Welcome to this session. I'm Johann and this session is about best practices when working with UX teams. Few words about myself. I work in product for 13 years now. I started my career in retail software. Then I moved to a surface as a service company offering B2B solutions in the search space. And now I'm working at eBay Klein Anzeigen, the largest classifieds player in Germany. So today I would like to talk a bit about UX and how you can best leverage this domain as a PM. So there are things that early stage PMs could do better when they interact first time with design teams. And there are also things that might be interesting to recap on if you already gained some experience. Well, as a PM you face challenges when touching the UX and the design domain. For instance, when do you involve UX teams? How best to prepare? And also how can you ensure that you create a UX that your customers love? So to spark some thinking around those questions, I divided the content into two parts, the UX briefing and the UX review. So let's start with the first part, the UX briefing. It's safe to say that the better you do your job in this phase, the smoother the second phase will be. Now when briefing UX designers, there are quite some boxes you wanna have ticked before even reach out. It's all about the objective. What do you want to achieve? Now this sounds pretty trivial, but if you zoom in a bit more, you might discover some tricky things. So first of all, who is your persona? Usually you do not only have one type of user, but you deal with segments of your entire user base. So in multi-sided marketplaces, for instance, you have buyers and your sellers. Now obviously any product feature you're planning, you need UX for and this will have impact on both sides. So think about it. Is there a persona that might benefit less or not at all? How would that persona perceive that experience? Try to cover all personas in your 360 degrees thinking. Now in order to further specify your objective, you need to differentiate between the, maybe conflicting goals your persona has and the goals your company has. So sometimes the feature you're planning is centered around certain business objectives, right? However, such an approach will not be successful if not related to actual user problems. So specify the problems your users are having and why the feature should solve those problems. It's important to focus on the why and not so much on the how. As this is the UX designer's task and you do not want to prescribe too much. However, the UX team should hear the rationale from you as a PM. Another item you would want to think about is the user journey. So usually you can expect from UX teams to be fully aware of the entire user journey. So there is no need to cover it, and it makes sense to be fully aligned on the entry points of the plan feature. Please note that talking about potential entry points could already be too prescriptive. So better phrase this as questions, even if you already have good ideas about where users should access the feature. You also want to pause a second and think about how this product change will be perceived by existing users compared to new users. While the feature could be something your existing user base is waiting for years, new users might be overwhelmed by it. So when thinking about how to merge your feature into the overall user journey, also considered a cognitive load of existing users versus new users. Another dimension you want to be aligned on with the UX team is the actual situation the user is in when being in contact with your plan feature. For instance, will it be mobile only? Can we expect users to be motivated to use it or does it somehow needs to be advertised within the overall product experience? Are users typically in a hurry when being in touch with your feature or do they have all the time in the world to explore it? What do you want to achieve is basically creating a UX that reflects real world situations your users are in. You also want to think about emotions you're aiming for, right? Just aiming for joy of use might cut it a bit short. So think about various types of emotions and which one should be predominant. Let me give you some examples. So for instance, the user experience of the Pinterest feed might be all about exciting users to discover new things they like. So excitement is the predominant emotion. In contrast, a new feature within a banking app might be more focused on making users feel in control and aspects of trust might be crucial. And products, for instance, leveraging the power of community would aim for a felt sense of relationship and identification. Think about the fact that next to functional components, there are also emotional components in your user experience. Make sure UX designers are considering both dimensions. So bottom line here is, when briefing UX teams, do not limit yourself to user problems and wireframes, but also talk about which users you are addressing exactly, in which situation they might be in and what they should feel when interacting with your product. Well, next to user-centric thinking, you also want to make sure that you have a good approach in how to measure success of your planned product feature. So be transparent about the business metric you want to drive and how this metric usually is measured. This information might have impact on how UX teams would design user flows and should not be overlooked. In the end, you want to be able to quantify the success of your planned feature and that requires tracking of your user behavior. Now, if you brief UX designers up from clearly about what exactly you want to be able to track, this can avoid a lot of back and forth. And it will be a time saver for you and for the team. Last but not least, it might make sense to also share your thoughts about the scope of the initiative. Maybe the planned product feature you're talking about today is actually just the first tiny step of a way larger initiative. And knowing this early on will make UX teams think a bit more proactively, as they might anticipate potential further iterations already when designing for the MVP. All right. So let's zoom in on the second part, how to evaluate suggested solutions and how to take it from here. So most importantly, listen first and take your time. If you think the suggested solution is not meeting your expectations, analyze precisely what you got. Think about it this way. Your design team invested reasonable amount of efforts to provide a solution to the challenge you formulated. Now it's on you to invest adequate time to work with that. Now you will feel much more comfortable if you have specified explicitly the needs and watch-outs upfront in the briefing fix. Just have a look back on your briefing and compare it with the provided solution. You will be able to clearly state which aspects would need refinement and which ones are just fine. And while doing that, clearly separate between UX and design aspects. When we talk about the UX, we often blend in design aspects and we shouldn't. It's necessary to differentiate both decisions. While UX is focusing on customer needs, information architecture and interaction principles, interface design is focusing on things like layout, visual design, spacing, fonts and colors. So when you are in a UX centered conversation with your team, make sure that you clearly separate both roles when giving feedback. And when given feedback, observe yourself. How often do you use phrases like, I think, I would, I assume. Good PMs do not center around their individual perception. Instead they have a process in place to give the voice to the users. So conducting usability testing is the best practice here and do not do it once. Make it become a habit in your organization. So you do already do UX testing on a regular basis. That's great. But just listen to users while interacting with your product could end up in having more questions than answers. So to move forward faster, I recommend to come up with clear hypothesis before the test. A handful of hypothesis covering your expected set of user reactions will allow everyone involved in the UX process to validate the current solution. And whether or not it can be built or it needs another iteration. And without a hypothesis, you would get unstructured feedback. And that would be open for interpretation and could eat up valuable time. And last hint, when conducting UX testing, take good care on wordings. So PMs and UX designers, of course, they know that wordings on a product can easily be changed before the release, right? But when conducting UX testing, one should acknowledge that how you name buttons, for example, will have huge impact on how users perceive that in the test setting. So aim for final wordings before running the test. And this will give you the best real-world feedback you can get. And with that, I conclude the session. Thank you for listening. I hope it was valuable for you. Feel free to reach out to me anytime on LinkedIn. Have a good day and take care.


