The final item of business is members business debate on motion 17505 in the name of Keith Brown on the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights report. This debate will be concluded without any questions being put. Would those members who wish to speak in the debate please press the request-to-speak buttons now? I call on Keith Brown to open the debate for around seven minutes. A great misery has been inflicted unnecessarily, especially on the working poor, on single mothers struggling against mighty odds, on people with disabilities who are already marginalised and on millions of children being locked into a cycle of poverty from which most will have great difficulty escaping. This is the reflection of the UN special rapporteur, Professor Alston, on the Conservative Party's appalling record in government. The report that we debate today explores the destitution, Tory austerity and universal credit that has imposed on communities across Scotland and the UK. It is unconscionable that, in a country that boasts the world's fifth-largest economy and huge amounts of wealth, 14 million people—some one-fifth of the population—live in poverty, over 1.5 million people live in destitution. That has been welcomed by the ministers responsible as an almost unmitigated success. It is, in fact, completely immoral that the UK Government is presided over the systematic emiseration of such a large part of its own population—disproportionately women, children, people with disabilities, older persons and ethnic minority groups. In September, I hosted a summit in Alloa to assess the impact of universal credit on my constituency of clump manager in Dumblane. From the evidence presented, it was clear that the Tory's flagship policy is a system not fit for purpose. Our unnecessary five-week payment delay that sends people into spiralling debt, a cruel and inhumane sanction system that pushes people to the brink and a toxic legacy of rising food bank use. The latest figures from clump manager councils show that 85 per cent of universal credit claimant council tenants are in arrears, totaling £550,000, despite doing all that is required of them. They still end up being 68 weeks in rent arrears before the DWP makes any payments. Sterling councils figures show the level of rent arrears among tenants claiming universal credit has increased from £13,000 in June 2017 when the system was rolled out to over £191,000 by April 2019. Those unacceptable figures are representative of a fundamentally flawed system that traps people in avoidable debt. In light of that, what has not been surprising is the UK Government's contemptible attempts to discredit Professor Alston and his report. Amber Rudd has accused him of showing wholly inappropriate political bias, while Philip Hammond rejected flat-out the findings as a nonsense. That stubborn denial to accept any kind of responsibility is matched only by that shown on opposition benches in this chamber. It should completely shame all Conservative politicians that the Government has now accepted the findings in Professor Alston's report as factually accurate, except that Tory policies have been directly linked to an increased use of food banks and an increase in the levels of homelessness and to have forced destitute women into sex work. Or perhaps it is a lack of shame that has led Tory politicians to stand up in this chamber time and time again. The Tory social security spokeswoman is defending the two child cap, the rape clause and the bedroom tax. In fact, even denying that the bedroom tax exists at all, discrediting the links between draconian sanctions and food bank use, and others writing glowing puff pieces on the unmitigated disaster that is universal credit. Senior Tory MPs have spent the weeks roundly criticising their own record in government, and it is not too late for their MSP colleagues to rediscover their shame and accept the harm that these policies have caused. Professor Alston is right to highlight the ideological fanaticism that the Conservative Government has shown in implementing austerity economic policies and pushing through with the deeply flawed universal credit. For what we have seen disguised as an unavoidable fiscal programme, it is a radical social re-engineering and the undermining of the social contract as we know it. For years, we have seen the welfare state, the foundation of the social contract, attacked. Strivers pitted against skyvers, while values such as freedom and individual responsibility are distorted to eliminate any responsibility on the part of the state to ensure the welfare of its citizens. What it enables is the creation of an environment in which the vulnerable are viewed as undeserving of assistance. It also enables the creation of a welfare system that denies the most deserving of their entitlements. It pushes disabled people into unsuitable work, and in which, as Professor Alston notes, British compassion for those who are suffering is replaced by a punitive, mean-spirited and often callous approach. This radical transformation of the relationship between state and individual is an attack on our rights as citizens, and for what freedom is there in being trapped in poverty as a child, as a single parent or someone with a disability. What freedom is there in being part of a social security system that appears designed to keep you trapped in that poverty? I am glad that this negative view of freedom, this entrenchment of poverty, is rejected by the SNP Government, which recognises that it is the Government's role to play a positive role in empowering and enhancing citizens' freedoms and recognising that we as citizens have the right to expect a social security system that provides just that, and the responsibility to make a fair contribution to society through a progressive taxation system that many political thinkers have said is a hallmark of a democratic society. Taxation is not a burden, it is an investment in our future, in health, education and infrastructure, and it is an investment that it can make empowers our citizens, strengthening their ability to take responsibility for their lives and liberating them often from ill health, or from poor educational prospects, or a lack of opportunities, and it enhances their freedom. The difference between the SNP Government and the Tory Government could not be more stark, with Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt having presided themselves over a decade of austerity cuts and sanctions, now offering huge tax cuts to the wealthy. The Scottish Government, for its part, spends £125 million a year mitigating that Tory austerity, rightly recognised by Professor Olson's report as unsustainable. For it is outrageous that a devolved administration must take action to protect its citizens from UK Government policies, money that could be better spent supporting the work of Social Security Scotland, a social security system built on the principles of dignity and respect that rejects a punitive sanctions system that has no other role than forcing millions into poverty. Using new social security powers of Scottish Government has already delivered transformative new entitlements supporting 77,000 young carers, 7,000 new families and low-income households, making more payments in the first two months than the DWP benefit that it replaced made in a year. It will shortly take on further responsibility to provide disability entitlements and winter and heating assistance. Today, we have heard from the cabinet secretary about the Scottish child payment. I would be interested to know when she replies whether she has received any assurances when the Tory spokespeople that she has spoken to as to whether they intend to continue with those benefits, the mitigation of the worst of the Tory Government if they were ever to get into power. The Scottish Government has also strengthened the social contract between the Scottish people and their Government and all paid for by progressive taxation. I wonder if any Tory members will stand up today and commit to those entitlements. Professor Olson described as compelling the plans of the Scottish Government to incorporate the convention on the rights of the child into Scots law and the recommendations made by the First Minister's advisory group on human rights leadership. That is the kind of action that Governments should take, improving the lives of their citizens and not impoverishing them. Adam Smith, one of Scotland's greatest philosophers, once observed that the true measure of a nation's wealth is not the size of the king's treasury or the holdings of the affluent flu but rather the conditions of the labouring poor. Politicians across the UK would do well to remember that. It is our responsibility as representatives of the people to challenge inequality, to fight poverty and want and to build a society that is fair, just and prosperous. It could not be clear that the UK Government is manifestly failing in this regard and the Scottish Parliament must have the powers to create a fair and equal Scotland.  We have a moral responsibility to oppose those measures and the SNP will continue to do so. Before we go to the open date, it would be right to recognise that, while this debate focuses on the UN report, those findings have been consistently raised by other organisations across Scotland and the UK for many years. The UK Government must end its stubborn denial and listen to those voices. It must implement the UN report's recommendations and it must evolve all social security powers to this Scottish Parliament. I look forward to what I am sure will be a considerd and thoughtful set of contributions from the members today. We move to the open debate and speeches of around four minutes, please, although there is a little bit of time in hand. I call Michelle Ballantyne to be followed by Bob Doris. While there are many valid points in Dr Alston's report, I feel that there is a missed opportunity, a missed opportunity to have a rational reason debate on the issues affecting the most vulnerable in the UK and a missed opportunity to depoliticise what has already been a heavily partisan conversation. There is a common misconception surrounding UN special rapporteurs, namely that they are representatives of the United Nations. As Dr Alston himself has said, he is not a UN official, he merely presents his independent findings to the UN. Bearing that in mind, we should be careful not to conflate Dr Alston's report with the opinions of the UN. I feel that it is also important to note that the UN has struggled with their relationship with rapporteurs and do not always agree with their findings. Philip Alston himself has recently come into conflict with the UN, as we saw from Bankie Moon's reaction to his work in Sri Lanka. Perhaps one of the greatest challenges, as with any piece of work, is ensuring its validity. Many of you in this chamber will have undertaken graduate and postgraduate work, and one of the first recommendations that you receive when you embark on research is that your sources should be peer reviewed. Sadly, the piece of work that we are discussing here today did not enjoy such academic scrutiny. For example, by referring to the UK's budget surplus or by Dr Alston's fundamental misunderstanding of the devolution settlement, the rapporteur does not help his cause. Neither has his hyperbolic language aided his case, and I believe that the Secretary of State will be formally complaining to the UN to make that point. While it has been confirmed that the statistics contained within the report are valid, what has not been accounted for is that many of those publications are simply out of date, relying on