Live from San Francisco, California, it's theCUBE at VMworld 2014, brought to you by VMware. Cisco, EMC, HP, and Nutanix. Welcome back to San Francisco, everybody. This is Dave Vellante with theCUBE, SiliconANGLE's production of VMworld 2014. We're here at Moscone, Moscone South, right inside the lobby on the right hand side. Stop by and see us. Abu Bakar Diare is here. He's with HP. He's a master technologist with HP. We're going to geek out a little bit, talk about software-defined storage. Yeah, I'm going to start off. I said several years ago, I said HP's got to get back to its roots of Invent. It used to be in the logo, right? This is your wheelhouse. This is what you do. You're part of that innovation team. So we're seeing, we're hearing a lot of marketing around software-defined, everything. So SDX, okay, and certainly plenty on software-defined storage. So how much of that is marketing? How much of that is innovation? So I wonder if you could talk about the innovation piece of that. Well, there's definitely a lot of innovation happening. I mean, I know a lot of people have been talking software-defined storage in general and it's a big buzzword and it's very difficult to understand. But from a technology side, there's actually quite a bit of work that we're doing to actually make that story true. When you think software-defined storage, you're thinking being able to provision and access storage capacity instantly, at least that's the way I think about it. And I'd like to pretty much abstract hypervisor layers. I'd like to be agnostic to those things. I'd like to be agnostic to virtual machines, possibly running on an operating system and serving storage. What I'd like to think about when I hear about software-defined storage is, provision to me capacity of storage pool that I can use now, that also offers you data services that are enterprise class, right? So being able to handle snapshotting, replication and all those enterprise level data services that you're used to. And so when you abstract all these things and you think about software-defined storage, just as being able to provision capacity quickly, rapidly and make it cost effective, that's where a lot of the technology to enable all those things comes from, right? Okay, so from a product standpoint, that's the virtual storage array, VSA. Talk more about the technology behind that. So you just describe what it enables you to do. Essentially, it simplifies provisioning and management. But it also includes a rich stack, which is, I guess that stack has always been software. Exactly. So what's the enabler there? It's just a lot of coding, a lot of testing. What's the technology? Little bit of both. So basically, you look at a VSA and it's pretty much essentially a virtual machine. You can think about it as like an IO controller that you put on any hypervisor that you want. One of the key things for us is making sure that we're hypervisor agnostic, which is why we're enabling KVM support coming up here soon, right? That's one of our technology enhancements. And so now you can run your VSA on any flavor of KVM. Initially, our initial support for KVM is going to be focused on Helion. I know you and Vish were just talking in your previous segment was just talking about Helion and our strategy there. So our first release with KVM will be focused on Helion. But coming down the line, right? We're enabling general support for KVM. And then we also already support VMware. We already support Hyper-V, right? In terms of hypervisor. So that's the first key. Now that our VSA, our controller is hypervisor agnostic, you can pretty much have it anywhere in your infrastructure, right, delivering data services for you, okay? So that's the first piece. And then the second piece after that is the technology that we put into the VSA. Some of the things that we do that nobody does, things like multi-site technology, for example, that allows us to stretch a cluster across locations and make your volumes pretty much look like they're local to any one side, okay? We're the only ones that can really do that today with the VSA effectively. And our customers rave about that technology. So there's a lot of technology investment that goes into the VSA. So that multi-site stretch clustering, I mean, presumably the hard part there is making everything consistent. That's correct. You're writing to multiple places. Could you talk about that a little bit more? Why is that so hard? Yeah, so the reason that's difficult is because one, you have a network in between and so you have to deal with latencies, right? And then two, you have to make sure that the data is coherent between both sides. So that when you try to access it, at the time you're trying to access it, you're getting the latest updated copy of that data. And so if you're familiar with the VSA and our architecture, what we do is we use network rate and we're able to pretty much spread your blocks across multiple locations. And that's how we do, that's pretty much the technology that's at the basis of being able to enable multi-site, okay? So we pretty much stretch your volume across two sites and we have replicated copies of that data on both sides, okay? And so as you're trying to access this data, you always have high availability and the data is always there for you because of the underlying technology, our network rate technology. And I'm doing that at synchronous distance, obviously, right? That's correct. And it's all done through software. That's correct, it's synchronous distances. Okay. Campus side. Talk about how Flash plays into this whole thing. So we currently support adaptable optimization and this is where we're using Flash more as a tiering, as a tier of capacity. And the interesting thing about our tiering technology is that we don't, like a lot of implementation that you've seen out there, we don't learn the customer data over a period of time and then make adjustments, okay? Our technology is able to adaptively, pretty much on the fly, okay? Look at the customer workload, look at the demand and make sure that these hot blocks are dynamically moved into the Flash capacity. And so that's the way we're using Flash today and we're having a lot of discussions because of our implementation. We're having a lot of discussion and engineering on how we can easily adapt this implementation to maybe using our Flash more as a cache, right? Instead of just a storage tier. But the cool thing about this implementation of being a storage tier that's different than others is the Flash capacity actually is also storage. It's not just a cache, right? That most implementation will say this cannot be used for IO, cannot be used for data. Actually, can you use it for IO but not for data? Well, we actually let you use that storage, that tier, that Flash tier as storage capacity. Okay, so help me understand that. So if I'm using it as a tier, am I manually allocating data to that tier? Or is it all dynamic? Yeah, that's the beauty of it. So we do provide recommendations to customers in terms of what percentage of Flash they should have based on the capacity they're addressing. Typically 10 to 15% is where you want to be at. But basically what happens then is as your data is happening on the storage node, okay? And every storage node will have its tiers. So you could have two or three tiers, right? It depends on you, because we support multi-tiers. So imagine you're in an environment where you have two tiers, a Flash tier and a SAS tier. And each one of the nodes in your environment will have the same configuration. And so what happens is as the data comes into that node, that node can figure out automatically which blocks are the hot blocks and will migrate those to the Flash tier so that you can get better performance on those blocks. And as those blocks start cooling down and other blocks are heating up, we just swap access to Flash, Flash storage. Now I'm thinking about sort of the technology behind this. I wonder if you could give us a little history here because, like I say, a lot of marketing around software defined. You guys have created this product well before the marketing hit. Where did it come from? Was it VSA? Yeah, was it an effort to just sort of lower costs for mid-tier and smaller customers? Was it sort of observing technology trends, a little bit of both? I wonder if you could talk about that. So this is funny. I'll kind of tell you a funny story. And this is an inside joke. But as you know, technology started with the appliance model, right? So we had this appliance model that would go out there and would sell our technology embedded in it. And one of the inside stories that we tell a lot, and it's probably the first time people are going to hear about this live, is that you have a whole bunch of marketing guys going on the road and demoing this stuff and wondering, it would be cool if I could demo this on my laptop. Because VSA is really based on Linux, underlying VSA runs a Linux operating system. And we add all our software on it. And so next thing you need to take that back to the lab and then a couple of people in the lab just starts a weekend project. And now they can run this demo that they want to take the customer on the laptop. And then this goes on until the customer asks them one day, hey, this is what we want. We want to be able to do that. Put that on anything that we want. And it's kind of like the unofficial birth of VSA, so to speak, right? So, wow, that is a cool story. It's a cool story. Okay, so then somebody said, wow, I can make a product out of this. Exactly, and then you realize you can make a product out of this and you can put it on any server to say X86 base. Hey, sounds like a good story, yeah, so. So it's interesting, so as a technologist, you must, I mean, obviously you see what's going on at three-par inside of HP and they've got an ASIC and it's great. Of course, CMC Mac will tell you, we don't want to build an ASIC. We do it because it affords us advantages. So do you see, and so it's clear at some point, right? A lot of those functions are going to go into