The great search brought to you by the key and a to prove lady to user powers of engineering every single week to find the Things that you need it's tough to find things because it's a global part shortage lady What is this week's great search? Okay, this week's great search is you know I had a couple great searches where we did you know alternative searches and then I went to like oh I'm like like trying to find some chips and stuff Then one design with and now I'm back to alternatives because I'm seeing like the second wave of part shortage is where I Believe that there are parts available, but they're not being allocated necessarily and so you know We have a lot of parts that we've ordered and the lead times are still a year and I'm actually seeing them stretch out to two years You know as I was looking at like a MOSFET that you know, we use the DMG 30 23 or 5 I think it's a nice little slot 23 P-FET for a lot of our boards that we use is like a little you know ideal diode type thing and You know it's a MOSFET, you know, it's like hey most generic common thing But it has 89 week lead time and so there's a lot of parts that are again common that are hard to get We got a bunch of shipments, but it might be a while to get in our next shipment. So this week's the great search is about the AP 2 1 1 2 K 3 point 3 which is our like super favorite low dropout regulator We use it in like everything We used to use the mick 5 2 2 5 which is also still a great regulator and we use that on a lot of boards The AP 2 1 1 2 has very low dropout and also can do 500 600 milliamps of current Easily from up to 6 volts. It's you know great. It's very stable. It doesn't need a bypass cap It's a great little regulator and once we started using it on our boards like our feather boards, for example I'll use the AP 2 1 1 2 We're like well like instead of stocking, you know, that's cheaper than the mick 5 5 2 2 5 We don't need that 16-volt input for all our stomach UT boards. Let's just move everything to the AP 2 1 1 2 That makes manufacturing and stocking easier because we only had to stock 1 LDO We've really only used 1 LDO for pretty much anything that needs to be point 3 volts And that's totally awesome as long as you can get that part Which we can no longer guarantee and we use a lot of them I go through over a thousand a day of this LDO because it's again used in like everything we use in all our breakouts and our feather boards So we're not out, but we're worried that we might run out before the next shipment because well What we're seeing is you'll get a ship date and that date will start getting bumped and bumped and bumped You know, you thought you're gonna get it in June You're actually not gonna get it's August and then it goes to November and then it goes to January of next year And so we needed to find Something alternative that I could you know to have as a backup so that we wouldn't be like stuck because The the regulator is good for up to 500 600 milliamps, which we definitely need for like our feather ESP 32 boards They can use a lot of current so all our feather boards I want to keep that regulator, but for our breakouts, we don't need 500 600 milliamps A lot of them can get away with 50 or 100 or even less very few even need more than 100 most of our sensors are very low power You know, they sip power and you know low quiescent currents is not that important As long as a dropout is low enough and it's pin compatible. It'll work just fine. So Today what I'm going to try to do is Find an alternative and one that has a lot of stock so that I can get enough that you know in stock it so we can keep all of our stem IQ T boards in stock and Let our AP 2-1-1-2 sit for the feather board. So it's like maybe if we divide the stock up We won't end up using a thousand a day because we'll secure that You know hard to get part for the boards that really need it the boards that don't need it We'll use something that's a little less capable, but hopefully about the same price So let's that's the that's the story But definitely like when I saw that, you know, our purchaser would be like, hey, we need all for this I was like, oh goodness. I gotta do this immediately. So because you know again We use a thousand a day and if we went out of this part like we pretty much grind to a halt So let's find an alternative. So if we can stay in business Okay, so the part that we're talking about is The AP 2-1-1 2k and yes, it's out of stock You know, there'll be some, you know, 16 I can get in like two months. They might be a little bit more In October if I need a whole bunch I'm looking for You know, maybe 6,000 come in October, but I'm not gonna get the rest until 2023 can't wait that long because again I use about a thousand a day. So let's look at this. So again, this is a 3.3 regulator lead time 80 weeks exciting But let's find something that's similar enough again, the quiescent current isn't that important to me and the current outputs on that important We just have to keep in mind the dropout. I want about, you know, point two to point four volts Again, the current we're using is so low. It doesn't matter, but it does have to be low dropout I can't use like an LT 117 with like a massive one volt dropout It's just I need something very light because sometimes you'll give it 3.3 volts and you want about 3.3 volts on the other side So it's 3.3 volts output. It's a one fixed positive and I want it to be active. I Want it to be surface mount and it should I Want to enable but I'm not a hundred percent sure that that isn't another name as well And then the reason I'm not picking the supplier device is because thought 25 is the same as thought 23-5 and I think like sometimes the package names are kind of like, you know, they're split between them So I want to be able to make sure that I can select all the options and again Output current is an important quiescent current PSS are they're all gonna be about the same and then protection features I'm not too worried about because almost all of them have the same features Okay, so The output Input maximum I do want it to be at least Let's just say five volts But it can go up, you know, so whatever But definitely it can't be less than that because I need they definitely need to have all my boards take five volt input then for the package again, there's a lot of Sot 23 is there's Sot 25, Sot 25, Sot 25, Sot 25, Sot 25, Sot 25, DC, there's like a huge number so I'm going to try to Select all of them and try to do my best to get all the different names So the Sot 25 I got those and then also the Sot 25s. That's another name. That's the thing that really you got to watch out for I think They might also be called SC 74s Yeah, SC 74s are also the same thing again This is a this is a tricky thing because you want to you want to get any package that's compatible Without getting the ones that are not Okay Next up so the current output. I don't want anything with less than a hundred milliamps out Because I just feel like if I'm gonna get a regulator I don't want to have to some chips wanna, you know have a hundred milliamp peak like You know the VL 53s Actually, those use a 2.8 volt, but like there are some sensors that use yeah, they can have a little bit of a pipe It's a spike in current Let's see some of the light sensors, especially because they they put a burst of IR out So I think a hundred milliamps is my minimum. I really want something that's in stock right now So which is gonna takes it from a thousand to 100 And then the dropout is you know dropouts are kind of calculating a weird way because they're like it depends on the output of the regulator So I think what I'm gonna do is I'm going to Check that on You know the board itself and and see what's up Okay, so the next step is I do want to kind of try to keep it to about the same price and The price I pay for the AP 2-1-1-2s On did you think is like about 10 10 ish sense maybe 12 cents? I you know, there's right. There's always gonna be regulators are 75 cents apiece I can't afford that because the boards I'm putting them on They need to be affordable. They need to be low-cost. I just need a basic regulator I don't need you know the end all be all And then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna look at the combination of the price and stock numbers So again, I can't really Go with something that's only 6,000 pieces in stock because like that's six days It's not worth it for me to do a revision if it's only six days worth of stock So I'm gonna look at is the ones that are like ooh like a hundred and ninety two like that's you know If I use a thousand a and I get a hundred ninety thousand that takes me to the end of the year And so I can at least float my current inventory that long So let's look at the AP to zero zero 2k which actually sounds kind of great because it's like similar to the AP 2-1-1 2k It's a smaller Let's see it's this one. It's fixed. It has a higher voltage input usually that means the dropouts a little higher It looks like it is a little higher, but it might be okay. The quiescent's also a little bit higher Again not not uncommon, but it has the overcurrent over temperature and reverse polarity. So let's look at the data sheet So yeah, this is a standard Regulator has pretty low LDO one thing that I will say that just to watch out for is it does have a bypass pin So the regulator I use now does not require a bypass pin either has some built-in capacitance or it's just Stabilized or it's compensated inside so the only thing to watch out for is This if you don't if I'm using it in a board with that that doesn't have that bypass cap spot because no board It currently exists has that that I've designed I started to make sure that it's not it won't go unstable and The noise isn't going to be too high. So you can check through the data sheet because they will have higher noise That said the higher noise might be the same as the current regulator. I have and as long as you know, that's true I'm good to go and the other thing to watch out for some of these regulators are not stable with Ceramic capacitors. I've seen that I've seen some that are like I they need high ESR Capacitors on the output, which is like really tricky because you think like oh like lower ESR is better Yes, except when that extra resistance adds a little bit of delay a little bit of stability to your regulator So just make sure that it can use ceramic caps. It's it's unusual these days to not see that But you can like Google for ESR Looks like here. They're actually like lower ESR is fine and there's no stability and then Sometimes you can search for ceramic if they don't mention it then it's it's probably fine, but Yeah, they don't have anything About electrolytics. So yeah, this looks like it'll probably be just fine stable with ceramic caps So this is one option, but again want to watch that noise see what that's like The rest of these there's not that many Then there's this one the AP 7 380 So that one has a hundred twenty thousand stocks. That's a good option But I didn't like this high voltage dropout. So the voltage dropout is 1.5 volts, which is like way too high You know, I need it to be the other one was 0.4 at 600 milliamps Which means it's gonna be like 50 millivolts at, you know, 100 milliamps or so I could deal with like, you know, maybe again like 0.2 or whatever 0.3, but 1.5 is is Right out. So not gonna look at the AP 7380 The next one that has a lot of stock is this one the AP 7358 54 it's a little bit more expensive now. We're getting into 17 cents compared to, you know, 8 cents or whatever But this one is 150 milliamp output Very low quiescent current, which is kind of impressive and the dropout's okay. It's, you know, 0.35 And this one That's a load the data sheet this one doesn't need the bypass cap You know, it's so it's maybe low noise. That's pretty good accuracy Range up to 5.5 volts. This is also probably a good option. I think for this one the AP 73.54 and The AP 2202K. I will just check the noise and the dropout and compare it For like about 50 to 100 milliamps. How does it compare to the AP 211 2k? It could be that for some higher current breakouts I would still stick with it AP 211 2k because I know it works. It's good at the higher Output current but for like a BME 280, you know, it's cool to swap it out It really doesn't matter what regular use all that all them are gonna act the same And I would just do a revision And until you know, I get another gigantic shipment of the regular I'm looking for I would just swap it out You know, I'm starting to do more of these dynamic swaps Definitely like MOSFETs. I can't get diodes. I can't get I'll just find the equivalent Part that has the same specifications Swapping in I'll just make a revision notes but I won't necessarily separate the stock because if the part is really equivalent enough and it passes test it won't It's not gonna make a difference and a regular like this As long as the noise is within reasoning the dropouts about the same again, you're not gonna notice much difference for low current uses So this time I'm gonna try to get through this part shortage being flexible and Creative so those are the two two chips. I recommend. I think this one probably is gonna be a better fit I'm gonna get some samples of both and try them out That's great church