figures and anecdotal evidence before 2017. I find it strange— Excuse me, Ms Ballantyne. Mr Arthur, would you stop shouting from your seat please? I find it strange that Dr Alston claims that poverty is rising in the UK when we can see from the social metrics figures that the rapporteur relies on that poverty levels have remained on roughly an even keel since 2001. While Dr Alston is right to highlight the funding that was cut from universal credit in the 2015 budget, there is no mention of the changes bought in both the 2017 and the 2018 budgets. I have made no secret of the fact that I would like to see funding levels restored to their pre-2015 levels. As I am sure many in this chamber would agree, it is vitally important that we support the most vulnerable claimants to the best of our abilities. That said, I feel that Dr Alston should have accounted for just some of the recent developments that have occurred in welfare reform, the economy and society as well, so I will raise them here. This year, £220 billion will be spent on welfare, and almost £10 billion has been injected into the welfare budget since 2016. I thank the member for taking the intervention and just saying that she spent the bulk of her speech so far in attacking the author of the report, the messenger. Does she accept the findings, though, or the statement from the Conservative Government that she accepts that Professor Alston's report is factually correct? I think that I just did that. You need to listen to what I am saying rather than just working up an intervention. We have had the introduction of the national living wage, giving £2.1 million of the lowest earners a pay rise. We have had an extra £250 million to support the child element of universal credit, and we have raised working allowances by £1,000 last month, meaning that £2.4 million claimants keep more of what they earn. Those are things that have happened that are not mentioned in Dr Alston's report. I have run out of time. I need to finish—sorry, four minutes is not very long. Not only that, this year, the UK had the fewest low-pay workers in 10 years. According to the UN, one of the happiest places to live has record unemployment, and is a top 10 nation for social support. I have to ask the question, how does that square with Dr Alston's report? I am not alone in believing that the UK Government's welfare reform policies are bringing in some positive changes. Bodies such as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation have concluded that UC will reduce the number of working families in poverty by around £300,000, while IPPR have highlighted that universal credit could be the most cost-effective method of solving child poverty. That is not to say that Governments should not and could not do more. As the Poverty and Inequality Commission have highlighted, Governments need to be better at monitoring outcomes from their policies as well as their impact, and both the UK and Scottish Government could improve their data collection to inform future policymaking. In conclusion, Solving poverty and inequality is a duty of us all to share, and regardless of Dr Alston's report, it is clear that there is still work to be done. Bob Dorr is followed by Elaine Smith. I thank Keith Brown for securing this debate here this evening. If I drawn to the Scottish Palathe's attention once more, the shameful and impalling indictment of the UK Government's persistent and deliberate attack on the poor in our society, which is set out very clearly in the UN special rapporteur's report. Much was made of the UN's relationship with the rapporteurs, but when you launch an independent report or an independent inquiry, it should challenge institutions. That is why you have independent reports, and I commend Professor Alston for his work here in exposing the shame of the UK Government. The rapporteur on extreme poverty in human rights Professor Alston was very clear. He stated that policies of austerity introduced in 2010 continue largely unabated, despite the tragic social consequences. He says that close to 40 per cent of children are predicted to be living in poverty by 2021. During his summary findings, he finishes off by saying absolutely damningly of the UK Government that a booming economy, high employment and a budget surplus have not reversed austerity. A policy pursued more on an ideological than an economic agenda, making the poor suffer in this country as a political choice by the Conservative Party. That indictment of the UK Government is backed up by this Parliament's social security committee and our recent report on social security and inward poverty. I am privileged to chair that committee, Presiding Officer. We hope to secure Professor Alston's attendance at the social security committee to discuss those matters further. We have already raised concerns unsurprisingly of the minimum five-week wait, often much longer to get universal credit. The 26 per cent increase in the first four local authority areas that saw the roll-out of universal credit, those rent areas really damaging some of the most vulnerable constituents that we all represent, the attack on pension credit for mixed-age households, the application of sanctions, not just to those currently on universal credit, but the extension of sanctions, quite frankly, to the inward poor more generally. If the only part of universal credit that you are going to get is child and working tax credits and no other benefit, then you can still be sanctioned. That is a new thing, it is a damning thing and that is a shameful thing. Closing job centres moving to digital by default, the bedroom tax, the shared room rate, the attack on housing benefit for under 35s and we could go on, our committee has deep and meaningful concerns in all those areas. Hardly surprising that the Scottish Government has estimated that up to 2020, 3.7 billion pounds will have been taken from Scotland's most vulnerable people because of UK political choices. I welcome much of the attempts by the Scottish Government to mitigate much of UK welfare reforms but our committee recognises that that cannot go on forever and there is an end point to that. I am actually not going to list those opportunities to mitigate but a special mention of the announcement this afternoon in relation to the child supplement, the child payment that the cabinet secretary said will be extended to up to 410,000 young people most likely to be living in poverty to address child poverty and lift 30,000 children out of poverty. That is this Parliament taking a different approach in the time that I have left, Presiding Officer. I want to talk about those who fall through the cracks of the good quality welfare provision that we sometimes have with Glasgow City Council, Citizens Advice and others. A friend of mine, Alec O'Cain, who runs her Facebook page and no one seems to hear contacted me the other day as he has done many times in the past, but an individual that would not go to a councillor or an MSP or an advice service, the lady had no food, she had no electricity, there were significant welfare issues because of Alec and no one seems to care. I was put in touch with that lady, we got food provision, we got power put back on and we were hopefully getting those welfare issues addressed but it should not have to be that way. It should not take well intentioned individuals such as Alec and his Facebook page to draw that to the attention of politicians to act. We have to deal with this at source and the source of the suffering is UK Government austerity and I commend Keith Brown for drawing that to the attention of Parliament here this afternoon and I thank my constituent Alec for all he does to help vulnerable people and the constituents that I serve. The last of the open debate contributions is from Elaine Smith. Thank you Presiding Officer and I also thank Keith Brown for securing this debate tonight and highlighting concerns in this chamber about the findings of the UN special rapporteur for extreme poverty and human rights. I would use the term shocking to refer to the situation described in Professor Philip Austin's report however as contents actually come as no shock to many of us who have been warning about the effects of austerity since 2010. The report also reflects the findings of all the anti-poverty organisations in the UK and of numerous academic studies. What has been shocking is the dismissive response to the report from the UK Government in spite of all the evidence presented and a similar approach seems to have been taken by the Scottish Tories in here. Keith Brown's motion notes the special rapporteur's view that the UK Government has been failing to listen and is determinedly in denial regarding poverty in the UK and indeed their response to the report seems to confirm this. The rolling out of universal credit across the countries played a big role in the problems mentioned in the Austin report, as is the dismantling of the social safety net and the rise in in-work poverty. An area of particular concern must be an increase in those turning to what is described by Professor Austin as survival sex, and Keith Brown touched on that in his opening remarks. The very fact that a parliamentary committee at Westminster has deemed it necessary to launch an inquiry called universal credit and survival sex, sex in exchange for meeting survival needs, should shame us all. That has nothing to do with women and, in some cases, men entering the labour market for work. It is about abuse, violence and humiliation. In fact, we should remember that prostitution is on the Scottish Government's spectrum of violence against women and girls. Universal credit has been an absolute disaster with a particularly bad impact on women's lives. Although the Austin report does note the devolved administration's efforts to mitigate some of the worst effects of the austerity agenda, once again, I welcome the specific announcement about the fund for some children, but we could and should be doing more, I believe, with the powers that we have. Keith Brown mentioned the mitigation of the bedroom tax, which the Scottish Government has done, but he also mentioned the two-child cap, which has not been mitigated, and I will continue to put the case that it should be. The report also mentions the provision of the welfare fund by the Scottish Government certainly. Bob Dorris, I thank Elaine for giving way. One of the things that the Social Security Committee found—we pick and choose the things that we mitigate—is that the Social Security Committee has agreed that it is no longer possible to mitigate everything that the UK Government does. Would you accept that point? I absolutely agree that this Parliament and this Government cannot mitigate everything, but I believe that the Government has been very keen to say that this is a despicable policy and that it is something that it has put high on the agenda. Therefore, that is why I continue to put the case that that particular policy ought to be mitigated, but I certainly take his point. The report also mentions the provision of the welfare fund by the Scottish Government for Emergencies and Hardships. Of course, that fund is welcome, but it has not been increased since 2013-14. That means that a real-time cut of £3.5 million. With the Government having no plans to increase that funding between now and 2025, certainly at the moment, that will represent a real-time cut of £7 million by that point. Asst about the underfunding of the welfare fund last week, the First Minister questioned whether the Labour Government in Wales had such a fund. I would like to advise the chamber that it does a discretionary assistance fund, and its