Alright, we continue talking football and Trinidad and Tobago's 23-year-old winger, Tyree Spicer, is starting the new year with a lot to look forward to. He was in mid-December the first overall pick in the MLS Superdraft by Toronto FC. In his four seasons at Lipscomb University, Spicer netted 29 times and provided 18 assists. This included 14 goals and three assists last season. In other eye-catching accomplishments, he was named to the ASUN All-Conference First Team, the United Soccer Coaches All-Region Second Team, the ASUN Championship Core MVP, the ASUN All-Tournament Team and ASUN Player of the Week. Well, Tyree Spicer joins us to talk about his accomplishments and expectations with Toronto FC. Welcome to the Sportsmax zone, Tyrees and Happy Happy New Year. Thank you very much, Happy New Year to you as well. Alright, so let's talk about the good news. You're starting 2024 with a bang. How does it feel, of course, to be the number one overall Superdraft pick? Did you see this coming? Maybe I had some talks with Toronto before. So I had an idea of it, but personally it's just overwhelming to know that I went number one overall in the whole of America. Just coming from a small country like Trinidad and Tobago, I just want to encourage all the youths.   As you can tell by my accent, I'm also from Trinidad and Tobago. And I have to say I'm so proud of you because for quite some time, at least for all of my career sitting on this show, I've not had anything really to celebrate when it comes to Trinidad and Tobago football. You know, I always have to read about the past footballers and look back at those clips from before my generation. So thanks to you, we have something now to celebrate. And you know, of course, a lot of the trainees will feel very proud, of course, to identify with you. How difficult was it from, you know, starting your career in Trinidad and Tobago during these times and of course making it now where you're the number one pick? I would say it was pretty difficult. I say I'm so thankful for my dad and my mom to always support me, my uncle as well and my aunt. They always stood by my side, no matter what situation I was in. I come from like humble beginnings, you know, how it all started. My uncle bought me my first cleats. Like sometimes growing up, like I won't have enough money to get cleats or to go to school.  I really dealt with it well. Like I developed really well at Trinity Nationals. I would say I grew up under my coach, Mr. Wark.  He taught me everything I knew today. I think that making a step to America, it was a big jump. But I think I adapted well. I think that the environment I had and the culture I had with my teammates and my coach, I think it helped me grow as a person and mature like over the years. And I think that last season it just, it all like just went straight in line for me. It was just at my peak. And I just performed like at a really good on a high consistent level. I can't go up for that as well because I always pray every day for it. I made it happen. It wasn't just, and this wasn't like a blink of an eye. It was work. It was progress. It took time.   Tyrese? All right. So Lance, we lost Tyrese in the middle of, of course, you know, such an important point. I was about to follow up though with, you know, he spoke about the struggles, you know, getting his first boot from his uncle. And for a young man like Tyrese, I, my question, the next question would be instantly, how was he able to stay focused because it's so easy. And I mean, I experienced this myself. Sometimes you feel like you just want to give up, right? But for him, he stalks through. And of course, now he's reaping the rewards. And I really wanted to know, you know, what kept him so focused. Yeah. Well, I think we're going to get him back hopefully. But he did suggest that it helped to toughen him. So even though his start had been difficult, I think the negative aspect of that, he turned it into a positive and he made sure that that helped him to become a tougher individual to, to climb, you know, the mountains he has climbed. Yeah. So beautiful. Well, I think we have good news. Tyrese is back with us. Tyrese, are you there? Yeah, I'm here. I'm here. All right. We lost you for a second. Do you want to continue that point that you were making? Yeah. So as I was sitting, I started off playing soccer with my dad from a very young age. I wasn't the best growing up, but I always try to work hard and pursue my goals. And I always aspire to get a scholarship or to go professionally. And I think over the years, me grinding and I putting in the work behind the scenes and on the field. I think it helped me develop as a player. I didn't, I wasn't like, I didn't have enough like money growing up. So it was difficult at times, but like I overcame it. My parents would like, you know, provide for me. And I think that growing up, I just always wanted to, to give back to them when I, when I go pro. And I think I have the opportunity now. I think that me giving back to them is just going to help me and help them. And it's just going to make me feel so satisfied. And Tyrese, I saw in an interview, you were compared to Alfonso Davies. How do you feel about that? It's surprising, honestly. Yes, like thinking that's a world-class player. And they're like, comparing me to him, my attributes and his attributes, my speed and dynamicness, like it's a surprise, but like I worked hard. And I think comparing us together is a big jumble. I think it's a good comparison. Right. And how excited are you to work with coach John Hirdman, who had a big part to play in the development of Alfonso Davies? Yeah, just knowing that he had a big part in Alfonso Davies' career is just going to be excellent. Yeah, I think we lost him again. I'm not sure if we're going to get him back, but some connectivity issues there. But really great to see this happening for young Spicer. It's the second time in history that a Caribbean player has been drafted, number one in the MLS. The Jamaican Andre Blake as a goalkeeper had achieved that, which was significant as well, because goalkeepers hardly ever get that kind of position. Yeah, Tyrese is back with us. Tyrese, a couple of weeks ago, we had a discussion about the role of schoolboy football in the Caribbean developing our players. I know you had played for St. Mary's College and transferred to St. Augustine. Can you briefly talk about your experience playing SSFL football in TNT and how much of a role that played in developing you as a player? I think my role developed really well in the SSFL. I think the level is really good. I think there's a lot of players that are overlooked. And I think that there's a lot of good talent there. Like myself, there's a guy called Kai for a bit as well. He's really good. He plays for Evansville University. There's a lot of good players that comes out of the SSFL. I think that the schools developed the young guys to excel in life. I think that is a good program and it shouldn't be overlooked. There's a lot of good prospects there. Yeah, a lot of Caribbean players get lost in the U.S. Collegiate System to their national programs. I've heard complaints that a lot of the quality players in the U.S. Collegiate System are often not looked back at from, you know, national coaches in the Caribbean. How eager are you to be a part of the TNT Soka Warriors International Program? It would be a dream, honestly. I always wanted to represent the red, white and black industry. I would be so happy to represent my country. I know my parents is going to be proud of for me to even be called up to the national team. I think sometimes college guys get overlooked because the coaches don't know how high the level is. But I think that the D1 level is very close to professional. They provide so much stuff for you to work on. They have so much development programs for you. If you need to work on anything, the access to unlimited supplies is there. So like the level is really good. I think that they do get lost in the collision playing field. Yeah, and quickly, Tyrese, because I know the MLS season usually starts maybe March or so, can you talk to us quickly about what happens between now and the start of the MLS and your your introduction to the to the Toronto staff and so on and preseason? Yeah, so preseason starts the 13th. I'm doing my personal work. I got from my performance team from Toronto FC. So like I'm doing that right now to get fit, to get my body in the right shape. And then when I go into Toronto, I do a medical and then we'll go to preseason wherever that would be. So I'm very excited to be on a journey to even like be on that team. So I'm happy for it. Yeah. And of course, we know that Trinidad at Tobago has a fairly rich record of outstanding players in the MLS. You have had a couple of MLS cup winners from TNT, Jovin Jones, a two time winner with the Seattle Sounders and Kevin Molino just recently with the with the with the current champions. And we know that Stern John was now retired, remains a legend in the Columbus crew folklore. So you recognize that as a TNT player, you are following up on some platforms that were laid by, you know, other outstanding TNT players. Yeah, I like just to follow on their footsteps. I always used to look at them on TV and be like, you know, one day I aspire to be there on that field and I have like the huge look up to you because I always looked up to Molino. I always looked up to Jovin Jones and my dad actually coached Stern John. I actually had a talk with Stern John like two days ago. And, you know, they always like tell me to keep keep my head down, keep humble and keep going close as well.  And I want to like show the younger folks that no matter where you come from or how low you are, like if you work hard enough, if you dream big enough, you can achieve anything you put your mind to. And, you know, that's a message I want to put out there. No matter where you come from, you could do whatever you want.  I want to thank you so much for joining us on the Sports Mac. So I'm looking forward to see your progress as you suit up for Toronto FC. Thank you so much. Thank you. All right, just here there from Toronto FC's Tyrese Spicer. He hails from the same country as I, Trinidad and Tobago. Let's take a break.


