. My question is in the post. So I don't want to jump the queue, but my question's in the comments somewhere. Wow. Since you're here already, why not just ask a question? Can I? Thank you. OK. So we have the home page of our website. Suffered a massive drop in rankings about three weeks ago. It had done really well for years and we've worked quite hard on it. And then overnight, it just disappeared. Not being an expert, my first instinct was to try and republish the site to see if there were any issues with it. And we were given a message by our rapid weaver software that there was a PHP and HTML version of the file on the server, which I know is not good. And when I spoke to my husband, he said, you'd also been given that message a few weeks earlier. So we think we had a duplicate version of our home page out there for a few weeks. Straight away, we deleted the PHP version because that was the new one. The original was HTML. And we fetched the site with Google and we resubmitted to be indexed. And the site popped back up within an hour. It was back. But it disappeared again. And nothing we've been able to do has been able to bring it back. We've done all the things I think we're supposed to do to indicate that the HTML is the original version. So we've added a canonical tag, excuse me, if I'm saying these things wrong, to the home page. We've advised Google Webmaster that the W version is the preferred site. We have, we've done so many things with the help of an SEO professional too. We've done a 301 redirect the index or HTML to their domain. Nothing seems to be working. And we've done some on-page optimisation as well. So we added a H1 tag. We've made the page load time better. Checked out our backlinks and we disavowed two that looked quite dodgy from early October. But other than that, we've reached a bit of a dead end and we're not sure what to do next really. So did the site disappear completely or is it just not ranking as well as it used to? So it has been, it is indexed. It is in there if we do the site search. But it won't come up for a search of our business name at all and it won't come up for a search of the, you know, the main keywords, except if I ask for it to include omitted results and then it's on page 13. So it's a massive drop. It was in position two on page one and it's gone to page 13 in omitted results. Right. What would you all do? Now? I mean, I would be looking for the first thing I would do. So go to Google Webmaster Tools. Use that to see if you have a manual penalty or check your links for that. Yeah. There's no manual penalty. The only links that we find that look dodgy and I'll tell, we run an adult party plan business. So sex toy party is the main search term for us. And there were two porn sites that were linking to us which we had never asked them to do. So we've disavowed those two which did look strange but nothing else looks concerning. And there's no manual penalty in the Webmaster Tools. We also looked at your search analytics report in Google Search Console to see when the traffic dropped and for what pages? Yeah, it's just the home page. And it dropped about a week after we originally uploaded the two versions of the home page. On the day that we did that, we uploaded the two versions. It was actually a spike in the crawl rate by about three times the normal crawl rate for our site. It went up three times on that day. And then a week later in the search analytics, there are three days where there's no visibility of that home page. So it's like it maybe was de-indexed for a few days. It is back, it's been indexed but it just won't show. So April nights is a business name and if we type that in, it's nowhere to be seen. Internal pages will show but not the home page. Have you made any changes to your code or content on the page? No, nothing. Sounds like a technical issue for sure. Technical issue, yeah. I feel like when we see something, there's something making it not show but we just cannot figure out what that is. And then we're sort of hoping that, well, if it is some sort of algorithmic penalty, maybe that will just lift when it runs again and we just have to wait. But we don't want to be waiting if we haven't actually fixed the problem. And yeah, that's sort of where we're at. We have contacted a lady called Marie Haynes who I'm sure you probably know. And she's going to try and help us next week. So I'm hoping she will find something technical that we haven't been able to find. But the local SEO company that worked with us, a few weeks ago, they hit a brick wall, really. They just said, no, we're not sure. Just wait. And waiting, obviously, is just killing the business. It's a 10-year-old business. And yeah, even the three weeks it's been gone, we can see the impact. Yeah. Can you put your domain in the chat? So we've got so many people here. Maybe one of us can take a look while I have a question. Yeah, we'll do that. Thank you very much. Can you double check this is an adult content website, or? It is, yeah, adult products we sell. So there's no porn or anything like that.  So a bit like I think you have pure romance in America. We do the same thing in Australia. OK. OK. I'll put that safe footwork at the beginning just in text. I wonder, maybe that's also something that's kind of playing in there. Yes. That's a little different. We might be assuming something. But we can, I think the link is in the chat. So maybe one of you. Does anyone want to let me their computer? Who wants this on there? So you stumped us with the first question. Oh, yeah. I have also been posting in the forum asking for advice there. So I'm sure people are sick of me by now. I've just been living and breathing it for three weeks. And I just I knew nothing about it. And now I know a little bit, but obviously not enough to fix it. April night. So the only thing I can get, I wonder if she's using the walkie-talkie. Oh, OK. So when we're trying it here, we're just getting paid. Which is, I mean, we're accountable. So I'm going to walkie-talkie. What is it? I don't know. Oh, good choice. Yeah. What's he doing? Oh. Oh. Oh. Right? And then he writes it like, what's your rule? What's your next one to decide? OK. Well, we'll, they're all digging into it. OK. Let's take a quick question and circle back. We'll come back. OK. Brilliant. Thank you. Go to the forum as well. .com. Yeah. I don't know. .com.aea, yeah. That's what I was talking about. Oh, .au. Yeah. Yeah. And nice is spelled, N-I-T-E-S. So it's a bit different. The link's there, though. Awesome. Thank you. I can see you've got it there. I can see it on your screen. Thank you. Thank you so much. It's a relief that even people like you will look at this for me. Because, yeah, it's very stressful. Thank you. All right. So let me just pick one of the questions that was submitted as well. Actually, I have a question if I could ask it real quick. All right. Go for it. I recently did a change of address. And I was wondering how long that takes. Like, roughly how long does a change of address take when you submit it to Google Search Console? So I guess for that to be submitted, you have to have the redirect in place? Yeah, I already did that. With the redirect in place, usually it's a matter of a couple of days. OK, so it's been going on, like, four months now. And so what are you seeing then? I added the new domain and the old domain to Search Console. And when I go to the old domain, it says click here to change address. So I clicked here to change address and went through the process of changing my address from the old domain to the new domain. I already had all the 301s set up to automatically redirect the new domain. But basically now when I go look at the change of address status, it just says the site is undergoing a move. I can either withdraw or wait, but there's no other. Like, I don't know if it's working or not, so. OK, that sounds like it's working. OK, so what you can do is just search for maybe your company name or your business name. You should see the new address shown in here. That's kind of the problem. Like, if I do a site colon and search for the new domain, it comes up with a new domain. But if I do a site colon old domain, it still shows up. But it has the new headings, new descriptions, and it points to the new domain, or, yeah, the new domain. But it's still showing the old domain in Google Search. That's completely normal. That's essentially Google trying to be extra helpful in that it recognizes you're searching for the old one, so it will show you something. But it sounds like we're already picking up the new one with the content. So probably the old one. I guess it doesn't matter about duplicate content because if I search for the page title in Google, both URLs show up, the old one and the new one. But if you click on the old one, it goes to the new one. I think that kind of sounds like it should be working as expected. I mean, it depends on what exactly is happening there, but definitely we're seeing the redirect. Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to do the change of address tool. Right. And so that was all my question. The site is undergoing a move, but it doesn't give me, I don't know if it's actually doing it or if there's a problem somewhere in between and it hasn't completed it yet, or if I should withdraw my application and try it again. I don't know how long this, it doesn't say anywhere about how long it would take for a move to happen. Yeah, so I think the Search Console tool just keeps that setting for 90 days, regardless of whatever is happening behind the scenes. But that's not a sign that something is still stuck. OK. So basically like 90 days and you hope that it would figure it out. Yeah, yeah. So if you have the redirect in place, then it should work out. Yeah, OK. Cool. Thanks, man. Thank you. Maybe, yeah. OK. How do you feel about this? So I was checking validation on the code, and character encoding wasn't declared at the very top, which is strange, but it used Windows 12.52, which I would expect it to be called to GTF 8. It didn't, but then it tried to change the character and coding halfway through and made a fatal error. I don't know. I don't think we care. They don't care. I can. So all right, that's. We also look at the page on the network that says that the HTML has no cache setting. I think that's fine. So that's fine, too. Yeah. So I mean, Google has to deal with a lot of broken HTML, and we've gotten used to it. I was also wondering if she had my name, because she said they had a duplicate version of the page. Did she go in the index and try and remove the version they wanted to remove from the URL remover? That may help. Yeah. If it thinks that there's a duplicate panel, I'm duplicate on that page, which is why I needed something. I don't know. Maybe she should 404 the original. Right. 