It's a pleasure of being here and I really couldn't resist coming out here when I saw the subject you want to focus on. It's been five years that I'm in charge in Brussels of environment policy and five years ago when I came in. Environment policy to 80% roughly would have been climate, energy and climate issues. It was 2009, it was leading up to the Copenhagen Climate Conference. Everyone had understood that there is some problem in the way in which we produce and consume on this planet with regard to energy use and the effect of energy use on the world's climate. Since then we have been trying to broaden this issue and we have come up with a wider assessment of how soon to be 9 billion people will be able to live on this planet enjoying a standard of living that we enjoy here in Europe. If you think about this, if you start looking at what we need for the way in which we live today and these 9 billion people who are expected to be around in 2050 so it's not in a couple of hundred years but it's in a very short foreseeable future. We have come to understand that we probably need natural resources that we would only find on two and a half times planet Earth and obviously despite technological advances cloning a planet is unlikely to happen within that foreseeable time frame. So we need to rethink, we need to become resource efficient as societies. The key pressure for this reality is coming from the developing part of this world because that's where all the expected demographic growth is taking place. Europe, the United States, Japan have barely grown over the last decades. All the growth to the 7 billion people that we are now starting when I was born at a rough 3 billion people on this planet has already taken place in the developing part and the expected growth to 9 billion is taking place there also. So we will have over exponential demand for consumption because these people on average don't benefit of the standard of living of consumerism in the way in which we see it in Europe and I'm applying European levels, I'm not even trying to think of US levels then we need to clone the blue planet a couple of times more I'm afraid. So the real issue that we have in today's economic reality is how do we make sure that we use the resources of this planet in a way to allow 9 billion people to have a decent life. That's the question that over the last 4 years we have tried to address and my department has just made a proposal, a text, drying out what we want to focus on in the next 5, 6 years and it's called living well within the limits of this planet and that really sums up how we look at the nexus issues. We have started being specialists, specialists for food or specialists for climate questions on energy issues, on water issues, on chemicals, on air quality and we have tried to define policy replies answers that would focus just on this one narrow aspect and we're beginning to see that by doing this we take very often the wrong turns. One example that people are beginning to talk about this year is the year of air quality in Europe and Europe has on air quality a significantly different problem from other developed parts of this world, notably the United States. Why? Because we have focused due to climate change and energy use a lot on taking private transportation with diesel engines. Diesel engines were said to be less energy consuming. You get more mileage out of a liter of diesel with diesel engines than you got out of petrol and it's also said that it would be therefore less CO2 emitting and you were doing something good for climate. The problem with these diesel engines is that they leave through their exhaust fine particles in the air that have damming consequences on human health. The air quality or the lack thereof in Europe is today the biggest killer that we have, bigger than car accidents or bigger than other diseases. So we have produced by shifting a fleet of cars away from petrol to diesel because we wanted to be doing good for climate. We have created in our cities a problem with the air quality that we now have to address and addressing it now means that we have to take another U-turn, introduce additional forms of controlling had we thought through the nexus issue before just going for something that would be energy saving, we would have made smarter policy. In the introduction I heard that water, energy, it's quite clear that the two are linked. If we want to have water we need energy and water can be used to produce energy, the relationship between the two is very, very direct and food is very directly related to it also. My key message on the nexus story is it's great that here you're talking about not just energy but that you've added food and water. It would be even better if we looked at all of the different environmental challenges and impacts if we took biodiversity and ecosystems and our effect on those into account. If we therefore made clear that we have a better understanding of what chemical substances we use in our production processes because unfortunately those substances we find back through wastewater in our surface waters that we see these substances possibly in the air as additional pollutants and that it's also very clear that where we have water and air quality problems we're immediately having soil problems also and soils is what we need, fertile soils is what we need to produce food. The way in which we consume, the way in which we produce is really circular and what we put out there into an environment eventually through food chain or through what we drink, what we breathe, the air that we breathe comes back to affect our own health as humans and I think it's very important that we begin to be a lot more focused and aware of those issues. Last but not least in to describe a little bit the overall nexus picture we need to take a lot more attention to waste. The way we produce and consume so far is extremely wasteful. We have learned, we have developed over the last century to dig up the ground to take out the raw materials that we needed to produce goods and when we didn't like them any longer to put them back into the ground, into landfills. That was the kind of life of our products. We're producing incredible amounts of waste and this waste very often is rather toxic and dangerous. It's not only the very direct toxic forms that we have to worry about. We see today in our oceans, we call it plastic soup, fine particles of all kinds of plastics that are prevalent in all our oceans and that through the oceans again through food chain are beginning to come back into our direct lives. We can no longer afford, particularly in going forward to 9 billion people that want to consume, we can no longer handle waste as waste. We have to begin to use waste as a secondary raw material and to bring it back into a circle economy. We are beginning to do this and I think in Europe we're rather more advanced in moving in this direction than in many other parts of the world and perhaps this has to do with the fact that we are not that well endowed with primary resources. So trying to use secondary resources is something that economically is more easily understood but we still have among the 28 European member states where 95% of household waste of municipal waste goes into landfills. We have member states where that percentage is at or below 1%. So we have a huge difference in understanding and in moving forward into a resource efficient circular economy that takes account of the interrelations between availability of natural resources of raw materials and the way we treat them. But that is going to be the real big challenge for the future. Now let me say a few words on the more narrow nexus also that you have put up here. We know that today we have already a rough billion people who have no regular access to drinking water. One billion now. We're adding two billion in the developing countries to our population. So you can imagine what challenge we have. We have some 2.5, 2.6 billion people who have no adequate nutrition today as we speak. We have another 2.6, 2.7 billion people who have no adequate cooking and heating facilities. We have over a billion people who have no access to electricity. We have 2.5 billion people who have no access to decent sanitation. All of those numbers are very directly related to the three elements of the nexus that we're talking about here. And that situation is very rapidly degrading. It's getting worse. It's not getting better. So we need to focus on these issues. And I think the ways in which we are trying in Europe to define these policies is to basically create an awareness of the availability of these resources. When I give a presentation, normally people are very surprised when I say that we are moving into a water scarce period. I had to give speeches in Brussels about water scarcity. And everyone was telling me, you must be not quite right. Look outside. It's raining again. As always, you can't try to pretend that we have water scarcity in Belgium. The groundwater levels in Belgium are coming down. We are abstracting. Even in rainy Belgium, we're abstracting more water than mother nature is regenerating as we speak. And that is as problematic as if you were spending more from your bank account than you're putting into it. At some point in time, you're going to be without the resource. So we need to create this awareness. And awareness in the systems in which we work very often comes with price. If something has no price or a low price, then people feel that, well, there is no problem in using it or even abusing that resource. I learned that lesson when I first started to talk to European beer producers about their use of water. Thought it might be a story that is of interest in Ireland also. But I was talking to Belgian breweries about the water they use in producing a liter of beer. And when I raised this question three years ago with them, they were saying that they use roughly 7 liters of water for 1 liter of beer. But having had a discussion between us, they said we actually think we can do better.  And over the last three years, they have made really substantive progress in that direction, which shows that it was not all that difficult. It just needed awareness. It just needed started to think about the fact that you can reuse water. You don't just think that water is going to be plenty and you just take it out. And the used water is sort of dismissed back into nature. So this awareness raising is what European policy is very largely about. But I told you in the beginning that the issue that we're talking about is a global issue. Who's only for Europe with no demographic growth, the challenges would be very different. But we are part of a planet. So we need to find these global solutions. And we were last year in Rio, 20 years after Rio 92, the first sort of sustainability world summit, to try to see how we can collectively address this challenge of 9 billion people on this planet. And there I think we still have a lot of work to do. For the moment, it is very largely Europeans who argue for resource efficiency and for a better, more sustainable growth path. Developing countries are very largely still copying the way in which they think, probably they are largely right, Europe and the United States have industrialized and have developed the level of wealth that we're enjoying for the moment. And they're just basically saying, you did it that way, now it's our turn, we want to do it in exactly the same way. And when we come and say, hey, we have to collectively be aware that there's only so much a limited amount of natural resources on this planet, then they basically think that we're trying to slow down their growth. So what we need to do is we need to come up with development models, with economic development models that show that resource efficiency works and that a circular economy not putting waste into landfills, but using waste, bringing waste, keeping waste within the circular economy for next generation of products, that this is at least as competitive and at least as good in creating jobs and creating wealth for people who are desperately looking for being lifted out of poverty. That debate is taking place for the moment and we need to really move this debate forward. It is relevant when we look at the food issue. One of the issues that in Brussels we are still striving with in terms of understanding the nexus is what happens if in Europe we produce less food, we shift to producing biofuels? How does that affect the global availability of food? How does it affect availability of soils and what does it do to climate change? We know that breaking up grassland, breaking up cutting down forest, breaking up forest land to produce food will set enormous amounts of CO2 free that will very directly and very seriously add to our climate change problems. On the other hand, from a development point of view, for the last 30 years we have been pushed to produce less food in Europe and to have food produced in developing countries for their own needs. Development of developing countries very often will have to start with agriculture. It's one of the things that everyone relatively quickly can pick up and