Hi everybody and welcome back to our podcast from the Kamasutra to 2020 where we look at your questions, your concerns, even your worries around all things to do with sex and sexuality. As always we have with us Dr. Anvita Madan Behel. Anvita is a psychosexual therapist and she brings the psychological perspective to the advice that the Kamasutra has to give. But along with her today we also have a very special guest we have Sharif Rangmekhar with us. Sharif is the director for the very first queer and inclusive Litfest in India, the rainbow literature festival. Sharif is an author, he's a communications expert, he is an expert on workplace culture and he's an advocate for the LGBTQ community. Welcome Sharif, welcome Anvita. Thank you Seema and welcome to our podcast this week. Thank you, thank you for having me, it's great to be here. Sharif, today we have a question that came in to us last week and it actually brought a tear to our eyes, I mean it actually made me cry a little bit and I felt that we really really needed you on this panel to deal with this. So the question was from a young gay man who said that not only is he looking for help and support in trying to come out and in basically trying to live his new life as a gay person but the fact that he is trying to deal with fear and self-hatred based around this new identity of his every single day and we realized Anvita does a lot of work on homosexuality. I am a huge advocate for basically all sorts of sexual orientations but I have to say that this kind of put a whole new light on something because even though we are there trying to be as supportive as possible, you realize that this is a journey that has far deeper layers and needs a whole different type of support and I know that it's something that you touched upon in your book which is called From Street to Normal where you talk about facing self-hatred, facing the fear, facing your depression about being gay. Yes Ima, sometimes you feel so much has changed you know from the time I came out which is 1999 but I was 30 years old when I came out. Yeah you feel that a lot may have changed you know given that that was over 20 years ago and then you hear these kind of stories you hear it from various people you know the people who want to end their lives. You know there isn't a specific answer to this or but I feel that today people are better off in terms of accessing information, accessing support groups etc but I will just come to a point what does someone really go through in a situation like this. Everything around you is heterosexual or heteronormative When you look around and you see TV and you see romantic films you know so to say it's always a heterosexual couple. When you look up your parents they're obviously a heterosexual couple. When you look at the press and they tell you you know stories of love it's again that. So you go to school people talk about you know boys talk about the girls they like the girls talk about the boys who are looking at them or who they like. So there isn't a space for you I mean you just don't seem to fit in anywhere and that leads to just so much of self-doubt you know at one hand you want to accept that you're different on the other hand you feel that that difference is completely out of place it has absolutely no dignity whatsoever in society because no one talks about it there is if the people talk about it by and large you hear jokes where you're the part of the joke when you've seen caricatialization in cinema you seem again to be some kind of thing or person to mock at to laugh at there isn't any status there isn't any dignity you know there's no self-respect in a situation like that it is it's only a few who can completely shut that whole world out and be themselves and even if they can I know it during the pandemic as well during the lockdown that many people who went through this kind of self-doubt hate towards themselves isolated in rooms because they have just come out to their parents and the parents hadn't accepted them there were others who who who were just getting into that journey of accepting themselves but they have no space to go to no place to go to etc so there were few I think who've tried to kind of meditate in a way to to look at themselves you know and you know perhaps as as one mental health expert was telling me because we were on a panel discussing this on TV in May what they call a certain kind of mindfulness towards yourself you know accepting starting to look at what you like what colors you like what kind of person that you desire for what do you want to want to wear you know and use their little private space if you have you know whether it's in the toilet whether it's in your bedroom to try and explore those things so that you can start you know creating your own little world out there but obviously that's not a permanent solution that is just no way because you can't live in the toilet in the room so all I can tell people and anyone is that start reading more start reaching out on Instagram for example there are a diamond dozen really really good mental health support groups to reach out to if not anything else you'll get someone you'll connect with someone who's so much like you to just tell you that things are fine the way they are you know and and there isn't anything wrong and I don't know whether it's easy Seema for anyone to get rid of that hate and doubt that you carry you know completely and maybe I'm taking a little long but I was I was telling you that when it was after I came up with this book and I was 50 plus that actually someone who knew me when I had first got into a gay group meeting Salim Kedway he said that this book this story and the stage of where I am was a coming of age which meant I spent over 20 years to come to terms with my sexuality to the to the point where nothing else mattered or what the young today called self-love you know that it took me those many years to actually love myself for who I am so I think that's what happens to a lot of people and and I just I just pray and hope that there are less and less such cases in this world you know of people having to feel success really I know what's it like and with I know that you had something very similar that you were talking about last time weren't you you were saying about how we don't have any examples of gay couples being together so where do you go to yeah but you know hearing should talk about a lot of the personal experiences I really want people to hear how it is a lifelong journey like research now speaks about this idea called internalized homophobia and that's what Sharif is talking about in some ways which is basically that we grow up in the same society so what we are watching you know all Bollywood movies the gay person is the comic relief in some ways you know that is the person that is ridiculous to see yourself in those shoes is a scary thing to actually undo all those stereotypes or those jokes and everything actually takes a really long time you know because we grow up in the same society we have the same stereotypes we believe in the same things we believe in all these heteronormative things we've grown up you know speaking about marriage and heterosexual couples and seeing our parents and all of that so it is actually quite normal to have that you know when you start thinking oh I might be attracted to the same sex person you suddenly have to undo all those stereotypes so it is quite normal to have that self-hatred in in the beginning because it's scary it's confusing it's it's so hard and a lot of times we have seen that people actually become very overtly homophobic because they're so scared that they'll be found out that somebody will find out that inside they're actually considering that idea and somewhere they feel like they're just transparent and people can look through their inner world and it and so it just speaks to what Sharif was saying about how it's not easy as one day oh I just feel gay and I'm out it is such a complex and difficult journey and it's a journey where there's no support there's no sex education there is no or I would just go to speak to a friend about it because coming and speaking to a friend is a coming out process which is also difficult right so it is just one of the hardest things to do and I assure you said one of the best way to get is find support find support from people who've gone through the journey before and find support groups it could be online it could be in person your wherever you're living there will be a group available or if not there are groups available online that you should seek so I just want to I want to say one thing sorry yeah on the point that Amita was just making this whole thing of internalized homophobia it comes to a point that I mean it didn't I mean there was a point that I wanted to you know end my life but that time I had no clue as to why but I know enough that more people who don't want to be gay in you know and I don't know whether you call it internalized homophobia it was just the whole fact that you feel left out you've seen the hatred when sexuality is discussed to the table at certain homes where people are so-called educated and supposedly aware where they were also discussing 377 and when it was read down in 2009 and then again in 2018 and you know they they said that you know I want to be loved so I don't want to be gay I I want I want to be like my brother like my sister like my cousin who are heterosexual you have people the fear is so high that you actually don't want to be yourself anymore because you you you don't want to face that violence you don't want to be hated you don't you don't want your parents to differentiate and you know kind of not love you you know that that's what people go through and it is that leads to the fear that leads to the fear of coming out that leads to the fear of recognizing who you are you know in your fullest form it and it's something that Anvita also said the other day which made a lot of sense that not only is this such a deep fear and the thing is that you know we are over here trying to say okay we support you through this really deep fear we're here by your side but it's not just that one off it's every day you face that fear like Anvita was saying every morning you get up and you face the same fear you may have met somebody today who says everything is going to be all right it's fine we're here the next morning you wake up and the same fear comes up and Sharif I know that you've been went through this journey this is something that you've faced personally how did you deal with this every single morning every day or continue to do it every day in some because it's a lifelong journey So you know Seema Anvita I think I am so lucky I mean in a way I used to regret at a point coming out quite late in my in terms of my age and I spoke to my godmother who is Chitra and she says well you know certain things happen in time look at it that 1999 is still better than 1989 as just as an example you know what the world was like then so in that sense I was lucky that I came out at the period where we at least had certain group meetings taking place I'm within my own residential complex a little bit last foundation was removed so I had a space to go to but it was after I came out and you know I'm lucky that I had a mom a mother who looked at each one of us each three brothers each of us are very very different people very different people and and so I would like to just quote her here she loves plants and she loves we have a whole terrace full of plants and she said that to her children are like plants some of them require shade at a certain point some of them need to be put out in the sun some of them need more water some need less water some need a different kind of soil different kind of nourishment etc etc etc but they choose how to bloom how to grow on their own what she as a godmother needs to do is ensure they were nurtured and they looked up so her approach to the three of us was that and in a way it was a certain amount of ignorance of sexuality and sexual orientation which was great because she just took me for who I am and didn't