software, but do you see this as the future of storage? Software defined? Yeah. Well, I mean, like Vish mentioned in your segment, right? We're looking at the VSA as this software defined play for cost optimized environment, right? And then there's other things that you want to look at in terms of customer needs for other environments. But the VSA is definitely right now positioned within HP as our cost optimized software defined story. We're putting a lot of resources behind it to try to make it easier to use, easier to deploy, and easier to consume, right? And so a lot of the work, like I mentioned to you in the beginning of our segment here, is pretty much going into abstracting the presence of the VSA itself. No, ideally we wouldn't even want you to think about the VSA there. We would want you to think about storage pool that you can dynamically provision and tear down as you need them. And so that's really where we're going. But Bukkar, what do you make of this notion? Because what you just described leads me to VVOLS, right, which is ultimately I want to pull a storage that I can have connect to sort of a VM sort of application view. That's great, that's great. So what do you make of that trend? Is that good news for you guys? Yeah, it's great news. Especially when a VSA environment for us, it's great news because one thing that block storage have been struggling with with VMware in general is that VMware awareness, okay? Being able to look at a container and say, this is a virtual machine. File could do that, NAS could do that before because all these VMs sit on the NAS file share as files pretty much, right? All these VMs. But with block storage, we see blocks. We understand, you know, LVAs and that type of thing, right? And so being able to see where VM begins and end is a little bit more difficult. And then being able to associate data services based on those boundaries is a little more difficult when you're at a LAN level. And so with VVOLS, we now finally have that capability with block storage where we can kind of look at a VVOL and a VVM's definition and all the metadata that goes with it.   We can enable QOS, we can enable stretch replication, we can enable snapshotting. I mean, there's a lot of things that we could do now more effectively in the array at a virtual machine level we wouldn't be able to do before. By bubbling up those services and making them available to the VVOL environment. And then, yeah, that's great. Does that level the playing field then with sort of NFS? Well, not only levels the playing field, but now I think it kind of really leaves it behind because if you look at some of the technologies that we have that they don't have, we really kind of finally be able to showcase the value of these technologies. Specifically, you're talking about the data services? Yeah, the data services, exactly, yeah. All right, we're running out of time of the car, but so let's talk about briefly OpenStack and Helion. What the play is there. So Helion is, as you know, this big OpenStack orchestration cloud play that HP's got initiative that we have. And as part of that, the VSA, the KVM VSA that I mentioned that we've enabled specifically for HP Helion today is at the core of what Helion's going to deliver for the storage stack, right? For the storage stack. So any customer that consumes Helion and deploys it, we'll have store virtual VSA and our, pretty much our API stack has been enabled with this OpenStack sender driver for all these ice-cazi functionality. So you want to deploy storage, you want to quickly provision virtual machines, meaning VSAs, all of the things will be enabled through Helion. And the VSA will be at the core of that. All right, and that's pretty fundamental to HP's cloud strategy. Exactly. All right, Abu Bakr of the R.A., thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. It's a pleasure having you. Thank you, Dave. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be right back with our next guest. We're live from VMworld 2014. This is theCUBE.


Attention Park Hill residents, this is a community notification of a new sexually violent predator in your area. Please stay tuned to the following short program for more information. Hi, I'm Technician Ron Hackett with the Denver Police Department. The Sex Offender Registration and Compliance Unit at DPD is responsible for the registration, monitoring and tracking of all registered sex offenders and sexually violent predators who live in the city and county of Denver. Here's a brief history of sex offender legislation in Colorado. Our state laws trickle down from federal government mandates. In 1994, we had the Jacob Wetterling Act, which mandated that states would establish a sex offender list. Megan's law of 1996 said that the public would have access to those sex offender registration lists. The Pam Litchner Act of 1996 stated that some offenders might have to have lifetime registrations, and the Adam Walsh Act of 2006 unified sex offender laws across the country. In Colorado, the legislature has determined that sexually violent predators, by definition, pose a higher risk to the community at large, and therefore mandated that upon their release from the Department of Corrections, the community must be notified. Sex offender notification in Colorado happens in two ways. The first is passive and ongoing through the sex offender registration process, which is a list maintained by local police departments. The second way is active via community notification for those offenders determined to be sexually violent predators by the courts or by the parole board. Most sex offenders in Colorado are supervised by the criminal justice system in our communities. Most sex offenders engage in crossover behavior, which means they may have been arrested for one type of crime, but be apt to commit another.  There is no typical sex offender, but all tend to be deceptive, manipulative, and secretive. 80 to 93 percent of sex offenses are committed by someone known to the victim. Sexual deviancy begins in mid to late adolescence. Sex offenses are not impulsive.  The community has a vested interest in helping offenders to be successfully managed in the community. Sex offenders have the same need for housing and employment as any other citizen. Any citizen who uses sex offender information to harass, threaten, or intimidate an offender will be subject to criminal prosecution. There are approximately 16,500 registered sex offenders in the state of Colorado. About 65 percent of convicted sex offenders are placed in the community on probation. The remainder are in the Department of Corrections or Community Corrections. Offenders may be caught for one type of offense, but be at a high risk to commit another type. Time of conviction is only one indicator of risk.  The offender's residence must be verified quarterly by the Denver Police Department. The full sex offender registration list is available by calling the Denver Police Department Identification Bureau at<PHONE_NUMBER>. Guided felons and those with multiple convictions are posted online at denvergov.org slash police.   Now, here's a look at the newest sexually violent predator living in Denver. Here's an overview of the registered sex offenders currently living in Denver. There are 2,485 total living within city limits. In Denver Police District 2, there are 384. Precinct 221 has 82 registered sex offenders. Of those, 47 have felony convictions and 35 have misdemeanor convictions. Erin Dwayne Tolbert is a sexually violent predator currently living in Denver. He's 58 years old and was born on August 6, 1960. He's a black male, 5 feet 8 inches tall, 190 pounds with brown hair and brown eyes. He's currently living at 2955 Quebec Street in the Park Hill neighborhood of Denver. Schools located within one mile of this offender include Ashley Elementary at 1914 Syracuse Street, Hallett Academy at 2950 Jasmine Street, Swigart International School at 3480 Syracuse Street, Denver School of the Arts Middle School and High School at 7111 Montview Boulevard, Odyssey School of Denver at 6550 East 21st Avenue, Denver Discovery School at 3480 Syracuse Street, Montessori Children's House of Denver at 2211 Xanthea Street, Smith Elementary at 3590 Jasmine Street. Parks located within one mile of this offender include Skyland Park, Greenway Park, Martin Luther King Jr. Park, Thomas Park, Central Park, McLean Park, McNichols Park, Denison Park. Recreation centers located within one mile of this offender include Martin Luther King Jr. Rec Center at 3,800 Newport Street. Bus routes located within one mile of this offender include Route 28 29th Avenue and North Quebec Street, Route 28 29th Avenue and Pontiac Street, Route 73 Quebec Street and MLK Boulevard. A brief history of charges against this offender.  He's not currently on parole or probation and registered with the Denver Police Department on October 5th, 2018 to 2955 Quebec Street in the Park Hill neighborhood of Denver.  Criteria one age 18 or older on the date of the offense or under 18 and tried as an adult. The offender was age 42 at the time of the offense. Criteria two the crime must have been committed on or after July 1, 1997 and convicted on or after July 1, 1999.  The offender was convicted on October 18, 2002 for criminal attempted sexual assault. Criteria three the relationship to the victim was one of the following. Victim was a stranger to the offender or the offender established or promoted a relationship with the victim primarily for the purpose of sexual victimization. The victim was a 35 year old female. The offender was known to the victim. Criteria four positive results are the passing of a risk assessment instrument administered by probation parole staff and a qualified treatment evaluator. Positive results include an assessment for the presence of a mental abnormality, a level of denial regarding the offense, treatment appropriateness and motivation, presence of sexual deviant interests. The offender was evaluated by the Colorado State Board of Parole with positive results determining him to be a sexually violent predator.