latest budget announced an increase to the funding of that fund. I think that Scotland should perhaps follow Welsh Labour in its regard and make provision of funding to the very poorest in society in absolute priority. I hope that I will get a wee bit extra time, but in bringing my remarks to a close, I want to highlight the work of the SSAA, the Armed Forces Charity, who was exhibiting in Parliament this week. I had to chat with them. Some of the project's supporters include working with families with children with disabilities and supporting women and children in need of stepping stone homes as they escape from dangerous or abusive situations. Poverty and deprivation can and affect the families of those in the Armed Forces and those who have left the service. We have got some veteran sleeping rough living in abject poverty and there are veterans nearly evicted from tenancies because universal credit payments have not come through. If I could briefly highlight the case of Walter Richardson, medically discharged from the forces, Walter and his family were facing eviction in Lanarkshire with council tax arrears, and they were quite simply living in poverty. Presiding Officer, far too many of those accounts in the UN report and our newspapers and in our communities in Scotland today in 2019, and it really is unacceptable. The work of SSAA and many charities in public services across Scotland should be commended as they try to hold people's lives together in the face of increased poverty and further austerity, but we do need fundamental change. The UN report is damming about austerity and the rapporteur is equally so about the UK Government's lamentable response, but outrage is not enough. This Government needs to make tackling poverty even more of a priority to turn ambitious words into meaningful action, to do everything with the powers that we have to stop poverty increasing across Scotland. I thank Keith Brown for bringing forward this important and timely debate. As I sat out in my statement of 27 November last year, the Scottish Government was pleased that the special rapporteur was able to spend two days of his UK visit in Scotland, hearing directly from people affected by poverty and meeting Scottish ministers, Parliamentarians, Government officials and representatives of civil society. That lived experience that he got directly from the mouths of people who are directly bearing the brun of Tory austerity. Not anecdote, lived experience, the realities of what is happening in Scotland and across the UK. We welcome the special rapporteur's final report. It is an absolutely devastating analysis of the UK Government's austerity measures, describing the policies pursued since 2010 as retrogressive and in clear violation of the country's human rights obligations and clearly shows that there must be a change in direction. In Scotland alone, we previously estimated that £3.7 billion would be cut from annual social security spending by 2020-21, due to the UK Government's welfare reforms. To put that £3.7 billion into context, that figure is the equivalent to three times our annual police budget or the entire annual budget of NHS Glasgow and Lothian. Yet the UK Government refused to fix the problems caused by the welfare cuts that have been articulated today, or to coin a phrase, as we have heard in the past during similar debates, they refused to test and learn. It means that the continued assault on welfare and continued benefit cuts make it feel like we in the Scottish Government are fighting this poverty with one hand tied behind our back. Michelle Ballantyne said that today's debate and Professor Alston's report was a missed opportunity to talk rationally about poverty. I think that it is quite the contrary. Professor Alston's work shawnt an independent spotlight on the politically motivated and ideologically driven attack on the most vulnerable. The special rapporteur notes that the devolved administration is spending considerable resources to protect people from the worst impacts, but that those efforts are simply not sustainable. How can it be sustainable when what is being brought out of the social security spending is the equivalent of NHS budgets for Glasgow and Lothian? In 2019 and 2020, we will continue to invest more than £125 million to mitigate the worst impacts that those changes bring and to protect those on low incomes. The Quality and Human Rights Commission welcomed positive policies such as our mitigation of the bedroom tax. As a result, we have shielded the most vulnerable. The reductions in household incomes in Scotland due to the impact of tax, social security and public spending decisions is lower than in England and Wales, but ultimately there is still a reduction. We cannot shield people entirely and the money that we spend is money that we would much rather invest in lifting families out of poverty. I fully support the Government mitigating the bedroom tax, but would you not agree that, given the despicable nature of the rape clause, the two-child cap policy, that that should be considered for mitigation as a special case? I want to get out of the fact that it is not sustainable to be mitigating everything. It is £3.7 billion that is coming out of social security spending. We are already spending £125 to mitigate the worst impacts of welfare reform. I published figures today about the totality of spending to help and support low-income families of more than £500 million. I do not want to always be mitigating the acts of another Government. I would much rather have the powers here to deal with the problem head on. That is the real disappointment that I have from Labour. While we have to wait and have our fingers crossed for some time in the future, maybe perhaps having a Labour Government to try and do some of that, I'd far rather have the powers here. In this Parliament, for us to deal and tackle these issues, head on and support the people who live in this country. I know that that does not seem to be where some are, but we will continue to do what we can with the powers that we have and continue to support and protect the people who live in this country to the best of our ability. The Scottish Government agrees with Professor Alston's assessment that the UK Government must reverse the many policies that it has pursued that are increasing poverty and inequality, such as that benefit freeze and the two child cap. His criticisms of universal credit reflect the numerous representations made to the UK Government by Scottish ministers. The UK Government must take heed of this report and make the changes necessary to provide support to people and to actively take action to tackle poverty and inequality in the UK. Indeed, what changes have been made do not go far enough. They do not address the long wait for a first payment under universal credit, the two child cap and its important rape clause. They do not reinstate the original work allowance that is proposed for universal credit. Professor Alston described the recent changes that were made as a window dressing to prevent political fallout, and I do not think that many of us in this chamber could possibly disagree. As Elaine Smith and Bob Doris have also made clear, it is quite incredible that the amount of disregard that Professor Alston's report has generated from the UK Government when, in fact, they should be utterly shamed by the misery that their callous cuts have caused. In Scotland, we regard confronting poverty as an urgent human right concern and one that requires priority action across ministerial portfolios and on the part of all state institutions. While child poverty and in-work poverty levels are currently lower in Scotland and in the UK, it is simply unacceptable that people are doing all that society asks of them, they should never get out of the bit and to continue to have to live in poverty. That is why we are not, as I said earlier today and in previous debates, sitting back and letting welfare reforms hit the poorest hardest. We are taking action. In his report, as well as noting that the Scottish Government is investing considerable resources to protect people living in poverty, the special rapporteur referred to Scotland's own ambitious plans for poverty reduction. Those plans are underpinned by our four official measures of child poverty, as set out in the Poverty Act 2017, which are expressed as targets towards the eradication of child poverty. Earlier today, in the chamber, I allowed the significant action that we are taking towards genuine reductions in child poverty, including the introduction of the new Scottish child payment. By the end of 2022, the payment will be introduced for all eligible children under 16. We estimate that around 410,000 children will be eligible for the payment, and it has the potential to lift 30,000 children out of relative poverty and reduce the relative poverty rate by 3 per cent. By the end of this parliamentary term, nearly two years ahead of our original commitment, we will introduce the new £10 per child per week, which will be paid monthly to all eligible families and children under six. That payment will help to prevent poverty for families just above the poverty threshold, but on insecure incomes. That is a substantial investment in families most in need. We also agree with the rapporteur's conception of poverty as a multi-dimensional phenomenon that impacts on the full enjoyment of human rights. In Scotland, the Government sees tackling poverty as part of its co-ordinated work to realise a vision of Scotland where every member of society is able to live with human dignity and enjoy their rights in full. We are committed to protecting human rights, advancing equality and tackling poverty. The special rapporteur notes her commitment to incorporate the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child into domestic law in the current parliamentary term. As Keith Brown said, in his report, Professor Alston also described the recommendations that were made by the First Minister's advisory group on human rights leadership as compelling. In her response to the recommendations, the First Minister endorsed the overall vision of a new human rights framework for Scotland to be delivered by a new act of the Scottish Parliament. The Cabinet Secretary for Social Security will co-chair the national task force that has been established to take that work forward. In conclusion, the special rapporteur is clear that the UK Government has been failing to listen and is determinedly in denial in regard to poverty in the UK, but the same cannot be said of us in the Scottish Government. We are determined to tackle generations of deep-seated poverty and will be ambitious, bold and radical in our approach. We will seek to pursue policies that are designed to respond to the needs of the people of Scotland. As I said earlier, today is really the tale of two Governments. We have the Child Poverty Action Group publishing report today about the devastating impact of the two-child limit that has been stemmed from a decision from the UK Government. On the other hand, we have the decisions and the actions that we are taking here in Scotland, the new Scottish child payment which will lift 30,000 children out of poverty, a glimpse of what is possible with the powers that we have, but ultimately what we want in those benches is to not just show what is possible with some of the powers that we might have, we want another Scotland, we want to create another Scotland, another Scotland that is fairer, equal and uses the powers at our disposal but does not have to mitigate the actions of another Government. That concludes the debate and this meeting is closed.