some startup industrial sectors but agriculture always is a key sector there. The point I want to come to is called ILOC, Indirect Land Use Change. Basically the reasoning is that we say that land use change can be problematic for biodiversity on this planet. We cut down forests, we dramatically reduce biodiversity, we weaken ecosystems and this will have very significant negative effects on the capacity of humans to exist on this planet. We therefore should be careful about how we do this but if we want to increase agricultural production in developing countries then somehow more soil, more territory will have to be used to produce this food in these countries. If as a consequence of that in Europe we produce less food should we leave our soils unused or can those soils be used to producing renewable energy which is something that we all collectively need. We need to move away from fossil energies to renewable energies and biomass can be one of those renewable energies that we're looking forward to. We're here in a way trying to deal with a chicken and egg situation. What is there first? What is triggering the land use change? Is it the demand in Europe, possibly in the United States for biofuels, for renewable forms of fuel? Or is it the fact that we are shifting food production anyway to those parts of the world where demographic growth is taking place? Are we moving food production into developing countries to face their growing numbers? And is that the starting point? Or where do we start? Looking into this has very concrete outcomes because if it is taking place anyway, if food production is supposed to move into developing countries to move towards the demographic growth areas, then there is choice in the other parts about the use of land, of soil in their territories. If, however, we are the beginning, we're the starting point, we're shifting out of food production into biofuel production, then we are creating shortage globally for food and therefore we would be held responsible. So this chicken and egg question is not just a theoretical question, but it is one that has very direct consequences on how policy can be defined, can be formulated. If you take a moment, you will see that in this communication living well within the limits of our planet, we have tried to address all those different linkages in making it clear that Europe is linked in to a global environment, but also that all the sectoral aspects are very directly linked with each other and that we cannot, as policy makers, just say that my driving motivation is to have clean water, clean surface water all over Europe full stop and I don't look at other issues. If I don't look at other issues, A, I will miss my clean water target because if I forget that the water, surface water is in direct contact with soil and with air and if those two other resources are polluted then my water will be polluted, I'm missing that, but I'm missing also the fact that without or only with clean water we won't be able to have a livable life in our respective areas. So we need this global understanding, we need to take holistic approaches, we need to define policies that become more scarce, aware, scarcity, the limits of this planet, this planet cannot be expanded, therefore the answer since we have demographic growth, and that to me is the starting challenge, if we had a way of making sure that we're not becoming more and more and more on this planet, things would look differently, but we are going to become more. Every projection that comes up is talking about the 9 billion number, what happens after that is less clear, but we're quite certainly going to be 9 billion. That is true, then we have to be more resource efficient and resource efficient means circular economy. We have to make sure that we have water balances where we understand that we're not abstracting more water than the world, than the region where we're living can regenerate. We have to make sure that our air is of a quality that is worth, that takes into account health needs. Our Chinese friends are just beginning to realize that air really is something of very, very high value and that you have forgotten about air quality, then the environment is going to make you pay very, very dearly for it. We need to look about balance on soil. Soils are very much abused also. In Europe, we completely seal off every year a surface equivalent to the size of Berlin. I'm using Berlin not only because I'm German, but because in Europe it is the biggest city in territorial size. Every 10 years, we take out one complete member state of the European Union. Every 10 years, we seal off soil equivalent to the surface of Cyprus. When you think about it, I think very quickly you can understand that this is not a sustainable way to move forward. How are we taking it away? We're taking it away because our cities are growing. There's growing urbanization. There's growing use of infrastructure and all of these need to sealing off soil. When it's sealed off, there is no more biodiversity. There's no more alternative use for all this. So we need to think in all the key natural resources of this planet of how our policy can be made sustainable. And sustainability, true for financial sustainability also, is that you cannot, over an extended period of time, take more out of your bank account than you put back into it. It's the old story. It should be so easy, but so many of us have got it wrong, both in the financial area, unfortunately also in the environmental area. And I hope that the kind of talk that we're having here today will create a better awareness for the needs to plan policy, to plan policy in a sustainable manner. Anna goes through respecting the limits of the planet and moving into a circular economy. Thank you very much.


There are two converging ideas about the college experience.  I really resent whoever came up with those ideas because how is a person supposed to live under those conditions? Here's the thing, if you're having too much fun, then you're not doing it right because you aren't working hard enough. But if you're working too hard, then you're also not doing it right because you're supposed to be having fun. Um, because, like, that's just a lot to think about. Like, that's just truly, like, a lot. That's a lot to cover. I don't know. Then COVID hit, and my college experience, for lack of a better word, was completely f***ed. And it was only then that I started living. So you may be wondering, how does one start living? What was I doing before? You may ask. You have been dead until now. Weird thing, weird thing about this, because usually I don't have a concrete answer. I actually, I do have a concrete answer for this video of how to start living, and it's twofold. So we're going to start with the, um, the number one fold. I cannot emphasize how little I thought about my decisions this year for me. To be honest, I was personally so overwhelmed after COVID being around people again. I was extremely anxious in crowds, or with, like, even just talking to people on a couch. I'm wearing a mask, washing my hands like crazy, and everybody has a cold. I don't have a cold. I would worry about putting my mask on, or how close I was sitting next to somebody constantly. I was constantly worried about it the first couple of months I was here. Honestly, the only thing that I could do for myself at this point was to just live through it. It wasn't going to be perfect, and I did need it to be. Because on top of all of that's pandemic stuff, I was now living in a new country, navigating a new social system, school system, culture, making new friends. I could go on. The first week I was here, I really struggled with the maps. Here, you might, for, like, two blocks of street time, it might be Fifth Avenue, but then after that second block, it'll change to, like, Pineapple Street. That should be nice, but then also the dining hall, like, it stresses me out that there's, like, no-to-go cups, like, in the dining hall. You just kind of have to, like, sit always and have coffee where I'm like, but what if I have things to do? You can drink in the street in Scotland. So in order to contextualize all this, I need to take you back to the first couple of days that I was here. I was physically alone for a few days, so didn't really, didn't barely see another human being. And then on, like, day three, I randomly met these two study abroad students.   And I was like, yeah, sure. Do you want to meet? No, wait, I didn't have any friends at the point. Then, like, these other people messaged me on Facebook, and they were like, hey, do you want to meet for coffee? And I was like, yeah, sure, I do. And then I introduced those people to the other people, and I went to, like, a million events and then met all these other new people and then introduced the new people to the other new people. And then by the end of the week, I had met 1,400,000 people, and I needed to lie down. And that was just the week the international students arrived, okay? Because next week, it was Freshers Week. Now on top of all of this, all these new people I've met, now there's, you know, I'm living with freshmen. I am now faced with the challenge of living with 18-year-olds as a 22-year-old, and that just makes you feel like the biggest loser and imposter. And really, I could have let that stop me so easily that first week, but you know what I did? But you know what I did? I stopped. Life has been super temporary for the past, like, four years, pretty much. My first year of college, I was, like, really trying to figure everything out. And then my second year, I basically kind of had to start all over when then the pandemic hit, and then I took gap year, and now I'm here, and then next year, I'm going to have to, like, sort of start all over again. So I feel like I've had a lot of practice sort of starting over. How do I put this? I'm not saying that I said yes to everything this year, because honestly, at the beginning of this year, I said no to a lot of stuff because I wasn't ready, and I don't regret that because I was doing my best. But the more that I said yes, the more doors opened, the more open that I became. You know, I said yes to travel, to people, to try new things, to dancing, to singing in a, you know, a crowd in London at Christmas fireworks on the beach on a Scottish holiday where I barely knew anybody. I even said yes to Haggis that one time. I did. And I want to emphasize that saying yes came in all forms, even in saying no. And what I mean by this is I said yes to myself this year more than I ever have. You know, if I knew something wasn't meant for me, I, you know, not always because I'm not a perfect person, but, you know, I just, more than ever this year, I just, I simply just let things go, which I have not been very good at doing in the past.  And I just, this year I was just like, I simply do not have time. You know, I just, I led with good intentions. And, you know, even if that meant saying no with good intentions, I did. I did that. And it was really good for me.  So I had to, you know, I can't play it fast and loose with what am I doing? No, I have to have to play fast and loose. I don't know. I was just like, I was trying to chill out, man.  And after a year of living like this, I just, I think I've just, this is now how I, this is now me.  But like now I just think it's like, I think that's just like who I am now, which is like super cool, man. That's a, I think I'm a chill person. A kid and when you're like in college, I think we all have this mindset of like, oh, I make a friend, and they're going to be my friend for the rest of my life. And I do have friends like that, but then I think in the past couple of years, it's like, I've like lived, I've like lived a lot of different lives in the past four years. So the thing that I've learned the most this year about people is saying yes to people for a short time. You can learn a lot from them. And it doesn't have to be this super intense thing.   And I know that may sound super stupid to somebody, but like, I think a lot of people need to hear that because you know, friendship is really complicated and there's a lot of like expectations and I really let go of a lot of those expectations this year and it made my life just like, exorbitantly better. You know, for somebody who films my life, I really don't film a lot of this. But I'm pulling, I pulled, I pulled a lot of this series like from my literal, like actual diary. It's this one. I wrote on the last page like a list of all the stuff that I had done to somebody who is like an adventurous person or I don't know like a different human being than I am. Somebody might look at this list and be like, I'm not really, what are you talking about?  But I am still proud of myself. Like I really am. And the thing that I wrote at the top of this page was you didn't become a new person but you grew. And if I have come to any conclusions this year is that that is all that you can ask for and that is what living is about. And I love having like all these new friends this year and like I'm, I am having such a wonderful time. Like I've met so many like really wonderful people that I've missed so much. But, oh my gosh, like after I talked to her like I was in homesick.