Next up, we have Nicholas Alessandrony, who is going to talk about the many, many collaboratively advancing best research practices through cross-taxon victim science. Well, good morning. It's a great pleasure to be here today to introduce the many, many's Collaboratory, a victim science project that aims to revolutionize comparative cognition research and advanced best research practices. So it is no news to anybody here that conducting studies in siloed laboratories with limited communication and collaboration with other units with small sample sizes and underpowered designs has had a devastating effect on the reproducibility, replicability, and robustness of research findings. This has created an urgent need to develop new workflows to enhance the reliability of scientific discovery. Behavioral scientists focusing on single species groups have begun to solve this issue by adopting a form of grassroots collaborative research known as victim science, where large numbers of researchers come together to pull resources toward a common research goal. Examples of these networks include many babies focused on human infant development, many primates investigating primate cognition, many goats working on goat behavior and welfare, and other initiatives like the psychological science accelerator, many birds, many fishes, and many dogs. These large-scale collaborations bring about extensive advantages enabling researchers to do science in ways they could not under the traditional model. For example, victim science projects collect data from hundreds or even thousands of subjects in a single study, which far exceeds the capacity of an individual researcher or team. Victim science projects also embrace and foster open science practices such as preregistration of materials and open data, thus sparing the transparency of research. Despite progress in other areas, creating a large-scale networking comparative cognition remains an unmet, albeit critical challenge. A reason behind this shortcoming is the multidisciplinary nature of comparative cognition, which often leads to differences in the definition of crucial concepts, think for example the definition of learning in psychology versus in biology, and in the implementation of research methods. Indeed, most researchers are specialists in a single species or taxon and comparing subjects with disparate body structures and abilities renders implementation of standardized procedures exceptionally difficult. Many-many's is an unprecedented mega-network of international researchers that aims to overcome these challenges by collaboratively developing and applying innovative methods to measure and compare behavior across animal taxa. It was funded after the Victim Science Conference held virtually last year where representatives from different networks came together to identify challenges to the implementation of victim science and explore solutions. It was during Hackathon that a large team of researchers agreed on the pressing need to create a victim science network to help comparative cognition realize its full potential. Many-many's will foster the convergence of many-fold perspectives and practices from diverse fields and develop extensive knowledge and novel viewpoints on how open replicable and collaborative practices can benefit victim science workflows. Indeed, the field of victim science in the behavioral sciences is relatively nascent and there is a depth of solutions. Our project will bridge this gap by providing insights into the effective execution of a victim science project that's promoting and enhancing the quality of research. I am very excited to announce that through consensus-based decision-making many-many's has decided that its first project named many-many's one will revolve around learning. Learning is a fundamental ability present across species from insects to humans. The study of learning provides an unparalleled approach to understanding how different species acquire, process, and utilize information to adapt and thrive in their environments. Researchers in various fields have developed methods and theories to understand learning with the species they study, but the typically isolated manner of this work has limited valid comparisons across species. To begin to unravel the mysteries of learning and its evolutionary origins, many-many's one will create an implemented task to compare reversal learning abilities across animal taxa. Reversal learning tasks are the gold standard procedure to investigate learning and behavioral flexibility across species. A reversal learning task involves subjects being first reinforced for selecting one of two stimuli, which leads to the formation of a dominant response. Then the reinforcement contingencies are reversed and subjects must shift their response and use the previously unrewarded stimulus as a cue. How long does it take individuals from different species groups to become aware of this shift and adapt their responses? Can they learn how to solve reversal learning tasks with training over time? What other factors affect reversal learning abilities across taxa? Past research on reversal learning has advanced our understanding of learning development, but it's not without limitations. For one thing, there's been substantial variation in the methods used. For example, differences in the cues used and the method and the amount of training, and this is made comparing results daunting, if not impossible. Also, while learning has been investigated in numerous species, each study has typically focused on one or two species. Moreover, within each field, studies have consistently suffered from small sample sizes and low statistical power, and result interpretation has depended on theoretical frameworks whose suitability remains under heated debate. Many-many's one will develop a reversal learning task that can be applied across taxa and collect data from at least eight species groups. Confirmed populations of study include birds, dogs, fish, bovids, human and non-human primates, insects, reptiles, and rodents. Many-many's one will also utilize a victim science approach achieving a sample large enough to ensure adequate statistical power and inference. As a result, many-many's one will help determine the soundness of competing theories through a robust experimental design and a large and diverse dataset. Importantly, many-many's one will pre-register its main empirical study and all research outputs will be published as pre-print, open access peer reviewed journal articles, open datasets, and open materials. Our project, which is now in the initial stages, draws on the expertise of project leads and researchers already engaged in victim science initiatives. Team members have diverse backgrounds in behavioral ecology, comparative psychology, biology, zoology, developmental psychology, computer science, and neurobiology. This will allow us to integrate multiple viewpoints to achieve a comprehensive understanding of reversal learning across taxa. The many-many's one undertaking couldn't possibly be fulfilled by any single research team given limitations in access to subjects, equipment, personnel, and financial resources. Our victim science approach will maximize feasibility by sharing the high cost of data collection, while fostering generalizability and replicability. We believe many-many's one is supposed to be a game changer in comparative cognition and victim science, and we are really excited to invite new collaborators to join our project. And the best part is that joining does not require access to a laboratory, participation in data collection, or prior involvement in victim science initiatives. So if you are interested, make sure to visit our website, many-many's.github.io, and come talk to me later. And if you know somebody else that might be enthused, please share this information with them. Thank you so much for your attention today, and I will now be delighted to address any questions or comments you might have. Thank you. I'm Ryan. I was just interested in making a standardized, like, behavioral paradigm between taxa. How exactly do you plan to do that with, like, different animals in taxa, of course, having different environmental stimuli? Yeah, exactly. So the methodological team within many-many's is currently discussing what is the best approach for that, but we've identified common both individual, I mean, independent and dependent variables that have been used in these kind of studies. So what we are trying to do here is to select the ones that can be applied across taxa. So that is one of the tasks we are currently undertaking. Thank you. Well, yesterday there was a very interesting talk about sample diversity in victim science, and I would say that another big challenge is incorporating equity diversity and inclusion actions within victim science networks. So to achieve that, we have developed a code of conduct and a collaborator agreement that aims to achieve these exact actions, right? So I guess it's important to recognize that sample variation as discussed here yesterday is important, but this is not a victim science problem. It is a science problem. It's more general, that's what I'm trying to say, and we need to address it. And I think victim science networks are doing a great job at addressing these concerns, which are absolutely valid and important. Thank you. Thank you very much.