Hi, I'm Tala Awadah, the Associate Dean in the Agriculture Research Division. Why Nebraska? Nebraska is a resource-based economy where innovation in agriculture and food industries are key for its economic vitality. I am fortunate to be part of highly talented and diverse faculty and work with outstanding students and staff to create new knowledge and new technologies to address challenges related to food and nutrition security, human health, natural resources, climate change and develop the next generation agile and adaptable workforce. Why is that important? Because through addressing these fundamental challenges, we can create a resilient and vital community in Nebraska and around the world. Hi everyone, Ola Komantra here and I'm Nebraska Research. I think Nebraska is an ideal place to work because of all the support and collegiality that one can find here. Our basic research is set to unravel important mechanisms taking place in the mitochondria and happening to underlie multiple human degenerative diseases and aging. Understanding these conditions and mechanisms is an important first step in preventing and combating these diseases. Nebraska's keen interest and investment in this research are really unique and wouldn't be possible in many places elsewhere. For that, I'm very grateful. Thank you and go Big Red. As soon as I arrived at Nebraska, I knew it would be an ideal place for me to work. The faculty and students are brilliant, they're friendly, helpful, curious, creative, genuine and hardworking. My research here at Nebraska focuses on understanding the evolution and function of animal communication, animal mating systems, sensory systems and the neural basis of complex behavior. At Nebraska, I've been able to take my research in a number of different directions that I never would have imagined prior to moving here. Many of these directions are driven by Nebraska's rich yet understudied biodiversity. Nebraska is a wonderful place to work, a place where I feel seen, heard and supported. Hello, I'm Cody Hollist. Thanks to the COVID-19 Rapid Response Grants, a group of people from the Department of Communications and Child Youth and Family Studies put together a project to try to support families in making sense of parenting during these difficult times and also support National Guard members who have been activated in state active duty to support COVID-19 relief. The resources and opportunities to provide this service to people around the country are really a good example of how Nebraska steps up and tries to support families in the very time and moments that that support and assistance is needed most. Hi, my name is Hunter Fledman and I received a COVID-19 Rapid Response Grant from the Office of Research and Economic Development. Because of this grant, our team was able to produce and distribute over 200,000 gallons of hand sanitizer to Nebraska communities, including schools, hospitals, colleges and care facilities. Our team was made up of College of Engineering staff and students, food processing center, faculty, staff and students, and Nebraska Forest Service staff, along with university operations and all of the resources from the University and Nebraska Innovation Campus along with donations from private industry and the community made this possible. For me, Research at Nebraska is about addressing grand challenges in landscape systems, everywhere from cornfields to cities to cattle pastures. And the challenges that we face today, they aren't simple. They're cross cutting, they're moving targets and in many cases they've scaled up to the point that they're difficult to address in isolation. For that reason, I'm not doing research in isolation, I'm looking for opportunities to connect. Opportunities where I can weave my single strand of expertise into broader efforts that help develop and scale up solutions and to positively contribute in that way. I'm Sue Sheridan, the director of the Nebraska Center for Research on Children, Youth, Families and Schools. Like the state of Nebraska itself, we are the center of everything. Our work impacts lives through research that enhances learning and development and touches all aspects of humankind. We have pushed the boundaries of understanding how to ensure that all children succeed to the best of their abilities, how to support families and times of adversity, how to promote resilience and mitigate risk for our most vulnerable citizens, and how to ensure that communities and their members thrive. We're not afraid to tackle the thorny issues facing society today or to roll up our sleeves, work hard and get things done. And that's Nebraska. My name is Jodi Koenig-Kellis and I am professor and chair of the Department of Communication Studies. I run a research lab called Narrative Nebraska. So for me, being a researcher at Nebraska means that I get to study the link between the ways in which people communicate through storytelling about difficulty, illness, pain, identity and families and the link to well-being, people's health, their mental health, their physical health and their relational health. To me, being a researcher at Nebraska means getting to pursue my lifelong dream of studying how the quality of our communication is linked to the quality of our lives.


This study compared two devices used for ventilating children undergoing paralyzed general anesthesia, the Oregon and Igel. It found that the Oregon had similar initial OLP levels as the Igel but higher OLP levels after 10 minutes. Additionally, the Oregon was easier to place a suction catheter through the gastric port and provided a better view of the airway using a fiber optic bronchoscope. The Igel required additional manipulations post-insertion while the Oregon did not. Overall, the Oregon was found to be more beneficial than the Igel when it comes to ventilation in children undergoing paralyzed general anesthesia. This article was authored by Ji Hyun Lee, Sun Pyeong Nam, Young Eun Jang, and others.


For over 200 years, man has flown through the atmosphere. However, it has been proven physiologically that we are best suited to live in conditions from sea level to 10,000 feet. When humans expose themselves to altitudes above 10,000 feet, certain physiological changes occur. This program will focus on the different types of hypoxia and how it affects the overall body function. Hypoxia is a known cause or contributing factor in aviation incidents and accidents. When altitude increases, the pressure of oxygen decreases, reducing the amount of oxygen carried in the blood. The ability of hemoglobin to carry oxygen is called the blood oxygen saturation, which is normally 95 to 98 percent at sea level. A decrease in blood oxygen saturation is measurable as we ascend. Hypoxia is an oxygen deficiency in the blood and affects every cell, especially the brain and nervous system. There are four types of hypoxia. Let's examine each of them. Hypoxic hypoxia, also known as altitude hypoxia, is the most common form of hypoxia in aviation and occurs due to a drop in oxygen pressure at the lung level. Hypoxic hypoxia can be caused by a decrease in the pressure of oxygen in the inspired air that can result from altitude exposure, strangulation, or respiratory arrest. In the aviation environment, hypoxia can occur when flying an unpressurized aircraft above 10,000 feet. Other causes of altitude hypoxia can be linked to failure of the aircraft's oxygen systems or the improper use of that equipment and or failure of the pressurization system. Stagnant hypoxia occurs at the circulatory level. It's defined as a condition that interferes with the normal circulation of the blood arriving at the cells. Stagnant hypoxia can occur as a result of cardiac arrest, shock, exposure to cold, and sudden changes in posture such as standing up after a prolonged rest. Aerobatic and agricultural flying expose pilots to acceleration forces commonly called G-forces that can result in this type of hypoxia at the brain level. Hypemic hypoxia is caused by a reduction in the oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood and occurs at the blood level. Anemia, bleeding, and some prescription drugs can cause hypemic hypoxia. Carbon monoxide exposure due to smoking or cabin contamination with engine exhaust fumes can also cause this type of hypoxia. Histotoxic hypoxia occurs at the cell level. Histotoxic hypoxia interferes with the normal utilization of oxygen in the cells. Alcohol and drugs are two items that can bring about this condition. Individual response to hypoxia varies. Your hypoxia symptoms may develop so gradually that they are well established before you recognize them. Hypoxia symptoms are most noted at cabin altitudes above 10,000 feet. This program, coupled with a flight in an altitude chamber, will better train you to recognize your personal hypoxic symptoms. Hypoxia reactions can be classified into two types. Signs of hypoxia can be detected in an individual, by an observer, or other crew members. Symptoms of hypoxia are the sensations perceived by the crew member. Keep in mind that there are certain hypoxic reactions that can be classified as both signs and symptoms. Some common signs of hypoxia are an increase in depth and rate of breathing, cyanosis, a bluing effect of the skin most noticeable on the lips and the fingernail beds, delayed reaction time, poor judgment, loss of muscle coordination. Some of the common symptoms of hypoxia are air hunger, a feeling of not enough breathable air, feeling of apprehension or anxiety, mental confusion, fatigue, nausea, headache, dizziness, hot and cold flashes, tingling mainly in the extremities, visual impairment with respect to color vision, night vision, blurred and tunnel vision. There are some important points to remember concerning hypoxic signs and symptoms. They are as individual as the person experiencing them. They may appear in a different order and can vary in intensity. The rate of individual onset will vary day to day due to other physiological and psychological stressors. Preoccupation with flying duties could be enough of a distraction to allow hypoxia to progress beyond the point of self-help. Behavior changes such as euphoria or belligerence may manifest themselves as a sign and symptom. Personal signs and symptoms normally remain the same over the years. There is the possibility some major life changes can add or subtract particular symptoms. Once you learn to recognize your hypoxia symptoms, you can begin to take corrective actions. Initial recovery from hypoxia can occur in a matter of seconds, while full recovery takes three to five minutes. Effective performance time, EPT, and time of useful consciousness, TUC, are two interchangeable terms used to describe human tolerance to hypoxia. They refer to the amount of time elapsed from the interruption of oxygen supply or individual exposure to an oxygen poor environment to the time when such an individual is no longer capable of performing routine flying tasks or taking proper corrective action against hypoxia. This chart shows the average EPT time at various altitudes. These times are to be used as averages only and are based on a healthy individual in a controlled environment at rest. It is important to remember that a rapid decompression will shorten these times by as much as 50%. Factors that can affect EPT include the faster you ascend to altitude, either by rate of climb or a rapid decompression. Peak altitude, physical activity at altitude, fatigue, dehydration, hypoglycemia, low blood sugar level, alcohol, over-the-counter medication and prescription drugs, smoking. The best advice is to be aware of the limitations of the body to altitude and oxygen requirements in accordance with the Federal Aviation Regulations, FARs. The FAR states, no person may operate a civil aircraft of U.S. Registry, one at cabin pressure altitudes above 12,500 feet MSL, up to and including 14,000 feet MSL, unless the required minimum flight crew is provided with and uses supplemental oxygen for that part of the flight at those altitudes that is of more than 30 minutes duration. Two, at cabin pressure altitudes above 14,000 feet MSL, unless the required minimum flight crew is provided with and uses supplemental oxygen during the entire flight time at those altitudes. However, it is highly recommended that supplemental oxygen be used above 5,000 feet MSL during all night flights and above 10,000 feet MSL during all daytime flights. If at altitude you begin to experience hypoxia signs or symptoms, here's an airborne checklist. First, don your oxygen mask. Second, turn on the oxygen. Then, select the proper oxygen setting for altitude, if applicable. Third, make sure oxygen is being delivered. Check flow indicator. Fourth, make sure all connections are secure. Fifth, intentionally slow down your breathing rate to prevent hyperventilation. Sixth, descend to an altitude where supplemental oxygen is no longer required. Hypoxia is a constant danger. Through education and knowledge, pilots can take active steps toward prevention and protection. Currently, the FAA and several military training facilities provide physiological training. The training includes a simulated high altitude flight in a hypobaric or low pressure altitude chamber. The hypobaric chamber allows a participant to experience hypoxia in a controlled environment where you can learn to recognize your own personal signs and symptoms of hypoxia. Hypoxia is an oxygen deficiency in the blood and affects every body cell, especially the brain and nervous system. There are four types of hypoxia. Hypotic hypoxia, also known as altitude hypoxia, the most common form of hypoxia in aviation. It occurs at the lung level. Stagnant hypoxia occurs at the circulatory level. It's defined as a condition that interferes with the normal circulation of the blood arriving at the cells. Hypemic hypoxia is caused by a reduction in the oxygen carrying capacity of the blood and occurs at the blood level. Histotoxic hypoxia occurs at the cell level. Histotoxic hypoxia interferes with the normal utilization of oxygen in the cells. Hypoxia symptoms are most likely to occur at cabin altitudes above 10,000 feet MSL. Hypoxia reactions can be classified into two types. Signs of hypoxia can be detected in an individual by an observer or other crew members. Symptoms of hypoxia are the sensations perceived by the crew member. Effective performance time, EPT, and time of useful consciousness, TUC, are two interchangeable terms used to describe human tolerance to hypoxia. These terms refer to the amount of time elapsed from exposure to an oxygen poor environment to the time when an individual is no longer capable of performing routine flying tasks or taking proper corrective action against hypoxia. If at altitude you begin to experience hypoxia signs or symptoms, here's an airborne checklist. First, don your oxygen mask. Second, turn on the oxygen. Then select the proper oxygen setting for altitude, if applicable. Third, make sure oxygen is being delivered. Check flow indicator. Fourth, make sure all connections are secure. Fifth, intentionally slow down your breathing rate to prevent hyperventilation. Sixth, descend to an altitude where supplemental oxygen is no longer required.