Welcome to Toffy TV. It is the Everton News Daily. Duncan Ferguson will be in charge of Everton when they face Manchester United on Sunday at Old Trafford. The club released a statement today confirming that the 47-year-old Scott would remain in charge of the Blues following Everton's 3-1 victory against Chelsea on Saturday. I suppose it's good to get that confirmation out. It allows Duncan to continue planning for the game at the weekend. He's obviously taken training the last couple of days. Will be planning anyway. He'll be assisting the Bifrani, Jeffers, John Ebrill and goalkeeper coach Alan Kelly for the trip to Old Trafford as Everton continues to search for a permanent manager following the second of Marco Silva. Some news on that today. Carlo Anciolotti is the new favourite for the Everton job. He was sacked by Napoli last night following their 4-0 Champions League victory which ensured they went through to the last 16. Anciolotti it was confirmed later on that he would be leaving the Naples club is 4-5 on McSkybet at the moment. David Moyes, the second favourite, 5-4. Michael Arteta a Rafa Benitez, both at 16-1. Arsenal and Westam are both apparently interested in Anciolotti 2 but David Ornstein said that Arsenal were interested in them so depending on which report you read it gives you conflicting stories on that. One manager who won't be joining Everton is River Plate manager Marcelo Gallardo who ruled himself out of the running or rather ruled himself out of leaving River Plate. He said he's got a contract until December 2021 and that's where he will be staying so that rules him out of it. He said after that expires then he may look to move on to a different challenge but he's there certainly for the next couple of years. River Plate have also confirmed that on their website. Jerry Mene says that he's feeling more settled at Everton nowadays. He said last year was a difficult season for him given the injury and then also coming to a new club and he was in and out of the team. He said even though people helped me to settle in I still felt as though I could have been doing more and I was frustrated. He said but this season I've really feel settled. He's learning more English. He's getting help from Fabian Delth and Guilffy Sigarton. He said people like that really helping him come on with his English. He said he's starting to understand Jordan Pickford a little bit better. He said but he does have to talk slowly and clearly so I get the message but each day I'm improving more. He said he wants to be the best defender he can. He knows he's not the best defender in the world at the moment and will remain working hard to improve his performances for Everton. It's unclear yet whether Jerry Mene is going to be fit for the trip to Manchester United. He missed Saturday's 3-1 victory over Chelsea. We still haven't had anything back on Llucia Dean or Mason Holgate who were also doubt as well for the trip to Old Trafford. The club hadn't said anything about those at the moment. Belong yet a set to miss out on a low move on Moise Keane that is according to Calcio Mercato. They feel that Keane will move to Roma on loan. This is despite Everton saying on more than one occasion that the young Italian striker won't be leaving. The club is here for the long term but Calcio Mercato are great. Let's be honest, I'm not accurate. Continuing to run with the story, I think they just won him back at an Italian club. But if Carlo Anciolotti were to come in, he's already gone on record and said Keane's a fantastic talent so you may feel as though he would get more of an opportunity under Anciolotti should he become the Everton manager. And finally, Richard Charleston has found his dog, that is the most important thing I suppose. Richie Cybert in Husky Assarola went missing last night, was found and taken to a vet and the Brazilian striker was reunited with the dog late last night. He tweeted, I would like to thank everybody who tried to help me and support me. Thank you, Richard Charleston 7, to which the club commented that English, commenting and complimenting on his English show. A nice story there, Richard Charleston reunited with his dog, that'll make him happy. Let's hope he follows it up with a couple of goals at Old Trafford at the weekend. That is your Everton News Daily, make sure you subscribe, make sure you give the video a thumbs up and if you want more videos, join us on Patreon. See you later.


Back in a previous video we covered the topic of situational awareness or being aware of what and who is around you What to take into consideration in case a self-defense situation arises and any safety measures that you can take Today I wanted to talk about one of those specific environments and take a look at self-defense in the parking lot You know, you're in a dojo. It's a very controlled setting. You've got air conditioning You've got four walls a roof above your head sometimes padded floors. It's a safe controlled environment Outside it's a very very different scenario. You've got different types of terrain. You've got weather to deal with you've got heat You've got obstacles other people It is not a controlled environment and this is where you're most likely to encounter a problem in an uncontrolled environment So always take stock of where you are.  You don't have to be obvious about it You know, don't be scoping around but kind of you walk in take a look around notice lots of people Traffic any holes or slippery areas in the floor anything like that. I want to talk about terrain terrain to me is a big big Factor because your footing is everything if you don't have balance if you don't have a solid stance or footing You have a big problem and you're probably going to wind up on the ground or even losing So what I like to do I have a habit whenever I walk in somewhere. I just kind of take stock of the ground You know, I just kind of check traction. So even right here. It's a little bit slippery. There's some loose gravel You've got construction right here. So in the parking lot obviously we have pavement and concrete There might be construction through scrabble This could very easily kick up and slip on you if you're not careful curbs So now you have a terrain difference in terms of level. So big difference You're fighting on here. It's very easy to step down and fall rolling ankle even going the other way tripping over it You've got loose gravel. You've got tree roots. You've got trees Okay, there could be stumps that you don't see loose sticks rocks grass. So grass alone is kind of versatile in itself I mean, you know, this is a dry day summary day. It's You know, it's pretty it's got some decent traction, but you don't know if it's loose or not It could kick up it could rip up on you.  So if it's been raining if it's early in the day and there's dew or moisture anywhere You're near a pond or a lake or canal all of this can drastically affect your footing even Parking lines the paint strips those get wet. Those can be very slippery. I had an incident once before I was on crutches and the crutch hit the paint strip and I slipped on it got to be careful So my first thing I do is I walk anywhere I check my footing all the time and you can be very discreet about just kind of check your traction And just ask yourself, well, I'd be able to run on this why be able to fight on this? Am I in a slippery hazard? Just be aware of the kind of traction and footing and terrain you have to deal with Because you never know when something's gonna break out where you're gonna be standing Let's talk about the obvious thing in the parking lot Parking cars you've got two types of cars deal with here You've got parked cars which can be obstacles or tools and you also have moving cars driving cars So not only not only do you have the risk of running into an obstacle fighting up against the car you have to watch out for moving traffic and If someone's not aware of you cars drive by all the time And if someone's not aware of you you can easily get hit. So your opponent is not your only threat You've got pedestrian traffic and you've got cars too. You really got to watch out for that Some safe practices you can take obviously Just keep an eye on what's around you are there a lot of people is the parking lot empty if the parking lot Is empty keep track of you know at any possible dark spots corners just anything to be aware of Also, there's a lot of little tools you can get self-defense tools. I personally like the coupon You know, it's basically a key chain It's a little steel rod or aluminum rod and it could be used for soft targets ice throats Growing it could also be used for wrist locks if you train with it a little bit So it's kind of a nice subtle tool to have on you I'm gonna list this in the description below if you're interested I recommend picking one up there. They're pretty cheap and they're really handy to have on you I've also got a few other items down there that are good for personal self-defense that you might keep on you Just give yourself an edge a little bit of advantage of something happens Weather let's get back to weather a little bit. It talked about wet grass, but Just look at the big picture. Okay, today's a nice bright sunny day But especially in areas like if it's arid or South Florida where it's really humid it gets hot and You might not be aware of it at the time adrenaline is running But that heat bearing down on you if the situation goes on long enough that you could put yourself at risk You know for possible heat stroke exertion Overheating just got to be aware of that Slip-sided that if you're somewhere where it gets really cold snow. That's an extra terrain concern Now you've got ice to worry about snow slippery and grass Big big concern if it's raining, you know, everything might be slippery You might not be able to get a grip on things it might even impair your vision weather Takes a big effect on you. You don't have any of that indoors or inside of the dojo train with so keep that in mind Let's talk about the difference between day and night right now is daytime. Okay visibility is excellent Something you might not take into account the Sun that suckers bright You find yourself in a self-defense situation to fight with somebody try not to be in a position If possible where the Sun is right in your eyes You don't want that kind of impairment if you can maneuver it Maybe if you're kind of sizing each other up or you're trying to kind of maneuver the situation Maybe turn try to get them where they're facing the Sun anything anything that can aid you and your advantage do it It's only gonna help you at the very least it helps you see a little bit better than them at night It's a little bit of a different story. Obviously, you don't have the Sun to give you this kind of clarity But most parking lots will have street lamps or some sort of street lights That's good, but they're really only there to give you visibility driving and getting to your car One concern and a lot