slot me into being a homosexual or being a heterosexual or being a boy or being a girl you know uh she didn't do any of those things so in a way home became extremely safe it is just that she asked me questions that I couldn't answer that point because she was curious to understand me better understand homosexuality better but then I came out to her I was hardly a month month and a half into gay group meetings I knew nothing for me it was just meeting other gay men was the first steps that was the excitement was about meeting other men you know it wasn't about trying to figure out uh the various nomenclatures attached to behavior to choices and all I didn't know all about I mean that's taken a long time to understand and know and nowadays there are any even new words you know pronouns and there's so much more out there uh but it was when I had to step out of home that there was always this conflict the moment I got into my car the moment I was on the street the moment I went to office even when I was the CEO for company there is this assumption that you hold in the power structure you're at the top you're secure you know in a way you are you know in many ways you are but I wasn't secure because I did face a campaign of someone who knew about my sexuality and he he sort of put me out there across the staff including the support staff the receptionist and the risk sending messages it wasn't WhatsApp so he couldn't send so many messages at the same time which was text messages but you know these these areas were always spaces where I was constantly holding back I was constantly trying to be the straight acting guy a corporate fellow you know the sahib because when you have a driver and you're paying in in cities like Delhi and you're paying him the salary or the boss your sahib so I had to be the sahib uh I could never uh I was it took me a while to explain to other people why I like to drive in the evening because that's the little time that if I was on a date or meeting someone I could actually completely be free in my car with the other person otherwise I'm constantly on guard go to a family function you're on guard so you're leaving leading two lives you know on a uh on a continuous basis you know and uh but you know like while Shakespeare says life is a stage you know they're all actors and whatever the exact line is but you can't be doing so many roles at the same time you know uh it's fine you know when people can shoot different shots at different points at the moment I walk out of my home when I walk into my home I'm constantly it's like day and night you know and uh and you know dust and dawn has its beauty that sounds it's very exhausting it took so much of a toll I didn't realize it Seema and I can't imagine oh sure it I can't imagine when I get calls from people that that they have to so many years later go through such things where you have to perpetually act I used to joke in an office when things became a little more open at work at the workplace uh that uh you know post 2009 because everyone was talking about 377 so we could discuss it at work uh that you know in public relations you're always you're there's a facade there is a politically correct behavior there is certain things you say to your client certain things you don't say to your client you're constantly performing in front of a client in front of the press in front of all these people I said that I I've become an actor because I'm doing it all the time but I'm doing the director's role with pressure from the world around me I'm doing the script I'm the script writer because I I need to know what I say and what I don't I decide what I wear and what I don't base is what everyone wants to see I'm doing the costume designing therefore I I do the makeup because then I uh you know I don't have to show everything to the world when I want to cry I cry in private because that's not what what people want to see because they want to understand so uh so it was it's it was really really exhausting and and you know it's I wouldn't wish that on anyone you know I wouldn't wish that on anyone that they have to constantly do this you know it's enough to be a son a brother a partner a cousin etc etc you know where it is too much to be so many different things so many different roles that you have to play which are not natural to the existence of a so-called loving family structure and society you know it it's just not worth it and I think you're really speaking to the lack of safety you know it is the lack of safety every day that one really needs to hear there that and the lack of choice that you cannot decide somebody else can just tell whoever they want to tell about an identity that you're really protecting how important it is but one fine day somebody can just spread it out to 50 people and that then you have to deal with the consequences of that you know when the receptionist finds out when she looks at you can you really have a conversation with her what that does to your life the turmoil and that lack of choice and powerlessness you know that's what we're speaking about how difficult it is in some ways because you don't have control over it and that process of not having control just living in that uncertainty can be so you know emotionally difficult for everyone yeah and Anvita I mean you know like there are many cases even today where I met this young professional who was attached to one of the consulting big consulting firms and he was placed with a public sector undertaking company where everything was masculine but he was engaging with the typical alpha male lot of people and he went through so much trauma and he was based in Chandigarh that he traveled down to an event in Bangalore organized by Right Circle for the LGBTQ job for something that we would never have heard of until the last year or two years and he met me my hair's turning up and he started howling he had never seen he had never been to a conference where there was sexuality and safety or as you just said safety was being discussed so that you could encletiate language say bring your whole self to the workplace but it's really being your whole self right I'm letting yourself just as my mom would say let it bloom you know whatever color it might be whichever way the leaves might be whichever color the leaves might be you know he howled and howled and howled and and he couldn't believe that there could be this kind of world as well just couldn't believe it you know he's fortunately he's moved to another place and he's very very happy you know but again he was lucky to have that information there isn't enough out far from enough out there for people to to you know know that they can turn to certain places certain organizations you know to just feel comfortable so I think what I would like to ask over here is that do you have any suggestions of groups that people can access so you talk about the LGBTQ job fair I didn't know about that I think that's amazing is that something that happens on an annual basis is it in every city is it in one place where can you find information on that so there is the as far as this one goes the first edition was actually in July 2019 in Bangalore they came to Delhi last year fed actually just a few days and two weeks before the lockdown they were really lucky and there were over 1000 people sought seeking jobs from the community over 1000 people pent up or yes you know demand as such you know but there this year it will be online on May I think third and fourth or fourth it's Pride Circle people can find for that out now there are many other groups for example if you're trans there's the Mitra Trust which is based in Delhi it's run by you've seen how you met Rudrani Rudrani Chetri who acted in the color the last color Rudrani runs that it's it's the Mitra Trust you can get a lot of help on on issues of transition mental health etc she also runs a modeling agency because as she says even trans people there's nothing unusual even trans people want to be models you know like everyone wants to wear clothes and and they know how to do the best makeup they actually know how to do the best makeup so yeah but actually it's something that she said when we met when she talked about this she said most trans people identify themselves as women and it's the one thing yeah so if they were to dress as men nobody would probably even be able to see the difference but because they like to dress as women um that's when they become visible in this particular identity and this is where they put down so she said that this is about empowering them to say you know we will have a fashion show we have a modeling agency where they get to dress the way that they want to and I just thought it was the most amazing thing that she said you know I absolutely love her for her work so uh what did you say that particular group is called again that's called the mitra trust the mitra trust the mitra trust yes okay and so we will actually put that in the description on the um on the video and obviously there is the hamsafar trust which is the oldest out of bombay they have an office in delhi but you can connect with them they have mental health experts etc also who are attached to the organization they team with a lot of issues on hiv as well and during the pandemic they were finding ways to deliver medicine uh the hiv medicine that is you know but you require to take uh two people's homes which were doing it in some of the cities which was quite amazing thing uh during the lockdown then uh so hamsafar is there then there's the hiv aids alliance which is then based in delhi and they they again do work across even mental health is one of the areas they look at there's a hf which uh supported a lot of people when it comes to safe sex stds and stis and again uh when it comes to that uh quite a few people have both identity issues and uh they also have issues and fears of carrying stis and stds so there are counselors attached on there it's a very well funded organization about then when you go i don't know exactly where uh which part of gujrat was uh is manvendra's govids uh who's the prince who had come out and opera went free it also featured him uh years ago it's called the lakshya trust you find it online online they do a lot of work like that there is uh tell me something um is there a group a support group for parents of gay children because i know that we're talking about a lot of young people who are coming out and they need the support but i think a lot of times we parents need help so it's called i think the swikar rainbow parents and uh they're wonderful good you asked over the button uh so they based out of bombay but they have a network now of parents coming on board from across the country but really location in today's world doesn't immediately it's not an immediate need i would say so there's aruna desai uh who's a co-founder does a lot of work there's chitra palakar again who's an actor and her daughter who's lesbian based in australia now so chitra and aruna quite often take the calls and they have helped parents they've helped children i know at least in recent times in the last four five months that if must have saved at least five or six kids and would have helped at least five or six parents as a result in in dealing with the truth for the parents to deal with the truth of their children of who they are uh so so they're a very good group to reach out to swikar rainbow parents then like that then there is your amazing litfest that you have the queer and inclusive litfest yeah it's a space for everyone i mean actually it's just it we just reverse at the litfest uh the dominance or the past structure that's reversed we're not heterophobic that's where there isn't a word like heterophobia as yet uh you know we're more accepting of heterosexuals we're more respectful and accepting of parents thank you which is why you allowed people like me to go no no not at all so we look at we look at intersections because it's it's almost like you know wasn't like that right child or cut someone they're going to bleed they're going to feel pain you have a heartbreak you can fall in love with someone you can