All right. Welcome, everyone, to today's Webmaster Central Office Hours Hangout. My name is John Mueller. I am a webmaster trends analyst here at Google in Switzerland. And part of what we do are these Office Hour Hangouts, where people can join in and ask their questions around websites and web search. I hope you're all doing well, regardless of the current crazy situation. And hopefully, we can get some of these questions answered that are still on your mind. All right, a bunch of stuff was already submitted, but you're welcome to jump in now if anyone wants to get started with the first question. I'd be happy to if no one else wants to go. All right, go for it. OK, so our website's been around for about 16 years. And we've never done any kind of link building at all, not even a guest post, nothing like that. I looked in Google Search Console, and I see that we have 320,000 backlinks. And when I go through the list, about 90% are just no good, the domains look spammy. There's nothing good about them. And I know that you said that Google does a pretty good job of finding out what those domains are and just not counting them at all. But you also said that if you're losing sleep about this, then just go ahead and submit a disavow file. So I did do that, and I have two questions regarding that. One is, you said that the disavow doesn't come into effect, or at least maybe you didn't say this, but I've read that the disavow doesn't come into effect until 100% of those links are crawled once again. So does that mean that every domain in that list has to be crawled, and only when it reaches 100% of that list does the disavow come to effect? Or does it happen on a domain by domain case within that file? It happens on a per URL basis within that file. So as we re-crawl the individual links that are pointing at your site, if they're mentioned in your disavow file or the domain is mentioned in a disavow file, we will essentially just drop that link. So it's not something you have to wait for. It just happens kind of incrementally. I think in general, with a website that old, you're going to collect a lot of weird things over the years, and you probably also collect a lot of good things over the years. So I really assume you probably would not need a disavow file for something like that. I don't know your website. I don't know what all has happened with it. But if it's a normal website, if like you said, you haven't been doing link building all these years, you didn't hire SEOs to do things that you don't know about, then probably I'd say 99% of the cases, you wouldn't need to do anything with the disavow. Yeah, I wouldn't really be looking into it, except for with the Jan Co-Update. We took a huge dive into the traffic, so I'm just trying to do everything I can to see if I can. No, that makes sense. Kind of go through all of the small stuff as well. That makes sense. Thank you. Sure. All right. Any other questions before we get started? OK. Wow. In that case, I'll just jump in through the questions that were submitted on YouTube. And if anyone has any comments along the way or needs any further clarification or disagrees, feel free to jump on in. And we'll see where we can go today. OK. Most of the WordPress themes have two navigation menus in the HTML code, one for desktop, one for mobile. It means that there are duplicate menu URLs on every page in the code. Is Googlebot able to understand the logic of desktop mobile menus? For example, when a page is displayed on a mobile phone, only the mobile menu is displayed and the desktop menu is hidden. When a page is displayed on desktop, the mobile menu is hidden and the desktop menu is displayed. Does Googlebot ignore the hidden menu links in the code? Do the hidden links penalize the website? So I think, for the last question, that's a definitive no. It's not the case that these kind of links on a page cause any harm for a website. I think, in general, it's probably something that can be cleaned up. I know a lot of sites use responsive design in a way that they have the HTML or the menu in there once. And they use the CSS to display it in different ways, depending on desktop and mobile. So in many cases, you can probably clean that up. From a practical point of view, from Google's side, the links go to the same places. From our side, that's essentially OK. It might be from a usability point of view. It might make sense to clean that up. It might be from a pure page size point of view. It would make sense to clean that up. But just purely from Google's SEO point of view, that's not something you need to change. Our business has a larger number of branches, but we have had to temporarily close some of them and redirect customers to collect their goods from other bigger branches. So we added an image highlighting the branch is temporarily closed with a link to the nearest branch to that. This is currently no follow. Is this the best way to do it? Or is there anything you can recommend? We don't want to confuse Google by linking two branches and making it no follow, but we also don't want to harm rankings. So you don't need to make this a no follow link. That's something that seems like a perfectly natural link to have on a site, and probably you already have the branches linked across each other in some other way anyway. So from that point of view, that's not something you'd need to do as a no follow. Using an image to let people know that this branch is closed is also fine. Essentially, by using an image, you prevent that text from being indexed. However, you can also use something like the data no snippet HTML attribute to let us know that something shouldn't be shown in a snippet, which is essentially the same thing. From a usability point of view, using an image is obviously a lot harder to read, like if someone is using a screen reader, they wouldn't see what is on that image. So that's something where I might use a normal HTML text banner instead of an image, but ultimately, that's a small thing. From a search point of view, the important part here is that you're not taking down the website completely, that you're not returning a 503 for these kind of situations, because if you take the website down completely or you serve a 503 response code, then what will happen is Google will drop that website from our search results. And depending on how long this is the case, it might be that it gets dropped from our index completely, which means people, if they were searching explicitly for that branch, they wouldn't find anything. And similarly, once you reopen that branch, it'll essentially take a pretty much, pretty long time for everything to get back into the index, to get back into a state where it's reasonably findable in search. So the setup that you have here with the banner, pointing at a different branch, giving information about the closure, that's a perfect setup. And no follow or followed link. From my point of view, you can also use a normal followed link. I don't think that would change much. We're looking at redoing our navigation on our e-commerce site. Would it be beneficial from an SEO point of view if popular product pages could be accessed directly from the navigation, as opposed to the user going through a category page first? Can it benefit the apparent category page if all the link power was going to child product pages, or should they follow a hierarchy order as the value of any links gets diluted, the more levels you go down? So in general, if you're thinking about page rank, which is kind of in this direction, then for a lot of websites, it is a case that the home page is kind of the primary page that people link to. It's kind of the strongest page on a website. And the closer items are linked from the home page, the more we can kind of pass value onto them and say, well, these are pages that are really important from looking at this website because they're even linking to it from their home page, for example. So that's something where as you see that you might have individual products which are more important, for example, which could be more important in the sense that you're selling them really well. It could be that you have a better ROI on those products. It could be that it's something that you're trying to build up. If you have products like this and you want to make sure that they're a little bit more visible in search, then linking them higher up within your website generally makes sense. The important part here is that you're giving Google a sense of hierarchy, a sense of kind of like these pages are more important and these other pages are a little bit less important. So if you were to take that situation and say, well, all of my pages should be promoted because they're all the most important page on a website, then you're not giving Google that hierarchy anymore. Then suddenly, if everything is important, nothing is important. So really taking a bit of time to think about what are the things that you really find critical when a user comes to your home page that they found first. And usually, those are the things that you would want to link there.  So that's kind of the direction I would look at it there. So kind of going back to your question, if there's something that you find really important, it's not so much that you need to link it directly from the general menu on a site, but more that you link it a little bit higher up within your website a little bit closer to the pages that tend to be more popular or stronger within your website. We had a lot of errors in our schema markup. So does Google still use it for pages that are OK, or is it a site-wide thing? This structure data markup is always on a per-page basis and a per-item basis. So if on a particular page you have some structured data that's valid and some structured data that's invalid, then we'll use the structure data that's valid because we can understand that. And we'll just ignore the part that's invalid. So even within a page, we can kind of pick those that are valid. And when you're looking at it across a bigger website overall, if there are some pages that have invalid structured data and others have valid structured data, we'll use the structured data from the pages that are valid. It's not the case that we would see a website as being lower quality because of structured data errors. It's not the case that we would see a website as being higher quality because it has no structured data errors. Essentially, with structured data, you're giving us a little bit more information about the pages and what you're writing about there. And we can take some of that to kind of show the kind of rich or snippet, essentially, in the search results for those pages. So it's not that we'll rank them higher, but more that we'll be able to show them in a slightly different way in search, which is often something that people are looking for. Because the clearer you can make it for your users, what are pages about, the more likely they'll be able to say, well, this is really what I want. And you'll end up having more qualified visitors going to your website. Our product pages is informational, behind tabs, still discounted from a ranking point of view or not. So I think we've been talking about this for a number of hangouts already. But essentially, with mobile-first indexing, the content that is behind things like tabs or behind user interface elements that where it's not immediately visible on a page, that's something that we still take into account. So purely from an SEO point of view, we can still use that. We can still use that for ranking. From a usability point of view, obviously, if you're putting stuff behind tabs, behind user interface elements, which