404, which we probably already did, but she said she removed it. Which means by doing the URL remover. OK. Here. Can I sit in the edge? That's a discussion. I don't think we have the burning gun. Yeah. OK. The smoking gun. What is a good search term to see how they rank in the results? Like, what should I search for, like, sex toys and then play? What's the search term, sorry? Is that what you said? It's really nice, and you come up first. When you search for nights, we come up first. Yeah. Yeah. But I want to see, because you're saying that you're not being ranked properly. Yeah. For the search term sex toy party is the main one. But for us, when we search April Nights, we only see the about us page or other internal pages. We don't see that home page anywhere. Yeah. You'll remind us. I think we have to look a bit more into detail. Yes, question in the first one. Good start. That's good. OK. Hey, guys. How you doing? Hi. I actually have a question. Hi. I think everyone's trying to talk at once too much. OK. Maybe go ahead, ask a question. Jump on in. OK, cool. Thanks. Kind of a good transition was, how do webmasters do manual checks for rankings? Because last night, I opened an incognito. I use your ad preview tool. And Google still loves to believe that I'm a robot. And obviously, putting that on my time sheet, my boss doesn't get too excited when I'm having to click through signs and storefronts and he's paying for it. And then actually last night, I got a try again later saying that your computer network may be sending automatic queries. We can't process your request. And I just couldn't search at all through Google last night. And I was wondering, really, what webmasters, basically, I would love to see what's on all of your laptop screens right now. How do you guys check rankings? What's the best way to do it? Nutrally, organically, without any sort of behavioral things taking effect. Yeah, I don't know. What do I use? Google Search Console. Google Search Console, that's what I use. Yeah. Inclusively for rankings. So I think the advantage of the questions, if the question is dumb, but no, it's perfect. I mean, lots of people have this question. I think the advantage of Search Console is you see what people actually saw when they searched for your site, where when you manually search, you might be searching for a term that people aren't using, actually, or maybe you're searching in one location and your users are in different locations. All of those things kind of come together. So I just put a link in the chat that you guys are familiar with, the ad preview and diagnostics tool? Yeah. No? Yeah. OK, yeah. So that's basically what I use. That's the only thing I've been, because I can choose a location. I can choose a geo. And that seemed to get fairly easy. But that's specific, I think, primarily for the ad side. I don't know if that would be so useful for normal ranking checking. And if you use something like that quite a bit, then we will show the capture and all of that. And especially if you use a rank checking tool on the site, then it's even more likely that we show captures and maybe even block access for a while completely.  Yeah. OK. That's what I recommend. I mean, there are other tools that use various ways to track rankings as well. Like what? Like what? I can't really recommend them, because they mostly scrape the search results and that's against our terms of service. There is one tool that lately has changed that. It is Majestic. They concentrate on links. They use the Google Search Console API to give you rankings on keepers. Same as the Spotify. They're also using the API. OK, so yeah, you can check there. Spotify? Yeah. Spotify and Majestic. Thank you guys so much. All right. More questions from any of you who are live or any of you here? Yeah, actually, I have a question. All right, go for it. Again, mobile first, going forward. So what does it take on Google? Because you're suggesting two different ways to have a responsive or adaptive website. Will it anyways affect what companies are using responsive or adaptive in the mobile first world? How do you mean? Will you give any extra benefits if people are using responsive or is there any benefit with adaptive? Not really. So we try to be kind of as accepted as possible of these different variations. So if it's one of the variations that works for Google, it should just work. I think responsive is really useful because you can save yourself a lot of hassle. You don't have to maintain multiple sites, multiple URLs. So that makes a lot of sense. But it's not that we will give a ranking boost to responsive or these. Did you all hear that? I don't really know if it works like around the corner with the microphone. Thank you for announcing. I'll ask another question on top of what you asked. So sites that have identical content on desktop and mobile have nothing to worry about. Identical content on desktop and mobile. It kind of depends on how you mean identical content. Like if it's just the text that is the same, then the text is already like a big part of what we use for ranking. But things like structured data are important. If you have international site with hreflang, those links need to be there. If you have an AMP version, that link needs to be there. So all of the hidden aspects need to be equivalent as well. So not just the visible text, but everything kind of beneath the scenes too. But in the end of the day, it's all about making the users happy. That's the bottom line, right, John? Well, it's about making the user happy. But if we don't have the information for indexing, Googlebot won't be happy. So let's connect it, please. That's why SEO has two augments, right? The human and the box. I mean, ideally, a lot of these things would just focus on the user and just would work. But from a technical point of view, there's a lot of work that needs to be done to make it so that we can index it for search. And I think that's a large part of the reason why people do SEO is not to trick the search engines, but to make it so that its content is actually understandable. But I really spoke today to a lot of people, and they're coming from different providers, SEO providers. And the number one problem is that they're not ranking on the first page. And this is the biggest problem that us, I never said number one. I said first page. So and they're having issues. And I think that's another article today appeared in the Canadian news where this is the biggest thing that we are dealing with. Every agency is dealing with. And I think that if you guys make some sort of video, I mean, Miley already did a video, but it takes a certain period of time to rank. And this is something that I'm dealing with and everybody else is dealing with. Do you have anything, any answer for this that we can kind of, how do we reply to someone that came from another provider, answered the same question? Another provider might have provided the answer and not providing the same answer again. What do we do, you know what I mean? You're sitting in a very, very tough spot. Yeah, I don't have a perfect answer for that. I mean, that's something where as an experienced SEO, at some point you'll kind of see where the general problems are and maybe be able to guide people that come to you and say, well, these are the expectations. This is what I can help with. And it will take this amount of time to actually work this out and for Google to figure out what's what I changed. So that's something where I don't see it as being a pure yes, no simple answer. Right. Yeah, I mean, I direct them to the Miley video and other videos and then they come back and they're like, oh, OK, yeah, that made that a lot of sense. And so it opens up their, because they want a quick fix. And I said, it's just not possible. There's a lot of things behind it and reasons and why. There's no quick fix to that. And then when you get into the technical stuff, they don't really care about that. They really care about the bottom line. That's really what we're dealing.  In the bottom line, it's their website that they care about their product. They're not interested in all this. So anyways, I just wanted to throw that in. What do you all ready? So they have a little bit of interest, I guess. And if they're paying you money, at least they have some interest there. Yeah, but it's really the goals that we focus on. And in the end of the day, I convert them. Yeah, no issues with that, but it's just, the other providers kind of give them all this, hey, I'll do this for you and I'll make you, you know. Cool.  It's, you know, they'll take money and all other providers, but at the end of the day, they will come back to someone who can actually. And in the end of the day, they really know who the good providers are in town. Well, there's, I mean, there's the article on choosing an SEO and how you should engage with them from Google. I would share them there. Yeah, that's right. Because if you're intimately familiar with that and you could use a third party to tell them where to go, then that has more authority than anyone agency. And in our experience anyways, with clients like that, it's more profitable to walk away than to try and get them. Sorry, what was the last part? More or what? It's more profitable often to walk away from a customer like this than to try and get them. And how about letting your client go away? That's the hard part.  