All right. Welcome, everyone, to today's Google Webmaster Central Office Hours Hangouts. My name is John Mueller. I'm a webmaster trends analyst here at Google in Switzerland. And part of what we do are these office hours hangouts where webmasters, publishers, people who put content online can join in and ask questions about websites and web search essentially. As always, if any of you want to get started and ask the first question, feel free to jump on it now. Can I? Hi, John. All right. Sounds like we have two people, so maybe one after another. And then we'll do both of you. Please go ahead. All right, go for it. Actually, I saw something in the answer box, like the image is only black background, nothing else. The image is a black background. Yeah. I don't know. That can happen, I guess, if we pick up an empty image at some point. OK, I just want to know that any algorithm update for the answer box? No, anything specific there. But I know this is something that people are always working on, so I wouldn't be surprised if things change there over time. OK, fine. Thank you. Can I ask a question? Sure. OK, I have some questions about the better add standards, if it's possible, if you can help me with that. Maybe. I can try. I've just been in touch with them on the side, so I don't have all of the detailed information on what all is happening, but maybe I can. OK, so basically, we own an affiliate network and we have a lot of problems lately with our publishers because they received a lot of messages with recording videos from you guys, showing that some banners are not OK, even if they are, I don't know, mobile 300 for 100 is not too big. But they were flagged as inappropriate. Can I? I can't remember. I can't understand why. That's my problem, basically. What I would do is go in the help form that they have set up for that. I think it's called the form for ad experience report and post about that specifically there. I've seen people from the team have been regularly replying to the threads there. Sometimes they can give specific information. Sometimes it's more a general kind of thing where we don't have specific numbers to share, we can say like 400 pixels is OK, 405 pixels is too much. Sometimes that's not the granularity at which these are defined. Yeah, according to the rules, I saw the banner must not go over 30% of the screen. And that's OK, but as far as I understood, you have problems also with the banners that have blinking buttons or something like that. Is this possible? I don't know. I would ask him in that help form. Thank you. OK, let's hope we can get back from other people there if the person from Google can't give you exactly what you're looking for. Sometimes they can point you at some similar things, too. OK, thank you very much. Sure. Hi, John. I've got a question. I dropped you a line the other day around elastic search. And we feel probably one of our competitors has done something against one of our sites where it's found a loophole in the elastic search to allow it to generate URLs. And we feel that they've been somewhat how indexed by yourselves. We don't have it in our site map. They don't kind of exist in our URL structures. It was about 6,000 URLs. And because of the URL parameters, it's very similar to our pagination. We can't kind of say, on robots.txt, to block that URL structure. Is there any way that you can think of how we can try and get rid of these 6,000 URLs from the index, please? That's kind of tricky if the URL pattern is very similar. So what you might be able to do is to server the index with your own code on the end in your CMS. That might be an option. But the difficulty with using no index there is that it means we're still going to crawl these URLs.  Then that's something you almost need to find some combination of robots.txt parameters that can catch this. So sometimes you can do that with wild cards where you can say parameter equals a, asterix, for example, and kind of go through the letters where you're seeing these problems to make sure that the pagination versions of those parameters are still crawlable. And just those specific patterns are kind of blocked. But that's really kind of tricky when the URL pattern looks very similar to URL patterns that you do want to have indexed. Yeah, I think also the issue is then of going through your search console to bulk remove these pages is a rather problem because obviously it only allows individual removal. And that's our next thing. So we kind of have an idea of the URL structure in these 6,000 pages. But then how do we then remove them from your index? Because it's kind of affecting us as seeing it as duplicate content, for instance. I wouldn't worry too much about the index part. If you have the longer term plan figured out with like new index or robots.txt or something, then that will settle down on its own. It's not something that you'd need to urgently remove from the index. The urgent removal tool from in-search console actually doesn't remove it from the index. It just hides it in the search results. So that probably wouldn't be what you're actually looking for. It will look like it's OK, but actually it's still in our index until we've actually reprocessed it normally. What you could do is perhaps set up a sitemap file with those URLs and submit that with a new change date for those URLs once you've added the noindex tag to them. And we'll go off and re-crawl them, see that the noindex tag is there, and then drop them from our primary index. OK, perfect. Thank you. All right. Let me run through some of the questions that were submitted. And as always, I'm sure there'll be more time for your comments and questions along the way. And we'll try to keep some time towards the end as well. Since I announced this fairly shortly a couple of days ago, we don't have millions of questions yet. So maybe we have a good chance of making it. We're trying to improve our product pages by adding FAQs, videos, and manufacturers documentation basically to make it as informative for the user as possible. Would we get some benefit from the Panda algorithm if we do this to improve our pages? So just generally stepping back, I would not worry about the Panda algorithm in a situation like this. If you're really improving your pages for your users, then that's something that we hope to pick up across the board from our algorithms. And it's not something that you'd need to do just to make the Panda algorithm happy. Essentially, if you make your users happy, then that's something we'll try to understand as well. So I would mostly focus on the user part and figure out what it makes sense to really provide for users that makes your pages significantly better than everything else out there. And that could be by adding these kind of information. And if you focus on the user, then usually that kind of algorithmic part settles down on its own as well. Some websites constantly change their landing page content every time you refresh the page and use these blocks of content to share amongst their pages to make them look unique at every refresh. This technique seems to allow them to outrank other pages. What are your thoughts on this? So first off, this is something that a lot of websites do not specifically for Google in the sense that a lot of pages are very dynamic. And they set up their site in a way that kind of automatically creates something new every time people view it. From our point of view, that's not necessarily a good thing, though. Because if you're changing the internal architecture of your website every time we look at your pages, that makes it really hard for us to figure out which of these pages are important, which of these pages are higher-level category pages, kind of things going up, and which of these pages are related to the current page you're on that are kind of further down in the hierarchy of the website. So from my point of view, this is not something that I would say really profits a website. Because every time we look at it, it looks different. And that can be pretty confusing sometimes. So from that point of view, that's something I personally wouldn't just recommend following blindly in the hope that you too can outrank everyone else. Sometimes there are other reasons why a website ranks, despite doing these techniques like this, that actually kind of hinder a page more from being recognized for the content on the page and to understand the context of this piece of content within your bigger website. If we 301 a page, can we take that content and reuse it on a new page where the 301 is going to? Yes, definitely. You can do that. So 301 is a really common use case is when you're moving content from one URL to another one. You let us know that this has permanently moved to the new URL. And in that case, you do take the content from one page and you put it on a different page. And the 301 tells us, focus on the kind of redirection target page instead of the original page. That's perfectly fine to do. Can the placement of internal links on a page have an effect on how the destination page is ranked? In general, kind of where you put the links on a page is less important than that we actually do find links on a page that are pointing at other parts of the website. So that's something that we've sometimes run across websites where we do have a problem that we can't crawl them properly because the internal navigation just isn't available. Sometimes what happens is they have a big search section on the website, and you can search for that content, and you can find it through search. But it's not actually linked internally with the internal navigation. And that makes it really hard for us to find all of this content. Because Google Cloud can't go in there and just search for all variations that it thinks there might be potential content out there on this website for. So we kind of have to try to find a way to crawl through that. So instead of worrying too much where you place those internal links, I would just make sure that you do have internal links on those pages. And to test the internal linking and the crawlability of a website, there are lots of really cool tools out there that can help you to figure that out or to try it out, kind of similar to how Googlebot might do that. One tool I know of is Screaming Frog. That's really popular. I haven't used that myself, so I can't vouch for that. But that's something that I've heard a lot of people do use for this kind of testing of a website to make sure that it's actually crawlable. And I think that's a really important thing to do. Even if you feel your website is actually pretty good with crawlability, then that actually makes it a lot easier for you to kind of understand what search engines might be doing when they come to a website. And then you see, oh, these internal links are actually set up in a bad way, or they're linking to different URL variations, and suddenly you have a giant mess of URLs on your website when this crawler goes through there. That's something that you might not have kind of this intuition initially when you look at your website. And having a crawler run through that and you watching what the crawler actually does, that can be really insightful. We just recently disappeared from the Knowledge Graph on the side. This happened since replacing old content with new content on approximately 1,000 pages and using 301s. Is there anything we can do to correct this? So the Knowledge Graph, the Knowledge Panel on the side is something that's generated algorithmically. That's not something that we can guarantee that a website will always be seen there. So that's something where sometimes it takes a bit of time for things to settle down. If you're reorganizing your website, restructuring your website with new URLs, with redirects, with content kind of moving around, then that's kind of normal to take a bit of time to actually be understood by our systems. And there's a chance that we pick up the right information to show in a Knowledge Graph again on the side, but it's not guaranteed. So this is something I definitely give a time. And if after the time you notice that it still isn't picking up the way that it was before, I