of people aren't aware of this really depends on what type of lights there are if you see the light is orange that is typically sodium vapor lamp now Might that's not like a big deal but what the big deal about that is is sodium vapor lamps have a very very low color rendering and color profile and They all also operate on a different frequency than our eyes are accustomed to at night time So there's a lot of detail our eyes will miss so that could be the difference of seeing somebody in the shadows or not There's a dark spot and somebody's hiding in it or Steve We're just standing in it with the sodium vapor lamp. You might not see them now if it's a blue lamp Then that's more LED and LEDs are gonna give you much better clarity They're gonna be brighter sharper and you're gonna see a wider color spectrum So that will affect visibility. So basically blue or white or LED lights Those are better be careful with the orange lights If it's orange just be aware that the dark spots you might not be able to see everything that's going on in them Now as you can see we're standing here in an open parking lot lots of maneuverability You know parking is light right now, but even if there's a lot of cars, they're still open space Clear visibility might not be the same case in a closed parking lot or a parking structure You've got different terrain considerations there. You've got closing spaces usually a lot more packed with cars You've got pillars you've got a lot more hiding spots even sound gets distorted it echoes a lot So if you try to call for help you might not be clear So just be aware of the difference between open lot and parking garage very different environments So if you are unfortunate enough to find yourself in a situation where you have to defend yourself in the parking lot You can't escape it the fight's gonna happen. All right, what are we working with now? Well, let's go back to the cars. You've got parked cars You know if you're caught up against them you've got things like the glass to worry about you know heads hands body parts Elbows can go through the glass that can really hurt you or you can use that against them But it's very dangerous. You also have side mirrors if you're sliding up against the cars watch out for those kidneys Watch out.  Okay, people walking around might not see you So make a lot of noise call for help scream yell Say call the police because if someone does see you it might not necessarily be clear Who's attacking who especially if you're ground fighting and especially if you do have martial arts experience and you're using it Call for help call for police make it know make as much rack as you can because you might not be visible And if you're not visible, you're definitely on your own and also these got a lot less space maneuver between cars You know if you're in a really tight spot, you're not gonna be able to pull any reversals or you know a lot of Rolls you're gonna be tight-knit space so watch out for that if you're ground fighting in the open area Again moving cars. You're now lower on the visibility line. A car might not see you So do your damage get back up on your feet as soon as possible.  What other tools can you use at your disposal? What's around you? Well, let's look around first of all This could be a weapon could be defense. You could throw it. You could swing it You could trip over it. So you got to watch out for that. It could be used against you. Also, what else do you have? You've got possibly shopping carts signs Are you carrying groceries groceries could be a weapon if you've got a plastic bag that hangs down You can swing that especially if it has weight to it at the very least you can throw it up Be the traction get them to bring their hands up might buy you split second to run or get a kick in or something So whatever you're holding you can use as a tool. You could have loose rocks and sticks water bottles cans Shopping carts. There's a whole bunch of things just take stock in your environment chairs There's always something you can look at and use and also be aware of what could be used against you Environments are usually rich with detail. Take advantage of that detail. What about the person themselves? What are they wearing? What are you wearing? Are you wearing clothes shoes sneakers high heels? If you're in high heels watch out for drains, you know You don't want to run across the drain in high heels. You don't want to drop your keys on there either Then you've really got a problem. So are you wearing flip-flops? You you're not gonna have a lot of rotation and be able to run with flip-flops. What are they wearing? Are they wearing a hoodie or a shirt that you can grab, you know, especially judo and brazilian jiu-jitsu? There's a lot of ghee chokes. They're wearing a jacket. Hey, that stuff will work great Especially with zippers across the neckline all that that could be effective if they're just wearing a t-shirt You know, what are they wearing? What can you hold on to? We're in South Florida people might wear suntan lotion skin can be slippery So gripping might be an issue just kind of look at the person are they wearing shoes or they wearing flip-flops? What can you use against them? What do you have to worry about being used against you? Get out of there escape if you have a coupon go for the eyes go for the throw go for soft targets Just at least if they're grabbing you get out of that grab and run Call the cops go to safety go to another store if anything is open. Don't just stay there Your goal is to escape. You're not there to combat improve yourself. Your goal is to escape and survive So let's talk about the escape for a second This kind of goes back to the beginning of this video when I mentioned when you first go to an environment Take stock of what's around you check your traction check the people check the obstacles Check escape routes. Just kind of know ahead of time if there was a situation or an emergency Where could you go? You know, I mean it might be obvious. I'm in a big wide open space But even right here I could run this way easily I can go that way a little bit if I want to go inside, but there's a wall there can't really run this way We've got water so that's really not an exit path. It's not a good one for me I can you know, just kind of see what's around you if you're in a parking garage again You're to have even limited spaces So when you get to a new place or environment in your parking lot just kind of in them back your head thinking If something happens for whatever reason whatever emergency where can I go? What is available for me and where am I locked off of you want to avoid being caught in corners? You know one be void anywhere where you can't run water is going to be a problem again Survey and having the back of your mind a plan B if something were to happen So those are just some of the observations I've seen and then I can look I mean just here in this environment I look around this is what I'm noticing now. I'm in South Florida. You know, we're pretty flat land around here What if you live somewhere with Hills, you know, there's a lot of parking lots that have only Unlevel grounding you've got potholes. You've got Hills. You've got ramps all that will drastically change the situation So I'm actually kind of curious. What else can you guys add? What other hazards in the parking lot or tools? Can you guys think of that would aid your escape or your self-defense situation? The gritty thought of being in a situation like this in the parking lot can be very scary There's a lot at play a lot to take into consideration If you are able to avoid the situation obviously that is best But if something happens try to use that environment as much as you can and remember the goal is to escape and get the safety Don't try to stay in your ground. Don't try to prove yourself and punish them get away and leave Hopefully if any of our viewers can pull at least one idea out of this and is able to defend themselves or even better yet Avoid the situation altogether, then it was all worth it. Thank you so much for watching As always we appreciate all of our viewers the more this channel grows the more we can do and present to you all So I please ask all of you share subscribe send us to all your friends Let's get this community bigger so we can do more of these. Thank you so much for your support


Good afternoon. I'd like to call the meeting, the special meeting of the Board of Public Utilities for the City of Santa Rosa to order. May we have a roll call, please? Thank you. Board member Wright. Here. Board member Watts. Here. Board member Walsh. Here. Board member Grable. Board member Batenfort. Vice Chair Arnone. Chair Galvin. Here. Let the record show that all board members are present. With the exception of Vice Chair Arnone and board members Batenfort and Grable. Great. Thank you very much. Just a reminder to everyone to mute your phones or microphones when you're not speaking and to put away your cell phones and personal computers. I want to announce that item 2.2, conference with legal counsel, has been taken off the calendar, pulled from the agenda. So we will only have the one item. So at this point, I will ask Assistant City Attorney Biggerstaff to announce our closed session, item 2.1. Thank you, Chair Galvin. Board will be going into closed session for conference with legal counsel, pursuant to paragraph 1, subdivision D of government code section 54956.9. Regarding the matter of the appeal of the city of Santa Rosa, Santa Rosa Water to Department of Industrial Relations, Occupational Safety and Health Appeals Board Inspection number 1495388. Thank you. Before we go into closed session, I'll open it up for public comment on item 2.1. If you wish to make a comment via Zoom, please raise your hand. If you're dialing in via telephone, please dial star 9 to raise your hand. Secretary Manus. There are no public comments via Zoom or in the chamber. Very good. I now ask the board to disconnect from the current Zoom and reconnect using the closed session Zoom information that was provided to you. And while we're doing that, we will move up to the conference room upstairs. OK, we are back. Just give me a second. We're back in open session. If we could have a roll call, please. Thank you. Board Member Wright. Here. Board Member Whatz. Here. Board Member Walsh. Here. Board Member Grable. Board Member Badenfort. Vice Chair Arnone. Chair Galvin. Here. Let the record show all board members are present with the exception of Vice Chair Arnone and board members Badenfort, Grable, and Grable. Thank you. So we're now back in open session. After having had a closed session, I would ask Assistant City Attorney Bigger Staff to please report out. Thank you, Chair Galvin. For item 2.1, the closed session, the board provided direction to legal counsel and staff. Very good. That takes care of item 2.1. And that concludes our agenda. So at this point, we will be adjourned. Thank you. Mr. Chair. Thank you, everyone.