are perhaps unclear to users, then they won't be able to discover that content. So when people find your web pages in search and they think, oh, this is really the page that I wanted to because it has information on this topic that I was interested in, if they go to that page and they see or they don't see any of that content, then it's very likely that they'll go back to search and maybe click on something else. So purely from a usability point of view, if something is important, then make sure it's important on your pages so that both search engines and users are able to find it as quickly as possible. Is Google controlling results related to some health terms, specifically corona, by filtering out some specific types of sites? If yes, how can we make sure that it isn't controlling other terms as well? So I'm not aware of anything where we're manually filtering out sites specifically around health terms. I do know that specifically around health, people have very high expectations of search results. And therefore, we work really hard to make sure that the search results that we provide there are of the highest quality possible. So it's not so much that we need to filter things out, but rather that we need to make sure that our algorithms are really working as well as they should be. And having good algorithms that figure out what content is relevant for users or not, that's something that makes sense across the board. So it's not like we would only need to do that for one specific query, but rather we can use these algorithms and use them everywhere. So whenever someone is searching for something and we have an algorithm that helps us to better understand what they're searching for and to better show search results for that, then we will try to do that. So from that point of view, it's not that we're doing anything really special for these kind of terms, maybe apart from the various kind of one boxes that we have in search where we try to highlight the more current information a little bit better. But apart from that, it's not that we're doing anything that we wouldn't otherwise want to do elsewhere in search. Will Data Highlighter be a part of the new Search Console? If possible, would you please let us know how many people are actively using it? So I don't have any metrics to share, sorry. But it is something that people are working on.  In general, I see Data Highlighter as a way to get started with structured data and to try things out. I would not see that as something that you should be doing in the long run. So if you've noticed that your structured data is working well, that you put together with Data Highlighter, then my really strong recommendation would be to implement that on the site directly so that you don't need to go through Data Highlighter, because that's something where if it's on your site directly, then other search engines will be able to use that as well. You'll be able to control it in a much more granular way in that you'll be able to say, this is really this specific type of data, and this is something slightly different rather than having to rely on Google's algorithms to figure that out. So from that point of view, if you've been using Data Highlighter regularly, I really strongly recommend that you find a way to implement that markup directly on your pages. And if you're curious about structured data and you don't have time to install a plugin or to implement structured data, then Data Highlighter is a great way to start. Should I take Moz's domain authority too seriously because it's been declining? So I can't tell you how seriously you should be taking Moz's domain authority because that's not a metric that we provide. It's not something that we use at all in search. That doesn't mean it's irrelevant for your website.  So maybe there's something that you see there which tells you, oh, I'm doing things right. And you can show that to your boss and say, look, I've been doing things right. This metric that I'm looking at has been going up. Alternately, it might be that you're looking at this and you're seeing it going down. And if you determine, well, this metric reflects this specific thing in search and it's going down, maybe that's something that you could be working on. But essentially, that's totally up to you. And so I can't tell you how seriously you should be taking this particular metric. It's similar to maybe other performance metrics where the page speed inside score might be going up or down. I can't tell you how seriously you should be taking this. It's something where you should take that metric, figure out what it determines, and work out for yourself how relevant that is for your current situation for the work that you've been doing. So from that point of view, I can't say you should ignore it completely because maybe it is useful for you. And at the same time, I can't say it's the most critical thing you should be focusing on because your website will disappear from search, if not. Both of those are not the case. Everyone knows that a DoFollow link will help to gain rank besides many other signals. So no one is linking to me with a DoFollow link as it costs some link juice for them as well. So how can a newbie like me grow my website if no one is willing to give me DoFollow links? And furthermore, many big sites have implemented site-wide nofollow policy. So it's just next to impossible for me as a newbie to get a DoFollow link from a big site. How can a newbie grow in 2020? Or should they just write content in the wait indefinitely? Is Google's system the same like others who favor only big players? Or will Google come up with new rules for links that will not differentiate between the type of links? So for that last one, I think we're already in that state where, essentially, we're using nofollow as a signal. It's not the case that we completely always ignore those links. So especially in some locations, we've seen that a lot of new websites are only linked with nofollow links. And it would be a shame for us not to be able to discover those links and to show them in search. So that's something where we do try to use nofollow more as a signal. Oops, let me just mute you for the moment. In general, though, I think it's also worthwhile to think about the bigger picture when it comes to the web and not just to assume that you need to always just get links, and then you'll be shown in search. But rather, you're essentially opening up as a business, as a storefront, in a bigger city. And it's both the case that you shouldn't just wait for someone to recommend your business, nor the case that you should just open your business up and you kind of wait outside and see if anyone will happen to come by and want to visit your business. But rather, you need to do different things to help promote your business. And sometimes you do things to call attention to your business in ways that kind of encourage people to take note and to notice, oh, this business exists, and they're doing some really great stuff. And then people will come, and then over time, recommendations will come as well. So that's not something that just happens automatically. It might be that you have to do advertising for a while to kind of get things going. It might be that you have to do some kind of special activities to kind of stand out even more than you otherwise would. But essentially, opening up a website is kind of the same as opening up a business. And you need to do various things to get the ball rolling. And at some point, if you're doing really great work, if you're doing something that's really fantastic for people, then you will get recommendations from various folks. And those recommendations could be in the form of do follow links. They could be in the form of no follow links. They could be just general recommendations, maybe on social media, where people are saying, well, this business is doing a great job. You should check it out. And you might just get more and more people coming by. So with all of that said, I would say that you need to think more than just looking at links and rather think about how you can grow a business in general, which involves all kinds of activities. Can Google follow links behind JavaScript from an SEO point of view? Is there something that we need to be aware of so that we don't harm any internal linking? I don't know. We have an expert here on Java. Yes, I actually asked a clarifying question there, because the question is, what do you mean by JavaScript links? If your JavaScript links, or with JavaScript links, what you mean is a link that is injected by JavaScript is a normal anchor tag, like an HTML tag with an href that has a URL. Even if it's JavaScript injected, we can totally discover that and use that for crawling later. If you are using something else, like a button or a span or a link that has no href but has an onclick handler, then no, we cannot follow those. Do you think that will change at some point, Martin? Who knows? I'm bad at predicting the future, it turns out. So I would rather not say something too definite, but it could hypothetically happen that we find better ways to deal with things. But it is just a very resource-intensive thing to actually click on everything, especially if it's not something interactive. If it's a button, then you can say, well, at least it's interactive. If it's a div or a span, then it's just a piece of text. So why would we click on a piece of text? Then we would have to click on pretty much every piece of text. So that's a little bad. And also, there are accessibility considerations there. So I would not expect this to change anytime soon, but who knows? OK. What if you have some of those links in the HTML and you also have them with JavaScript? Does that cause any problems? Sorry, muted myself. That doesn't really cause problems. Fundamentally, if you have it in the initial HTML, we might be able to pick it up a little earlier, because we do run a link scan on the initial HTML. But with rendering picking up on speed, it shouldn't be that much of a difference. And it's not a problem anyway. Cool. OK. And you occasionally do these JavaScript office hours as well, right? I do. The next one is next Wednesday, or actually Wednesday, so April the 8th, 7 PM. Swiss time, you can just check out the calendar where you also find these office hours. And you can submit your questions on YouTube. Ones I actually post the thing on YouTube as well. Cool. OK. So Peter, if you need more information on JavaScript, it sounds like you have an expert that you can go to and get that directly. Cool. OK. If I use the subdomain of my parent company, would it prevent me from ranking for my own knowledge graph? Since whenever people type relevant keywords, my parent company's knowledge graph will show up instead. I don't know how you mean that specifically. So it's really hard to say. If you want to send me some queries or maybe post them on Twitter, that would be useful so that I can take a look. In general, it's probably not something where the subdomain or main domain is really kind of the issue, but rather if we see that something is really strongly associated with one particular company, it might be that we showed that knowledge panel as background information, regardless of the individual products, for example. But it's really hard to say from this kind of a question. So if you want to send me some more detailed information, I'm happy to take a look at that. Regarding keyword cannibalization, when two URLs from the same website are appearing on the search results for the same query, the question is, is this something that confuses the algorithm, meaning the fact that there are two URLs. The