fall out of life you can have domestic violence you can have great sex uh you have you have just so many things that are absolutely similar so we look at it from the queer and inclusive which is why so we often look at women in particular because there's so many common things that they go through in terms of just the patriarchal structure the family structure the power equations in a family it's not very different so that's where we are coming from so it's safe in that sense that you can get a lot of information you can understand many things because people use history they use picture they use my apology that you're anyway and that's what on uh so there's just so many things that are used visual media cinema to tell us stories that we don't see also you know short films that we don't see and those are very so I would tell a lot of people who want to feel comfortable follow the kashish film festival uh follow what the queer chronicles does out of Chennai because they also organize a film festival uh you know and they organize conversations uh as well it makes you feel more comfortable I think you just get to know many more lives you know um that itself is reassuring you know it can create a sense of self a sense of solidarity even without personally knowing the person you know so yeah I was just saying that for all the resources that sheriff is given when we think about going to a counselor especially about our sexual identity make sure that the counselor is somebody who is an ally to the LGBTQ community it is not true that every therapist psychologist out there yeah they would be part of the same society the same stereotype there's something known as conversion therapy where people are trying to convert people so a lot of times these organizations will have a list of people like in London we have something called the pink therapy where they have therapists who basically are somebody that you know they have been they have been looked at and seen that they are supporters of the LGBT community they will be allies so it is very important and it is very helpful to go to a therapist but please make sure that they are somewhere it could be on their website it could be through a friend it could be through those agencies that they are actually allies of the community because it's not true that every therapist is safe so make sure of that sorry because you know I think also a lot of youngsters who are online and not youngsters okay I'm young but even on Instagram you just have to do LGBTQ mental health you'll get a list of queer run mental health groups where they have queer affirmative mental health experts there are few heterosexual experts who also accepted as you know supportive or understanding and I mean they see the whole rainbow you know they don't see any problems with the rainbow also interestingly which something that can give us heart is not only what the judge during the 377 order Indu Malhotra had said that history opposed us an apology but just a few days ago last week in Chennai a lesbian couple was protected by the courts the the judge had said said that I'm getting over my preconceived notions and as assigned parents and the couple to go to a for queer affirmative say for them to understand now if I think let us be small little incidences and occasions are the ones which we can you know hold on to in terms of hope and I think that is why it's important for the more and more community to go into social media is largely safe there are lists there are organizations there are groups also which deal with other identities but they're queer like the queer muslim project then people from the northeastern region they have the chinky homo project they have yeah all they have such groups which are dealing with the multiple identities because a person coming from let's say Manipur or Nagaland or any of the seven sister states and they come to Delhi they also fees racism they also become a minority for where they come from but it's added to their sexual identity which becomes that much more heavy to deal with in terms of it same with the queer muslim same with all this so there's a lot out there and people should make full use of it that's that's the freedom that's I think that's really really good advice and with that did you want to give us a piece of advice just to um bring the session to an end I have no advice I think we've heard such amazing things um just you know a couple of things that I wanted to add was uh it is as difficult as you were saying for parents the coming out process is as much for the parents as it is for the person obviously more difficult for the parents but you know the parents also have to undo their preconceived notions of weddings for their children uh taking the partner to a family dinner how do you you know disclose to the masi and the chachi and the mommy that you know who is going to come as the dinner date uh with your child so it is not easy so the sensitivity holds true for them as well you know they they have to go through their journey and their preconceived notions in some ways um so if we can support them as well in some ways also the coming out is very difficult because we have to think about everything for you at risk you know Sharif spoke about your career might be at risk because people in office might accept you your religion might be at risk you know you grew up just because you're gay it doesn't mean you're no longer Muslim or you don't believe in going to the mosque or you don't um you know believe in your Allah or Islam or whatever that might be at risk your favorite cousin might not want to be you know your favorite cousin any longer your parents might want to reject you your best friend might be awkward so how much is at risk at this coming out really and and how important is this identity the congruence of it that you are willing to risk all of it you know i just if people could just in understand how disconnected life feels uh and you want that matching and you know like bringing your whole self in as Sharif was saying um and that is why you're willing to take the risk of upheaval of all these identities and more and more people are accepting there are a lot of religious groups that are accepting um i i don't hear and otherwise so please do access those groups um and finally um i just want to say that i had a funny story with when he was saying that if you are in the community and you are um you know thriving and surviving in the community sometimes we have stereotypes about our own community in some ways the first time i read lesbian psychology is i thought no men there's going to be no domestic violence it's going to be all pretty and fine they're all women and then i suddenly read a chapter on um you know the fact that there was domestic violence within the lesbian community or there's domestic violence within the gay community and we think those things don't exist because you know the whole the patriarchal structures might be missing or whatever but there are as many issues within the LGBTQ community which might be around um isms of you know like Sharif was saying about phobias or stereotypes or the same there might be stereotypes within or boxes within the community um so don't feel like you have to fit into one mold sexuality as we now know it is very fluid so get the support get explore it figure out what's your identity you know that in the mindfulness that Sharif is talking about finding that individual uh space to figure out what's yours and identifying that's where you feel most connected in some way so that would just what i would leave everyone with fantastic um i think i'm going to go back to that point as the ending point as well because um you know we were talking about self-mindfulness i think that's what Sharif called it is that right Sharif you call it self-mindfulness that wonderful thing of self-love and just understanding yourself and as both understand Sharif said at the beginning that you know everywhere you look there isn't any kind of model to follow there isn't any kind of gay love gay couple model that is put out for you in public to follow and say this is what i will look up to everything out there is heteronormative and you are fighting battles just trying to find yourself so what we suggest is that when you actually go into this idea of feeling really miserable and not understanding how you want to take this further whether you want to accept this this identity of yours you know you are gay but you don't know how to accept it the best thing that you can do for yourself is just for a little bit of time every day have a little fantasy time so give yourself time to fantasize i know that for a lot of young men for a lot of young women it's really hard to see themselves physically in a relationship with another person of the same sex because they don't see it anywhere else so there are no pictures depicting it there's no kind of visuals depicting that and you don't know how it would even look so our advice is go out and actually fantasize about it don't block it out of your mind don't say to yourself oh my god no this is wrong you're in private this is happening inside your head nobody else can access it give yourself the time to think it through visualize yourself with somebody that you really want to be with if it's the same sex person visualize yourself with that same sex person visualize yourself in a state of intimacy whether it is lovemaking whether it is conversations whether it's hugging or holding hands whatever it is see it through like a movie in your head and do this every single day for yourself just a little bit of private time as your own personal completely free therapy and i think that with that is there anything sharia that you want to add just before we bring the video to an end yeah just one thing i'd like to say is uh picking up on what i'm with i was talking about about parents i think we need to be patient with them and we need to have as many conversations with them we need to make them uh you know we need to share information with them as well we need to make them aware uh because it's it's like a coming out journey for them as well because ultimately they have to when they engage with the world around them they need to feel as proud of their children as you feel proud of your sexuality so i think that's something we we all need to because we are the kind of people who want our family around us i think that um that's really good advice sheriff thank you and with that thank you for all of your advice as always i hope i really hope that this is one time when everybody out there who's either within the gay community or not within the gay community that you really do take something away from this because i think it is extremely important i hope that this is brought home to you just that kind of struggles that other people exactly like yourself but with a slightly different idea of love are facing and i don't think it's fair on anybody to have to go through that so please do take away at least a couple of lessons from our video today if you enjoyed the video leave a like leave a comment i am available for questions on info dot sima dot anand at gmail dot com anvita if you wish to get in touch with anvita on um she's sorry it's anvita dot madan behel at gmail dot com for if you are interested in counseling and it will be in the text below and sheriff if anybody needs to get in touch with you what where do they reach out to you it's it's s they can just i think it is off the net for my name i'm on facebook i'm on instagram but otherwise they can email me at sd round maker rang and they are at gmail dot com super as anvita said it'll all be in the descriptions anyway in the meantime do take care of yourselves stay safe and we'll see you next week