Yeah. I think it's always tricky, but learn through experience. If you guys don't mind, I actually have a question. Okay, go for it. Cool. Internal footer links, do they help with ranking for a keyword? Not really. I mean, they help us with what we call it. But it's not that we would use internal footer links to kind of promote specific content. But it helps us to be able to crawl to those pages and sometimes it helps us to understand the context of individual pages within a website. But if it's a site-wide footer link, then that doesn't provide a lot of context for us. We talked about that. We talked about that stuff, but then transitioning into the same question where if you're providing a server, remember we talked about that. If you designed a website and then you put your name on the bottom, abc.com. And now you've done that in 100 websites. You said that you ignore that, right? You ignore that so-called credits, right? For a large part, yeah. Okay. So, but I still see that as a do-follow in other 100 tools that's really- I think that's kind of normal. We ignore a lot of things that other tools still show as a link. Okay, so you're not taking that to consideration. You're taking signals from somewhere else and applying that to their site, right? Like, but I mean, we see it on the other side, in the other side of the world, outside of the Google algo, we see that in other tools where, wow, I mean, they are getting traffic from this and the client comes to you and says, whoa, 1.3 million, this guy has insane traffic. So he's seeing that somewhere else and I'm coming back and saying, hey, these are stuff that they do ignore, but they're not taking into consideration, but he's like, well, they're getting traffic from there. So, you can't say that that's why they're getting traffic. Like, that's where I would force correct your client is that they could be getting traffic in spite of those. So just point them to best practices and say, hey, we don't know exactly why they're getting traffic, but that's against best practices to make an education. I know, but I mean, he's still wants it. And then he got, you know, somebody else from our industry, okay, gave him the insights on that it is, even though violating the policy. And anyways, sometimes you can't, but it's good to know again, so you are ignoring those little things. And so it doesn't really matter if it's credit from developers or if it's so-called anything else, right? That you're kind of using your clients for traffic. I don't know what you mean with anything else. Well, I'm seeing a lot of people in my industry, okay, in around the world that are using their name and taking traffic from their client's sides. So I mean, if people click on those links and go to the other side, that's, I think that's perfectly legitimate. Like if you're- If you're dropping an anchor text, SCO in a hundred different sites around the world and your client's sites and then you rank for that keyword SCO is that fair? It's not fair, right? Well, you could be ranked despite that. It's not necessarily because of that. So that's one thing to keep in mind. Something I think with a lot of these techniques is that in an ideal world from our point of view, when we recognize something that's kind of going against our guidelines that we can kind of isolate, then we should just ignore that part. So common example is keyword stuffing, where if we can recognize the keyword stuffing, maybe we should just ignore that keyword stuffing on those pages and try to rank the page based on everything else that we have. And that might be happening here.  Even if it's getting traffic, like even if people are clicking on it, you guys are still ignoring it? Well, we don't see what people are clicking on. But if people are clicking on it, then your site is getting traffic from people clicking on it. So- But it doesn't have a ranking on it. I mean, that's something where ultimately if you put a sign out saying, well, I made this website and people are going, this is a nice website, I'm gonna go check that person out who made that website, I'm gonna get one made too, then that's a good thing. That's not necessarily something that has to have an SEO effect, but definitely you don't care where they come from. Right, but if you hide the like as in California, abc.com, that's like spamming in a way. Well, I mean, if we can isolate that and just ignore it, I think that's a good approach. Okay. But you guys don't hurt us if we're getting traffic from those footer links, from those clients or something like that. If people are clicking on those links and coming to your site, it's like- Yeah. Stop that. Stop it. Is it a link? Yeah, it's a link. That's how a link is supposed to work. Okay. How people click on it? Right, questions about that. Come on. So our site has a lot of categories which can probably look like that content to Google. I don't- We're wondering if Google would look like that to their agent or if we have a lot of those days that someone has like this content like that to Google. Follow up. I might- Okay. I don't know. I think it's something that is to some extent also, some category pages don't have a lot of content. I mean, to some extent, you can go through and try to create more content for those pages or just an index one if you want. I'm sorry, we're- David, I also have trouble hearing him. Okay, that's quieter. Okay. So thin content on category pages. I think to some extent, some of that can be natural and we can pretty much ignore it. It kind of depends on the site overall where if the thin content pages are just like a small part of the site, then whatever. Right. But if the primary part of the site is just thin content pages, then they're missing a lot of value that the site could have. So that's one thing to kind of think about. But I know there are different approaches to handling that. Some people look at their analytics and see like where people are jumping or like low kind of time on site and try to prune those pages out. Others work on improving that content. It really depends on the site and what you can do. I don't know. You guys have any experience? Yeah. We've seen some category pages are doing really well with nothing but product listing. But yeah, we try to write some content but we have so many pages that sometimes it's really hard to keep up. But yeah, I mean- Do you try to know index some of those pages? No, no. We keep them open. Yeah. We try to create content as much as we can. But not creating just the content, creating the unique content. That's the key. Because if you just copy it from somewhere from Wikipedia, you're not gonna get anything. Still that content. Exactly, still that content. But if you create the unique content, then that's it. I use like a three pillar system, educate, value, and ideas. That's it. That's what good content's all about. I think educating, doing things that shocks Google. Right, John? That's not good. How does it shocks Google? No, not shocking. All right. What were you about to say? I was gonna say, I faced a similar question recently. Recently, as our site has a lot of categories and a lot of subcategories, which we're referring to as review topics. The consultant, Glenn Gate, that we hired, advised us that if we don't have any unique content on those particular category pages or review, something that won't add any SEO value, we say, it's better to just no index, but follow them because they're good for the users. Or just make any contact with what Dennis was saying. So we ended up no following, or I'm sorry, no index, but follow. But follow. We would crawl everything. I see. And understand how to approach, right? Yeah, it really did. And that's the same. We have, in our opinion, we use the category pages more for a user, a visitor, item to help them find things, not for SEO. Our individual articles are what will draft what will bring the controls for the proper, I say, research. So our philosophy. Could you say that again? I'm sorry, I couldn't really hear that well. All right. All right, all right. So our philosophy when it comes to category pages is to help the user so we don't, we no index the pages, they have no SEO value for us. However, we make sure that there's enough content on the pages that someone does go to it, they can navigate properly. Okay, cool. So then that kind of flows the next question.  The most SEO juice. That's not the way.  That's why he backed away. I would say the first paragraph. Top of the HTML. Huh? Okay, some votes for top of the page, top of the HTML. And the first paragraph. First paragraph. Link in there, make sure it's a good reputable site that you're linking to. That is, enhances the article. It goes to someone just because it's a good link and it doesn't have that. And anchor text. Pay attention on the anchor text. Okay. Thank you. Good anchor text, good site, top of the page. Okay. That's the content on the page. Okay. Good, good. Hashtag good. I think that's kind of reasonable. I don't know, from Google site, we wouldn't say like where on the page you would need to put stuff to get the most value out of it. I think it really depends a lot on the context. But I think these are good tips. I mean, if it's an important link on a page, then it'll be on top of the page in general. So, but do your crawlbots know what's important? Ooh, I think Googlebot has.  So, I think they're better. So I think that's pretty good at understanding the intention both on placement and within the rest of site and how you treat the links in the content. But I am an optimist and get a lot of help for that. So how old is Googlebot? Would you say? 13. Wait, this conversation could get weird real quick. No, I think it would be weird.  Well, see, bots work like dog ears. Yeah. But, I don't know, it doesn't matter if Googlebot evolved a little faster than us anyway.  Okay, just leave me alone. Yeah, my name? I think he is already. Okay. Yeah, I don't know what advice to add to that. Okay. Okay. I forgot a question. I don't know you. It was an area where they said the rank brand is like a five-year-old. So that's, I remember there was an article about that, but anyways. Brand Scramble, what do you think? At Google right now, it's kind of like, still like a child that doesn't really understand it. It understands a lot of things, but there's still a long way to go. Of course, yeah. I think that's something where if you work outside of search, you might think that search is pretty much complete and like, what are all these people doing at Google? But when you work on the SEO side or in search, then you realize like there's things happening all the time and things are changing all the time. So basically at Googlebot has a short attention span and we need to keep everything above the fold. Users have a really short attention span. Yeah, users have a shorter attention span than at Googlebot. When is the last time you read a whole article? Very true. 2007 for me. That's only after I have good headers.  