All right, welcome, everyone, to today's Webmaster Central Office Hours Hangouts. My name is John Mueller. I'm a Webmaster Trends Analyst here at Google in Switzerland. And part of what we do are these Office Hour Hangouts, where folks can join in and ask their questions around websites and web search, and we try to find answers. Bunch of stuff was submitted, even though it's just a few days, but lots of things lined up. But kind of as always, if any of you want to get started with the first question, you're welcome to jump in. Hi. I have actually two questions. So first one is about URL length. Listen, we have got a client. So when I checked his website, he said it's about header. So his category URL are like this. Domain URL slash header slash odeter slash freestanding odeter. It's a very long, and he used the keywords a lot of time. So is it bad for SEO? What do you suggest in this case? That's fine. I mean, we use URLs to identify the content. So if it's long or short, that's essentially up to you. When we have multiple URLs that have exactly the same content and we have to pick a canonical, then usually we tend to prefer a shorter one. But usually that's within your own website. So if you have kind of the short version and the long version and they both show the same content, then we try to pick the shorter version. But it's not that the shorter version has a ranking advantage or anything like that. And the second question is about the backlink source. So if an English website gives backlink from another English website and another backlink from non-English website, do you give same importance to both URL or it varies based on the language? That's all the same to us. So it doesn't matter the language of the website. I mean, what happens is we try to understand the anchor text and how that belongs within the context to understand the page they're linking to a little bit better. But it's completely normal for websites to have links from all kinds of other websites from different countries, different languages. Thank you. John, perhaps I may chime in before you go over the other comments if that's OK. OK. But I just wanted to ask a trivial question or perhaps not that trivial regarding interstitial pop-ups or what we are currently having is a discussion between our sales team and the SEO people regarding how we actually get consent from our users. I tried to go on. Sounds better. So we are having a discussion with our sales team regarding how we actually get consent from our users. And there is one option, which is this bar at the bottom of the page. And the other one, which says people more is to have an interstitial, which actually is overlaying the content and even trying to gray out the background content. And you said on a recent tweet that consent as such is OK if you have the cookie bar at the bottom. However, it becomes a problem if you really have these interstitials which are overlaying any content. And I wanted you actually to perhaps you can elaborate a bit more on what could be possible when it comes to interstitials. Perhaps we don't gray out the background or because it's basically a means of increasing the people to give consent to allow us to display advertisements. What's your advice when it comes to this? So I guess first of all, I don't know. What the legal requirements are that you might need to watch out for. So that's kind of like on the side. I don't know if my suggestions would be compliant with what you're looking for. In general, the kind of a bar on the bottom of the page, that's something that's really useful for us because then we can still see the rest of the page. So in particular, we can recognize how much of the page is mobile friendly. We can recognize which are the prominent elements on the page, all of that. That's really kind of the thing that makes a lot of the normal web search processes just kind of work by default. That's kind of the one side. The other, I guess, extreme that we sometimes see is when people redirect to a different URL for kind of confirming that they're allowed to access the content or age interstitial or something like that. And there the problem is when you redirect to a different URL, Googlebot will follow that redirect. And we will only have that interstitial content to index. So there is no other content on the page. It's not even the right URL. So what usually happens in those cases is we index the interstitial. And we think all of the pages from the website are the interstitial. And basically, we do eliminate all of the pages towards that interstitial URL, which is kind of the thing that you really, really want to avoid unless you want to remove your website from search. No, we don't. And I guess the alternative that you're kind of considering is somewhere in between in that you have a full page interstitial that you remain on the same URL. And there, it's generally more a matter of how you implement this in a way that Google can still see the normal content. So in particular, if you're using JavaScript to display like a div on top of the page and the rest of the page is still there, then that's something where we can still see the rest of the page. And we can kind of work with that. So those are kind of the different approaches there. One other thing that I think I have seen some sites do is to go into the area of what is it? Flexible sampling, almost, where they kind of request that a user signs in in order to see the content. And by signing in, they also have some kind of cookie consent or whatever attached with that. And for us, that's usually less of a problem because we would see that as flexible sampling. Like you're saying, well, my content is here. You just have to take these steps to actually see the content. So that's perhaps another approach that might be worth reviewing. Perfect. Makes sense. Thanks a lot, John. Sure. Hello, John. Hi. I'm in this side. Actually, I do a lot of problems. I mean, I wanted to ask from you, but I can only ask some things from you. Actually, recently, I have got rejected reconsideration request. I have filed reconsideration request for my client. OK, so I mean, Google has sent us two sample links. I mean, you guys are sending us two sample links as an example of natural links. So I found that one of the links carries no follow tag. OK. And I don't think, I mean, Google is considering with no follow tag links as an important link. I mean, you understand my point? I don't think how you guys can send no follow tag in a sample URL. And can you please explain this thing? That could be something that went wrong on our side. But generally speaking, if you did a reconsideration request, especially for link spam, and you got it back saying that it's not good enough, then I would focus on the bigger picture. And not worry too much about that one no follow link. But really, think about what kind of bigger picture things have you been doing with regard to links that you still need to clean up. And sometimes what can happen is that they will flag an issue and say, well, this is the kind of thing that you should be watching out for. It's not like these are the two remaining links that you need to fix, but rather here are some ideas of issues that you need to clean up. So I would take it more in that direction and really try to clean those links out as completely as possible. Sometimes the folks on the forum can be helpful for these kind of things where they can say, oh, you still have all of these millions of links. And they can guide you towards the things that you really need to remove. OK. So John, we have also identified many of the links are coming from the feed pages. I mean, after checking all the external links that we are getting, the backlinks we are getting in Webmaster, so a lot of feed pages are generated. And what should we do about them also? Or what should we do? Feed pages. What kind of links did you mean? I didn't understand. Feed, feed, feed URLs. Like, how do you mean feed URLs? I mean, we cannot be able to open that kind of URLs. They are just, if I open that kind of URL, that will download, it got downloaded in our PC, in our system. So you have some examples also? Yeah, that's correct. RSS feed. OK. Usually, that's less of a problem. But usually, the RSS feeds are generated based on the content on a blog, for example. So that's usually where, if there's a link in an RSS feed, then probably that's due to a link in a blog post somewhere. And cleaning up the blog post fixes the RSS feed automatically too. So what do you suggest? I mean, should we consider feed URLs also to be in order to disavow them? I mean, I don't know if. No, I wouldn't worry about disavowing the feed URLs. It's something where, if you've kind of gone out and placed blog posts on other people's sites, and those links also show up in the feed, then maybe it's best to just disavow the whole domain, to make sure that you have everything covered. Because if you've been placing links on other sites and they show up in the feed in addition to the site, then it's not the feed that's the problem. It's kind of the general practice of going out and dropping links on other sites. Great, John, one last question. I mean, John. Sure. So I mean, if we will place naked URL in building, any place in the website, so will it be considered as a natural link for if I'm placing any naked URLs? So without a link or? Without a link, without any context. Without any, well, if it's not a link, it's not a link. You should be fine. Yeah. OK, fine. Thanks a lot, John, for your help. Sure. Let me run through some of the submitted questions and we can get to more live questions afterwards just so that we don't completely ignore all the things that people lined up. Because a lot of times people just can't join because of the time zone, so I want to make sure that we can try to get some of their questions through. OK, the first one is about an AMP website. They changed all the internal links to point to Google's cache URLs. So basically even on desktop, it always goes to the cache. A few months later, I had some negative results in terms of rankings and change back. So the question is, how should I do it, essentially? So first of all, I think pointing to the cache URL is generally a bad practice because these URLs can change over time. It's not that those URLs will always remain the same. So personally, I would link within your website, link to your own URLs. And if it's loaded on the AMP cache and they can swap out the URLs against the AMP cache URLs with the cache where it's displayed, that's fine. But I wouldn't kind of generate a website structure by pointing at AMP cache URLs. The other reason why I wouldn't do that is that as far as I know, a lot of these caches are blocked by robot stacks. So if you're changing all of your internal navigation to point at URLs that are blocked by robots text, then that's going to definitely have a strong effect on your website. So my recommendation there would be to link within your site and keep those links within your site. And if it's loaded on the cache and it swaps it out for the cache, then that's kind of on the user side. That's not something you need to worry about. But from crawling and indexing, definitely make it so that we can index your site and not have to kind of worry about the cache. I'm seeing random errors of Google Tag Manager verification failures for a search console for our sites. And you link to a thread. I'm not aware of anything specific happening there with regards to tag manager verifications. But I'll definitely take a look at the thread and see if there's anything more that we need to figure out. So try to find something there. We often receive DMCA violation notifications. We're not pirates, so disputing complaints and dismissing them oftenly, but it takes time. If it weren't for the fear of Google discontentment, then we wouldn't be doing it. Does the number of DMCA complaints affect the ranking of a site? Is it possible to get rid of a bad reputation? So I double-checked on this, because I wasn't sure what we actually announced at the time. But I think 2012 around, we did a blog post saying that the number