is an unusual process or that this is not a standard process, I think that we as a committee need to be prepared to say to the Government that we will not accept the unusual process. We will continue with the due process because that is how we as committees legislate. I do not think that because a policy decision has been made by the Government, for the Government of the day to then request a member of a different party in a committee to introduce that policy to an existing piece of legislation, please let me finish. By default, they are veering from the due process that we should follow, so I am not arguing against or for the proposition. That is again an argument that we have on a different day and there will be many views and we will have ample opportunity to express those views, but my premise is about ensuring that this committee does what it is supposed to do in the way that it is supposed to do it, so I do not think that we should veer from normal process in that respect. That is why I am saying that we should not accept that this is an addition to the bill. John Finnie, I am going to try and summarise where we are and try to see a route forward through this, John Finnie. I thank colleagues for their comments. The reason that I contacted yourself and the clerk was for these specific reasons. Can I say a few things about that? I know that we are not going to discuss the individual merit. I have had an amendment written about this for considerable time. It features in discussions with another party. I am bringing forward an amendment. I think that you can safely assume that I will be bringing forward other amendments, but I am not flagging them up. I am flagging that up as a courtesy given the profile that the issue is received. I am not wanting anything to circumvent any procedures. I think that that is absolutely important. The other proposals I will bring forward at stage 2 will stand and fall on their merits, as this one will, and it may be that any amendment that is brought at stage 2 that in any way does not fit with some of the work that we have done. We cannot always scrutinise to the level of detail that we want. People could say that, as they could on any piece of legislation, we have not taken enough evidence on that. I absolutely expect the committee to scrutinise this. I have tried to be helpful by flagging this up in advance, and I am grateful that there has been an opportunity to discuss it on the agenda. I will absolutely assist you and the clerks in helping the committee to look at this. I would like to say that, without wanting to cut anyone off, everyone has had a chance to say something on this. First, the bill that we are looking at is a Government bill. Anyone at any stage during a Government bill can bring forward amendments at stage 2. What is important when we are considering this is to also bear in mind the importance of standing orders and the procedures of this Parliament, which I must ensure that, as a committee, we comply with. The other thing that I caution people about is that it is clear from round the committee table that everyone wants to take evidence and hear evidence from people on this amendment. That is the ability that we have. I have logged that everyone wants to consider it. John could, in theory, have lodged this amendment at stage 2 without telling us if it had not come out. We have to bear that in mind. I personally think that, as convener of a committee and a committee member, to bring something in at stage 2 of a debate having not looked at it when you have looked at the bill at stage 1 is wrong from the committee, but that is my personal opinion. If I was bringing an amendment in at stage 2, I would like to see it at least had airway during stage 1. My proposal to the committee is that, first of all, we continue to work on the stage 1 report, which is based on the bill that is in front of us. We will not be in a position to publish that to laugh to recess anyway, so there is some time. I then would like to clarify what the procedures are for this Parliament in relation to this. I then would like to speak to the Government Minister Graham Day, as far as business is concerned, to find out more about deadlines and timings. I then would like to take the opportunity to speak to John Finnie about the amendment and try to get a wording for it. I then would like to come back to you as a committee with what the proposals that would be appropriate, based on those discussions today, to hear evidence on the amendment that we have not yet seen. At that stage, we can decide how we take to the stage 1 report forward, whether to publish it at that stage or whether to hold off. My feeling is that doing so now would be wrong, but I absolutely believe that it would be wrong in any shape or form to prejudge this, and we need to take evidence on it and hear clearly and then make up our mind as a committee on the evidence that we hear on whether it is a good proposal or not, in the same way that we do on all amendments and Government bills. That would be the way that I would propose to deal with it. Does anyone think that I have fundamentally missed anything? I am wrong, so I am happy to hear your views, Mike. Just the word consultation that you never mentioned. I think that when we do this, we need a very short consultation before we invite people to give evidence. Let me see the procedure and let me find out exactly what is being done. I understand that there are a lot of people out there that may have a comment on it. We need to make sure that, when the Government works out the timescale for this bill, we are given time to do our job properly as a committee. You have always made it clear to me, as your convener, that we are not going to be driven by the Government. We are to be driven by the way we look at the legislation and do it properly and not be constrained by Government timescales. I am mindful of that at all times. I do not disagree with anything that you said. I did not want to clarify for the record, however, that it is still unclear whether the additional subject matter or the additional topic should or will be included in the stage 1 report or will be dealt with as a stage 2 amendment. If it is dealt with as a stage 2 amendment, knowing that in advance of completing and publishing the stage 1 report, we are fundamentally missing the point. If we know that it is coming and we know that the subject matter is well rehearsed publicly, it should form part of the stage 1 report to give it the due process that it deserves. For that reason, I would not consent to the overall approach that you mentioned. Well, let's come back after recess when I have more information to consider it, but all we can do as a committee when it comes to the stage 1 report is to consider what is in the bill, as far as we can go. Now, we can caveat our stage 1 report, but I would look to the class for advice for that, and I don't want to make a decision on that until we've discussed it as a committee how we want to handle it might. We can say in our report that we are aware of what was coming down the track because it isn't the public domain by the finance minister in Parliament, and we can comment in our report on that. Indeed we can, but until we have more information in fairness, until we know more about what's happening and the timescales, I think it would be wrong to make a decision on any particular item. I therefore would ask if you would support me in what I'm proposing to do on your behalf, and report back to you post the recess. Thank you very much. We're now going to move into private session.


All right, welcome, everyone, to today's Google Webmaster Central Office Hours Hangouts. My name is John Mueller. I'm a Webmaster Trends Analyst here at Google at Switzerland. And part of what we do are these office hours hangouts with people from all over the world and lots of patients that were already submitted. And always, if any of you want to get started with something before we look at the submitted questions, feel free to jump on in now. John, well, the videos won't be replacing you, will they? How do you mean replacing me? No, I mean, the new videos, which are really good and useful, kind of strikes me that they answer a lot of the questions that you continually get asked in our Webmaster Hangouts.  But for me, that means that they just constantly get asked. So you won't be getting rid of Webmaster Hangouts for you to replace the video there. I think we're setting up a machine learning system to automatically replay the right video at the right time and then we'll cover all of the grounds, including all of the buzzwords. OK, yeah. Is that OK? No, no. I think these kind of interactive videos are really interesting as well, because it's important to see what people are worried about at the moment, whether they're having problems. And I just always just send them to the cancer. John, can I ask a question? Sure. Actually, I was searching something and I found that in the result page for the same domain, but the different pages are ranking on the position 1, 5th, 7th, and 9th. Is that possible to rank a domain with the different pages for the single query? Sure. With our algorithms, that's always possible that you have multiple results from the same site with the search results page. From our point of view, that's perfectly normal. That can make a lot of sense. Really kind of common example is if you're searching for your company, then you kind of expect to see a bunch of results from your company as well. So it's not something that we would see as a bug or as a problem. Sometimes people do report these kind of pages where a lot of results are very similar from the same site in the same search result page. Maybe that's not so great. What you can do then is use the feedback link on the bottom of the search results pages to let us know about that. And these feedback reports are reviewed regularly. And that's something that is brought up with the search quality team to kind of see where are people having problems now, what they like at the moment, and what might we be able to do to help improve the search results in that review. OK, thanks. Hello, Jim. Hello. Hi. Hi, John Pratik here from Hendaval, India. Yeah, so I have one query. Normally, we generally read in LinkedIn like there is position director of SEO, manager of senior director of SEO, and bigger company like WPP, Omnicom, those are the largest digital marketing agency in the world. So director of SEO, so I would like to say one point, which generally try to get the backing from natural link building. So nowadays, so natural link building, so if we do the website with technical SEO that is done with one activity, but to get the natural link building. So what is the actual meaning of natural link building? I don't quite understand the last part. Normally, we often listen about natural link building. So what is the actual meaning of natural link building? What is the meaning of natural link building? John, you posted as a question in the forum as well, if you want to read it on the chat. Oh, in the chat. OK. Yeah, I know a lot of agencies do link building in really weird ways that generally don't align with our guidelines. And for a large part, I know our algorithms are being worked on quite intensively to kind of help make sure that those kind of links don't play a role in our search results rankings. So that's something where in general, our recommendations are really to make sure that you have fantastic content on your website and to have something that people really like, that people like to share. And that's kind of the way natural link building works, is that the people look at your site, they see something they really like, and they recommend it to other people. Whereas if you come to other people and you say, oh, you need to put this link on your site, or I will pay you for this link, or I will post this link to 5,000 directories, then those are all essentially not really recommendations when we find those kind of links. There are things that you drop there yourself. So that's something that we would not recommend doing. I agree with your point, but actually, the scene is that like, let's take an example, Stone Temple consulting one of the world's largest SEO enterprise agency, Stone Temple Consulting. If you are aware about Stone Temple Consulting, that company. So they do the guest posting. So that guest posting activity, they consider it natural link building. Is this right? Guest posting is natural link building. In general, for