Welcome to the Adam does movies podcast episode six. I'm your host Adam. Of course today. We're talking transformers We're talking robots in disguise. They're more than meets the eye these movies I'm not so sure about they came out in 2007 and they continue to flourish all the way up until this week When transformers rise of the beast hits the big screen the seventh installment to the transformers universe the transformer If you will think I'm the only person that's ever so bad. Let's probably keep it that way Here's the synopsis via paramount pictures on IMDB set in the 1990s Transformers rise of the beast will take audiences on an action-packed Globetrotting adventure as the Maximals Predacons and Terracons join the battle between the Autobots and Decepticons on earth Noah a sharp young guy from Brooklyn and Elena an ambitious talented Artifact researcher are swept up in the conflict as Optimus Prime and the Autobots face a terrifying new nemesis Bent on their destruction named Scourge Wow, that's a lot to take in feels like the Autobots are always right on the cusp of extinction every single time One of the movies is called Age of Extinction, but we'll get there today on the podcast We're going to be Briefly going over all these transformers movies the pros the cons everything a little bit of trivia mixed in and I'm going to rank them quickly We're going to do this in a concise manner. We're going to stay on topic. We're going to say focused So let's talk a little bit briefly about this new film coming out. It's not directed by Michael Bay It's not directed by Michael Bay. I think I kind of flubbed my lines there. That's okay This is on this is off the cuff. So forgive me if there's some mistakes He directed the first five transformers movies did not do bumblebee and he is not back for this one He's actually retired from transformers. He's done. He's he's hung up the uh Robotic towel if you will No, the director here is Steven capel jr. Who directed creed 2 which was a solid film I quite enjoyed that direction was good in that movie. I think he'll he'll do okay. Hell mean this one The movie is just shy of two hours long which makes it one of the shortest transformers movies, believe it or not It's crazy how long these films are and the stories are so insanely stupid It's remarkable the Fast and the Furious franchise looks at transformers plots and are like, yeah, that's a bit much That's a bit extreme This is a standalone movie to bumblebee which came out in 2018 That's confusing because bumblebee was a prequel to the transformers movies directed by michael bay um This is a sequel to bumblebee, but not a prequel anymore to the bay verse It's gonna set up its own trilogy as I graze over my notes I see that it stars michelle u p davidson colman domingo ron perlman peter dinklage and of course peter cullen back for the millionth time to voice the autobot leader himself Optimus prime as well as he should be peter cullen is is just terrific. It's such a voice of of generation, right? It never gets old Let's dive in to the first film that started it all Obviously not the first thing that ever started transformers is based off the hasbro toy line from way back in the 80s where I like to live adam adam born in 1982 Big fan of the transformers when I grew up a little bit was able to watch the cartoon series by some of the toys And uh, yeah, we never looked back Maybe we should have though Maybe we should have when we approached these bay movies and look at what exactly worked with them Not that the movies didn't work.  I don't mind the design of them. It's okay So let's jump in 2007 transformers directed by michael bay Runtime of two hours and 24 minutes. I believe this was also produced by steven spielberg So you got the big names on this one spielberg probably produces a lot of them It's it's easy money at the end of the day for a producer stars shyla bow shyla beef shyla buff Fresh off of even stevens. I think he was in eye robot and charlie's angels. He was in these bit rolls Of course, lewis stevens a fantastic character from the hit disney show even stevens Here though. He has he's front and center. He is the star of this thing sandwood wiki joining him Megan fox. She has a character name. It doesn't matter to me. It's just it's megan fox She's hot. She looks good. She's sassy. That's all you need throw her straddling a motorcycle Straddling the hood of a car really just a pin-up girl for the ages Then we have josh du mel who's going to go on to be in a few of these as well Josh du mel might be in More than any of the other ones to be honest with you. Here's the synopsis the plot synop for short if you will High school student sam wood wiki buys his first car Who is actually the autobot bumblebee bumblebee to fend sam and his girlfriend? mackayla, I think that's her name mackayla Okay, mackayla veins from the decepticon barricade before the other autobots arrive on earth They are searching for the all spark and the