of valid DMCA complaints is something that we would take into account for ranking. So if you're dismissing them, if they go away, when you kind of flag them as being wrong, then that's perfectly fine. But if your site is collecting them over and over again, then that's something where our systems might pick up on that. If we have breadcrumbs only on the desktop site, how will it affect the snippet on Google? So in general, when we switch to mobile-first indexing, we only take the content from the mobile site into account. So if you only have some kind of markup or some kind of content on the desktop version, and it's not available at all on the mobile version, then we will not have that available for indexing. So breadcrumbs, if they're only on desktop and not on the mobile, and we switch to mobile-first indexing, we will not have your breadcrum markup anymore. With regards to putting breadcrumbs on the bottom of the main content on mobile, that's perfectly fine. It's also possible to use kind of responsive design elements where you're saying, well, on desktop we have room and we can display it. And on mobile, maybe we don't have room or we need to display it in a different way, that's also fine. But the markup needs to be there on mobile if you want us to use that markup. We migrated our website on the 13th of December from an old platform that wasn't mobile enabled. It was a major move to a new server, new platform, new category, new URL structure. All the pages and categories have been indexed. And the URL redirect setup, we had some technical issues with 404s, which have been cleaned up. We're working on speed, which was fine in testing, but now too slow. Taking all of this into account, is it reasonable to assume that the rankings won't have settled down yet, or could the site speed be the cause of the low traffic? So I took a quick look at this before. And I think what is happening is you moved within the same domain to completely different URLs. And usually these kind of moves tend to take more time than when you move to a different domain. And it sounds a bit paradox almost, but when you move to a different domain, we can take everything one-to-one and just copy it over, essentially. Whereas when you restructure your website, then we really have to relearn your whole website and understand, again, how all of this fits in together, what the context is of individual pages, how to kind of connect things, what the internal links are like, the internal anchor text. And all of these are things that take a significant amount of time for us to settle down and figure it out again. So I wouldn't assume that the speed is kind of the issue here. We do take speed into account, but that's something that's generally a little bit lower with regards to priority and probably takes a little bit longer to get picked up. But rather, on the one hand, the restructuring takes time. And on the other hand, if you change the design of a website significantly, then that can also affect how we see that for ranking. So for example, if you had a website with a lot of good textual content on the pages and a clear internal navigation, then that's kind of a good thing. And if you redesign into a really minimal version of the website with the same URLs maybe, but the internal navigation is a lot less or there's a lot less content on the pages, then obviously we would rank it based on the less information that we have there. One thing kind of that point in the direction of this not being really a speed related problem is when you look at Search Console. So what I tend to do in cases like this is take a period of time before the change and after the change where you're looking at roughly the same kind of days. So I try to pick the same weekdays. I try to skip over holiday seasons because that always skews the numbers a little bit. And I compare the queries where the site was ranking before and after and the URLs that were ranking before and after. By comparing both of those, you can fairly quickly see if there is any problem with the old URLs, maybe not being redirected. If the most important old URLs don't show up at all in the new time period, then that's kind of a sign. And with regards to the queries, you can often understand a little bit better what kind of changes am I seeing? Is this like a change across the board where maybe all of the queries before and after maybe dropped by 20% or some number? Is it specific to the branded queries or is it specific to kind of the long tail, the non-branded queries? And by looking at those differences, one thing I noticed with your website is essentially the branded queries are all more or less the same, which to me points in the direction of, well, technically, your website is kind of OK. Overall, we're seeing it as generally being OK. Probably speed, which would be something that would apply across the whole website, is less of an issue here. But the non-branded queries are the ones where there's kind of a drop there. And to me, on the one hand, that suggests that maybe these are URLs that we haven't recrawled and re-indexed that well yet, which could be that from a restructuring, it just takes time. Or alternatively, maybe these are pages that look significantly different before and after, where we're kind of ranking the page on what we have indexed now. And the index version that we have now is significantly less useful for us, for whatever reasons. Maybe it doesn't have enough text on it. Maybe it doesn't have a clear heading structure on it. Maybe the images are not that accessible for us, all of these things. So that's kind of the direction I would go there. And kind of look at it. I would double check this in your own Search Console account to kind of see if that matches what you would see as well. And if it's really more the non-branded queries, more the long tail queries that were going to your site and are less visible for your site, then I would kind of, on one hand, give it more time to settle down. And on the other hand, really significantly review the pages themselves to see what were they like before, what do they look like now. If you're not sure what they looked like before, there's archive.org, which is a free service where you can check a lot of URLs to see older versions of those. So you can check kind of the old versions that used to be shown in Search and see what they looked like and compare that to the current version that you have yourself. All right, we have a few thousand sites that show up in Search Console. Report, index, then not dependent in Site Map. I think sites probably is pages. Not sure. So in German, we tend to use the same word for websites and web pages, which makes things a bit confusing sometimes. But I think probably they mean pages. So a few thousand pages that show up in Search Console Report, index, not submitted in Site Maps. Most of them are non-canonical pages, which point to their respective canonical version via rel canonical. When we check one of these with a site query, it shows up in the search results. When we check them with the URL inspection tool, it says canonical URL provided by the user with the correct canonical and canonical URL selected by Google with verified URL. Why are these non-canonical pages indexed, although there's a clear signal with a canonical? The pages are almost 100% identical. So let's see. So I think there might be multiple things happening here. It's kind of hard to tell without some example pages. But in general, when it comes to canonicalization, we take multiple factors into account. We do use the rel canonical. That's a fairly strong signal for us. We also use things like redirects. We also use internal linking, external linking. We use site map URLs as well. Kind of the internal linking structure with things like hreflang, all of that plays a role as well. And essentially, we take these multiple URLs that show the same content, and we try to figure out which one of these URLs is the one that we should pick. And it can happen that we pick URLs that have a rel canonical on them pointing to a different one. So that's not impossible. If you're seeing this on a large scale, then I would try to figure out why Google might be doing this. So for a few individual pages, I wouldn't care about this. It's like, sometimes it goes this way, sometimes it goes that way. From a ranking point of view, it doesn't change anything. It's purely just which of the URLs are shown. So again, if you're seeing this on a large scale, I would try to dig into those situations and see what might you be doing that could be confusing Google. So that could be things like internal linking. Are you linking to the exact URLs that you have in the set for rel canonical? If you have something like hreflang, are you using the exact URLs there as well? Sometimes things like upper lowercase plays a role. If you have a sitemap file, does that match exactly what you have submitted as well? So all of these things kind of ideally would align. If they align, then we'll go with what you suggest, essentially. If they don't all align, then Google will try to figure it out and try to come up with a canonical version that works in general. And again, it doesn't change anything from ranking.  And the other place where this plays a role is, of course, with tracking. If you use things like analytics, then you want to be able to track the individual URLs that you kind of care about. But that's kind of the direction I would go there and try to figure out what might be happening there. If you have URL parameters in these URLs as well, so something with the question mark, and then some, I don't know, words equals something else, then the other place I would also look is the URL parameter handling tool. Because it can happen that you have a setting there that you forgot where it's like Googlebot should ignore these parameters. And that's why those URLs are not being picked as canonicals. I'm looking at log files from the past several months. And about 75% of the 404s we send Google happen when Google requests very old embedded content. So we're talking about old CSS, JavaScript image files that haven't been on site for up to five years in some cases. I've seen URLs from a site we migrated three years ago in the refer. I verified the requests as genuine Googlebot. Did these kinds of requests happen when Google renders old pages? If so, why are you rendering really old versions of our page? It seems like a sign of something going wrong. Is there something we can do about this? So there's generally nothing you need to do about this. It's essentially just our rendering setup, our crawling and indexing setup, checking pages again. And when it comes to crawling, it's really common for us to re-crawl URLs that are kind of old, where we think probably there's going to be a 404. And if you return a 404 for us, then that's perfectly fine. It's not going to cause any problems there. So I think if you look at your log files in detail, you'll find lots of these weird quirks, but they generally don't cause any problems. I think it's kind of weird that we would re-render really old pages, but I don't see it as being weird enough that I would contact the rendering team and tell them to stop doing this, because usually they have good reasons to try to check things out. Sometimes they're experiments. Sometimes it's just double checking kind of how the old rendering worked versus how the current rendering works. Lots of reasons why that might be happening. But again, I generally wouldn't worry about this. If the number of requests is causing a too high load on the server, then that's something where you can adjust the crawl rate setting in Search Console to let us know to crawl less. And when we crawl less, it's not that we'll kind of crawl percent-wise less of all of the URLs, but rather that we'll focus more on the URLs that we actually do care about. So that's kind of an approach you could take if you wanted to go that direction. Our competitor is now making all the external links on their site with help of Gaskit page with JavaScript redirection. He linked from site A to site B, not directly, but through