guest posts, we recommend having well-known follow on those links so they wouldn't pass any paycheck. I mean, that doesn't mean that guest posts are bad in that sense. It's just that you can use these to kind of drive traffic to your site. And if people like your content, they can link to it as well. But it's not the case that you should go out and write for other blogs and just drop links to your sites. But these are essentially old topics. From my point of view, if you're seeing something where you're kind of worried that people are doing things wrong, then I'd recommend submitting that as a spam report, sending that our way so that the Web 17 can take a look. If you'd like to discuss what specific other sites are doing or what other agencies are doing and kind of wondering like where you should position yourself as an agency, I'd recommend going to the Webmaster Help Forum and really kind of discussing that among peers. Thank you. One of the tricky things, I think, with regards to all of this, is that it's easy to spend a lot of time focusing on things that your competitors are doing, which might be doing right or that they might be doing wrong. And that's all time that you waste, essentially, because you don't really have a chance to work on the things that you want to do. So instead of spending too much time analyzing what your competitors are doing in minute details, maybe it makes sense to kind of think back and think about what you want to do in the long run or what you want to do with your sites or with your clients and how you can kind of work to really improve that situation overall rather than just try to follow what other people are doing or to complain about what other people are doing. John, on that subject, I don't need to put in there, but you just mentioned about guest posting. So for me, is there a difference really between just guest posting and actually contributing? I mean, for instance, if I contributed to Search Engine Land or Search Engine Journal or somewhere and you've put a lot of time, effort, research into something as an individual, and you contribute as a guest author, would that be considered the same as just a guest post on some site where you just got in touch with some random and just said, here you go, can you just put this on? And here's this link, which we want to have this anchor go into this page. I remember Matt Kutz, when he stuck a fork in guest posting. Some years ago, he said, look, if you'd have dinner with the people that you would. Oh, no. I think you got muted. Oh, sorry. Who muted me? Someone that had enough. Wasn't me. Do you get my point? So I think there's a difference between a genuine contribution to the industry that you're in, or the peer group that that is notical is in, and just some naff guest posts. There's just some article that's spun together and just thrown with a link. I think you could probably draw a line somewhere there, but finding that line is really hard. That's something where in talking with people, I also see that they try to kind of overvalue their contributions to some of these things. And essentially, it essentially is this kind of situation where it's like they send out 1,000 emails. Like I would like to write a blog post for your blog, and I am the expert on this topic. And I don't even look at your site. I don't even know what your site is actually about. I will write you a blog post for $5 and include some links in it. And that's kind of between that extreme and the situation where you're actually seen as an expert and the other side comes to you and says, hey, Don, can you write something for us? We would really like to publish something fantastic from you and kind of have your voice on our site. So I think those are kind of two extreme situations. But it's really hard to kind of draw the line in between there. And I would almost go so far as to say, well, even those kind of guest posts where you do contribute significantly to the site, maybe it makes sense just to have those links as no follow and have it such that you kind of profit from the people who actually go to your site because they think that you wrote something fantastic and they're really interested in hearing more from you. But I think that's the kind of situation where I'd be hard pressed to kind of draw the line. And the Web Spam team generally tries to look at the bigger picture. And for them, if they see kind of a bigger pattern and it's like, oh, there are hundreds of guest posts out there. And for each of these blogs, they're like, well, I am the expert and I'm contributing significantly for this other site. And those are the only links going to that site. And you're just placing those links yourself. And it's not really a clean recommendation for your website. So I think the tricky part there is that looking at the bigger picture often makes this a lot clearer. But looking at them individually, it can be kind of tricky to spot the differences there. Yeah, actually, along those same lines, if you guys don't mind if I sneak in, how do those sites get away with it? Like, AVO, AVVO is a resolve any legal issue and you can find any lawyer and super lawyers where they give you a seal and a link. And they're follows. And how do they get away with that? How do they get away with it? I think another tricky part there is that you don't really know if they get away with it. Will you dominate in each one? Well, in the sense that for us, for the Web Spam team as well, we try to recognize those kind of links and just ignore them. And the Web Spam team, when they run across a bigger pattern of links like that, they also apply manual action there. And they essentially neutralize those links. But this is the external link. So you wouldn't see that any of the link tools. And a site might continue to rank fairly well despite all of these links essentially being ignored. So what ends up happening is they spend a lot of time doing all of this stuff to kind of build these unnatural links. And in the end, they don't really have an effect. And they could have spent that time actually doing something useful for the long term for their website. Yeah, no, I agree with you. And we have, obviously, we're in the lawyer space. But a lot of lawyers and their competition will pay or show up on these directory sites. And it's just they still dominate not only just page one, but the top three rankings. And just kind of curious how, first of all, from what you're telling me, it sounds like that they're not supposed to be able to do that. And how does Google handle that? How does Google know if it's like a paid link or not also? Yeah, usually when we look at the bigger picture of what is supporting this website, that becomes a lot clearer. That's something if we see like, I don't know, 90% of the links are coming from various directories, then we might assume that those are kind of the only things out there that are kind of seen as a recommendation that we could just essentially ignore. But I think if you're an expert in one of these areas and you see other sites doing really shady things, I would just submit it as a spam report so that the website and people will know about this and can take a look at that, and can double check to see if things are working right on our site as well. And if you have something more complicated that's hard to kind of fit into a spam report, you can also send that to me. And I can forward that on to the team as well to kind of double check. Thank you. All right, let me grab some of the questions that were submitted and then we'll get more to interesting discussions with you all. OK, the first one is from Mark. I'm curious how Google would handle duplicate content consideration for two brands that want to partner and display an identical landing page on each of their sites. Neither party is willing to give up the canonical and the microsite is out of the question. Is there a generally acceptable workaround for a scenario like this? So I guess this is somewhat of a unique situation in that neither side wants to kind of allow the other side to be canonical. What generally would happen here is we would look at both of these pages and we would look at both of these pages and see that they're different in the sense that if these are two brands and maybe they're selling the same product, then at least part of the page will be subtly different with the branding or the addresses or something like that. So we would index both of these pages. We would recognize that part of this page is actually duplicated across the other side as well. And what would happen then is when someone searches for something within this duplicated block, we would try to just show one of these pages in the search results. And it kind of depends on which one matches best what we think maybe the user's intention might be or their location or other personalization factors. Sometimes we might even show both of these in the search results pages. And we try to show it like that. So it's not the case that we would demote your website or say this is spam and kind of take it out of the index completely. It's just that we would have both of these and we would try to rank them essentially against each other and try to figure out which one of these is the best one. And if there's like a really clear match within the duplicated content that we'd say this is really the right content to show, then that's usually less of a problem because one of these two will be more or less visible on the first page of the search results. If it's really a competitive area, though, where people are looking at a lot of different competitors and also your content, then that might be a bit trickier in the sense that we have two of these pages that are essentially competing against each other and we have to rank them individually. So the alternative might be to have one page that is kind of stronger that would actually have a better chance against all of the other competition. But instead, you're stuck with two pages that are not that strong because they have to stand on their own each. And that might be a situation where actually having the content on two pages is less useful than having everything on one page, where you could have one stronger page versus two less stronger pages. From my point of view, it really depends on the competitive landscape there. If it's a really competitive area, then maybe it makes sense to rethink that partnership and rethink how you want to strengthen your product versus just sticking to your brand as an ego thing. On the other hand, if it's the less competitive area, then maybe that's perfectly fine. Let's see. What else do we have here? After hearing about the mobile first index and how AMP is a ranking signal, we recently created an AMP version of our e-commerce store. So just first off, AMP is not a ranking signal. So maybe this clears something up in the rest of the question. Let me read through the rest. Our e-commerce website is fully responsive and the same content is shown on desktop, tablet, and mobile. Our AMP pages, however, are very minimalistic and show just the product name, description, image, prices, and a few options. Promotions that would normally be shown on the product page won't be shown on the AMP. I'm curious as to how Google will index our website. We have a fully responsive mobile site with more content and an AMP site with the same amount of information almost but not quite. So is this a problem or not? So from our point of view, an AMP page should be equivalent in with regards to functionality and content as your normal mobile page. We want to be able to show the AMP page to users in every situation where we would otherwise show your mobile page. So if your AMP page doesn't have the full functionality, the full content on it, then that would be something that the AMP team might take action. Well, technically, this is a valid AMP page, but we don't want to show it in the search results because we know users will have a worse experience on these AMP pages than on your other mobile pages. So we'll just show your other mobile pages. So that's something that's probably suboptimal for you because you