might double check that you actually do have the same information on those pages, that it can still be found, that information on your pages, that you're using the right kind of structured markup, if that's available for your setup, that we can actually extract that information easily. And if all of that is OK and you still can't figure it out, I would go to the Webmaster Help Forum, where people have a lot of experience with kind of digging through website issues in general. And sometimes they're just general issues that are in the way of us picking up the information in an optimal way. So that's kind of the approach I would take there. Oh, gosh. What would you recommend for 2018 if you had to pick three things to concentrate on to improve rankings? I don't know. That's kind of tricky. I don't know what three things I would focus on there. Let's see. So I guess the kind of turning around and looking at the topics that we're currently looking at for 2018, which might kind of fold into what you could be looking at for 2018. On the one hand, it's trying to make sure that JavaScript sites work really well in search. That's still something that we find a bit challenging from time to time. And understanding how JavaScript works, how rendering works, that's a topic that I think will be pretty important for this year, because more and more sites are using these modern frameworks and making sure that they work in search is something that, as an SEO, you have a chance of playing a role there. On the other hand, if you just go and say, oh, it uses JavaScript, I can't help you with that, then you might be missing a big opportunity there. So that's one thing I would focus on. Mobile is definitely also still something that's really, really important, essentially making sure that all of your page's content is available completely and all functionality is available completely on mobile devices in a really good user experience. So not just taking your desktop pages and mapping them one to one to mobile, but really making sure that they're really fast, that they have all of the information that is needed on there, that they have all of the information that you need to be visible in search, like what you want to be found for, that they have all of the functionality of your desktop pages so that people don't have to kind of bookmark this URL and then send it to them by e-mail and look at it on a desktop computer a little bit later. Chances are they'll forget about that. And they won't convert if they have to go to a desktop computer to actually convert. So that's one thing that I would also focus on. And the third thing is something that we've also been talking about for a while now, everything around structured data. I think that's something that is still kind of hit and miss for some websites where working together with a web designer and making sure that you mark up the right things, that you're using JSON-LD, mark up on pages where that makes sense, all of those things combine, can play a role in how we pick up the content. And sometimes that's not mapping directly to rankings. Sometimes that might be mapping to different ways of appearing in search, which could be that maybe Google Assistant is able to extract more information about your business thanks to the structured data market that you have on those pages, and through that is able to recommend your business in ways that a normal web search engine might not be able to do. So those are the things that I would be focusing on there. Whether or not all of these improve your rankings, I think is kind of short-sighted thinking, because that's making the assumption that everything around search will stay the same, and it's just a matter of sites shifting up and down in the search results. And that's pretty much guaranteed not to be the case. There are almost certainly bigger changes in search happening where it's not just a matter of things shifting slightly up and down, but rather of things being used completely different. So that's kind of my take on that. All right, let's see. If a product is no longer in stock, what would you recommend doing? So this question comes up fairly often, and I think my recommendation would be that we should write a blog post about this so that people have something to actually look at in documentation kind of point of view. Journal's options here are let the page stay indexable, but have structured data to indicate the product is no longer in stock. 302 redirect the product page to a nearly identical variant. Let the page stay live, but set meta no index. Let the page stay live, but have a canonical pointing to a nearly identical variant. So what I would do in a case like this, before we actually have our documentation set up that you can follow, is kind of differentiate between situations where a product is permanently out of stock and never going to be in stock again and nobody is going to care about this product anymore in the future and the situation where the product is kind of temporarily out of stock and might be back in stock at some later point. And I guess a third variation might be that the product will never be in stock again, but you want to keep something as a reference. So with, let's see, those three situations in mind, if something is really permanently out of stock and never going to come back and you have a replacement product that's pretty identical, I would just redirect to that replacement product. That seems like the easiest solution there. From a search point of view, it might even make sense to just reuse the old URL and say, well, this is the URL of the new product instead. That helps you to kind of build on the existing URL rather than to have to worry about all of these redirects going to old versions and this 2011 version of the product redirects to 2012, 2013, 2015, 2018 version of the product, all of those redirects are a big hassle to maintain. So if you can keep the URLs and just replace the content, that's probably the ideal situation. If it's temporarily out of stock, then essentially that's up to you. I would probably keep that page as it is and maybe use structured data markup to indicate that it's no longer available at the moment. That way, we can keep indexing that page. We can keep crawling that page. And once you change the markup to say it's available again, we can pick that up and show that again. So nothing really changes there. If it's something that is moved to an archive situation where you say, well, we once had this thing and we want to have a placeholder for the documentation and the support material, all of that, I might consider moving it to an archive section of a website and just keeping it there as something that's not a part of your normal shop, not normal e-commerce setup, but kind of like a place where you keep kind of old documentation, old things together and just redirect to that page instead. So those are kind of three variations. I hope that covers the more common ones. And again, we should probably write this up at some point to make it a little bit easier to figure out what the options might be. From late December, different language versions of a site were canonicalized into one. It's shown in the new Search Console report. For example, de.example.com and en.example.com goes to en.example.com. And in the cache is the version of the German page shown as the English one. Has Google changed something from multi-lingual sites? Is it a problem with thin content or some issue with hreflang, canonical, or redirects? Hard to say exactly what is happening in this specific situation. When you say they were canonicalized into one, were they redirected to one URL or not? In general, when you make bigger changes with canonicalization with redirects, that can take a bit of time for things to settle down on our side, especially if it looks like these pages are not exactly identical. Then we might not be sure of which one to actually use and to show as a canonical one in the search results. So that's something where I suspect, since you're talking about the new Search Console report, this is fairly recent. And maybe it's just a matter of time until it actually settles down in the situation that you've provided there. And one thing I would just make sure to do there is if you have a preference regarding the canonical URL, then be as explicit as possible about that. So set up redirects from the old URL to the new one. Use the rel canonical. Make sure that all of the internal linking goes to the preferred version that you want. Make sure that the sitemap file points at the preferred version. All of these signals kind of add up for us. And the more we can clearly say this is the one that you want, therefore we'll show that one, the more likely we'll be able to pick that up. On the other hand, if the signal say a bit here and a bit here, and we're like, well, we need to make a decision, then maybe it'll go this way or maybe it'll go that way. And that kind of isn't really what you're looking for. What does duplicate content mean? Content copied from other websites or original content that's duplicated within a website? Which one to avoid most? Can a website be demoted if original content duplicates within website pages? So that's a complicated question, actually. So we have different types of duplicate content that we look at there. From our point of view, there are lots of technical reasons why within a website you might have the same content on multiple pages. And from our point of view, we try to help fix that for you as much as possible. So if we can recognize that these pages have the same content on them or the same primary content on them, then we'll try to fold that into one and make sure that all of the signals we have focus on that one page. On the other hand, if this is content copied from multiple locations, then that gets to be a bit trickier for us, because then we have the situation that this website has this content on it. Another website has the same content on it. Which one is actually the one that we need to show in search? That makes it a lot harder, because then it's not a question between which one of your pages we want to show, but which one of these pages by different people or on different servers do we want to show. And there might be strong opinions by both sides saying I want to have my version show. So that makes it a little bit trickier. The trickiest one or the one where maybe it's not trickiest, the one where you really need to watch out for with regards to duplicate content is if within your content, the majority of the content is copied from other sources or the majority of the content is kind of rewritten, repurposed from other sources. Then when our algorithms look at your website, they're like, well, I've seen everything from this website before. There's nothing of value essentially here that we would miss if we didn't index this website, because all of this content is based on something that's available on different parts of the web. And in a case like that, it can happen that our algorithms say, we need to kind of ignore this website completely. We don't need to focus on it in search. The manual web spam team might even come in and say, actually, it's a waste of our resources to even look at this website, because it's just pure copies of all of these other websites. Maybe slightly rewritten, but there's nothing unique here. And in those cases, we might remove a website completely from search. So that's kind of the one that you really need to watch out for. If it's really just a matter of your content on your website in multiple URLs, then from a technical point of view, you can improve that slightly by kind of having fewer copies on the website, but that's not something that you really need to watch out for. John. Yes. If someone copy content of our website, the DMCA, can you protect us? Can protect you. So I need to be clear that I can't give you legal advice. So I can't say you can use the DMCA to do this, or you should use it, or it's the right approach here. That's something where you need to have kind of legal advice from an advisor on your side first. The DMCA process is something that we do follow. So if you submit content to us