existing one confuses the algorithm and hurts the ranking of the other URL. Let's say I have one URL in position four and the other URL in position seven for the query. So if I remove the second one, does the first one perhaps improve its position? I think this is a complex topic. And at the same time, something that people often overthink. But in general, what I would kind of think about is what you want to have shown for a particular query. And then use that to kind of focus your efforts on that one particular item. Because as soon as you have multiple items that are essentially strongly overlapping, then it's, on the one hand, harder for us to pick which one of these pages might be the most relevant one. On the other hand, it might be harder for the users to figure out which one of these is actually the one that they're looking for. And finally, from your side, it's also a bit trickier to determine which one of these should you be maintaining, which one of these should you be updating. So with that in mind, I'd really strongly recommend making sure that the content that you're creating is really clear and focused on one particular topic so that these individual pages can become really strong for those particular topics, for maybe those individual queries. And you don't have to worry about how is overlap happening here. On the other hand, if you have something like a blog or something where you just bring out new content all the time without regularly updating the old content as well, that might be that it just kind of naturally happens that you have some amount of overlapping content. Because maybe you write about a pre-announcement where some company is about to announce something new or has just announced that they're working on something new. And later on, they announce that it's actually live now, that it's available. And it makes sense to write about both of those situations. So that's something where it would be kind of normal for you to say, well, I have some content on this topic already. I have some content on the new variation of this topic already. And maybe I'll just create something new, even newer, on that topic as well, like if that product is already in use and you're able to write a review about that. So that's something where, on the one hand, it makes sense to focus, to try to kind of bring some sense of focus into your website. On the other hand, sometimes it also makes sense to just write about things as they come. How effective is old off-page SEO, like backlinks creation? Many agencies spend lots of time doing old off-page activities, such as image sharing with links, article submission on sites like Tumblr, classified sites, and other free posting sites where people hardly read any of the posts. But those platforms for dropping links with some text, basically majority of their site has poor quality posts. So off-hand, all of those examples that you mentioned are really terrible ways of promoting your website. So that's something where if you hire an agency and they go off and post links on Tumblr, on classified sites, and free posting sites, and they claim that this is going to help your website, then I would move to some other agency. So just to be really clear, this kind of activity has zero value for SEO. It's not something where you're promoting your website in any way, but rather, essentially, they're spamming the web. So that's something I would strongly discourage anyone from doing. On the other hand, creating really fantastic content and then reaching out to perhaps other sites who want to talk about that content, that's a totally different story. So it's not the case that I would say any work that you do that results in getting a link is a bad thing. But rather, you should be focusing on things where you end up getting natural links because of the value of your content that you're providing and not focusing on dropping links into random places anywhere where you can drop a link randomly. That's not going to help your website. That's just going to be considered a spam. So that's a really bad idea. So that's kind of like, I can't say any amount of working on a website to improve the links that you would get is bad, but rather, you should definitely not be doing this kind of spam. And if an agency is doing this kind of spam for you, I would switch to a different agency. I've created a web page, and it's ranked on a second page. I want to take my page to the first page. So I'm thinking, I have a new branded site. How can I rank my web page at that page? So I don't think there is any magic trick to ranking higher. And essentially, ranking is not so much something that is an attribute of a website, but rather, essentially what you should be looking at is how your website is relevant with regards to individual queries. So you can rank for anything at first position if it's specific enough to your individual pages. If you make up a word and someone searches for that word, then maybe your website will be the only one that is shown in those search results. So just ranking alone, I think, is a bad way to think about it, but rather, think about it. What kind of value do you want to provide with your pages? And how can you show that value? How can you work on promoting your website to make sure that other people are aware of your website and the relevance that you're providing? And then focus on the ranking of those keywords, rather than just ranking itself. Another thing that you can do, which I strongly recommend, is to think about how you can branch out and maybe focus on more niche keywords to get started so that you don't have to compete with all of the big sites, for example. So one way you can do this is to use a various kind of keyword research tools that are out there. There's also Google Trends, where you can take one keyword and you can pick a location, location that perhaps you'd like to target. And it'll give you a little bit insight into how that keyword or how that phrase is used in those regions. And it'll also give you some alternatives. So some other ways that people are searching for similar topics. And often that can give you some more ideas on how you can write about this. And instead of just taking a short, very competitive keyword and focusing on that, maybe it makes sense to focus on something a little bit longer, a little bit less competitive, and to build out your website from there. So that's the directions that I would take in cases like this. But in general, if you're starting out with a new website, everything will be a little bit kind of shaky in the beginning until things settle down. So take your time. Take your time to do some research on what your strengths are, what the value is that you can bring to the web. And also take the time to figure out which topics you really want to write about or create content on, and how you can expand from just one narrow topic to maybe a broader set of topics. What's the optimal way to build a sitemap with links that have hreflang to other regions? Is it enough to put one link and let Google read the meta of that link that has hreflang? Or should we list all variations of all countries for that specific link? Does Google ever visit your site without declaring itself as a Google crawler? So for the first one, when it comes to hreflang, there are various ways that you can implement hreflang. It could be either in a sitemap file, like you mentioned here. It could be within the HTML on the page. It could also be within the HTTP response headers. And all of those places are places where we pick up the hreflang links. We combine them all. And based on the combined information that we have, we essentially try to use that appropriately. So that's something where theoretically you could mix sitemaps and HTML meta tags, for example, to pull together the complete set of hreflang links. From a practical point of view, hreflang can be extremely complicated, especially if you have a lot of pages in a bunch of different languages or countries. So my recommendation would be to pick one location and to focus only on that location. Just to make sure that it's easier for you to debug. It's easier for you to maintain if you change URLs, all of those kind of things. So that's kind of like theoretically you could split it up into different locations. But practically, I would really recommend just picking one to make it easier on yourself. Regarding, does Google ever visit your site without declaring itself as a Google crawler? I think that's plausible. It all depends on what you mean with Google. If you mean, like, Google employees, then definitely we use browsers just like anyone else. And they're not kind of declared as a Google bot. And we have various other tools that also access websites in various ways. When it comes to search, we do always declare it as a Google bot when we want to index content. So we really want to be clear that when it comes to indexing things for search, we want to make sure that we're accessing it in a really straightforward way, that we ask for permission first, we check the robots.txt file, and if the robots.txt file isn't accessible, then we might hold off. If it is accessible and lets us crawl, then we will crawl. And we'll do that with the normal Google bot user agents. So from a search point of view, we definitely always declare it. How to make a link completely uncrawlable? I mean, we want to have some links for user navigation, but we don't want Google to spend crawl budget on crawling or storing those links. So probably that doesn't make much sense because we have essentially enough crawl budget to crawl most websites. It's extremely rare that we run into situations where we are kind of limited by the amount of crawling that we can do. And usually those are situations where the server is overloaded or something like that. And usually also in cases like that, the issues are not so much individual links that we run across, but rather that we run across situations where suddenly the same page is indexed 1,000 times with different URLs. That's something where, like when it comes to crawl budget, that we could run into issues there. On the other hand, if it's like one URL more, one URL less, or 10 URLs more, or 10 URLs less, that's not a situation where a crawling budget would ever come into play. So probably in a case like this where you have individual links that you just want to hide from Google, that has absolutely no effect on crawl budget. So probably you don't need to focus on anything there. In general, if you want to make sure that a link is not crawlable, then I would block the URL that you're linking to by robots text. That's the clearer signal that you can give us that you don't want Google to crawl this link, and then Google won't crawl that link. So that's kind of the direction I would head instead of trying to kind of obfuscate the link from being seen. Obviously, there are various ways how you could obfuscate that link. You could use, I don't know, some fancy combination of JavaScript in a way that Martin said you shouldn't do, and then suddenly we won't be able to see that link. It might happen that at some point later on we actually do figure out how to crawl those kind of JavaScript links, and then you're stuck again. It might be that you use, I don't know, Flash or some other technology that Googlebot doesn't understand anymore and set up a link like that. There are various ways to block links from being seen by Google, but from a practical point of view, I don't think any of that makes sense. You're adding a lot of complexity for something that has probably zero value for your website. So you're spending a lot of time on things that make absolutely no