an additional page on the site with some kind of a JavaScript. Is this something like a link from Facebook? So the question is, do these JavaScript Gaskit URL links convey weight and signals? Does Google not perceive them as a real intermediary? So a lot of times we can crawl through those, and it's absolutely fine. We get to the destination page, and that works for us. So usually that's less of a problem. In general, if we can't crawl through them, then it'll look to us like they're just not linking to those pages. But I don't see this as being particularly useful for a website. So if a website just doesn't want to pass any signals through a link, then I would just use a no follow on that link. All of this extra complexity just means more things can break. So personally, I would avoid trying to go through all of these extra steps to try to hide links. If Google's search result page is intermittently ranking two pages for the same keyword, how can we help Google to rank only one of them? We have two pages that keep alternately ranking for the same term in the search result. And I wonder if the competitive competition is ultimately drawing down ranking. Both pages are important to the site, so we can't just delete or redirect one. So the cases where I have seen something like this happen is usually when we're unsure what the intent of a query is, so it can happen that this fluctuates over time. For example, we might not be sure if the user is searching for a specific product or a specific kind of product. And depending on how we would judge the intent of those queries, we might say, well, maybe a category page would be more useful because they're looking for this type of product. Or alternately, we might say, well, they're looking for the exact product, so the product detail page would be more important. And these kind of fluctuations can happen over time. It can happen that, I don't know, from day to day it changes. It might happen that with queries like we're so far on the edge that we might show both of these pages because we're just not sure what exactly the user wants. And from our point of view, that's usually normal in that it settles down over time, usually, or maybe it'll settle down in the sense of, well, we figured out we can't tell what the exact intent is, so we have to show both of those pages because one of them will work, but we're not sure which one. So that's something where, from my point of view, I wouldn't worry about it too much if you have really strong feelings about those two pages, then I would just make sure one of those pages is really well-targeted for what you're trying to aim for, and maybe the other page is really well-targeted for a different, clearly separate facet that people would be searching for. But for the most part, I don't see this as being problematic. Question about implementing schema markup for the future. Future-looking is always tricky. Can it be easier to maintain? Can it need less reliance on multiple steps and parties for extensible code? Can we make it easier to instruct developers and designers? Maybe make Google Tag Manager more efficient? I don't know. I think it would be nice to have it easier. But to be totally honest, I think in the future, at least in the near-term future, we will have more types of structured data markup. And it will continue to get more complicated probably in the sense that there are just lots of requirements for different search features. And in order to do something really fancy in the search results, where we can really highlight your site really well, or if there is a way to also include information that we can show on Google Assistant, or rather, I guess, speak on Google Assistant, then all of these things, they currently rely a lot on structured data markup. So that's something where, as these areas expand, I would expect to see some amount of additional markup coming in. And anytime you have more structured data markup, kind of like the interactions get trickier, and the requirements get a little bit harder in the sense that, oh, you have to have I'm just making something up. Like a name with 17 characters, you can't just have a name with 15 characters. Sometimes these things change over time. So I suspect it'll get harder in the near future, at least. Maybe in the really long term, it'll be like, oh, the machine intelligence can figure it out for you.  I don't see that happening in the next couple of years. So if you're kind of on the hill with regards to should I learn more JSON-LD to figure out how to do markup myself, I think that's a good approach. I also think, at the same time, a lot of these things can be made easier by content management systems and plug-ins, extensions that you have for content management systems. So if you're using something like WordPress, then maybe there's a plug-in that does all of the structured data markup for you automatically.  So instead of creating all of the kind of special markup yourself, if you have a plug-in that does it for you, then those plug-in developers will continue to kind of stay on top of things, ideally, as the markup evolves over time and probably make that easier for you. But purely from a markup point of view, I don't see this getting any easier, unfortunately. We had two products. So the page structure was obvious, a home page, domain.com, with links to both products. Now we dropped one product, which is better, put the main product landing page directly on domain.com or redirect domain.com to the main product landing page. So both of these are kind of the same thing in that you're folding one product and putting it together with your home page. From my point of view, if you're reducing the scope of your website and really going to just a one-page website, then I would focus on the home page directly, rather than redirect from the home page to a lower-level page. If this is something that is very temporary in the sense that maybe next month you'll have another product to sell and then you go back to having multiple products on your site, or maybe next month you have 100 products to sell, then I would stick to the structure where you have multiple product URLs and the home page separate. But if you're really sure that you want to decrease the scope of your website to just one page, then put it on the home page. I think that just makes everything a lot easier for tracking and for crawling and indexing. The rich result update in September changed a lot of search results. I want to understand why for some home pages stars are still appearing. In my opinion, it could be the use of misleading markup or is there an actual issue with understanding markup technically? And will it be solved in the near future? So not exactly sure which update you mean from September. We've had a lot of things over time. But I think, in general, when it comes to structured data and the rich results, sometimes we do get tricked by people who are implementing the wrong markup. And then we think, oh, this should be showing review stars because we think it makes sense here. And actually, when someone manually looks at it, they're like, no, that's implemented incorrectly. Or another common one that we see is recipe markup where maybe you'll have a recipe for a fantastic blog post on your website. And that's not really a recipe. So our algorithms might look at that and say, oh, it looks like you have a recipe with multiple steps. But actually, it's a blog post. And it's definitely not a recipe. So when someone manually looks at it, they say, well, this is wrong. And from a manual point of view, we do try to take action on a lot of these. So if there's something where you're seeing sites showing up with rich result types that don't make sense for that site or those pages, then let us know. Feel free to use the spam report form. If you're seeing this on a larger scale, you can also drop me a note directly. Sometimes what I've also seen is that some plugins, like I said, they make it easier. But plugins can also be wrong sometimes. Sometimes the plugins are just set up incorrectly, which can result in us on a larger scale seeing an issue. And that's something where some people just send a note to the plugin maintainer and say, hey, you have this bug. You can fix it. And then your users won't be upset. So I'd use the web spam report form for most of these. If you're seeing things on a larger scale, feel free to drop me a note. If some URLs are blocked by robots text, is this still considered a waste of Google's crawl budget? No, if they're blocked by robots text, we're not going to crawl them. So it doesn't change anything. In particular, crawl budget is something most sites don't need to worry about. So for the most part, I wouldn't worry too much about that particularly and try to optimize for that, unless you're really a website with millions of millions of URLs. And sometimes small things on a website like that can lead to us suddenly having two or three or 10 times as many URLs as you actually have. And with a small website, that doesn't really matter. But if you have millions of pages from the start and suddenly you have 10 times as many pages, then that's where we really get bogged down with crawling. Now that deduplication is in effect, does a web page need to rank in position one to be a featured snippet? Before deduplication, I was under the impression that the results one to 10 were eligible, but mostly one to three earned the snippet. Is that or was it ever the case? I don't think that was really ever the case. So I'm not sure what all has been changing with the deduplication that you mentioned. I think this is with regards to the featured snippet and the organic results sometimes appearing on the same page. And some of the experiments we've done there to try to simplify that. But in general, we can pick up featured snippets from all kinds of URLs. It's not that they have to rank number for first. And just purely from a practical point of view, it's pretty common that we run across a page where we think, well, this is a really good page for this result. So we'll rank it first. But at the same time, it's hard for us to determine what would be a good featured snippet for this page, because maybe the structure of the page is a little bit tricky, or maybe the query is hard to match with the content on the page. And then it can happen that we say, well, this is a good first result. But we cannot pick any featured snippet from this page because we're just so unsure about that. So we won't. And then maybe we'll pick a featured snippet from one of the other results. Maybe we'll just say, well, we don't have a featured snippet for this query, and that can also be fine. Then the cookie consent thing. I'll try to see if I can find some more information on what variations would work well for cookie interstitials. So I also noted some folks on Twitter ping me about this, so maybe we can find something there. How does Google treat timestamps and URLs? For example, if you have slash month, slash year, slash today, would that be the same as slash month, slash year, slash yesterday? So when it comes to dates, we use various signals to pick up information about a date that is relevant for a page. But the URL can be a part of that. Sometimes it's a pretty clear signal that a page was published on a day if it has a URL like that. But we also have the, I think, in the article markup, you can specify a date on the page to let us know there as well, as well as kind of visible dates on a page and all kinds of other signals. And with regards to dates in general, is the question, I guess, is something that looks like it's from today better than something that was from yesterday. And the answer is no. It's not the case that something that is fresher will be considered better than something that is older. And that's kind of obvious when you think about it. There are lots of topics where the information has been published and there's evergreen information out there and there's really good reference material out there that doesn't change from day to day because nothing has changed there. And that's really good content that deserves to rank