Absolutely formatting, so yeah. So you're the goodies for next year that you're going to be adding to a search console, like voice search add-ons or no? Oh, voice search is already in search console, but we just don't. Saying more in depth, like so we can really see. I don't know. So like when it comes to voice search, my feeling is that if you're an SEO and you're focusing on keywords and text on page, then you're not really doing voice search like the right thing. Because on voice, you have a lot more opportunity to do interactive things that you can't really do with just the normal page and focusing on keywords. Yeah, but what do you do when there's obsessive clients that are still wanting those keywords and, you know. We have clients. If you have to fight with them. But let him box you out, for real?  But anyways, I educate and I show, but definitely I think voice search is more like long tail and yeah, it's more creative and I think it's more fun, but it's something. It's something also that's more forward-looking at least at the moment where creating a voice bot to interact with is not easy. And it's not something that will guarantee business success, but it's something where if you practice with that now, if you try these technologies and tools out, then you have a bit of an understanding of where it might make sense and where it might not. And I think that's a reasonable thing to kind of do. And when talking with clients, obviously, like trying to sell them on a voice bot will be really hard because you have no idea what the business output will be. It feels similar to native app. Gonna make sense in specific cases, but it's not a worthwhile investment probably right now for everyone. I would spend time looking at the research and the data that's out there, like being actually does a good job putting out a lot of research on their voice data and how they're seeing it in search. And I think if you wanna be seen, start asking voice queries yourself that are related to your customers and see what's returning. Sit down and start using it and see what's happening. A lot of it might be coming from surprising sources. Like a lot of structured data is able to give those quick snippets out or really quick answers, but just start there. And if your client's bugging you, ask them to start asking keyword-rich queries to see if their responses are helpful or if they're even an appropriate answer. They have the right information to serve. A lot of them feel that all of it should be on our shoulders. There's things that they don't need to do. I describe the location for you, George. I believe that going into the voice search is the, again, content uniqueness to actually answer exactly what the customer is looking for. Because somebody did the study, I don't remember the company, but they found that some pages will show up on a zero position, even if they are ranking on a seventh page. So Google will realize that this page has the huge click rate. It has a conversion rate and how to meet content. It will just put the position zero answer right away without even ranking that page on the first page. Something like a frequently asked questions page? Well, I mean, it's something where, if it answers the user's question in a short and direct way, then I think that can be valuable, even if it doesn't rank first in a normal organic search results. You can be on page two and the rich snippet showing on page one, yeah. Exactly, but yeah, I mean, that's the, it was John's, it's John, I forgot his last name, but yeah, no, he did a YouTube video on that. But for sure, like, no, I see that. Yeah, but it still doesn't help answering, you know, the... Yeah, I mean, I don't, there's an absolute answer to a lot of people. Is there a way to see what people will be seeing? Cause especially with Siri on iPhones now going to Google, you know, obviously. It's already defaulted on Google. It's already. Yeah, all the iPhones already defaulted to Google, yeah. Cause the... In Siri, wasn't it, didn't it just switch from like Bing to Google? Yeah, yeah. And now, cause obviously Siri displays search results and everything unique. Is there a way to see how we would look or rank or show up there as opposed to the regular browser searching? I have no idea. But if it's a normal search result, you'll see the end result in Search Console. So you wouldn't be able to kind of have that theoretical view of like, if someone searched for this, then we would rank here. But you would see someone actually search for these things and we showed up here. So that's something you see, but you don't see it broken out by type of device for things like voice search. Okay, you guys are smiling too. That's probably coming in the future. Sounds like voice is something everyone is kind of looking for or more information on, trying things out. Yes, and how to. Yeah, I believe it's the next step for Google from going from mobile to voice because that's something that simplifies in life. Can we just ask a question and then we can answer it? So how would you use that for businesses? For businesses? Bring customers, bring clients to the page. Basically answer what they're looking for. So there's the question that voice is just really once it leads to a page. I think the more interesting question is how can a user get their answer satisfying just voice without say Siri directing you to it? Yeah, I don't think that's the most though. I mean, would that be like, I think in your case it's probably easier because people might say, oh, I want to buy this from Macy's and Google could theoretically say, okay, you won't get it tomorrow. Like in an ideal world, but for like a normal general business, how would you kind of see that kind of transactional interaction or like the business value installation of services like apps? Right, so voice query and answer kit, the voice service could recommend an application to install. So that's a good distribution. Okay. I just feel before even people get into voice, like they're going through like 10 Google reviews or whatever other reviews it is. And then they're going to the website and then they might make another voice search. That's from what I see now that's happening. That's going to become more voice search searches. But how am I going to, is what, is Google Home or Alexa going to read like, 10 Google reviews, which will take, you know, I want it fast. I don't want to have the reviews, you know. Alexa does, they have an open SDK. You can basically create your own app that will just, you know, you will say, Alexa, go to my website and then, you know, search for blah, blah, blah, and Alexa will read an answer for you. So, but this is something that you'll have to train Alexa for. Yeah, API needs to be trained a lot, so. Yeah. I think Google has API.AI, which has a new name that I forgot, which makes it fairly easy to kind of set up this interactive agent type set up. And there are lots of example codes I saw that might be interesting to try out as well. But it's something where I think at the moment, it's still at a stage where you're trying things out and nobody really knows what users will end up doing.  Yeah, but you guys are pretty good at predictive. Like business models. They're very good. I have voice action API for Google. And Brooke, it looks like there's some pretty good documentation on the Google developer site and there's some Stack Overflow conversations. You can go check that out. I do, I read more of Yuval Harari's books now. I stopped reading blogs. I don't know who that is. Who's the bad? It is. It is. It is. Okay. Check my Twitter feed more often. Okay, we will check your Twitter. I hope you don't quote the whole book. You only have 280 characters. If they're wanting answers through voice search, is content length still going to be important for voice search? I don't know. So I guess if someone is searching for part of your page, then if you have a lot of content on your page, you have more parts that could be relevant. That's one aspect. But I think it's also one of those things where trying to take the traditional web search approach and just applying it to everything around voice might not be the right red answer. So I don't know. I think it's something where it's probably worth working with your users, maybe doing some user studies even to see how they would even try to find your business through something like a voice search. Or maybe you'll find out like, nobody's actually using voice search to search for my business at the moment. And I can just pause it for a year and look again a bit later. Because looking back at things like around the mobile, when people started using mobile more, in the beginning it was also the case that some people just didn't use mobile phones to do certain type of things. And businesses were kind of in a situation where I can make a mobile friendly site, but nobody's actually searching on mobile for my business. Now it has kind of really shifted in that people use mobile for everything. So if you look back and say, oh, nobody was using mobile, therefore I never make a mobile site, then you might be missing this part. Just like you might be missing that when it comes to voice later on. Makes sense. But now since people are using Facebook, if let's say we drive traffic to our site from Facebook, does that increase our crawl budget? I don't think we care at all. What is that? So if people are going to your site through Facebook, that's awesome for you. But I don't think Googlebot really cares. Doesn't care. Not in the sense that Googlebot doesn't like your site because you're cool on Facebook. It doesn't affect how Googlebot crawls and indexes a site. OK, so they don't really have the page ranking. Sorry, go on. And they're trying on your site, so that's a good thing. And Google likes it. So more people come to your website. Better? Yes? I can tell you that it's coming from a site that, I know you guys don't believe in the domain authority or page authority, but if it comes from a site that might be a little bit more well-established, wouldn't that help us with rankings? Not necessarily. No. OK, then I'll leave it to you. Yeah, I think there's an indirect effect there, of course. If people are going to your website and they like what they find, they might recommend it. And we can see that recommendation. But just by going to a site doesn't necessarily mean that it's a good thing. Otherwise, you would put your ifame on other people's sites and it would load your site all the time. That doesn't really mean anything. But you're taking the 13-year or 14-year consideration just a little bit. Like it's a small signal, though. Now, I've been around for 13, 14 years in the block. I don't think we use that traffic from Facebook at all. I mean, I don't even know how we would be able to track that from web search. Yeah, social means there's no correlation. Yeah. All right, one last question before we close out. What's happening December 31st, 2016, at midnight? What are you planning? 