war on earth heats up as the decepticons attack a united states military base Sam i'm sorry. I can't read sam and mackayla are taken to the top secret agency sector seven to help stop the decepticons But when they learn the agency also intends to destroy the autobots they formulate their own plan to save the world This is the longest plot synopsis. I've ever read in my life ever I guess that's fair because it's almost a two and a half hour movie about transformers punching each other Transformers And speaking of sound effects Gosh, they're good in these movies. The sound design in transformers is top tier. It's peak What the matrix movies did for the visual fighting style with bullet time slow motion kung fu The uh transformers did for sound design Kind of like the star wars prequels or the pod racing that Transformers took that to like a level. Uh, they took it to a level 100 I love doing podcasts alone. I stumble on my words. It's great. Let's keep going trivia time According to megan fox She was attending a linkin park concert And when it was over the band met her personally and stated that they heard about the live action transformers film And requested whether they could have a song of theirs in the film and thus What I've done Appears in the closing credits That is a jam too Mm That is a great song and I love that megan fox is the one that brought linkin park to the table Loving her more right now really loving her more right now. Thanks, mackayla I'll never forget your name again or until I do inevitably when I talk about this next movie on the list Here's the thing transformers one. I like it a lot I haven't seen it in a few years, but I know I still like it a lot watch that one I believe it I was in las vegas at the time with my wife We were probably freshly married newlyweds and The movie was playing Like on the strip at one of the theaters. We were just we were just in vegas We lived in arizona at the time. So we were only a couple hours from vegas. It was sweet You do, um, you know three four hour drive.  She loved it. I loved it And we were excited for the sequel A sequel that would unfortunately Really sully the first film's reputation And from there things would only get worse in my humblest of opinions But this first movie Had state-of-the-art visuals state-of-the-art sound design this massive scale to it And I know a lot of people didn't like this I dug the shaky cam point of view from the human aspect of it Where it was just a cavalcade of destruction and vehicles smashing into each other You couldn't make heads or tails of what robot was what robot But it was so frantic and so in your face with the explosions and the noises I couldn't help but just want more And of course you had some of the most blatantly terrible product placement ever My favorite was when the all-spark was like going loose and wild with it And everything it touched would turn into a robot so a laptop with clear branding turns into one a mountain dew machine Is shooting out mountain dew cans I think sam at one point grabs one Pops it open a glig glig glig glig glig thanks mountain dew Optimus Maybe that doesn't happen, but he yells optimus and bumblebee a hell of a lot And no one does it quite like him and no one will ever again Especially as the sequels start to unspool But yes the first transformers big fan of this one It was a great start to what would inevitably be a massive new franchise for universal Is it universal it's universal right paramount or universal I get i'm confused to be honest with you I think earlier I it's paramount. Okay paramount Let's move on to transformers revenge of the fallen aka transformers 2 the first film came out in 2007 two years later Which is of course 2009 I did the math for you. We have a sequel two hours and just shy of 30 minutes 229 it's bigger. It's longer. It's badder meaning worse.  Let's go to the synopsis from imdb A youth chooses manhood The week sam whit wiki starts college the decepticons make trouble in shanghai a presidential envoy believes It's because the Autobots are around. He wants them gone. He's wrong The decepticons need access to sam's mind to see some glyphs imprinted there that will lead them to a fragile object That when inserted into an alien machine hidden in egypt for centuries will give them the power to blow out the sun Sam and his girlfriend mackayla veins and sam's parents are in danger Optimus prime and bumblebee are sam's principal protectors if one of them if one of them goes down What becomes of sam? My god And that's like not even half of what's happening in this movie at one point a decepticon Disguises itself as a hot blonde college chick who seduces sam back to her room And is getting undressed and making out with him before revealing it like why take it that far you have him in the room Why start the seduction angle? Why get him on the bed? It was so bizarre and there's a lot of of bad in this film What it has good though Is we have the primary cast