Our first question is from RTW girl. Should certain people avoid hit or is it a good workout for all people? I love this question. I love this question. Okay, so hit stands for high-intensity interval training And I remember when the studies came out. I know you guys did too. This is a big deal in fitness where they showed that short Hit workouts were at least as effective but often more effective for burning body fat and preserving muscle Then steady-state cardio and I remember when that came out every trainer was Was all the latest rave like everybody was jumping in on the hit bandwagon Yeah after that study and I hit the reason why it's more effective is because hit is more like resistance training Then steady-state cardio is steady-state cardio is definitely very cardio like hit is like doing You know how we say doing like tons of circuits with weights is doing cardio with weights hit is like doing weights with cardio It's explosive. It's more strength build It's not exactly like lifting weights, but it's much more like lifting weights are doing resistance training Therefore it's gonna preserve more muscle therefore. It's gonna be very effective at pure fat loss Now here's the problem with it and this was the issue that I had is when I saw all these trainers doing it There's there's a lot of people. This is completely inappropriate. Oh, yeah, I mean and that was everywhere I mean that was the first thing that I saw was like, oh my god I I would never take certain clients through you know a workout like that because they just don't have the joint integrity They don't have the ability to You know properly stabilize and in to to get through these type of explosive moves Well, when you when you're training a client you talk about stability strength, I mean with explosive Performance is at the pinnacle I mean that's what most clients that you get or that we would train were Deconditioned out of shape poor mechanics. I mean if they were ever to do hit it wouldn't be for a very long time It they don't it doesn't belong in any programming In fact, if if you're an OG listener, you have probably heard us talk about this a little bit We haven't talked about in a long time but I remember when we first hired our marketing team and They wanted us to to write this and we didn't we didn't write a hit program till way later in the business because We and by the way, the reason why they want to is because they have the tools right We have the tools to be able to look up what people are searching the most and we knew that it would be more profitable for us to Release it in fact when we finally did release it It was one of the biggest program launches we ever had and it is the only program of all of our programs It comes with a warning and that you we don't we don't think you should do this for long term It is not for most people and that was that just speaks to like the integrity of the business is that when we first started this We're like listen, we know that there is a place for this stuff We do know that it has value But we also know that the majority of people Shouldn't be using it and most certainly shouldn't be using it for a long term Which is what I also saw so after all those Studies and stuff that came out to support the benefits a hit when we are in the early 2000s when we were all trainers The the next thing I saw was that's how everybody started to train all the time.  You've never done this before The risk of injury goes through the roof But it's even deeper than that even if you don't hurt yourself if you're a high stress Individual with borderline hormone issues. You don't get good sleep. You've got kids You have a mortgage you got a hard job and then you're and you're doing resistance training Which is good But that's also adding a stress and then on top of that your cardio is hit and you're gonna go do add hit on top of that It's probably not gonna benefit you in fact I've taken clients who are in this category where they just overdo everything they don't get good sleep There's type a type individuals. I look at their workouts I'm like, oh, yeah, I do hit five days a week and because I know that's good and I took them and said no more hit You're gonna do steady state, but I thought steady state was not as effective No, no, we're gonna do steady state because your body needs some more recuperative type workouts And then lo and behold they burn more body fat and they feel better And that's this is like the the key to exercise It needs to be appropriate for your body if it's not appropriate for your body in your lifestyle I don't care how awesome the workout is on paper or how great it's supported by studies if it's not right for you You're not gonna get there any faster You're not gonna progress any better and if anything you'll get there slower and maybe even set yourself back Yeah, even and another thing to consider too is that like as you ramp up like, you know One of those variables like intensity you have to also be able to counter that with you know more emphasis too on the recovery So that is something that I do think that we did well In terms of like alternating that with our flow sessions and really emphasize the fact that we're gonna need to maintain You know the the joints health through this process of really like hammering it So you don't find that in a lot of hip programs at all It's just all just the hit and then you come back and you just you do it on yourself again We should we should always we should probably have a little bit more clarity here or bring some more context for the Listener who doesn't want know what it is because there's two things you guys are also talking about cardio and resistance training Right, so you can use hit in both ways, right? So you can do the high-intensity interval training with Cardio modalities and then you could also do it with resistance training essentially. It's short bouts of maximal exertion interrupted by bouts of minimal exertion so it's like To give you an example it would be like you're on a bike and you're riding at low intensity and then every 45 seconds you do 15 seconds of all-out sprinting as hard as you can Yeah, and then you back all the way off let the heart rate recover and then go and then what the benefits that all the research and studies show It's the the calorie expenditure that you're getting from the massive spike And then the heart trying to recover to come back down to its resting heart rate and because of that The body has to burn a ton of calories to do that So that's where a lot of the the positive benefits from now I I like using it and I used it quite a bit with clients for cardio And I'd use it obviously later on when they're ready for some of that because there's a little less risk with cardio Then there is with weight training like so where I have the biggest you know bone to pick with it is when you see trainers using it with you know jump boxes and Speed ladders, you know, and then they're doing squats right after that And I mean that that's where I have a problem with it because you see all this dysfunction in the client I mean their form looks and they're literally just trying to exhaust this person and burn as much calories as possible Doing these dangerous exercises and even if it's not dangerous like they're gonna get hurt like maybe they have they have enough Controlled and I get hurt. I've rarely ever see anybody do it with great form So you see this kind of like circuit-based type of training And it's really these trainers that are either one or are short on time or just trying to burn a ton of calories And I have more of an issue with that than I do with to be clear Doing it with resistance training can be far more effective. It just requires better programming Yeah, there's more things more very I mean our hit program is hit with resistance training not in cardio But we've carefully programmed it and planned it out so that you reap the benefits and minimize the potential on one of those Determiners was when your form breaks down you stop Yes, and so that was something that we try to emphasize as much as possible is that you know We are trying to get through the this time of You know like like cutting out the rest and we're trying to get through these exercises, but We're not trying to degrade You know the performance of each one of those exercises we stop if that's the case So the way I would I used it for cardio was like this and this is I did this the entire time that I was competing is I talked about this many times that I did hardly any cardio when I was getting ready for a show So I would do or any sort of movement was exercised like training resistance training or walking For 90 of my training now when I got to the last couple weeks Was when I would start to introduce cardio hit was actually the first piece of cardio that I'd introduce So I would actually do that post workout three days a week I would do 12 to 15 minutes of hit afterwards So I do my weight training session get on the elliptical stare master treadmill whatever and I do these these 12 to 15 minute bouts The the logic and theory behind it for me as a competitor at that time was I I don't want I wanted the last thing I want to do is add more time to the gym I'm already training seven days a week and an hour hour and a half inside the gym So I don't want to start introducing a half hour hour of this this this cardio these cardio routines I want to just up my my calorie expenditure With the shortest amount of time and doing that with hit post workout was the strategy on it It wasn't until I got even closer, which is like the final week when I would start to do these You know 45 minute to hour long bouts of cardio. I wanted to avoid doing long bouts of cardio for as long as I could because I knew that that would also Sacrifice the most muscle that way your body would start to adapt after that's why you do this for such a short period Yes, very smart application look to be very clear 30 minutes of walking Is not nearly as stressful in the body as 10 minutes of high intensity interval training on a treadmill literally so three times as long Of walking is not going to hammer your body like three like one third of the time But done with sprints with interval type of sprints So when you're trying to train yourself to also facilitate recovery And which that's how I like to use cardio with a lot of people is I'm they're already pushing themself the resistance training Especially if they're beginners or intermediate I'm not going to throw more crazy stress on top of them with sprints I'm going to say go for walks 30 minute walk. You're still moving. It's good for you But it's also not damaging and not stressful on the body. In fact oftentimes it's the opposite of stressful It's actually more rejuvenating. So just to paint the picture Like hit even though it's shorter can definitely place a major stress on the body More so than steady state cardio, of course Unless you get into the extreme states of steady state where you're walking for, you know, three hours a day