spent a lot of time creating these AMP pages and you probably want them shown in search. So my recommendation there would be to think about what you can do to actually make your AMP pages on par with your normal mobile pages or maybe to think about where it makes sense to use AMP pages where you can provide the full functionality and the full content and maybe where you can't. So AMP pages can be done on a per URL basis. You can do this for individual products. You can do it for individual parts of your website. For example, you could put all of your informational content in AMP and maybe leave all of your product pages as mobile-friendly and a responsive site until you've worked out how to make those product pages like full-fledged AMP pages as well. I think we did a blog post on this topic recently where we talked about the various ways that we really want to make sure that AMP pages are equivalent to the normal mobile pages. And in the end, it really comes down to we want to recommend your website. We know what is on your mobile pages. And we want to make sure that users have the same experience when we send them to the AMP version of the page. We don't want it to be that just because it's fast, it doesn't have the full functionality. So then it's OK for a website to have both mobile and AMP together and not going to hurt in rankings, basically. Yeah. So with regards to mobile-force indexing or not, I think that's kind of secondary there. But you can have a responsive site or a mobile site and an AMP site as well. This is essentially per URL. And some people have both of these because they know users go to either one of these. Or maybe there are other things that you can do on your mobile site that you can't quite do on the AMP site completely, such as maybe personalization where you recognize the user and you log them in automatically and you give them this one-click-by options, those kind of things. I believe one or more of that is possible with AMP. There are things you can do with the iFrame elements. There are lots of dynamic elements that are happening in AMP as well. So this is something where if you want to stay on the bleeding edge, I'm sure there are lots of cool things you can do there with AMP. But you also have to kind of realize that you might be spending a bit of time getting all of this to work at the moment if you're doing it all manually. Whereas if you give it a little bit of time, maybe it goes down to just a checkbox on your CMS and you just put that checkbox on and all of the AMP content just essentially flows automatically. John, do you know on the subject of mobile design? I know everybody's keen to get, you know, that people are searching more on mobile than desktop now. So I was reading a guide actually in the thing with Google that was around guide to mobile web design here. One of the first things it said was make sure that you have your call to action right up at the very top of the page. So my concern with that, I've not actually thrown a master call to action at the top of the page because my concern is also that, for instance, in informational rather than transactional queries, most the call to action is obviously still important because they're not just to provide information. I'm just concerned actually that would be considered main content and actually that needs to be all informational stuff any kind of call to action. Are you not mobile? I don't know. I suspect that depends quite a bit on the type of content that you have and what your call to action would be. So I think for a lot of informational content, maybe the call to action is just we want to give you information on how to solve this problem. It's not like you need to sign up or you need to buy something specifically. But obviously, that depends a lot on the website itself. So for example, if you have support content for a product that you've already sold and people are like, how do I do this with this product? And they come to your site, then there's no real call to action essentially that they need to do, apart from reading the content, solving the problem that they have, and potentially some kind of a rating system maybe on the bottom that says, was this useful or was it not useful? But that really, I think it depends quite a bit on the type of website. But I would definitely test these things and consider that maybe they're different from mobile and from desktop. And where it makes sense to make changes in the design, to put maybe buttons higher on top or with different colors or higher contrast or whatever and see what the difference makes when you do things like A-B testing. Okay, fine. Yeah, and actually maybe even kind of along those lines, like, are there any real advantages using a popular WordPress theme that's been used by many sites? With regards to SEO, do you mean? Or I guess, yeah. So to use it, it's pretty popular and a lot of sites have used it. And those sites are doing well, as opposed to maybe some of the outliers that may or may not, let's say they have like equal user experience. Yeah. As far as I know, we don't have any kind of kind of inherent advantage for site layouts that are common. So it's not that we would look at a website and say, oh, this theme is this really popular theme here. And these important websites here are using the same theme. Therefore, this website might also be really good. It's more that we try to understand all of these sites individually and figure out how we should be ranking them. And sometimes a lot of sites have similar themes and that's perfectly fine. But it's not the case that we would say one theme because it's popular is better for SEO than others. I think if you're using a common CMS like WordPress, then a lot of the common themes will be pretty optimized already. People have a lot of experience creating these themes and with regards to kind of the basic SEO elements. And these things are pretty well worked out and they just kind of work. The only thing that I've noticed in talking with people here, specifically around WordPress themes or bigger CMSs, is that the more features a theme has, the slower it tends to be. I know because the more... It's going to sound like a site that's really, really bad. You know, the builder themes, those have lots of features, but they are really, really slow to... I just want to throw that in there. Yeah. Yeah. They don't have any names and sites, but some of these big builder ones are just drag and drop.  It's just terrific and all the functionality, very slow. Anyway, sorry. Yeah, I think sometimes it makes sense to have a lot of functionality on a website because you actually use that. But if you're creating a fairly simple content type website and you have a theme that provides all of this functionality, then suddenly the JavaScript behind the theme and all of the embedded files are just so complicated that it really bugs the site now. So that's something maybe to keep in mind. It's less of an issue with regards to SEO, but more with regards to user experience and there are a bunch of kind of speed testing tools that you can use to try these out. I'm also kind of curious if maybe the Googlebot is more comfortable in some of the more common themes, navigating and indexing. Usually that's less of a problem. So the more common setups are essentially or pretty much any of the common CMSs and their default themes, they're set up in a way that they just work for search. I think it's been quite a while that you had to explicitly do all of these tweaks and install all of these mods and plugins just to make it work reasonably well. Nowadays, if you take a standard installation of WordPress and you just throw it on a server and you take one of the default themes there, you have a pretty well SEOed site. It's not that you need to do significant work to kind of really bring that up to another level to actually be competitive. Obviously, there are a lot of really good plugins out there that kind of help you to tweak those last 10% out and really make sure that everything is well optimized, but for the most part, you can take a default setup and just run with that. Thank you. Of course, by the way. All right, let's see. Fairly long question here. I think this goes towards like Google News, top stories, issues, how-to stories. I'm aware that Google generally doesn't allow how-to stories, but once in three days, I end up coming across how-to stories in the top stories car. So what might be up with that? So I think, first of all, one of the points of confusion I sometimes see is that the top stories in the search results, they're essentially an organic search feature. It's not the case that they're tied to Google News. So it's not that any kind of Google News-specific guidelines would explicitly apply there. These are essentially normal search results from our point of view, and these are normal pages from the web. They don't have to be from Google News. So it's not that the Google News guidelines would necessarily apply there. If you do end up seeing content in Google News that you think doesn't belong there, I believe within Google News, there's a way to submit feedback. So that might be something you could do there. But with regards to just the top stories carousel, that's something where we sometimes show various things from the rest of the web. And let's see, the question goes on. Top media houses are updating titles and pages and trying to get the content back into the top stories carousel. I think this probably goes into the same theme in the sense that if you're seeing something in the search results in general that you feel doesn't work that well or that isn't useful for you, for your queries that you're doing, I would definitely also submit feedback there. And posting about these kind of things in the help forums is a good way to get feedback from peers into the discuss this kind of issue. But if you want to really make sure it's passed on to the team, I would submit the feedback in the search results page. Is there a way to track traffic, which is coming from AMP pages? For us, it's showing as referral traffic in Google Analytics, but it should be shown as organic traffic. I don't know specifically on how to do this, but I know there are a number of people that have done blog posts on how to set up Google Analytics so that it tracks this properly. So that's one thing I would look into. I think the difficulty is by default, if you just put analytics on both of these versions, since they're technically hosted on different hosts, Google Analytics will treat that as kind of referral traffic from another site rather than search traffic. But there are blog posts out there that show how to set that up in a way that actually tracks a little bit easier for you. What does duplicate content mean? Content copied from another website or original content that repeats on the same page within the same website. Which one is harmful for website ranking? So for us, duplicate content can be either of these. Essentially, the basis for duplicate content is we see the same piece of content on multiple URLs. And we think it probably makes sense to just show one of these. So when it comes to content that is duplicated across websites, if it's a one-to-one copy of the same content, then that's something that's easier for us to recognize as duplicate content. And we'll say, maybe there's a technical reason why this content was duplicated here. Sometimes it's as easy as having the same content on dub-dub-dub and non-dub-dub-dub on the website. And those are kind of the normal situations that every search engine runs across where we have to say, well, this is really the same thing. We will keep one copy of this and kind of ignore the other copy because it's exactly the same thing. There's no additional value in keeping both of these. On the other hand, if there are pieces of the content just copied across different pages or across different websites, then we do try to index both of those copies and show the appropriate one in the search result. And where it gets harmful for website ranking is not when it comes to these kind of technical things or these practical situations