difference from an SEO point of view. If the same link is present in menus as well as the primary content of the page, is there any possibility the link in the primary content is giving additional support for SEO, like understanding, relating the content better? It can help us a little bit better, primarily with regards to the anchor text. So if you have a little bit of a longer anchor text in one place, then we can combine those anchor texts and get a little bit better context about that link. But in general, it's OK to just have the link in one place. It's also OK to have it multiple places. It's not like there's a big difference between those two. Uh-oh. Rumor has it that Feedburner might be retired, too. Do you know anything about it? Is it just a conspiracy? I don't know anything about it. I mean, I do know about Feedburner. Feedburner is a cool way to kind of propagate RSS feeds, but I don't know of any specific plans that are out there with regards to that. It does sometimes feel like RSS is a bit of something that few people care about nowadays, but it is still a big part of the web. It is still something that is used, for example, with podcasts. It's kind of the primary mechanism for distributing podcasts. And podcasts are really popular, so I don't think, in general, that RSS is going anywhere. But I don't know of any specific plans with regards to Feedburner in particular. If I want my video on the page to be ranked in index, is video or embed tag better than iframe? I think we probably understand all of these variations. Essentially, as long as we can understand that there's a video that you're embedding on a page and we understand which video files are associated with that, then any of those variations will work. There's also the video structured data that you can use to explicitly tell us about the video content on a page. But essentially, if you're using a setup that is commonly in use on the web, then probably that will just work. So if you're embedding YouTube videos, for example, or if you're embedding videos from Vimeo or any of the other bigger providers, then we've seen a lot of those video embeds, and we can just work with them. And it's not the case that any one of these embeds is better than the other, because as long as we can pull out the video and understand how it is on this page, then we have what we need. There is no additional value in kind of tweaking the tag to be more SEO friendly or less SEO friendly. Apple recently updated Safari on iOS and Mac to block third-party cookies. As a result, should we expect a drop in mobile traffic in Google Analytics, or will this not affect analytics tracking on iOS or Mac users? I don't know. I don't know how analytics handles that or how that affects individual websites. I would recommend checking in with the analytics folks. They seem to be pretty active on Twitter, so there's, I think, a Google Analytics account on Twitter that you can ask directly. Who would probably know more on this? Is there a way to get explanations from Google SEO teams when a website is penalized or filtered from the search results with no message in Search Console? My website has suddenly disappeared from the search results since July 2019. I'm not sure to understand why. I try to respect Google's guidelines as much as I can, but I don't achieve it to get it back into search results. I don't know. So in general, when it comes to manual actions, when a website team looks at websites and sees that they're doing something that goes against Google's guidelines, we do send notifications in Search Console and you both get a message in Search Console as well as have that manual action section report in Search Console. So from that point of view, if anything is penalized, then that would be visible there. If it's not visible there, then that's something where essentially our algorithms are trying to figure out where this web page will be relevant and how we should be able to show it in Search. I think in general, if you're running into a situation where a website is not indexed at all in Search, so if you're saying it disappeared from the search results, I would try to figure out is it indexed or not. Because if it's not indexed, then most of the time for normal websites, that will be due to technical reasons on the website. So that could be something where perhaps you or your host is inadvertently doing something that prevents Google from being able to index this content at all. And those kind of technical issues are things that tend to be easier to resolve. It might be, for example, that maybe you're blocking users in the US and Googlebot is crawling from the US, so we wouldn't be able to pick up that content. It might be something else as well. If the website is indexed and it's just not ranking where you want it to rank, then that's obviously a little bit trickier. Because there's so many factors that play into ranking that it's really hard to say, this is the one thing that you're doing wrong or that you should be doing slightly differently. It's really a lot trickier. I don't know. I think I just saw a comment in the chat which suggests that maybe you're here live. Is that possible? If so, what I can do is after we finish with the normal hangout, maybe if you want to stay on, then I can take a quick look at your site to see if there's anything obvious. It's a bit hard to do that in the live hangouts because I have no idea about your website and where I should even start. But after the recording is finished, then I tend to have a little bit more time to double check. So we can take a quick look there. All right. I think we're running kind of low on time, but maybe I can just shift over to any other questions from you all in the meantime. Hi, John. Hi. Again, me from Search Engine Journal. So I would like to follow up with the question I had in the hangout about large images in Discover. So far, here is what you have found through our tests. So when we use AMP, all of our images, like all of our images, are pulled large. But when we switch to non-AMP, they are becoming small. And sometimes I do notice that even AMP images on other websites have small thumbnails. But in our case, we have all the time like large when we use AMP. But when we use non-AMP, it's small. And I did the following tests. I changed the image aspect ratio to a Google Recommended aspect ratio, the thumbnail, to see if it does help, but it didn't. I a little bit changed our article schema to play around, to see if it does any impact, but it didn't. And I would like to know, is there any specific secret in AMP that it helps pull images large and we can implement on the regular web page as well? I think there are two ways that you can do that with the large images. One is that form. I don't know if you filled that out. Yes, we did fill out many times and a long time ago. OK. Yes, and I did feel it again like a few days ago. But I don't know if it was reviewed or not. And the other is the Max Image Preview robots meta tag. I think you have that as well. OK, I'll double check specifically for your site with the team on that. Thank you very much. Yeah, to see if there's anything kind of blocking that maybe I can point out, or if it's blocking on our side and we just need to unblock. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Sure. All right. Anyone else with any questions before we pause the recording? I could jump in with number one if you'd like. OK, go for it. So you've said that once a site switches over to mobile first indexing, that's the only thing that's going to be in the index. Now I'd imagine, obviously, you also cross-check the desktop site occasionally. But what I'd like to know is, should all my SEO focus now only be on the mobile site? Because suppose on our website we have a separate team for mobile, so rather than making the change both times when it's something that's just technical SEO, like a meta description or schema, am I safe if I just do those changes on the mobile site? From talking with the indexing team, they would like to see anything consistent across the desktop and mobile site. But we will, essentially with mobile first indexing, we only use the mobile site for indexing. So from that point of view, I think it's OK to focus on the mobile site. But in the long run, it should really be across the whole site. And using things like responsive design makes that a non-issue. If at some point you can switch to something like that. I get what you're saying. Thank you. Sure. All right. More questions from any of you? No more questions. If anybody doesn't have, I will give one. OK. So what would be the best recommendation from you to avoid meta descriptions rewrite? To avoid them from being rewritten. So we try to do two things when it comes to displaying the description in the search results. On the one hand, we try to recognize when there's irrelevant meta description given on a page, which could be just like a collection of keywords. It could be something where you have the same description across a large number of pages. That's something where we would probably jump in with our algorithms to try to resolve that. And the other case is when the meta description is something that doesn't match at all what the user is searching for, where we think probably it would be easier for the user to understand why this page is relevant if we pick something from the page itself that covers those queries a little bit better of what they're actually looking for. So those are kind of the main situations where we end up rewriting the description that we provide in the search results. So if you can make sure that your pages have unique meta descriptions, that they're kind of short, that they would fit into a snippet on a page, and that they match what users would generally be looking for when they're going to that page, then chances are pretty high that we'll just reuse what you have in the description meta tag. Because very frequently we see that the Google does pull, as a meta description, first sentence, the H1 tag, which is repeating the title tag. One does see a blue link with the headline of the article. And in the meta description, the same text goes. Yeah, so. Yeah, I don't know. I think that would suggest to me that we're not completely sure about the meta description that you have on that page. So I mean, when we try to pull out text from a page, it's sometimes tricky to find the right part of a page to pull from. And sometimes headings make sense. Sometimes something that's higher up on the page makes sense. But it's sometimes a bit tricky. OK, just send an example of that case. OK, cool. All right, I think we're pretty much at time. I'll be around a little bit longer if any of you want to stick around afterwards. But thank you all for joining in. Thanks for all of the questions that you submitted. And hopefully, we'll see each other again in one of the future Hangouts. And of course, in the meantime, stay safe, stay healthy. Don't do anything crazy, like going outside, depending on where you're located, I guess. All right, wish you all a great weekend. And hope to see you all again next time. Bye. Bye.


General Governor Samuel O'Timm has set up an investigative panel to look into the illegal disposal of liquid waste into the River Benway by pure biotech company Limited. The establishment of this panel is coming following complaints from residents about the pollution of the River Benway with cassava waste by the company, which is located at kilometer 10 Boko Road. Governor O'Timm further disputes claims that the said company is owned by him, insisting he does not own shares in the company. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.