All right. Welcome, everyone, to today's Webmaster Central Office Hours Hangouts. My name is John Mueller. I am a Webmaster Trends Analyst here at Google in Switzerland. And part of what we do is these Office Hours Hangouts with webmasters and publishers like you all here. As always, I'd like to give those of you who are kind of new to these Hangouts a chance to ask the first questions. It looks like we have a bunch of new faces. So feel free to jump on in and ask the first couple of questions. Hello, John. Can you hear me? Yes. My name is Tom Goreng, and Baby Cyberspace is my site. And I started it back in February of 2004. And it was a prototype that we worked with Navy Recruiting Command to find out how to recruit within internet gaming. And during that time, we put some parts of the site that had to do with Counter-Strike and some of the games that were out there at the time that were pretty prevalent. And I still have on the site custom maps and those type of things that are way outdated. And I have a number of probably 100 or so pages that I just want to delete because they're no longer germane to what my site does. Should I delete those piece mail or do them all at one time? Whatever you want. From our side, it doesn't really matter which way you do that. One thing that might be worthwhile is to think about if there are any pages on your site that replace those pages. So if you could set up a redirect. Otherwise, just removing those pages, having a 404 page is perfectly fine. Well, thank you. I might have to jump in. Can you hear me OK? Go for it. My name is John. We have an inbound marketing agency and we have a client that we're working for. We did not develop their site. We came in much afterwards and creating content and all of that. And about three or four weeks ago, they received a manual penalty. And it gives you the responses. It looks like it's automated. It gives you four options. And we had no idea what it was, what the problem was of those four. We thought perhaps it was duplicate content, but because their site was meshed, there was data feeding to a company in Canada that they also owned. So they were sharing contents between the two. So we said, OK, that's probably it. So we pried those two apart. We separated them. And then it came back and said that our appeal was rejected and that it was for doorway pages. And so we went back to the site and looked at it and they had a whole bunch of city pages that they had set up. And we weren't even aware of it actually, but we were like, holy cow, OK, we got to get rid of those. That's probably it. And we were like, why did you do that? And they said, well, those are our best pages for getting people to the site because people want to know if we service their area. It's exactly what all our competition is doing, blah, blah, blah. So they did this without malicious intent, but we think that's what it was. So we're now in review again, waiting however long it takes. And it's kind of nail-biting. This is this company that depends heavily on the internet to get business. So just curious what your thoughts are. Is there anything else we could possibly be missing? That sounds about like doorway pages. Especially if you have kind of the thinner city pages where basically you're taking boilerplate text and just swapping out the city name, and it's essentially the same page over and over again, then that would probably be seen as a doorway page by the web spam team. And that might be something that they would take action on. So if you've cleaned that up, then that sounds like the right step there. OK, do they ever provide any sort of insights when they get back to you? Did they ever come back with something and say, no, it wasn't that, it was this? Sometimes, yeah. So there are two types of ways where they sometimes give a bit more information depending on the situation. On the one hand, sometimes they'll give sample URLs. So that helps narrow things down a little bit. And sometimes they can give a bit more kind of free text information as well regarding an issue to kind of explain what is happening here. And usually that's something that they turn to when it ends up being this kind of back and forth where they can tell that you're not a malicious spammer and you're not trying to manipulate things in a crazy way, but you've kind of ran into this trap. Maybe someone else set it up a couple of years ago. Maybe listen to that advice, all of that. So those are kind of the situations where they will try to get some more information back to you. OK, great. Thank you. So I need to wait, basically.  OK, thank you. Can I jump in here? Sure. No, hear me? OK, so I'm Allie. I work for caseinate.com. And we just did a site replatforming, and it did not go so smoothly. We had problems getting indexed for a little while. Now we're back being indexed, but our organic rankings are just plummeted. So another problem that we're having is when we replatformed, we went from Shopify to Magento. And Magento automatically creates these segmented URLs for based on price and color and things like that that we didn't set up. And so we changed in our robots to block all those extra pages because they were coming in as duplicate content because they're just subpages of one page. But that being said, now Webmaster Tools is saying that our robots is blocking an important page, but it's not an important page. It's just one of those subpages. So it is being blocked, but on purpose. Is that hurting? Part of the reason why our organic is taking so long to come back? Or is that part of our problem? Or is that a totally separate thing? Yeah, so I guess there are two aspects there. On the one hand, it sounds like you changed the URL structure completely of the website? Yes. Did you set up redirects? We did. Problem is we set them up. We tried to set them up for all of them. Our site's been around for a very long time. And so a lot of ones are iPhone 4 and Samsung Galaxy. They're very, very old phones. So they got all the newer stuff. I'm working on still trying to get the old stuff. But for example, before this, we were ranking number four for iPhone 7 Plus cases. And now we're at 70 something. And it's been like three weeks. Yeah, I mean, you'll always see some fluctuations when you do a redesign of a website. And especially when you move from one CMS to another, because essentially the whole layout of the pages changes, the URL structure changes of the website, kind of the internal linking of the website changes, all of that takes time to be reprocessed. So that's definitely one thing where you should see some fluctuations. It sounds a bit more extreme in your case, especially sounds like it's been that way for a while. So that's something where I'd probably dig in a little bit more to figure out exactly what's happening there. With regards to the kind of the faceted pages with the individual, kind of like the price in the URL or other attributes in the URL, those are the kind of pages where we'd recommend allowing crawling and using your rel canonical to kind of combine them on your preferred page. So that's kind of what I would aim for there, to kind of guide Googlebot into the pages that you do actually want to have crawled and indexed. Because by blocking them, you're preventing us from crawling them, but we'll still find links to them. And we'll essentially try to index a robot page where we don't know what the content is, and we can't really rank that that well without the content. So if we could crawl them, see the rel canonical to your preferred page, I imagine you would see a change there. It looks like Mihai also recommended another tool to kind of look at for Magento. I don't know anything specific about Magentos. I can't really say how that will work. Do you want to say anything about that, Mihai? Well, it's basically an extension we've worked with multiple Magento stores, and it's an extension we found that kind of achieves the goal you just explained to use a canonical tag for the filtered categories, because it's usually a categories that are the problems whenever you apply price filters or other facets. And the canonical tag would point to the non-filtered version of that category, which would kind of achieve both the goals of redirecting any ranking signals to the non-filtered category and avoid indexing and reduce the crawl frequency of those pages. And what was that tool? What was that extension? I've mentioned it in the chat. It's MageWorks SEO Suite. OK. Sorry, it's my first time doing this. I don't know how to find that. OK. Go on, can I just ask a question on that? Sure. You know, when you talked about different CMSs and it having to be re-evaluated, are different crawling rules built according to, if you like, popular CMS platforms? So for instance, if Magento has certain site structures that are, if you like, common as such, with parameters and filters and so forth, say you then move to a new platform, say Shopify or vice versa, or PrestoShop or whichever. Does that have to kind of be reprocessed, if you like, so that the patterns are built and they understand that this is a different platform? It's almost like rules to understand which is the important types of URLs there. Yeah, that's something we try to do on a per site basis. So as far as I know, we wouldn't try to figure that out based on a CMS. So we wouldn't try to say, oh, this is Magento. Therefore, this will be the common pattern because you can set up all kinds of crazy server site rewrites and then the URLs look differently. So it's something where we try to look at the site and see what do we find with normal crawling, which patterns make sense for us to kind of focus on, which ones can we kind of ignore, those kind of things. And especially for smaller sites, we'll probably not even think about kind of patterns at all. We'll just say, oh, we'll just try to crawl everything. So URL parameters are probably one of the best places to sort of try and handle that a little bit, maybe? Yeah, I mean, depending on the type of site, the way you have it set up using URL parameters is a great way to kind of make it easier for search engines to crawl your site. If it's a complicated site structure and all of these parameters are in the path of the URL somewhere, then that's a lot harder for us to figure out than if they're individual URL parameters where we can say, oh, we can ignore this parameter here because it's just changing the order of the items on the page. It doesn't change the content of the page. OK, thanks. Just a little addition regarding Magento. Magento actually has out of the box a canonical feature. It's just that they applied for pagination URLs by default, which is not ideal because Google will kind of stop crawling those pagination URLs and won't really find new products anymore. OK, awesome. So do you think that that might have to do with the rankings then as well, like why it's taking so long to come back because of all this mess? Or is that a whole separate feature? I imagine that probably plays into that. So especially if we have trouble crawling the site, then it's really hard for us to kind of reprocess everything and understand how it should all fit together again. But what I would do is maybe take a look at those plugins and those settings to see if there are easy things that you can do to change and otherwise maybe go to one of the Webmaster forums and kind of explain what you're seeing with specific examples as well so that other people can take a quick look there too. OK, great. Thank you. Sure. All right, let me run through some of the questions that were submitted. And as always, feel free to add comments or more questions along the way. We work on a huge website, justanswer.com. And since late April, early May, we've experienced a big drop in Google Index. This happened across all of