where you have the same content on multiple sites, but rather when a website is built up purely from duplicate content. So one case that comes up every now and then is someone that takes an RLSS feed from a popular news website or from other news websites and just publishes it on their own website and says, this is my website and tries to kind of act like this is what they've created when actually all of the content is copied from other websites. So that's the kind of situation where the web spam team and our algorithms will look at that and say, there's no value in actually indexing this website. It's just purely there to copy other people's content. We can drop this completely from our search results and users would not feel any disadvantage. So that's the kind of situation you want to avoid. You really want to make sure that what is published on your website is actually significantly useful, compelling, high-quality content of your own and not just something that you're compiling from other websites. Obviously, sometimes there are situations where you take a snippet from another website and you write about that a little bit more. That's perfectly fine. But really making sure that overall your website is unique and can stand on its own. That's really the most important part. John, on that, John, can I just chip in on that subject here? It kind of strikes me frequently that people often don't seem to necessarily realize that actually you don't have to have two pages with the same words to not actually be able to rank the two pages. And you can have different words, but they can mean the pages can essentially answer the same questions, meet the same needs, meet the same query cluster. And really you're kind of fighting with yourself, even though the words are not the same. That's true, isn't it? So if you have like 1,000 pages that are all like first dance at a wedding, top-town first dancers at a wedding, this may be slightly different. You could better off adding them together, putting them into one big page, and canonicalizing everything to the superset. I think that makes sense. For a lot of content, if you can combine it into something that's really strong, especially if it's in the competitive area, then that's something that you'll have an advantage from. I mean, it doesn't help you if you have two pages ranking the same search results, they're both ranking on page three. Whereas if you have one page that's ranking on page one, you probably get a lot more traffic to your website overall. But those are kind of the situations that you want to balance it. But that's the point, it's just that it's not necessarily just because, I mean, if they're exactly the same, one's gonna get filtered anyway. Whereas in situations like this, where they actually, you see a lot of people just like throwing out these 500 word blog posts, not so much now. But they're all kind of, they run out of ideas and they're ending up with a lot of content that actually just says the same thing over and over again, because they've got a content calendar to me. And actually they'd not do themselves any favor instead of which they could perhaps be making something really great. And 10 pieces that are rubbish, it'd be better off in one amazing piece. You know what I mean? Now, I think that's kind of an overall human nature problem as well. Where it's like you could be spending time working on something really big, and instead you're going off and doing all of these small things instead. And sometimes it, I don't know, it takes a lot of effort to actually kind of rope yourself together and say, okay, I'm not gonna let myself get distracted by this list of keywords I could be writing for. And instead I'll make sure that the rest of my content is actually really high quality. And that's, I don't know, that's sometimes it's something I run into as well. Not so much that I go off and create content for different keywords, but it's just I have like all of these small things to do, or I could be spending more time building this bigger thing instead. And finding that balance, finding enough time to build that big thing instead is sometimes hard. Let's see, a few from the chat. I have a no follow link from a high authority site. After a few days I see that in Search Console will it affect my ranking? If it's a no follow link, it doesn't pass any signal. So that's something that we essentially don't take into account when it comes to search rankings. We do show it in Search Console because we try to show all of the links, including the no follow ones there. I have the same website structure in another website. So does Google count that in copiescape or not? Just because it's the same structure doesn't mean it's the same website. But on the other hand, if you have different websites all focusing on the same theme, you run into the same situation as we talked about just before in that you're creating all of these small things, they're competing with each other. And instead you could be creating something really big and fantastic that works well for the long run. So that's kind of something where maybe it makes sense to take all of those small websites that are similar in theme and to fold them into one stronger website instead. We have a client with a business primarily run out of a WeWork space where many people share the same address. They're worried Google isn't going to validate their address and give them a rankings map listing is true. I don't know how Google My Business handles this. So this is probably specific to Google My Business. If you're looking at the map listing, the local results listing, I don't know how Google My Business would handle that. My assumption is they have a lot of practice with this and sometimes there are legitimate reasons why people share the same office space so that should kind of work out. I believe Google My Business does the verification with the postcard. So if you get that postcard and that works, maybe that's okay. I would definitely check with the folks in the Google My Business Help Forum though just to make sure that you're not accidentally running into any issues down the road or you work to get this listing set up and the listing works and then suddenly someone says, oh, from a policy point of view, you're not allowed to do this and they take it away from you again. So just to kind of make sure that you're actually complying with the guidelines and if there are specific kind of details that you need to watch out for, then I'm pretty sure that the people in the forum will be able to help you with that. Cool, thank you. With the web search, that's totally not a problem. If you have just a normal website, you have your address there and it's a shared workspace, that's perfectly fine. Okay, and because the Regis Business Centers and then some people that work from home are getting like the UPS addresses not really harmful in Google search. For web search, it's definitely not a problem. For Google My Business, for like the local listings, I don't know what the guidelines there are and what you might need to watch out for. It might be that they want to have something where it's like, we know this is actually your address where people can come there and talk to you if they have any questions. There might be some guidelines around that. There might also just be things where they say, well, we realize this is more of a service area business where you kind of go out and visit the customers directly in their activity area. Maybe that's also okay. I really don't know, so I can't speak for the Google My Business people there. Cool, thank you. All right. My website is ranking first place for this keyword software development company, but since the last seven months, and this keyword kind of fell out of the top 100, so I guess you're not ranking first place anymore. I am not finding out what the problem is behind the last ranking. My website is number one on Google India, but not on Google.com. Oh, okay. So, I think that can be completely normal. From our point of view, a website can rank very high in specific countries, but it doesn't mean it'll rank very high in all countries. So, it doesn't mean it'll rank very high on Google.com, which is more kind of international or US focused. So, from my point of view, that's completely normal. Geo-targeting plays into that a little bit where if we can tell that a user is looking for something local, we'll try to bring more local search results in. Which could be results from that country. So, if people in India are searching for this company, and we know that this is a good result for people in India, then maybe we'll show that a little bit higher in the search results. So, that's something from our point of view that is essentially working more closely. A lot of times this is across different countries, and a lot of times it's also like if you're ranking very high in a small country where there's less competition maybe, then that doesn't necessarily mean that you'll rank high internationally where there's a ton of competition. John, you know this past week or so, two weeks, when there's this, I don't know what it's called, maybe there was no update, maybe there was, but I think there was anyway. The point is, there's a lot of US and AU sites again massively since that time showing up in the UK for local service plus location, seems to have kind of correlated with that. And I know that they're doing this switch whereby eventually you'll all be able to see listings or sites that are from within the same country. Could that be impacting this at the moment, while they switch over to that kind of thing where they're trying to work out which sites are from which country, or maybe they're chopping India there because it's an India, if he's in India, then our site's in India, I don't know. I don't know. I wasn't aware of anything kind of geo-targeting or location-based that was happening there in the search results. So I don't know if you have examples where things are getting ranked wrong, especially with local search results, I'd love to see those and pass those on. As far as I know, there wasn't any update specifically around kind of changing the way localization works for search. So might just be an effect that's kind of with some of the changes around. Sorry? Thank you. All right. The non-update, if it didn't have anything to do if it didn't have anything to do with the local, it didn't maybe have to do with. Oh, I mean, we make changes all the time. So that's kind of the thing where sometimes we'll see reports like, oh, everything is changing in search and we go back to the engineers and like, what did you change? And they're like, I don't know, we made like the usual 10 changes last week. None of these are really treating me until the 100% present. Do you know when you mentioned that you maybe need a recorded thing that comes in when there's like common things that you say? That would be one of them when you say, we make changes all the time. I mean, I don't want to like downplay the experience of what webmasters are seeing. And sometimes they do see frustrating changes and they don't know what to do. For a large part that as far as I can tell is essentially just our algorithms are adapting and this might just be the new normal for your website. And it's normal about things around relevance and kind of the evaluation of quality and the user expectations that changes over time. And that can mean that a website that was ranking really well for a long period of time suddenly doesn't rank that well. That other websites which I can't figure out why are suddenly ranking a little bit higher. These kind of algorithmic changes happen all the time. And especially like these last couple of weeks changes where like people are saying, well, I see some changes but I don't really know what they mean. And then you look at the blog post and it's like, oh, well this one has like five keywords on it and this one has three and this one got ranked lower and this one higher. And it's like so many weird anecdotes where when we take them back to the team, they're like, well, these are just normal changes as we always