well in search. On the other hand, it might happen that maybe some recent event takes place where suddenly everyone is looking for something new on this topic. For example, if you have geographic regions, then maybe geographic background information for a country is really kind of useful as a reference material. But if something critical happens in that country, then people don't want that reference material. They want the news. They want the newest information. So in those cases, we probably would prefer something fresher rather than kind of the reference material. So it's not so much that fresher is always better, but it really depends on the situation and our algorithms change there fairly quickly when we see that something kind of new is happening. If domain A links to domain B would do follow links, but domain A later adds a no follow to the link. Does Google discount the link domain B got in the first place? So when it comes to links, when it comes to content in general, we essentially rank the pages based on the information we have at that time. It's not the case that we would say, well, it used to be better, but now it's bad. Therefore, we'll still treat it as something better. But rather, we base our decision on the current situation. So if a link gets changed to a no follow, then we treat it as a no follow. If a link gets changed to have a no follow removed, we treat it as a link without a no follow. If the content on a page changes, then we treat it as that new content. So all of these things are essentially tied to the current state of the web page, of the website, not so much to the previous states. And usually, that's a good thing, because that means that you can improve things. So if you have a website that's not ranking first for all of the queries that you care about, you can improve things. And over time, as we see that the new content, the new website deserves to rank better, then we'll rank it better. It's not so much that we say, oh, this website didn't rank well last year. Therefore, it will never rank well in the future. We have a site that ever since March, April, 2018, we've seen a big drop in traffic that hasn't recovered. So that's a really long time. I don't know if so. I think this might be my question. Oh, that's your site. OK. I think so, yeah. It was two sites on the same day. OK, go for it. OK, so yeah, back in April, it's when April 3rd, both our sites were doing really well. And then it dropped through the floor about 50%, 60% down on each site, two separate domains just overnight. So yeah, we've had people in. We've had technical audits. We've, as sort of journalists, we pride ourselves on what we do anyway. But I mean, we've doubled down. We've been cleaning up. We've been, I mean, the list, I've got 25 technical and content-based points. We've improved site structure. We've really been through everything, really, and nothing. No improvement, really. They're flat, both of them. It's eerily flat. And it's the same traffic every day since April the 2nd. So I don't really know where to turn now. I mean, we're talking about good pieces of content that ranked 2nd or 3rd, page 4. No, so it's not just a sort of just general distaste, or I don't feel like, oh, people are doing everything significantly better than us that we went from 3 to page 4. So yeah, we've lost staff. I don't really know where to turn, though. If you want, you can drop your domain in the chat, and I can take a look at that afterwards. I think, in general, if it's been so long since a change, then that sounds like our algorithms are pretty sure that we should be ranking the site like this. And I mean, changes can happen in our algorithms, so it's not completely impossible that we would see changes like that. But it's something where usually that means we think we're ranking it in the right place. And I can take a quick look after we kind of pause the recording to see if there's anything specific that I can point out, like, offhand. But usually that means that there's not like a situation where we're on the edge. We're not sure how we should rank it, but rather it's we're pretty confident that we should rank it like this. If you've had other people look at it, then probably from a technical point of view, it's OK. I know that Glenn Gabe sent you a note about this, because he's been through it, and sort of getting to head scratching time. I don't know. I can take a quick look after we pause the recording and see if I find anything offhand. But usually it's more a sign that we're kind of OK with the ranking that we figured out there. And these things do change over time, so it's theoretically possible that something in April happened where we're like, OK, we need to reevaluate how we rank some of these sites that we have indexed. The curious part of it is that the sites' rankings actually return for exactly one week in July and then disappear again. Yeah. I don't know. It's hard to say. I don't know your sites at all. So it's really hard for me to say, oh, it's a terrible site. It deserves to not be ranked. It sounds like you're pretty sure that it's not. I'd like you to take a look. And yeah, I see a lot of these sort of queries on the web, and there's always something sort of nefarious in the background. And as you say, you guys know what you're doing. But things have been running pretty good. And yeah, I'd like to see if you could take a look. That'd be amazing. Just I think. So I have a bit more time after we end the official hangout. And if you want to stick around, I can take a quick look. Yeah. I'd like to see. Yeah. Thank you. Sure. Maybe we'll just switch to more questions from any of you in the meantime. It looks like there is also some in the chat here. Let's see. I have a question about sites using heaps of microsites to link back to the main site. A client or competitor has over 100 of these sites. The site's linking over help prop up the rankings of the main site. Is this business breaching any Google guidelines at all? Anything I can do? So that just sounds like a PBN, which is kind of like the games that people play. If you want, you're welcome to send me, I don't know, the site in question. And I can have someone from the WebSend team take a quick look. Sometimes it's OK to have multiple sites. And they link together. Sometimes the multiple sites are essentially just there as a network to prop up the ranking of another site. And sometimes it's useful to kind of dig into those details. So if you want to drop me some URLs, then feel free to do that. In addition to the product question, I guess with different domains, I don't know. More questions from you all, maybe something live. Probably the easier. Nothing. Oh my gosh. OK. Then someone pointed at an hreflang question. Let me see if I can find that. So maybe scrolling down some of the other questions that were submitted. And like I mentioned, if any of you want to jump in, ask a live question. Go for it. Yeah. I was just looking for one here. OK. Arnie, go for it. So after December, I started getting some weird messages that my robots.txt was blocking important URLs. And in fact, it apparently was because it was not very supposed to do that. Those URLs were like our main URLs, which makes me think that probably somewhere in time someone dropped a disallow slash there or something like that. But the thing is, I went through all of our logs, all of our internal systems, and I didn't see anything changing our robots.txt. We also have robots.txt monitoring alerts that we basically pinged. And if it's different than we expect, we get an alert and we didn't. When I went to Google Search Console, old version, it allows me to see the previous version that Google has in cache, something like that. And it did not block any of those. What I've been doing is basically I've been just marking all of them as fixed. But I'm afraid that it might happen again in some time. And I don't know what could have happened here. It's hard to know without looking at the site. Double-checking the old versions in Search Console is a great way to start. I would try to figure out if this was a one-time event or if this is something that is ongoing. So in particular, if you submit those URLs with the Inspect URL tool, does it say that it's still blocked or is it OK now? They're all OK now. So if it was a one-time event, it could have been something as simple as the robots.txt file returning 403 for a brief period of time or returning a 500 server error for a brief period of time. Because both of those cases are situations where we say, well, we can't access the robots.txt file. Therefore, we won't crawl anything from the website. And usually what happens is the next time we check the robots.txt file, which is, I don't know, maybe a couple hours later or the next day, then we can crawl it normally again. And we get all of the normal content and we can crawl the website again normally. But during that period of time, where we're essentially blocked by the robots.txt file that we can't reach, then we would assume that all of the URLs that we would otherwise try to crawl are blocked by robots.txt. And we might flag that in Search Console. So if this is like a one-time thing, it happened once.  Then maybe that was just something weird that happened on the server very briefly. If you see this happening more than once, then I would definitely try to determine where this might be coming from.  So filter out all of the robots.txt requests that you got, in particular from Google, and look at things like the response size and the response code that you gave back and try to see if there are differences in the sizes or if the response code has varied over time and use that as a way to narrowing down where things went wrong. Sometimes it's as simple as someone pushed a new version of the website and the robots.txt file was made inaccessible during that push. And we tried to crawl just during that short window. Then the next time things go, it'll be better. That might also be a sign that maybe kind of you're pushing things to production process could be improved so that it doesn't block Google when it tries to access the robots.txt file. OK, now I think what might have happened is we allowed Google to index a bunch more URLs in the beginning of December, and it had been hitting us really hard, like six times the usual. And it was overloading our servers, and we started returning four or two minds to Google. And after some digging, I figured that you received that as 503 or something. Yeah, yeah. So maybe that's just a message that was wrong. It's not that the robots.txt was blocking because you could not read it. Now we would differentiate between 503 and us thinking that a website is blocked. Also, if the robots.txt file returns a 503, then that's a temporary thing for us. Then we'll try to get the next version of the robots.txt file first before we stop crawling. But if you return a 500, then that would be a sign that the robots.txt file is blocked for us. OK, but do you treat 400, I mean, 429s as 500s? I don't know where we would treat 429s. I don't know for sure. Yeah, because I remember the only thing that I found around this was a post because of some Gary answer on Twitter that Google, that it said that you might treat 429s at the same way, meaning it will just slow down crawling. But when I saw here on my logs was that we were not returning any 500s to Google, only 429s. And at the same time, the number of server errors in our Google Search Console properties, they started increasing by tens, even though we were not returning 500s. OK, I don't know. I'll double check. That sounds like it might fit. Yeah, but I'll double check on our side to see how we would treat 429s. All right, thank you. OK, we're a bit over time, so I'll pause the recording here. If any of you want to stick around a little bit longer, you're welcome to do that. But otherwise, thank you all for joining. It's been great having you all here. It's nice to have so many people jump in even on short notice, so thanks for all of that. And I wish you all a great weekend. And a good start next week in the meantime. Bye, everyone. Thanks, everyone.