our international sites. We weren't changing anything significant in the last couple of months. What could that be? Or is this just a regular index cleanup that Google does every spring? So from our point of view, it's not that we have spring cleaning in our index. We try to re-crawl and re-index essentially URLs kind of like normal. I took a quick look at the website to kind of see what type of site it is. And it looks like it's heavily based on user-generated content. So this seems like one of those sites where, from our point of view, our algorithms might go and say, well, there's lots of low-quality user-generated content here. We have to be a bit more careful. Or it might be that you're working really hard on cleaning things up and have really high-quality user-generated content. And depending on how things evolve over time, it's also conceivable that our algorithms sometimes switch from thinking it's this higher quality to thinking this is lower quality. So my recommendation there would be not to take this as something that just randomly happened. But rather to kind of think about what you could be doing on your side to significantly make sure that the quality of the content that you're providing for indexing is as high as possible. We haven't heard about Panda in a while. Is it still being handled in the same way? Is there any direct connection between Panda and other quality algorithms? So essentially, Panda is still rolling the way that it's normally rolling. It's something that's kind of automated in that we don't really have to worry about individual refreshes anymore, which makes things a little bit easier. There's nothing kind of like the jumps that would happen with regards to Panda in the past. So that's something where we don't have any big news to share on that because it's essentially working the way that we think it should be working. With regards to connections to other quality algorithms, in general, we try to keep these algorithms separate as possible so that each of these kind of quality algorithms has its own data set to work on. One thing that does happen, though, is that sometimes quality information from one algorithm is used in other algorithms where, when it comes to understanding how we should be treating this website. So for example, if we think this website is generally lower quality, then that could flow into other things, like maybe crawling and indexing speed, something like that. So I have a question. Hello. Sure. Yeah. How could I target my website for multiple geolocation? I mean, I tried using hreflang, but it's not working. Hreflang should be working. That's essentially the right tool there, especially if you have different language content. If you're just targeting individual countries, then I would use a normal geo-targeting tool, which is built into Search Console. So you can say, this part of my website or this domain should be targeted to this specific country. hreflang is a little bit different in that it'll swap out URLs. So geo-targeting will change the ranking locally for people who are searching locally for local content. And hreflang will just swap out the URLs. It doesn't change the ranking itself. And if you see that the wrong URLs are being shown in the search results for your contents or the wrong language version, then I suspect maybe the hreflang markup might not be set up properly in that you might not be linking directly between the canonical URLs. So you really need to link between the URLs that we actually indexed like that. And do I need to make the changes in XML sitemap also after I include the hreflang? No, not necessarily. So you can put the hreflang in the sitemap, or you can put it on the pages themselves. So depending on where you have the hreflang markup, that's where you should be making those changes. Thanks. Sure. All right. Can external links from my page to another domain in any way harm rankings or quality of my pages besides bleeding page rank? All of these links will be relevant and useful for the user that might land on this page. So since it's asking in any way, that's something where I would watch out for things like unnatural links. So if you have, on the one hand, maybe paid links on your site, if you have advertising on your site, then those are the type of links that should have a nofollow attached. Otherwise, we might lose trust in the links on that site. If you have user-generated content on that site with links from random people on the internet or leaving them there, I'd also make sure to have a nofollow attached to those links so that you're sure that the normal links on your site are really relevant. They're natural. They're there because you placed them there as a webmaster. So that's kind of what I would aim for there. What specific advice do you have for webmasters that had a website lose rankings at the end of last week? So this is kind of a tricky question in the sense that, what specifically could you offer webmasters who have one of the millions of websites that changed rankings in the last couple of weeks? So obviously, there are lots of different things that affect different websites. There's nothing, not one specific thing where I can say all websites that saw a change in ranking last week or last couple of weeks had the specific problem. In general, rankings do fluctuate. That's something where I wouldn't say that you could kind of assume that rankings will always stay the same if you don't change anything on your website. On the one hand, our algorithms change all the time. On the other hand, the rest of the web evolves as well. So these are things that do kind of change over time. There's nothing really specific I'd be able to point out there. Some websites linking to me have a lot of backlinks, but don't rank for any keywords. Totally junk sites from a backlink profile standpoint. From what I can tell, they have been penalized or suppressed to not show up in search results. Do these sites still pass a vote to me? I want to disavow them, but I'm not sure if they're helping me rank. So I guess, first of all, if these are totally useless sites, then they're probably not helping your website rank. So from that point of view, that's something you can probably kind of ignore. So if you're worried about these sites linking to your website, then I would just go ahead and disavow them. If these are just normal spam sites, like they're out there in millions anyway, then I wouldn't worry so much about it. But as soon as you're kind of worried about those links and you just want to make sure that they're not causing any problems, I would go ahead and just disavow them. A negative SEO attack, I have a client who is a nonprofit charitable organization and they help to get people out of debt. They're the largest organization of their kind and have a high success rate. I believe they're under a negative SEO attack and we need someone at Google to annually take a look. So what I would recommend doing there is maybe posting in the Webmaster Help Forum with the details so that other people can take a quick look and pass it on to us if that's needed. In general, just because it's a good organization or a large organization and they're successful doesn't necessarily mean that their website will automatically be ranking well. So that's something to kind of keep in mind. I think it's really important for a website in general on the web to offer something that's useful, that's compelling, and useful for users. But just because they're large and they've been successful doesn't necessarily mean they'll rank well, too. So it's not the case that I would say that they would automatically be ranking high. So from that kind of point of view, I'd be skeptical about saying that it's automatically a negative SEO attack just because they've changed in rankings, even if you do find a bunch of crazy links pointing through that website. But it's always useful to have examples. So I'd really recommend kind of posting in the Help Forum or sending that to me directly so I can take a quick look. On our website with steady daily organic traffic during six months or so, let's say about 40% of the pages are displaying a rich results. Contemporary peak of organic traffic have an impact on the way the pages are displayed in the search results. I'm trying to figure out if there's a correlation between the organic traffic to my website on one specific day and the change in rich results on the same day. In general, that wouldn't be related. So at least I can't think of any situation where that would be related. And usually any kind of correlation between different factors takes a bit of time to be propagated. So even if there were something tied in there, then that wouldn't be something where you would see any change on the same day. In general, the reduction in the number of rich snippets, rich results that we show for a website, if everything on the website stays the same, if they're using valid markup, if they're complying with our policies, then that would kind of point at our algorithms looking at that website and thinking maybe this isn't as high quality of a website as we thought. And that's the kind of thing that's totally unrelated to kind of a spike in organic traffic. So what I'd recommend doing there is kind of taking a step back and thinking about what you can do overall to increase the quality of the website overall. The issue omitted search index has been bothering us for over a year. OK. I think I looked at this in the past. So this is essentially search for a specific address in the country and some sites we don't show there. We have a property profile page for every address in Australia and every time the property is listed, we create another listing similar to what our competitor does. So in general, what happens with the kind of filtered results in the search results is we filter them out when we think that this is essentially a duplicate of something we already have shown in the search results. So if this is something where you have pages that are essentially very similar to other pages or that don't have significant unique content or don't have anything that we would be able to highlight as a difference in the search results, then that would be normal for us to actually filter that out. And that's not a matter of a site being penalized or otherwise kind of being treated badly. From our point of view, it makes sense to show users unique content in the search results. And if we see things that are essentially just a duplication of what we've already shown the user in the search results, then that's something that we would filter out. So my recommendation there would be to kind of rethink the strategy of creating pages for every single address in the whole country and thinking about what you really have content for, like where is the value of your content and what you want to rank for there. So that's kind of my recommendation there, taking a step back and not just automatically generating one page or two pages for every single address in the country, but rather trying to find ways to actually create something of value that you can maintain on your website that lasts over a longer period of time. John, you talked earlier about this and about doorway pages and how different cities, pages that target cities can be seen as doorway pages. I was thinking about, for example, Rob's site with the experience gifts that he has to offer in various states