2016. 2016. 2017. What are you planning in the years? Is there any algo coming? I don't know. Champagne and shrimp cocktail, baby. Yes, I understand Cooper and Google Algo all happening at the same time. All right, Massimo, all right, so over to you. First one. And if I have time, I'll do that. We've noticed on a couple of client sites that Google, instead of using the meta title and description, went out and put content on the page. Only happening on a couple of clients, not all. Research says if the description is spammy or other things like that, Google can opt to do that. And we pride ourselves on not writing spammy stuff. So I'm not understanding. I don't understand why, or if that's happening more often now, or are you guys going to take away the meta's? All right, I guess from a general point of view, we try to rewrite the titles and the snippets based on the user's query and the type of device that they have, because the amount of space that we have. So that's kind of one thing that sometimes throws people off in that you do a site query and you see your title there and we think that's what users see. But actually, depending on what users search for, we might show a different title. To try to make it clear that this page is really about what the user is searching for, so they should really go there. So it's not necessarily a sign that we think your titles are bad. It's just that we think for this query, maybe a different title would be more useful. But that's done algorithmically. So sometimes we get it wrong, too. So if you see us getting the titles really wrong, then having the query and the page where you saw this would be useful feedback, and I can pass that on to the team. Now, is that something that you are doing more now than before and trying to judge and adjust that for the query? Has that changed recently? I don't think so. But I'm hearing more people talking about it, so maybe some dial somewhere has been twisted a little bit. Thank you. That's what I do. I don't think it's by design. We're messing with everyone's title as well. OK. Perfect. That's a question about our site. All right. It's about 301 redirects. So we did a 301 redirect. We did a rebrand about a couple of years ago. And then the site traffic has kind of consistently been about 50% of what it used to be. And we just haven't been able to get it back up to where it was. Concurrent, when we did the 301, we got a penalty. Because we tried to switch from folders to subdomains concurrent with the 301. I think it was really messy, so we got a penalty after that. So that was third up in a couple of weeks. But the traffic kind of just stayed a little bit. What kind of penalty was that? It was for pure spam. OK. That's pretty harsh. So we had Michael Coddham, an SEO consultant at our site. He said that it's probably something because of that. Because everything on our site looks really good. He said the onsite off. So usually the pure spam manual action is something that is really for like regress spam, not like a technical thing, like subdomains, subdirectories. That was the only thing that we did. We switched from folders to subdomains on the destination site. And then we redirected the old site to that new site. But we did it all at once. So did you get the manual action on the new site? On both. On both. OK. Because these things are done manually from the manual action. And it would mean that someone from the WebSend team was looking at both of your sites and saying, well, there's nothing of value here. We can take them out completely, which sounds a bit at odds with what you're saying. It's kind of a reasonable site. Right. So I don't know what might have been the case. It might also be that there was some kind of hacking going on, if possible. Did you file? User. Yeah, we did the reconsideration. It got lifted pretty quickly. We explained in really good detail exactly what we're doing and what we're adding. We took office of domain to figure that that was the problem. And we looked at when the graphic just kind of has been much lower. Yeah, it's hard to say. I mean, it's always tricky in situations where you're comparing something from before manual action and after, because after you perhaps cleaned up the issues that caused this artificially high ranking. But nothing else changed. It wasn't like back when it started going like that. I don't know. Probably have to look into the site. Action went away. It's been a little over two years, two and a half years. So I don't think from the manual action that would be kind of lingering, because once that's lifted, it's lifted. And everything else is essentially just out of it. So probably the current ranking is more like what we think the site should be ranking for. And maybe before we had that free bonus that the Google algorithm figured it out. So how long does it take Google to rank a new content page? Less than one hour. Sometimes, sometimes, yeah. I mean, we can index it very quickly. But I think a new page within an existing website is a lot easier for us to understand than a completely new website, because a completely new website, we have no idea of the content. What we should be doing there. And we make some assumptions, and we show it in search. And then over time, it kind of settles down into where we think it should be. Negative SEO? No, I don't think so. I mean, Michael and we had another guy, CK Chow, look in, they both said that something is definitely wrong with your site. And the ranking is not, based on everything that we see, it looks like everything else. I don't think you can really say what the ranking should be. I think that's kind of the tricky part. You can look at things like the links and the content on the site, and you're like, oh, this should be here. Well, it's up to the competition, I guess. We use so many factors for quality indexing and ranking, it's really hard to say. I think with the exception of the first question that we had, if you don't rank for your company name and the company name is not a generic word, then that's kind of something a bit different here. But for normal content on your site, it's really hard to say where you should be ranking. Just a close look for the woman who had the April night say, I found the forum post. Oh, thank you. Thank you. I'll still be there, I don't have any later today. Thank you. Can I just ask John a quick question about that? You were just mentioning the fact that we don't rank for our business name is unusual. Does that sound like a penalty of some kind to you? But if it were a penalty, you would definitely see that. That would be manual action, but it might be that our algorithms are getting something confused. Right. Do you know where we could go from here? Would you just advise to speak to somebody like Marie and keep trying to get advice from SEO professionals? I would focus on the forum. And if you don't get a good reply there, I just keep banging at the forum door. It looks like Suzanne already provided you some answers, but I'll hop in there. I think she's got it. Other folks in the forum, other top contributors and other volunteers will come hop on. So I think it's a really good place to get pure retail where. Ashley is pretty good. You're the best. I did something wrong. I didn't really understand forum etiquette. I started a new post and I got into a bit of trouble with the legy who was helping me. So I've been a bit scared to post another question, but it might be the wrong thing to do, but I don't know where else to go. We'll figure it out. Just I'll bump it and we'll figure it out and take a look. John, can you make a small suggestion regarding submitting something to the index? I mean, you can do that now, but just type in submit index and the little search box will show up without having a Google search console on the site. So suppose you want to index something too quickly. Can you create like a page where people can just go in there as opposed to just typing it in, submitting to the index without having a search console? You can just bookmark that search. What? You can just bookmark that search. I know, but it's kind of sometimes. Yeah, I don't know what the plan is to kind of expand on that. It's just a suggestion. That's all. Cool. All right, so let's take a break here. Thank you all for joining. It's been good having people from Australia and the US and from Canada and New York join in. Hope to see you all again in one of the future hangouts or in the help forums or on Twitter or somewhere else. And thanks again. Thank you. This is gonna be just... Thanks for all your help. Thanks for your help. Thank you. No, we really appreciate your time, guys. Bye, everyone. Bye. Thank you. Bye-bye.