What's going on everybody? This is Giovanni from the options trading channel here with another trade today It was a green trade all of my trades today were in the green But there is a big issue big problem, so I'm not gonna spend a whole lot of time Actually talking about my trades in general I'm gonna spend a little bit more time talking about the strategy and my logic behind my strategies guys So let's get right down to it Big gap up this morning on spine the markets markets did Did very very well Just keeps going up where it stops nobody knows but either way I did get a bicycle here on the very first hour of the day and I was terrified I'm not gonna lie guys. I was extremely extremely terrified because it did gap up Quite a bit off to the left as always we have the intro day chart on the options that I Traded today the one in the middle the hourly chart on spine and the one on the far right is the daily chart of spy I trade the hourly charts based off the daily charts. It's that simple depending on what the Direction is of the daily chart. That's the direction that I trade in the one hour term. I bought in I In Because of the gap because of the big gap I went a little bit deeper in the money Then usual and then I went eight eight days out and so I purchased it 327 calls that expired eight days, but I only bought one only bought one here is why because of that gap up I bought it at 365 and then not even five minutes later I went ahead and sold mainly just out of fear out of extreme fear I sold at 367 firm, you know, basically even after After commissions and then after I sold the that call on spine And then I went on about my dame at my day job and then I suddenly realized hey I can look at the cues. Let's see how the cues are doing and this is what I saw I saw that I got a bi-signal at the exact same candlestick as spine But there wasn't a ginormous gap up and it had already dipped back down and now it's on its way up And so that is the rest of the trades here I bought two call options the two twenty fifty calls on Cues on the cues QQQ bought them at two dollars and this is where I screw up guys If you have been watching my last several trades You will notice that I will sell half. I will sell set a limit order at 10% gain and in the rest I let it fly Well, not so much today. I don't know why I was extremely nervous just because of all of the looming You know end of the world people Okay, and maybe not end of the world people but all the people that are saying hey It's got to come back down crashing back down needs a healthy pullback. I believe that it does I believe that it needs a healthy pullback, but it's still running guys. So anyways, I got Extremely extremely nervous still not the best time to trade guys. I will say that bought two at two dollars it got up to two fifteen very quickly and I decided to sell one and the other one I Swore I swore it on everything that I was gonna let this one ride And I was gonna just sell at an even two dollars who cares I got scared and I ended up selling at 225 So I averaged a 10% gain off of my entire Position Exactly 10% in fact, and I was like hey, that's fine. I live to see another dame that is absolutely fine Well, look what ended up happening towards the end of the day ginormous rally It actually closed at the exact time and as you can see by this entry day one minute chart on the cues Options that I traded today. I bought at two and they closed well in the after hours to sixty eights It is extremely frustrating guys to Let my emotions get to me. I still got to work on that It is been so difficult. How many times have I been talking about this the add the the hardest aspect of day trading of trading in general investing is Setting your emotions aside. I thought that I was smarter than the markets And well look what happened and then also the other really frustrating part is whenever I decide to Actually hold a position overnight the markets don't cooperate They they they don't gap up in the right or they don't gap in the direction that I'm actually trading it and it actually Goes flat or goes the opposite direction and then whenever I decide to not hold a position overnight It gaps up air good gaps up in that direction and I can make a lot more money So that's really frustrating, but I'm gonna work on it. This is not the best way to build wealth not only just day trading in general, but the way that I'm trading only making 10% each Trade that's not the way to actually build wealth. You have to let some ride for higher gains This is what the strategy was designed for in my eyes in my opinion anyways But you got to let some ride scale out of your trades. I'm still getting used to it I'm still only trading a couple of contracts per position and Maybe it's time that I start doing three I do have room to to add three or four possibly four contracts But let's see. Let's see what happens in the near future right now It's working fabulously because the the markets are actually cooperating. They are trending They go up and then they they go sideways to consolidate and then they go up again. There's a clear distinct pattern going on over the past couple of weeks ever weeks and so I hope it continues on But I just wanted to show you guys today's trades I just It's been so frustrating because I am at work and I have to hide I have to hide the fact that I'm trading and it's it's it's hard. It's a really really really hard I end up calling my best friend over the phone and letting him know my trades Just to get some emotion that excitement out of my system guys Thank you so much for watching everybody Tell me what you thought about today's trade about this video Let me know what you traded what you made money on what you lost money on guys I can't wait to move forward with this strategy. I think I got something tremendous here Something pretty fabulous pretty cool that I can actually Build wealth on granite as long as I follow my day trading rules my strategy my plan I think everything's gonna be good guys Don't forget to hit that like button and that subscribe button if you haven't already I would greatly appreciate it. See you here on the very next day trade. Hope it's a good one Hope it's a green one guys. Talk to you guys later


We just got to do our part, including starting with me. Take or eliminate two or three plays. It's just being on point with everybody around me. And especially with the red zone stops, how much do you feel this defense has improved since we won? Like I said, man, we only going to get better. We getting better each and every week. But you know, it's the one or two or three plays. And we just got to correct those and get it going. Just understanding that it's a part of the game. You got to be ready at all time. Like they said, going into the game, everybody will starter.  And we just got to move forward because it's part of football. Prambling around back here. Oh, it's very important. We're going to have to plaster, stay with our man longer than the guy with the ball, and just finish hard. Oh, just all the movements. Just making sure everybody on the same page in which we are.   And specifically with Kayla, a guy I know who's really, you know, attached to your hip just in that position, just how hard was it? You know, to see a guy like that, he's already kind of dealt with the injuries and all the promise that he has to kind of go down like that. Oh, it was tough. But you know, I'm like a big brother to him. So I'm just here to motivate him.  So, you know, I check up on him, make sure his head where it needs to be and just tell him we're about getting help. Can't worry about football at this point and just worry about yourself. It's very important, man, everybody should love pets. That's how I feel. I feel a lot like that was motivation, especially in the red zone, you know, they drove the ball, they got it down there but we came up with some big stops and thanks to the fans and everybody that came out. Yeah, I've been impressed. I like what I've been seeing going to the games, the loud noise, the crowd, everything about it.