and cities. If he would have a filter or something that would create a separate URL that lists the services in that city or state, could that be seen as a doorway page? Or that's not exactly what Google understands this. Doorway pages would be more if you have one general service. Oh, speak of the devil. You must have heard me. Excuse me. Yeah, so doorway pages would be more if you have one service that you're providing across the whole country and you're just creating pages for each individual city listing the same content, essentially. So if you have one online store that you offer or one kind of service that you provide across the whole country and you just create pages for every single location, even though you don't have anything unique to offer there, then that would be a doorway page. But if you had services that were specific to individual locations where you can really say, in this area, I have these services. I have this address. I have this specific thing to offer. Then that would be kind of a normal page. Right, so what I just kind of watch out for is to avoid splitting that up too much because you're kind of diluting the value of your pages there. So if you have it for each individual part of a city and you create separate pages and say, oh, well, in this part of London you can also drive 20 miles to see this, then that's probably not that useful. And that will probably result in each of those pages having so small value overall that they wouldn't rank on their own. So it's basically like, in cases like this, it's just like a store that sells t-shirts would have pages for each of the sizes, something like that. I mean, something that is useful for users searching for that specific size kind of t-shirt, just as it would be for like a sub-selection of your entire services, particular to that filter or whatever that is. OK. Can I ask an unrelated question, more questions? Sure. So back in January, February, you guys rolled out the thing about mobile pop-ups, or just pop-ups in general. Have you guys seen sites been penalized from that? And what's another option instead of a pop-up or subscriptions or coupons or whatever have you? Yeah, we did roll it out. It's specific to mobile, so it's something you wouldn't see on desktop search. But we did roll it out. For some sites, it does have a fairly strong effect for other sites, especially if you're primarily searching for that site's name, then you wouldn't really see a strong effect there. So if, I don't know, if, like, let's say Google News had this issue, and if people were searching for Google News, then obviously we'd still be showing Google News. But if they were searching for some article that's somewhere on Google News, and Google News had this issue with the pop-ups, then we'd probably try to show some other variation because we think we'd have something better fitting for the user for that case. So that has rolled out. What I would recommend doing there is kind of thinking about what you can do with regards to banners instead of pop-ups. So instead of blocking the whole page, maybe just like a part of the page and say, hey, we have this special offer, or hey, we also have an app, or whatever you want to do there, to kind of give users the option of going there without blocking the actual access to the normal content. Watson, thank you. Sure. All right. In order to have SiteLinks search box displayed in Google search results, do we need to allow Google to crawl and or index the website's internal search results pages? And no, you don't need to do that. The tricky part with the SiteLinks search box markup specifically is that we would use this markup when we would show a SiteLinks search box. So if you are noticing that we're showing this kind of search within the snippet part when people are searching for your site's name, for example, then using that markup lets you swap that out against whatever search results page that you want to provide. So that's something that, from our point of view, doesn't need to be crawled and indexed, but it does need to be a valid URL. And in order for us to show that, we do first need to come to the conclusion that showing this kind of search box in the snippet for your site would make sense. One other kind of tricky aspect with the SiteLinks search box is that, at the moment, we don't differentiate between mobile and desktop URLs there. So if you have separate URLs for your mobile and your desktop site, then I would kind of thinking about setting up an automatic redirect on that search results page so that people get to the right version that matches the device that they're using. Or maybe even switch to responsive or dynamic serving if you can do that. Can I follow up on that one and just ask if that page needs to have a canonical tag that is self-canonicalizing? Or if canonicals affect that in any way? That doesn't matter. That's totally up to you. So if these are pages that you mean to get indexed separately, then using canonical tag is a good way to do that. I'd kind of be careful with getting search results pages indexed because that quickly kind of balloons, and suddenly you have millions of URLs that are indexed, and they don't provide that much value. So I think about maybe getting the main search results page index, like this is where you can start searching within the site, but not the individual searches themselves. Perfect, thanks. How many external links can we use on a single page with the nofollow tag? As many as you want. So if these are nofollowed links on a page, put as many as you want on there. Obviously, for usability reasons, there's probably some at some point you want to kind of make a cut and say this. It doesn't make sense to add even more links to this page because nobody's going to be able to find anything specific on there. But there is no limit from our point of view. This is something that commonly comes up. For example, if you have a really popular blog and lots of people leave comments and those comments have links to their websites and you have nofollowed all of those links, then that's something where sometimes a page has a lot of links on it, but these aren't necessarily links that you need to care about. Many blogs say that redirects chains are bad for ranking. Authority is deprecated by 10% for every redirect, but I've not been able to find any official word from Google. For example, if we redirect from example.com to dub dub dub, example.com, and then to HTTPS, example.com, would that impact the rankings? No, that's not a problem to have these kind of redirect chains there. In general, we do recommend reducing the number of redirects that you chain just for usability reasons. Every redirect that you do, especially if it goes to a different host name, so from example.com to dub dub dub, example.com has a kind of a cost associated with it on the client side. So as short as you can keep this chain is kind of what we'd recommend. If you can set it up, then I would just redirect to the final URL as much as possible. But there's no issue with regards to page rank being passed or signals being passed when it comes to redirect chains provided we can kind of crawl through them. One thing that we have mentioned in the past is that up to five hops will follow automatically, like right away. And if we need more than five hops, then we kind of have to pick that up in the next crawl cycle, which might be like a day later. But in general, if you're seeing more than five hops in a redirect chain for URLs that you think are important on your site, then that would be something I'd fix anyway. That's just way too slow, especially if people are on mobile devices, then all of these redirects, they just take an enormous amount of time. And really, if you can avoid that, then I try to avoid that as much as possible. Let's see. Can you help me understand Search Console? There's kind of a question about why does this specific URL show so many impressions and which rankings for these specific queries. I think there was some help already given in the comments there. And if you're unsure about the details there, this is really the kind of thing I'd recommend posting in the Webmaster Help Forum about, because people there can really kind of guide you to the details there. Is it possible to use hreview microformat for customer satisfaction reviews acquired by Google Surveys to pull through star ratings on my website? So I'm not sure how Google Surveys pulls in customer satisfaction reviews. So that's kind of one thing to watch out for. In general, if you use review markup on your pages, it should be specific to the item that's being discussed on that specific page. So it shouldn't be broadly for your business or for your website. It should be specific to one specific item. So if you're selling, I don't know, blue shoes, then the reviews that you include on your site should be specific to that kind of blue shoe that you have on that specific page, not to your website in general. So that's one thing kind of to watch out for. The other thing is that it should be obvious to any user coming to your website how to leave a review. So that's another thing where if you have a too complicated setup where you're pulling reviews from an aggregator that's pulling reviews from somewhere else, then that's really hard for users to kind of follow up and see, oh, where is this review actually coming from? Can I look at it? Can I leave a review myself? And that would be something that, from a policy point of view, the web spam team might say, this is not set up properly. I tried Data Highlighter for this page, and I see a completely different page. And the fetch page and the live page by the tool, I am unable to figure out why. So I don't know about that specific URL, but in general, the Data Highlighter is built based on the indexed content. So if you have pages that change fairly regularly, then that's something where if you try to mark up one of these pages with the Data Highlighter, it'll use the index version of that page. So in particular, if this is kind of a lower level page on your website that we don't crawl and index that often, it might be that this page is a couple of weeks or even a couple of months old when you mark it up. From our point of view, that's less of a problem, because what we're trying to look at with the Data Highlighter is what kind of items you're marking up, not the specific values that you're currently marking up for that individual page. So that's something where we're using machine learning to understand that for this type of page that has this type of content on it, you're saying, this is the date, and this is the location, and this is the description, this is the name, this is the price, those kind of things. And that's something that we can learn even from older pages. So from our point of view, just because the content that's displayed there is older isn't necessarily a bad sign. I would watch out for situations where you've done a complete redesign of your website and used the Data Highlighter, then obviously you want to make sure that you're marking up pages that reflect the current design of those pages. That said, if you're doing a complete redesign of your website, then maybe it makes sense to put the mark up directly on the page anyway so that you don't have to kind of worry about Data Highlighter picking up the right things on your pages there. Let me see. We observe the Fetch tool is