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I would like to thank organizers for inviting me here. Very pleasant, nice place. Also, I would like to remind that there was announcement about the conference dedicated to UNOSO. The poster is outside with details. I would like to emphasize that two organizers, namely Andrea Agarachio and Alexander Bufiato, worked in the department that was led by UNOSO. And I am affiliated with this department. So it was a big pleasure for us to work and to communicate with this great mathematician whose name is very often pronounced during this meeting. And also, Yakov Pesin was one of students of UNOSO. So everybody is welcome to attend this meeting. Today, I will speak about group actions of special sort, so-called totally non-free actions. I have a problem with the voice, but hope you are able to hear me, particularly because of this equipment. And invariant random subgroups. So I will begin with listing some classes of groups. Before, mostly, I understand some lead groups, like GL and R, where we are figurative and lettuces in these groups or subgroups in lead groups. But there is a wealth of discrete groups. There is abstract group theory. There is a combinatorial group theory. There is geometric group theory. And recently, measured group theory started to develop. And what is measured group theory is at the end of 60s, 70s, when Yakov Pesin, when me were students in Moscow State University of Lomonoso, attending seminars of UNOSO, of Sinai, and other great mathematicians. So sometimes, talks were considered triples of the forum group acting on probability measure space X mu. And at that time, it was called dynamical system with non-community time. And group G, again, can be topological group, can be lead group, but also abstract, can be abelian group, non-abelian group, but abstract group time to time were appearing at that time. Now, the study of such triples is a very popular subject. And in contrast with 70s, 80s, where mostly attention was paid to the measure space, group didn't play so much role. Now, more attention is paid to the group. What can be said about group if you know some properties of the action? Now, I will list you several, just sporadically taken from my mind classes of groups, just to refresh your memory, the varieties of the world of discrete groups. In my talk, I will consider only commutative groups, abelian, sorry, only countable groups. So, among the simplest is class of abelian groups, which is subclass of the class of nilpotent groups, subclass of the class of solvable groups. These are classical classes that people study in undergraduate courses of algebra. Then there is splitting of groups on amenable and non-amenable, very important in the notion, due to for Neyman discrete case and Bogolubu in topological case and Bogolubu definition for general topological group was a group with invariant mean. And the main result was that such a group acting on compact space has invariant probability measure, generalization of Kralov-Bogolubu theorem, one of the most important and often we use theorem in dynamical system. There is subclass of amenable groups called elementary amenable, which is subclass of groups without free the subgroup on two generators. This is just, it is not very, almost not important at the moment, like really like to understand, to don't ask me for definition. What are elementary amenable group? Also at the end I can define. Now, okay, some other list, three groups which will play some role. In my talk, the realization of them, grommu hyperbole group, there is so-called automatic group, even more general class. This is a subset of this set of SOFI groups, very popular subject of recent investigation and many interesting results are obtained for the SOFI groups. The problem is that nobody is able to produce example of non-SOFI group. Now, okay, such classical groups as group of auto-automorphism of free group, which is closely related to mapping class groups. There are so-called Tarski monsters. Higman-Thomson, finally presented infinite groups and so on. More reasoned are groups associated with minimal homeomorphism of a counter set. If you have such minimal homeomorphism, counter set T acting on X, a counter set, then you can associate set in a countable group, which is called topological full group. This is standard notation, which perhaps at the very end, if time permit will be mentioned again. As in the class of rigidly finite groups, these are infinite groups that can be approximated by a certain sense by finite groups, group acting on trees, buildings. Now, this slide shows something completely different and basically introduced and studied by speaker and his students and collaborators, classes of so-called so-called similar groups, fractal groups, iterated monodromy groups, branch groups, which will appear later and play some role now. Groups of intermediate growth in the intermediate growth in the sense of Milner-Schwarz. You count number of elements, so group has to be finitely generated. You count number of elements of lengths not greater than N. N is the natural number going to infinity and growth function, the number of such elements, grow faster than any polynomial, but slower than exponential. So there was question of Milner if such group exists and I constructed such a group and now these groups of intermediate growth are closely related to all these listed examples and appear in various situations as well. Now, what is totally non-free action? Again, I consider in my talk only countable groups and given a topological dynamical system, so group acting on say compact, not necessarily compact topological space by homeomorphism, so this is called topological dynamical system or metric dynamical system when you have group acting on measure space, in my talk measure will be probability and invariant. One can consider other situation when measure is quasi-invariant, but let it be probability invariant measure. Okay, so basically I will deal with this situation but also sometimes with this. There is well-known notion of a freeness of action, action of such dynamical system on commutative time or measured group GX mu is free if there is a subset of full measure with the properties the stabilizer of each point is trivial. So this is notation for stabilizer. Stabilizer of point in group G is a sub-group of elements which fix this point, it's a sub-group. It's clearly so freeness of action and means the triviality of stabilizer almost sure. And this can be formulated, here assumption that the group is countable is important that for every non-identity element, the measure of the set of fixed points of element G is zero. So fixed G is a set of fixed points for element G. So there are two approaches for the definition of freeness. In fact, it's essentially free. So because we assume that the first condition holds mu almost sure. Yeah, so here I remind what it means, this notation. Okay, and a few years ago, Anatoly Varshik, he came with very interesting definitions. He called triples action extremely non-free if again there is a subset of full measure aside that for any pair of different points from this subset, stabilizers are different. So if your space X, okay, is uncountable space, space like the back space isomorphic to interval zero one or whatever, so there are uncountable many points in X. So in particular, this means that the set of sub-groups of a group must be uncountable. There must be many, many sub-groups in your group. Okay, but here, okay, it requires that the different points almost surely have different stabilizers. So this is complete opposite to the freeness. In a free case, we assume that stabilizer is trivial group and here not only non-trivial but different points have different stabilizers. And he called triple totally non-free if the set of family of sets fixed points of elements generate sigma algebra of the measure space. So there is sigma algebra of measurable subsets of the X mu, so if it is generated as a set. So it means that this family of sets which are sets of fixed points of elements is rich family, it's base of the sigma algebra of measurable subsets. This young Ukrainian mathematician Artem.co we recently came to stronger condition. We call situation action absolutely non-free if every measurable, for every measurable subset and every positive epsilon, there is element in a group such that the measure of a different symmetric difference between E and the set of fixed points of G is less than epsilon. It's clear that this C is stronger than previous ZB and Wershik when he gave his definition he observed that A in fact is equivalent to B. So total non-freeness is equivalent to extreme non-freeness. And natural question arise what group have a faithful totally non-free action. So I would like to emphasize that before people were mostly interested in free actions if you look at classical books and so usually assumption of freeness play a role. And okay, Wershik came from completely different perspective now we are interested in totally non-free actions. Okay, and how this affects dynamics and how this affects group theory. Let us see. So the main point of my talk is that such actions lead to the so-called invariant random subgroups which will be defined soon and to the so-called factor representations which will be just mentioned and didn't discuss it because of absence of time. And both things are pretty important. So now I'm going to explain what is invariant random subgroup. Random subgroup, okay, so given a group again countable group in my talk but this works for locally compact groups and so on. By sub G I denote set of subgroups but I call it space because I consider is this topology. This topology is topology induced from the product topology of set of two elements zero one to the power G. So space of configurations on a group G just given subgroup H in G we identify its characteristic function which takes value zero or one depending G belongs to H or not. And this characteristic function is the element of this space. So here we have product topology which in case group is infinite makes this homomorphic to a counter set. And here we have close subset. Close subset in this space. So we induce topology. So now we have topology on the space of subgroups. And this is pretty interesting object to study of topological and combinatorial properties of this space of subgroups with this topology in the case of locally compact groups there is also definition more complicated and called shabati topology. So study of properties of this group. In our situation this space is a totally disconnected compact metrizable space. And converges in this space means the following sequence of subgroups HN converged to H. Even only if element G belongs to H then it must belong to all members of this sequence starting from some moment. If it doesn't belong to H it doesn't belong to all members of sequence starting from some moment. Now there is in this script to set theory notion of counter bandics on rank. So given a space that can be set of isolated points you can delete isolated points. This is called taking counter bandics on derivative new isolated points may appear and you continue this process. So in our situation when space is totally disconnected metrizable compact space this process of taking derivative will stabilize on certain countable ordinal and the first moment when stabilization whole