make them. And it's not that we have like one algorithm where it's like we will insert a new random number generator and all of the search results will be jumbled around. That doesn't make any sense for us. We really need to make sure that the quality of our website of our search results essentially is as high as it can be and that it adapts fairly quickly as expectations change as the rest of the web changes. So when you do increase the meta descriptions to 320 characters, so just kind of curious why the increase? Why the increase? I don't know. I know we've been experimenting with that for a long time. That's something where I've seen various blog posts I think over the years where it's like, oh, Google has long descriptions and sometimes some longs, I'm sure it was like these mixes and these are things that we always kind of experiment with and it's almost like one of the, I'd say easier things to experiment with where you're just like tweaking like three lines or four lines and you can test that fairly easily. You can test that across millions of search results pages and see how users react to that. And that's something where maybe the results came out and said, well, this is something we should just be doing more of and maybe that'll change again in the future. So my point of view is I wouldn't go off and just change all of your snippets now that they're like we're sometimes showing more because maybe on mobile we're showing less and it's not so much the number of characters but the space that we have available. So I kind of like we've always said, look at your search queries, look at what people are actually searching for because we do adjust the snippets and the titles based on what people are actually searching for. And if you think your listing isn't great then think about what you can do to improve that. Thank you. Let's see, I had a service page link to the brand name instead of related keywords. Does this technique, is this helpful for service pages, for ranking? So internal linking within your website, it's always useful to have good anchor text that describes what the link page is about. Sometimes that makes sense to use branding on it. Sometimes it makes sense to be more descriptive. That's totally up to you, especially internal linking. It's like you need to make it so that users can recognize what this link is about and we'll try to pick up the context from there. Wikipedia provides all nofollow links, but why is it in the first place? So I think you're mixing up two things there. On the one hand, Wikipedia has links to other sites that they generally apply nofollow to because they've had such a problem with spam there, they really want to make sure that people don't just go to Wikipedia to add links in the hope that it helps their website. So this is something that I believe Wikipedia came up with over time and something that's kind of in line with our recommendations in that if you're hosting user-generated content on your website and you can't vouch for all of the links that people are placing there, then using nofollow is a good way to kind of let search engines know that there's a link here but actually we can't vouch for completely. But that doesn't mean that Wikipedia doesn't get links from other sites which don't have a nofollow. So that's something where I think on the one hand, Wikipedia also has a ton of really fantastic content and that's something that's worth showing in the search results. So it's not just the case that our algorithms would only look at links, we do look at a lot of different factors. Wow, we totally didn't get through pretty much most of the questions that were submitted but that's fine with me as well. What else is on your mind that we need to cover before the year is out? I'll ask a question, John. Go for it. Is there any, when we've been looking at our search results recently when we Google some of the things that we ranked for whether it's flying lessons or gifts or all of those things we've noticed that our result has a date next to it whereas nobody else's does. Does that just mean we're using a particular markup and they're not or is there any significance to that fact? So we're being seen as more of a news or blog site or anything along those lines or is it just that we're using the markup? The dates that we show are usually more based on the visible content and that if we can recognize a date in the visible content and we think it might be relevant we might show that in the snippet as well. I know sometimes we get that wrong so if you're seeing us get that wrong, let me know and kind of send me some example queries and you're out or we get it wrong because I know the dates team, they're also based here in Zurich, they do look at this from time to time and think about what they can do to improve their algorithms there but it's not the case that we would look at a website and say, oh, this is a blog or this is a news website, therefore we'll show the date but it's more that we think the state is actually pretty relevant on this page we'll try to highlight that in the snippet so that usually it's normal. It's just a product or a category it's not something like a blog post that would be, we've updated this on or this is our new post for Monday it's just standard category of all flight lessons or just a normal product of a balloon ride so whereas others don't have that. Yeah, that sounds like something to pass on as well. Yeah. Could I share that? Or am I going to share? And so here, if you guys can see that. Oh, okay. Can you see me now, Link? Or post it in the app? Yeah, whereas other people just don't have that. So it doesn't matter if we write number one for it or we're ranking lower down we still have the date whereas others don't. Yeah. So I don't know. Who has one? Yeah. It's not somehow picking up on maybe that it's kind of an event as such. I know it's not an event. I know it's used, it's an experience there but I'm just wondering whether somehow some algorithm, you know, detection is. Yeah, possibly I don't have to check out markups to see if we have it as a... Maybe the developer used an event markup because you can do that. There is an event markup. So maybe it thinks that happens on that date and it's just an open voucher and open certificate for it. I was just thinking of these. Just, I imagine that if there's lots of other trips and things around ballooning, et cetera, that are events somehow get detected as, as you said especially there's an event markup as well. Yeah. I don't know, happy to take a look. All right, thanks for the knowledge. I'll send it to you. Fantastic. John, can I send you some of these ROG like US and AU sites that are invading the UK SERPs for services? Oh my gosh. These Americans taking over the world again. We're invading. Yeah. All right, let's take a break here. If you want to stay on, happy to stick around a little bit longer but maybe we can pause the recording here. Take a break. Thank you all for watching. Thanks for joining in. So many of these hangouts for this year. I think the next one will be next year. So in the meantime, I wish you all happy holidays, good new year and hope to see some of you again next time as well. And like I said, I'll stick around a bit. So if you want to continue chatting, see you soon. Absolutely. Thank you, John.


Hi, I'm Zor. Welcome to Inezor Education. I would like to expand our menu of different prisms towards basically a general prism. General in terms of now we were talking about prism with rectangle or parallelogram as a base that was parallel to Pippit. We were talking about triangular prisms with triangle as a base. Well obviously we can talk about polygonal prisms when a polygon of different number of vertices is a directories of this prism. So just for example we can consider hexagonal prism. So that would be the picture of the hexagonal prism. Something like this. Looks like hexagonal prism. Hexagonal because there is a hexagon as a base or it can be pentagonal or quintagonal. Whatever it is. So most importantly is the following. The directories is a flat polygon of certain number of vertices. And all the side edges are obviously parallel to some line which basically makes the prism. Remember we had the concept of a cylindrical surface when there is one line and there is a directories, another line and we basically move this line in such a way that it slides through all the points of the directories. Making air and cylindrical surface. And then in case we have this directories as a polygon and then we cut another plane. So this is the base where the directories is and then somewhere else there is a parallel plane to the base. So they basically make the object called the prism. Alright. So what's important about polygonal prisms? Well first of all this isn't. So as usually I have the same formula for their volume which is area of the base times the altitude. Now how can I prove it? Actually this is much easier after we have already learned that the similar formula exists for triangular prism. Because what I can do is I can just divide it into triangular prisms like this. For instance this is A B C D E F. So I will connect one particular vertex with all others here and correspondingly here. So in this case I have cut my hexagonal prism into one, two, three, four triangular prism. One is A B C A prime B prime C prime. Another is A C D A prime C prime D prime. So these are vertical planes which cut my hexagonal prism into triangular. And obviously they all have the same altitude. Now their volume of the entire hexagonal prism is equal to some of these four triangular ones. And the area of the hexagon is equal to some of these areas of these bases. So basically you have like V1 is equal to S1 times H. V2 is equal to S2 times HV3 times H and V4 is equal to S4 times H. Where 1, 2, 3, 4 are 1, 2, 3, 4 triangular prisms.  So the formula is still the same. What else is interesting about these polygonal prisms? Well there is others formula about the number of vertices, edges and faces. Now this formula is not only valid for prisms but for any kind of polyhedron. But in this case let's just check it out for the prism. So let's assume we have some kind of an n-sided polygon as a base. Now how many different let's say faces we have? Number of faces. Well if I have n sides of the polygon I have n side faces plus 2 bases so that gives me n plus 2. Now how many edges do I have? Well I have n edges here, n edges here and n side edges right? So it's 3n. And how many vertices we have? I have n vertices here and n vertices here. So it's 2n. And notice that f plus v minus e equals 2. And this is the Euler's formula. For any polyhedron, not only for prism but for any it can be whatever some non-necessarily prismatic kind of a polyhedron. The formula is true. So I'm not talking about any, I'm talking about the n-sided polygonal prism and for polygonal prism this formula is true as we see. Alright so that's basically the only interesting aspects of polygonal prisms, the volume and this correspondence between the number of faces, edges, and faces, edges, and vertices. So this is an interesting formula actually. If you will start checking this formula for any kind of object geometrical, just let me illustrate it for non-prismatic kind of object. Let's talk about pyramid for instance. If you have a triangular pyramid, so we have a triangle as a base and we have the top vertex. So how many vertices we have? Four, right? One, two, three, four. How many edges do we have? One, two, three, one, two, three, four, five, six. And how many faces do we have? One, two, three, and four. F four plus V four minus E six again two. So no matter what exactly you put as your figure with vertices, faces, and edges, the formula is true. We will check it again for any pyramid and obviously it will hold. Well basically that's it for today. That's all I wanted to talk about for polygonal prisms. Now as usually you know that this course is presented on Unizor.com and I usually recommend you to watch the lecture from this side because the site has comments and that's very important. Alright, that's it. Thank you very much and good luck.