not working. Is there any update in the Search Console tool? As far as I know, there is nothing specific, kind of broken, or stuck, or changed with the Fetch as Google tool. There are some limitations with regards to how often you can use that tool for your website. So that might be something that you're looking at. It might also be that we're just not able to crawl much more from your website because we think your website is kind of limited from a kind of capacity point of view. But in general, as far as I know, there is nothing stuck with the Fetch as Google tool. How come a homepage index in Google and ranking for numerous keywords is not ranking anymore on the first keyword it was ranking for on page one in the search results. Another deeper page is ranking instead, but far from the home page is first ranking. These kind of things can change over time. That's not something where I'd say this page is ranking number one now. It'll always be ranking number one now. In the future, that can change. Fluctuations are kind of normal in Search. What I would recommend doing there is thinking about finding ways to make sure that people come back to your site on their own as well. So instead of just relying on traffic from search, think about what you can do to take that traffic from search and turn them into recurring visitors so that you don't have to always rely on your page's ranking in a specific location in the search results. Obviously, that's not always that easy. That's kind of what everyone wants to do, right? We're an international multi-language e-commerce startup. For some of our products, thumbnails show up in mobile search, while others don't. How could we optimize our page so that more products will displayed with this thumbnail? I don't know how you're seeing these URLs being shown with a thumbnail, so that's something where I'd probably need a bit more details, maybe screenshots, maybe example URLs. But this is probably also something where other people can help out as well. So I take this kind of a question and go to the Webmaster Help Forum and see what you can do there with feedback from other people. And if all else fails, feel free to send me the link to your thread, and I can double-check as well. With mobile first, should we start including mobile pages and sitemaps? No, you don't really need to do that. When it comes to mobile first, our primary goal is to try to keep everything as same as possible, with the exception that, of course, we're indexing the content on the mobile pages. So the sitemap continues to list your normal canonical pages, your desktop pages, the rel canonical stays the same, all of that kind of stays the same. Obviously, if you have a responsive setup where you keep the same URLs for different kinds of content or use dynamic serving for mobile content, then that makes all of this pretty much a non-issue. You don't really have to worry about it. So if you're kind of on the fence with regards to moving to a responsive layout, maybe that's something worth doing. We have a very large site with a number of products going offline every month with a 404. If there were an increase in this amount, say, 1 million 404s in a month, how would that affect us? And how would your best advice be in handling this? From my point of view, that's fine. Some sites do fluctuate quite a bit. If you have a lot of 404s, that wouldn't be a sign. From our point of view, that the site is lower quality. Obviously, it makes crawling a little bit trickier because we can't kind of recrawl everything that quickly. One thing you can do is use the maybe unavailable after meta tag to let us know if you know ahead of time which URLs will go 404 so that we can drop them from the index without having to actually recrawl them that often. But in general, yeah. I asked a follow up question to the 404 issue. There's a remove URL link or option in the search console. If I remove pages, should I follow that up with a remove URL request? And the reason I ask is each one of the pages that I'm going to be deleting link to each other within the same directory or folder. I'll be getting, I mean, if the pages get crawled at a slow rate, which they probably do because they're not that anyway. Should I be deleting them all at once and then removing URLs at the same time? And is there a bulk way of doing that through search console or do I have to individually request URL removal? Yeah, so the URL removal tool there is specific to the search results. So it doesn't change indexing of those URLs. It basically just hides them in the search results. So that's something where you can use it for situations like that where you have kind of a handful of URLs that you want to have removed. If you need to remove them quickly, that's an option there. In general, however, you can also just let us recrawl those. And we will drop them when we see a 404. And that works naturally as well. There's no bulk option in Search Console for your removals unless these are all in a specific folder where you can say everything in this folder should be removed from the search results as quickly as possible, then we can do that. But if it's individual URLs here, there, and there, you'd have to submit those separately. In general, we recommend not using that tool for normal maintenance. So if you're just removing individual pages and you do this every now and then, then I wouldn't use that tool. I primarily use that if you have something really critical on your site that you want to have hidden from search immediately. So maybe someone's full address or name or something that you accidentally put on your site and you want to have that removed as quickly as possible, that's a good use for this tool. Well, I guess my only question was if they're all interlinking to each other and Google de-indexes or gets rid of or calls 404, half the pages, the other half of the pages are still linking to those pages that no longer exist. Would those broken links display any kind of a quality problem with my site? No, that would be perfectly fine. I mean, from a usability point of view, it's not great to link to a 404 page, but it's kind of natural. It just happens. The web isn't perfect. Most websites aren't perfect. We have to deal with that. Maybe it's the OCD and may not want it to be perfect. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, it's always good to have high goals, but it's not the case that if we run across a bunch of links on your site that go to 404s, and we say, oh, this is a bad site, we have tons of 404s on our pages as well. I recently went through some of our Help Center, and we linked through a bunch of really old pages that haven't existed for a while, and nobody has noticed it. So it happens to everyone. Matter of fact, I think the page that links to the webmaster, things that you're doing now, actually has a broken link on that page. Hey. Yeah. OK. Thank you. I hope it's not. These kind of things happen. It's not that we would take any kind of a technical issue like this and say, oh, it's a sign that this website is lower quality. All right, we have a couple minutes left. Do you all have any questions left over? What can I help with? Can I? Sure. So my question is, one second. When do you need to declare the language of a site in Google Webmaster 2? It makes sense to declare it when you have a website with online content, or when you have a physical business in that specific country. So you probably mean the location, not the language? Location, yeah. Because language is something you wouldn't need to declare in Search Console at all. Location is something where you can set the geo-targeting. If you want to do that, what happens is when we recognize that users in that country are searching for something that we think they're looking for something local, then we'll show your site a little bit higher in those search results. So that can make a lot of sense. If you do have local content for users like that, if your site is primarily this generic reference material type content where people aren't searching for something local specifically, then probably that geo-targeting setting doesn't have a big effect. But if they're looking for something local and you have something local, then I would definitely use that. OK, even if you have video content with description in a language like Romania or Czech Republic or whatever, you think that is better to use it. I mean, you don't have any disadvantage to not use it. So that's something where I'd at least give that extra information if you have it. When it comes to different language content, usually we can map that anyway. So if someone is searching in French, and you have a website in French, then we will recognize. They probably want the French version, not the Spanish version, for example. So the language itself also helps us to filter automatically. But if you have country-specific content, then that definitely helps. I think with a pure video site, it's kind of, I don't know, hit and miss. So if you really have country-specific content, maybe you do have something specific to individual countries. And in that case, I would definitely just go ahead and do that. OK, thank you very much. John, if you have something that's country-specific, let's say like rent a car service. And how does that play out for users who are outside the country but are searching for something specific, like rent a car Romania, and you offer rent a car services Romania, how does your targeting work in that situation? We use it for the user's location. So that's something where if you're targeting users in the UK who are searching for a rent a car in Romania, you would kind of have to geotarget the UK, which probably doesn't make a lot of sense here. So this is something where if we can recognize that the user is searching for content in a different country, then I think we would pretty much ignore the geotargeting card there. Because it's like you're searching for rent a car Romania. It doesn't matter where you're located. You want a site that's rent a car Romania. You don't want a random rent a car site that happens to be geotargeted for the UK. OK, so content plays more of a role than actual relevant content plays a role than geotargeting. Because I know geotargeting plays more role if you're looking for something local to your specific area. So if you're searching for pizza and you want local pizza places, I think pizza is maybe a bad example unless you're in a really small country. But that kind of thing where you're searching for something that's where we can kind of guess you prefer something that's local to your country or your area. OK, but if I have a .com site, which is a generic TLD, and I offer rent a car services in Romania, but I also want users from the UK, the US, to find me when I'm searching for that. Should I geotarget? It's also for users in Romania, of course. But should I geotarget for Romania, or should I just leave it open? I think you probably wouldn't see any big changes there, either way. OK, OK, got it. All right, so with that, we're kind of at the end of our time. Thank you all for joining. I have another Hangout set up on Friday in the morning, European time, if you're all around. Otherwise, I'll set up the next batch of Hangouts probably early next week again. Thank you all for joining. Thanks for all of your questions and comments. It's been a fun Hangout again. All right, see you all. Bye, John. Bye.