is called counter bandics on rank. So and then when we finish this procedure of deleting isolated points eventually we come to perfect kernel that set without isolated points. And in our situation this set can be either empty or a counter set. And it will be empty if and only if the cardinality of the set of subgroups is countable. And otherwise it will be a counter set. So again for interesting group even if a group has only countable many subgroups and for instance nilpotent countable groups have only countable many subgroups and many solvable groups and Tarski monsters and so on. Still it is interesting method just to understand the topology of this discrete topological space but if there are uncountable many subgroups it's even more interesting you should like realize what group subgroups should be deleted just to reach this perfect kernel which is homomorphic to a counter set and this perfect kernel will be invariant. Yeah, I forget to say and this will appear immediately that we have action of a group on this space by conjugation. Group acts on the set of subgroups by conjugation. And this is action by homomorphism in our situation and this perfect kernel is invariant subset for this action. So restriction of action on this perfect kernel gives you action of your group on a counter set. Pretty interesting situation which can be used in many situation. Yeah, so one of the first question I will formulate few problems. Interesting group that the mind counter bendixon rank. By the way, in space of subgroups there is a subset of normal subgroups which is close subset which also is interesting for study. It's a counter bendixon rank. For instance for free group it is not known even for free group is two generators. It is not known what is counter bendixon rank of the space of normal subgroup. Of the space of subgroup is one, it's easy. Okay, so now what I already said that group G acts on the space of subgroup by conjugation. Given a subgroup H in G and given element G it maps H to H conjugated by G which is this expression. This action is by homomorphisms. What is a random subgroup? We have compact space of subgroups with random subgroup is random subgroup. It has a low or distribution which is probability measure. So we can identify random subgroups with probability measures on the space of subgroups. What is invariant random subgroup is random subgroup whose distribution, whose low, whose probability measure is invariant with respect to action by conjugation. So we are looking for those invariant, for those probability measures on the space of subgroups which are invariant with respect to this action. Action, it's called a joint action, action by conjugation. And again it's not difficult to understand that you can in certain sense it's important to restrict attention only on a perfect kernel on a counter set because it is invariant and on counter sets the space, there are many probabilities measure while surrounding things is a countable set of isolated points and so invariant measures are just data mass supported on finite orbits. But on the space of subgroups acts not only a group G itself by conjugation and this can be viewed as action of the group of in-automorphism. What I was speaking before is action of the group of in-automorphism on the space of subgroups. But now we can consider action of a large group, a group of all-automorphisms. Just given an automorphism phi and the subgroup H, you take image and this is action and again this is action by homomorphism. Because now you may look for random subgroup which is invariant with respect to action of this larger group. The larger group is, the set of invariant measures is less, less. So probability measure on the space of subgroups which are invariant with respect to action of group of all-automorphism are called characteristic random subgroup. And the characteristic comes from terminology in group theory. Subgroup of a group is called characteristic if it is invariant with respect to all-automorphism. Yeah, instead of subgroup to be invariant we consider probability measure which is invariant with respect to the action of automorphism group. And by the way, in previous definition in my opinion it was better to call not invariant random subgroup but normal random subgroup. But people started to call invariant random subgroups so I don't want to change terminology. Okay, so now we have like two situation. This action of a group or group or the same group of in-automorphism basically. And we are looking for invariant measure and the triples of this sort. Also one can consider certain subgroup which is intermediate. So group of in-automorphism is a subgroup of the group of all-automorphisms and quotient of it is normal subgroup and quotient is called group of auto-automorphism and one can take arbitrary intermediate group between these two and consider for random subgroup which are invariant with respect to action of this intermediate group. But we will not go into details of this. Examples, examples. If you have normal subgroup in G and put just delta mass, so H is a point in the space of subgroup, you put delta mass, it's invariant random subgroup just because of normality. It's fixed point for action by conjugation or if a group has finite conjugacy class and conjugation of H, H1, H2, HN, you put delta masses in HI and take some of them and average. These are examples of invariant random subgroup but these are kind of not interesting examples. And we are interested in continuous, continuous invariant random subgroups. Continuous means this measure should be continuous, no points of positive measure. And additionally, we are interested in ergodic measures. Everybody's, I hope, is familiar in this auditory. What means ergodic, so action is ergodic if invariant subsets have measure zero or one. Yeah, the set of invariant random subgroups is simple, showcase simple, as well as set of characteristic random subgroups is some sub-simplex of that previous simple. In any case, also showcase simple, so ergodic measures correspond to extreme points. So we are interested in finding extreme points in cardinality of the set of extremes points and so on. And general questions are what groups have ergodic continuous invariant random subgroups. In the future, I will abbreviate this like E, C, I, R, S. And given interesting group, how many such I, R, S it has. So as I told, we have simple of invariant random subgroups, simple of characteristic random subgroups. And we are interested in understanding these simplexes, counting the set of extreme points and so on. Two important cases are the so-called Paulson simplex. A simplex when extreme points are dense in the simplex. Take closer to the set of extreme points, you get your simplex back. And such a simplex by result of Lyndon Strauss, Olson, and some name, I'm sorry, I forgot, shows that such simplex is unique up to a fine isomorphism. And the example of such simplex can be produced very easy. You consider two sided shift over say binary alphabet 01. And consider the simplex of all invariant probability measures. And this is Paulson simplex. And another situation is Bauer simplex when the set of extreme points is closed. And the basic example is you take say compact metric space, consider simplex of probability measures. And it is Bauer simplex set of extreme points is just X itself. Now how these two notions are related. If you, let's go back to our dynamical system, group acting on space X mu, probability invariant. And then we have a map, which I denote phi from X to space of subgroups, namely to each point of the space we associate stabilizer of this point. So here point has subgroup. Now total non-freeness means that phi is almost sure injective. Different points have different images. And this leads to the invariant random subgroup. You take measure mu, which is image of mu and this map phi, mu is phi star mu. So now started from GX mu, you get G acting on space of subgroup by preserving measure probability measure mu. Mu is image of mu. And if mu was ergodic, mu will be ergodic. If mu was continuous without atoms, mu will be. Yeah, so it means that totally non-free actions on the back space produce invariant random subgroups. Ergodic actions produce ergodic. And so on. So this is a link between totally non-free actions and the invariant random subgroups. Totally non-free actions produce IRS. Now some results about IRS, very short account of results. So at the end I am going to list a certain result obtained by my collaborators and me in the last three, four years. But just short excerpts in the history. So first of all, there are groups without any continuous ergodic IRS. And as I told, I will abbreviate this ergodic a continuous IRS. Lettices in simple higher-rankly groups. Tak Tsimer 1994. Higman Thomson groups. So Thomson, he produced the first example and Higman then generalized that the first examples of finitely presented given by finite set of generators and finite set of relators. Infinite simple groups. Very famous in group theory, very studied. There is opinions that they are not so big. Nobody is able to prove this. In any case, these groups are very poor with respect to continuous ergodic IRS. They don't have this result due to... To us, Artem Dotkov was mentioned, and another young mathematician from Kharkov, Konstantin Medenets. Now, there are groups with uncountably... When I say uncountably, I mean cardinality of continuum. Tutti zhpave alef-0, alef-0. Rufs with uncountably many continuous ergodic IRS. For instance, non-Iberian free groups of FR, are number of generators from two till infinity, but countable infinity. This result is five years old, the result of Louis Bowen. So the name of Bowen was pronounced many times during this conference, but it was Rufus Bowen who had shot, but very bright mathematical life in the seventies. This is a reason for this, Louis Bowen, my reason colleague, but now in Austin, Texas. So he used various sophisticated ideas. Five years ago, so he proved that non-Iberian free groups have many, many invariant continuous ergodic invariant measures. Now, such group as a group of finite permutation of infinite countable set, set of natural numbers. For instance, this is due to worship. And some other, so this group is locally finite. Every finite generated subgroup is finite, so it's union of finite subgroups. Such group are called locally finite