and say, this was illegally copied from our website, then we will follow the right steps with the DMCA approach to kind of take whatever action is necessary there. And one thing to keep in mind here is that this is on a per URL basis, so it's not that you can come to us and say, well, this website copied a lot of our content. Do what you need to do, Google. But rather, you need to tell us explicitly, this URL on their website and this URL on our website, this is where the problems are, and Google needs to figure out what it needs to do there from a legal point of view. So that's kind of what you need to watch out for. But again, I can't give you advice on when to use this or where you need to use this. It's really something where you should get some legal help first to make sure that you're doing the right thing there. If you go off and do the DMCA complaints wildly without any kind of reason behind that, it's also possible that this backfires because it is a legal process. OK, thanks. John, off the back of that in my conversation earlier with you, we've got a similar issue. And actually, within this competitor, they've actually created a directory in the name of our website. So they've obviously sectioned off the whole area. And we can see where they basically duplicated all our URLs and our content, which they don't possess. Is there an easy way to go instead of going through a legal route to present this to Google? As far as I know, you need to go through the normal process there. So there is no bulk review or Google does a review kind of process. You really need to follow the steps on a per URL basis. OK, thank you. Hi, John. Hi. So I was about to ask you something about related to how Google calculates the quality of a piece of content. So what is the importance of the metrics like fresh reading, quite the length of paragraphs, the paragraphs after hearings, and the passive voice tone, or, for example, how difficult the text is written, and something like this in this direction? So from an SEO point of view, it's probably not something that you need to focus on in the sense that, as far as I know, we don't have these basic algorithms that just count words and try to figure out what the reading level is based on these existing algorithms. But it is something that you should figure out for your audience. So that's something where I see a lot of issues come up in that a website will be talking past their audience. So maybe you're making a common example as a medical site. You want to provide some medical information for the general public because you know they're worried about this. And all of your articles use these medical words that are 20 characters long. Yeah. It's something where, technically, it's all correct. And you could calculate the reading level score of that content. You come up with a number. But it's not a matter of Google kind of using that reading level score and saying this is good or bad, but rather it doesn't match what the people are searching for. If nobody's searching for those long words, then nobody's going to find your content. Or if they do find your content, they're going to be like, I don't know what this means. Does anyone have an English translation for this long word that I don't understand? And they go somewhere else to either convert or to read more or to find more information. So you don't have any specific algorithms which calculates these metrics or something like that? At least we don't have anything public that we say this is what we do and this is what happens there. It's something that I know the team is still working on this. So it's not like a one-time algorithm thing. And we figured it out. And now it's working forever. I know there are people here in Zurich that are still working on trying to understand the quality of pages better and to figure out where pages are good, where pages are bad, and when to show them where they're relevant. Thank you. Thank you, John. Sure. All right, let's see. Some more of the questions that were submitted. Is your guidance about infinite scroll from 2014 still good guidance to follow? Or would you offer any updates? From my point of view, that's still pretty relevant. So having something that changes the URLs in a way that they remain valid URLs that can be crawled and accessed directly, that's good. Having some kind of pagination links as well, I think that's really good as well, because that way, even if any search engine doesn't do this infinite scroll kind of action or event on a page, they can still crawl through those pages. So from that point of view, I think that guidance has aged surprisingly well. I haven't actually checked the sample site that we put up in a long time. Maybe we should double check to make sure that it's actually still working, but that's more a matter of kind of normal maintenance of a website. The second part of the question is any additional thoughts on how to help Googlebot crawl links loaded on scroll in spa build in Angular? So spa is a single-page app set up in Angular. I think that's a complicated topic. Lots of things to talk about there. I would recommend taking a look at the blog posts that we did for rendering. I think that was last fall. And also, at Google Developer Days in India, we did a presentation on making PWAs more indexable. Those are good places to start and probably help you kind of get started there. We also have a smaller Google Group set up specifically for JavaScript sites, where if you have specific questions around your site or kind of a design pattern in general, you can go there and get advice as well. I try to stay up to date with the threats that are happening there. So you might even get an answer directly from me there, or you definitely get an answer from one of the other people who have been working on trying to figure this out. So there are some things you do need to keep in mind. You can't just take any random JavaScript framework website and kind of assume that it works for Google. You do have to kind of watch out for some gotchas to make sure that nothing crazy happens when we render the pages. I'm curious as to how long you think it would take for a large sitemap of 301s to start showing degraded index rates of URLs contained in the sitemaps. I know 301 sitemaps are improper, but it's a technical question, our curiosity. I don't think we have any number that we have for this. So it really depends a lot on the website itself. And on some sites, we crawl millions of URLs every day. And then 10,000 URLs more or less is like, nobody cares. It's like, in the noise. And we can pick that up fairly quickly. On the other hand, on other sites, maybe we just call a couple thousand URLs every day. And then 10,000 URLs more, that does mean a significant amount more to kind of process and spread over time. So that could take a lot longer there. So there's no real kind of time point of view where I could say, this is how long it should take and this is how long it shouldn't take. From a rough order of magnitude point of view, I don't think this really helps, but I'm thinking with somewhere between a couple of days for a website where we do crawl and index a lot of content to maybe four, five, six months for pages where we don't crawl a lot of content, where it takes a long time between crawls for us actually to get through everything. So that's a pretty big time frame to keep in mind there. And finally, one thing that makes this a bit tricky is if you're using site queries to look this up in Google Search, so not in Search Console, then it might even be that after this period of time, we tell you a number for the site query that is still significantly higher. And the reason for that is that we still understand this mapping of the old URLs to the new URLs. And if it looks like you're explicitly searching for the old URLs, we'll try to be helpful and show them to you. So you might do a site query for a site that moved to a new domain maybe a year or two ago, and you might still see results there. And that's not a sign that something is broken. It might just be our algorithms trying to say, hey, this person is looking for these old URLs. I know about these URLs, so I'll be helpful and bring them to the user, even though we've moved all of the content to the new URLs in any time. A quick question about GPS coordinates in schema, is it essential using GPS coordinates within code or via schema for a website business focusing for its clients based in different locations or states in a country? As far as I know, we don't use GPS coordinates in that regard. So if you have addresses on a page, then that's something I would mark up. But as far as I know, we don't use GPS coordinates. So this year, if your business is located in a place where there is no actual postal address, I don't know what we would do in a case like that. If that's the situation for you, then I would love to find out more. So feel free to maybe contact me on Twitter or on Google+, and I'll try to figure out a little bit more with the schema.org folks on our sign. If it's really a matter of different business locations and you do have addresses, then I would focus on addresses and not GPS coordinates. Just around that, John, obviously you're getting better image recognition. Are you using at all any of the EXIF data within images? Or is there any benefit when you're talking about local image search, for instance? Because obviously when you're using something like Tinypng or something like that, to optimize it often strips out the EXIF data. And is there any benefit to keep some of the EXIF data in images to help with local image SEO, and so forth? So the last time I checked on this was a couple of years ago, and we did use some of the EXIF data there. But that was specifically for image search. So I don't know if that's so useful in a case like yours. So if someone is searching for a location in image search and we have this information about the location for the images, then that might be useful for us to actually show those URLs in image search. But it's not the case that we would use the EXIF data in images and apply that to the ranking of the web page itself. So those are kind of different situations. Sure. Sure. Thanks. But I should really double check with the image team to see what the current status is with regards to EXIF. And maybe there is something we should document a little bit better to kind of make sure that if we are using it that people are aware of that and they don't use tools that strip out this information without adding it back in at the right time. Thanks. In the EU, we must add a cookie policy page. This is something we add by default on every site that we create. The content is obviously the same. Is this considered duplicate content? Hard to be creative on that matter. That's perfectly fine. If this is kind of a div on your website that you have across all of your sites, that's the way it is. And for the most part, we should be looking at these pages and saying, well, this is kind of copied across the board. And we know it's the same everywhere. But there's actually unique content elsewhere on this page. And we'll try to focus on that unique content. So that's something that, from our point of view, should be no problem. The important part for us is that we can still render these pages. So if your cookie policy page is actually a redirect that goes somewhere and sets a cookie and redirects back, then that's something that could potentially block us from actually crawling and indexing your content. On the other hand, if it's like a subtle banner on the bottom or something on top or like a box somewhere, and we can still see the rest of the page when we render that content, then that's perfectly fine. Canonical A to B, then after one month, we do a no index on A. Does page B drop in ranking? Because the related signals from A are not transferred anymore. I don't know. That's interesting kind of setup there. In general, when you have a canonical from one page to the other one, and we have a canonical because we see that it's kind of a confirmed thing in that the same content is both on both of these pages. You have the internal links also pointing to your new canonical. Then usually, we kind of treat that as a redirect. So if there's a redirect in place, then we do forward those signals. If after some time, the redirect drops out and a lot of the signals are still applying to the old URL, then that could be a bit of a problem. On the other hand, if you've moved all of those signals to the redirect target already, then if the original page drops out, then it's gone. It doesn't really have any role anymore because there's nothing attached to that original URL anymore. We are storing additional website information in Google Docs, which spiders don't pick up. Would it be found and credited to the web page if linked to a blog or is there a better platform? So we can index some content from Google Docs, but I believe you have to set it public to everyone, of course, so that we can actually look at that content. But it's sometimes tricky for us to pull out the content from Google Docs with all of the formatting options and everything. It can look pretty complicated to a search engine. So if this is critical content for your website, then I would make sure that at least the critical part is also on your pages so that we can find your web pages for that critical content. You can have a link to the Google Docs page there as well. And users can go to the Google Docs page to get detailed information, kind of like you would go to a PDF file to get a detailed document on that topic as well. But at least we'd be able to find your web page and rank that appropriately based on the content that you have on the web page as well. Let's see. Four questions. With the new Search Console data, we can see 16 months of data for a single domain property. Will this look-back window also be available to property sets? As far as I know, property sets are also on the horizon. So that's something that should be happening. If a website rewrites a URL but doesn't return 300 status code, can Crawler figure that out that the URL has changed? For example, you request one URL on the server. It turns a different one with 200 OK. So if the server returns a different URL, then that sounds like there's actually a redirect happening. And if that's the case, then that's fine. If you're just returning the content of a different URL and kind of making both of these URLs available, then it's a matter of us figuring out canonicalization. And sometimes that can go one way, sometimes another way. So again, make sure that all of the signals are aligned. Two websites with similar content, each representing a branch in a different city. We're seeing one site's pages in Google Cache and snippets for the other one. Can we take any steps beyond canonicalization to prevent this? Usually this happens when large portions of the website are copied across both of these sites. Then we assume that, actually, the whole website is kind of a copy of another, and we try to help you by just picking one and showing that. So if you don't want that to happen, then make sure that these pages are really unique, that the whole website on its own can stand on its own is not seen as mostly a copy of another website. And let's see, final question here. Google is rewriting our meta descriptions even after we've optimized them. So what can we tell Google to stop doing that? We do change the snippets and the title of pages we show in Search. And that's not really something that you can control. It's also something that depends on the query that people use. So that's something where provide good titles, provide good descriptions, if you try to use them, but we can't guarantee that. I don't think it's going to work. I don't think it's going to work. Ah, but I think it's going to work. Of course, I have suggested that search console data is unreliable. Can this data be trusted to make important business decisions? For example, if click-in impressions data is only showing half the story, can it be trusted as proportional, even if it isn't showing us all the data? So I don't know specifically what is mentioned in this blog post. It mentions Webmaster Tools, so that sounds like it's pretty old. For the most part, the data that we do show in Search Console is not absolutely complete. It's something that is, however, a significant portion of the information that we have for our website, and it's meant to be as representative as possible. So for example, when it comes to clicks and impressions, we do figure out things that only happen very rarely. We filter them out primarily for privacy reasons, so that these one-off searches can't be linked back to specific users. But that's something that, overall, across a bigger website generally ends up being somewhere in the noise. And the other aspect there is that it's sometimes really hard to actually measure what a website is exactly getting for traffic. So sometimes, even if you're looking at analytics data, which is generally pretty good, there's lots of reasons why that data might not be complete. That could be that people are using ad blockers and blocking some of these scripts.  So that's something where, if you look at different sources of data, you will always see differences. I don't think there's ever a case, unless you've blocked the website completely from the internet, that you will see the same data when looking at very different ways of tracking kind of that data. We created a booklet PDF with good information on government disability regulations, and we want to make it freely available. Much of the content in these documents is taken from articles from our website. The PDFs are text documents, not image documents, contain no text anchors. Will duplicate content in the PDF document harm our website's ranking or other websites that choose to host it? Nope, definitely not. If the PDF is hosted on another good quality website, can links in the document pointing to our website potentially improve our websites ranking? So from what I understand, links in PDFs we do try to pick up. But as far as I know, we treat them similar to links in text files that we don't pass in signals through those links. So that's not something where you probably see any change in rankings due to other people hosting your PDF. What will also probably happen with these PDFs is that we'll recognize that these are the identical PDFs, and that's something that's a lot easier with PDFs because you do copy them one to one. And we'll generally try to pick one of these PDFs on one location and try to index it there. So what you can do if you want to have your version as the index version is use the rel canonical header, which you can specify as an HTTP header as well for PDF files and tell us that this is actually the canonical version. That can help us there, but it's still not guaranteed that we always pick the PDF that you host on your website because sometimes there might be reasons to actually pick it up somewhere else. And from a general point of view, if you're trying to spread this information, if this PDF has information about your company, links back to your website with more information, then it probably doesn't really matter which one we index because people will find this document. They'll find a way to go back to your website to get more information. And that's probably what you're kind of looking for. So that should just kind of work out. Can you tell me scenarios due to which my US site gets ranked in all regions, Google Search, but not the local site for that specific region? We have hreflang in place, site links are displayed for US Google Search, but not for all local sites. So this is completely normal. We do try to have local rankings when we think that people are searching for something local and just because there is one big site in one country doesn't mean that it automatically ranks number one in all other countries. And that's essentially completely normal. That's kind of the way that the web works in that we try to figure out which of these URLs is relevant in which of these locations. And then we have to kind of take all of that into account and figure out how that lines up. A quick rendering question. Google Search Console fetch and render shows very odd rendering for all URLs of a client site, almost a CSS broke. Same for search regions as well as users. No priority block resources reported. This is a WordPress site. Mobile usability report is also showing an increase in mobile errors. What could be happening there? So I don't know. I'd have to take a look at the screenshot and maybe look at the site of what's happening there. What I would recommend doing in a case like this is talking with other people as well and either posting in the Webmaster Help Forum or specifically in the JavaScript Sites Forum if you suspect that it's due to something from the JavaScript side. But either of these sources might be able to help you kind of figure out what specifically to watch out for. Why can't Google Reps answer questions on malware? Even if we don't see malware on our website or in Search Console, they ask us to remove the malware. So what is sometimes really hard with malware is that sites can be hacked in ways that are really hard to figure out and in ways that are essentially cloaking specifically to Google or to Google's users. And figuring that out can be really hard if you don't have experience with that. So my recommendation, if you can't work this out on your own, is to go to the Webmaster Help Forum and check with the experts there, or if this is something that you rely on and it's being flagged as malware to go directly to a consultant maybe who specialized on malware issues because they have practice kind of looking at ways that hackers try to hide malware on a website. And in the meantime, they're sometimes really good at hiding malware so that you as a webmaster don't even notice that it's hacked. But when users come to the site, they get redirected to crazy hacked content. All right. Oh, wow. Time-wise, I think we're almost on time. I need to head on out fairly soon. But maybe there's time for one more question from one of you. John, I'd like to ask a question. If the new regulatory factor for the Site-B is going to be the main ranking factor for all including desktop and mobile. The main ranking factor. I don't think it will be the main ranking factor. I think in our blog post, we also talked about this a little bit in that it is a ranking factor that we take into account, but we still take relevance into account as well. So just because the site is slow doesn't mean it'll never be visible in search. So you will only be counting as the mobile site-B won't be calculated by it. The desktop will have different algorithms. Yeah, this is only specific to the mobile version of the search results pages. When using the Page-B inside, the ranking factor will be considering the score in the Page-B inside, or you will considering the user experience in the Chrome browser. So I don't think we've kind of specified exactly what we're looking for when it comes to speed. There are lots of different ways of figuring out what the theoretical and what the kind of practical speed aspects are there. We want to keep this open a little bit so that we can make sure that our algorithm reflects more what a user would actually see, even if that sometimes means that it doesn't reflect exactly one-to-one one of our existing tools. So we think our tools map fairly well to that, but it's not like we take this number and multiply it by the number here internally, and we come up with a ranking factor. All right, I need to head on out. I'll be setting up probably a hangout in Mountain View next week, so if any of you are watching and want to join in in person from Mountain View, I'll be putting that on Google Plus as well. I think the one on Friday I need to cancel because I'll probably be busy with lots of other things, but maybe we can catch up next week in person, and we can do a normal hangout then as well. All right, thank you all for joining. Thanks for all of the questions so far, and if anything else is on your mind, feel free to jump on in the help forums to kind of bring some more information there as well, and hopefully I'll see some of you again next time. Thank you, John. Thanks, John. Bye. Bye.