groups and there are results, again, due to co-inventedness. For instance, some special inductive limits of a finite group also have this property. Okay, now some recent results of speaking collaborators. It's not result, just observation, because nilpotent groups have only countable many subgroups, so we may not consider them. They are not interesting, not very interesting. But solvable groups usually have many ergodic continuous IRS. And as a first example that we considered carefully is the so-called lemplight group which play important role in a group theory, in theory of random walks, in theory of L2 co-homology and so on, L2 beta numbers. So this is just a risk product of group of order two and infinite cyclic group. What is that? You take a direct sum of infinitely many copies of group of order two indexed by integers and in a group of integers X on this direct sum by shift. And this action is action by automorphism, so you can consider corresponding semi-direct product of Z with this I billion group infinity to group of elementary to group of infinite rank and this is called lemplight group. In fact, it's too generated, can be generated by only two elements. It's a meta-billion, two-step solvable extension of I billion by I billion, has exponential growth, is not finally presented, it's quite non-trivial group, quite interesting group, has uncountably many subgroups. We computed perfect kernel and this Bendixon rank, but let me focus on the, just on this statement, it's due to Louis Bowen, Rostislav Krautchenko and me, that the simplest of invariant random subgroups on the lemplight group contain Paulson sub-symplex. So inside there is sub-symplex which is Paulson-symplex. So it shows that already a meta-billion group may have many, many invariant random subgroups and in fact it has uncountably many ergodic, ergodic continuous invariant random subgroup. So in fact, our statement is more precise but just to save time, I formulate it in this more simple form. Any questions so far, by the way, I know that I speak too fast. I will indicate and tell so that everything is clear. Now, you know that free group is a universal object in category of groups, it means that every group can be, is homomorphic image of a free group, in particular two group, group generated by two elements is homomorphic image of a free group with two generators. And now the following observations that if you have surjection from a group G onto H, so phi is epimorphism, then you get two maps from subgroups of G to subgroups of H, just you take image of subgroup and this is Borrell map and in opposite direction, subgroup of H to subgroup of G but containing kernel of phi. You take just pre-image, pre-image. And surprisingly this like opposite map is even continuous map. So consequence of this is that if factor group has many invariant random subgroups, then you can leave them to G. The group G itself will be. So now result of Lewis-Borlin that free group onto generators has many IRS just follows from the analysis result for the lamplighted group. Lamplighted group has many so in particular F2 but Lewis-Borlin was using percolation to show his result and so on. Okay, now kind of more. Another result due to Boevin crouching on me stays the following. Every non-Abelian free group, FR, group with R generators, number generators two or larger of infinite or countably infinite rank has uncountably many continuous. Weekly mixing characteristic random subgroups. So this is much more stronger than before. So first of all, instead invariant random subgroup. Here we may claim about characteristic random subgroup. And remember I discussed there are much less characteristic random subgroups than just invariant random subgroup. Secondly, instead ergodicity we claim that the action by in the automorphism action of free group by so here we mean action by automorphism group of free group. But we claim that mixing already hold if you restrict action of full group of automorphism on the subgroup of in the automorphism. We already have weekly mixing property which is much stronger than ergodicity. So previous results that free group has many continuous ergodic invariant random subgroups is made stronger in two directions. And using the fact that subgroup of characteristic group is again characteristic in contrast with normal subgroup. Normal subgroup of normal subgroup is not necessarily normal. So it's called subnormal. So, but the subgroup of characteristic subgroup of characteristic is characteristic. And now we can conclude from this result that if a group G has normal subgroup and this normal subgroup is isomorphic to free group non-community free group then G itself has uncountably many continuous weekly mixing IRS. And this query is applicable in the following situation, for instance, in the situation of non-elementary gromo hyperbolic groups. In the situation of the mapping class group of possibly punctured by finitely many points oriented surface of negative oil characteristic. And the auto-automorphism group of a free group, very important group started by many mathematicians. So here we use results of the mother's hand, the manager of Dell, Dennis Austin, who proved that the groups listed groups have normal subgroups which are isomorphic to non-community free groups. Among to prove that theorem we use some result of ADIAN in few days I will give a talk in Moscow at conference dedicated to 85th best day of ADIAN who has a few great results in group theory. One of them is related to so-called bounded Bersight problem and another here managed to construct infinite family of identities which such independent family none of identities like, identity I mean group identities like identity of commutativity commutator X, Y equals one or identity of nilpotence like chain of commutators is identically equal to one. So here built infinite family of independent identities and as one of corollies of this is that free group, non-community free group has uncountably many characteristics subgroups. It was known not known before. And another we take I billion group, just elementary P group of infinite rank, ZP is a group of odd P, P prime and on I billion groups in very random subgroups is just a space of all probability measures on the space of subgroups because action by conjugation is trivial action. But one can study characteristic random subgroups on I billion groups. And this is quite non-trivial thing and even for this particular case, it's not trivial. In fact, we proved some more general result but in this particular situation, the set of extreme points of the simplest of characteristic random subgroup is countable set. So simple itself is power. Simplex is a sequence of methods mu m is a probability measure in certain sense uniformly distributed on all subgroups of G of index P to the power m. P to the power m, sorry, not n but m. Now result by, I already mentioned that the nilpotent group is not interesting. Now, if you consider group from the point of view of growth, groups of polynomial growth are virtually nilpotent by famous theorem of Gromov. So this is not interesting case in our situation. Now, a group of exponential growth like free group, lamplight group, they may have uncountably many in very random subgroups, this was already mentioned. And what about groups of intermediate growth? And with Bindrin and Agnabida, we showed that there is group of intermediate between polynomial and exponential growth with uncountably many ergodic continuous invariant random subgroups. And perhaps this is the last statement that my time is going to the end that there is class of branch groups that was mentioned at the beginning. Next few slides we will tell few words, what is that? But right now assume you know what is branch group. Statement tells that each branch group has at least countably many ergodic continuous invariant random subgroups. And the first example of branch group is again group, sorry there was some notation, a group generated by four involution, group acting by automorphism of binary root three. This was the first example of group of intermediate growth constructed by me. And then later I understood, studying the properties of this group, I understood that it has branch structures, so introduce this class of branch group. So this statement, this theorem is applicable to this group which is studied by many people. So we know that at least countably many ergodic continuous IRS exists on this group, but we don't know if it is uncountable or countable. And this is one of open problems. Just I will finish in two minutes. Dr. Agracion, is it okay? Yeah, just a few words about branch groups. So people study actions of groups on trees, in particular on root trees. Here is binary root tree. Root is fixed point. And the group acts by automorphisms of the tree. There is boundary of this tree, the tree is infinite. The boundary consists of infinite geodesic rays and it can be identified with the space of binary one-sided infinity sequences. And group acts also on the boundary in natural way. And uniform Bernoulli measure is invariant for such actions. So we have this triple group acts on the boundary which is counter set by Bernoulli measure preserving transformation. And the fact is now group is branch, if it acts, if it has a faithful action on spherically homogenous root tree with the properties that action is level transitive, transitive on each level. And the structure of subnormal subgroup in certain sets imitates structure of the tree. And it was observed already in 2000 by Bartoldi and me and the branch group acts on the boundary completely non-free. So just different points have different stabilizers. So in particular total non-free with respect to uniform Bernoulli measure and the recent reviews that we understood that action is also absolutely non-free. Definition was told, say given at the beginning. And to prove this theorem, to prove the results that the branch group have at least countably many, we consider action diagonal action of a group on the ends power of boundary of the tree. But factorized by the action of symmetric group by permutation. We show that for each end such action is totally non-free. Has only countably many ergodic components and restriction on different connected components leads to different totally non-free actions. And therefore to different invariant random subgroups. Thank you for attention.