back sam whit wiki and mackayla I remember the name promises made promises kept or something bumblebee optimus the whole cruise here It's still a fun time. You got josh du mel in the mix. I think tiris is in the first three We got a fast and the furious crossover character. It's too bad. These are these both paramount That's universal. I think it would be nice if we could get that fast and the furious transformers crossover movie It really would be nice It's probably not going to happen though Regardless, this thing sucks. It was a massive step down But the steps would keep going down further and you would just tumble with them And that's where we get to transformers three. But before we do, let me talk about some trivia here. Let me throw some at you John tutorial Was allowed to climb the pyramids during filming in egypt at one point He simply broke down crying when michael bait questioned him. He said you just don't get to do this in movies You don't get to shoot in a place that's 4 000 years old Can you imagine?  What are you doing get up?  Can I lean around the pyramid? Will that be sexier than a car?  It's gonna be freaking great Let's go tutorial get up Another see another funny piece of trivia the college scenes were shot at both the university of pennsylvania and the princeton university However, neither school is named in the film as both schools felt that the judy whitwicky scenes were damaging to their image If you don't remember judy whitwicky gets her hands on some brownies that are freshly made and Potent if you will so she gets drugged out of her mind Uh really on a high starting to start starting to hump things wanting to make out with her husband The little dumb robots are there.  So I can understand why maybe that's not the badge of honor They want to put their name on Speaking of badges of honor, we have skids and mudflaps in this movie Some of the most embarrassing characters ever put to the screen not since the black crows in dumbo have uh, Have the black community been so poorly represented Skin and mudflaps are just so atrociously bad.  What are we gonna do?  We're gonna kill these suckers It's so embarrassing and this goes on the whole film Michael bay would go on in the next movie to say yeah, they're not in this If you can find them in this I'll cut you a check for $25,000 his words The reason this movie is also such a hot mess is I believe which we're sitting through right now A writer strike was going on and bay didn't want to wait on production for the script to be completed Before he started filming this thing. He's like, ah, we'll fix it in post Let's have optimist drop down on a highway at night start killing shit We'll blow some stuff up and we'll we'll write it off later And that's what they did And that's why we have the movie we have Let's jump forward to 2011 Transformers dark of the moon.  What does that even mean? It means this movie's two hours and 34 minutes. We keep getting longer We keep getting dumber shy is back But not mackaya Megan fox Hit the hit the sticks hit the bricks.  That's how he handled his actors Michael bay is notoriously tough to work with as a director He's yelling at the top of his lungs like he's playing a round of call of duty with the boys Because he kind of is there is stuff blowing up all the time He has to keep command. He has to keep people safe I don't know what he's like though as an individual. It's very possible. He's a total garbage person I just don't know Megan fox seems a little sketchy at best as well Regardless, they didn't get along You don't bite the hand that feeds Megan. She's kicked off only later to return to the Ninja turtles movies that he produced.  You can go into these movies. I'm producing them Now we have rosy huntington white lee or wheat lee. I don't I don't know who this person is I don't care to know who this person is.  They've been at all three so far We're gonna keep doing their war war stuff. Whatever they are their soldiers Did I not get the Transformers? Oh, yeah, there is a oh my gosh. I didn't get the plot for transformers Dark of the moon or dark of the yeah, that's what it's called transformers Dark of the moon plot IMDB, let me just let me just bring this up really quickly since I screwed the pooch in the notes And we're just gonna head on down to the snop Here we are Storyline Autobots bumblebee ratchet iron hide mirage aka dino wheel jack aka q or q Way, I don't know that and side swipe led by optimus prime are back in action taking on the evil decepticons Who are eager to avenge their recent defeat? The autobots and decepticons become involved in a perilous space race between the united states and russia to reach a hidden Cybertronian spacecraft on the moon and learn of its secrets and once again Sam wittweke has to go to the aid of his robot friends The new villain shockwave is on the scene while the autobots and decepticons continue to battle it out on earth I don't remember any of that happening. I remember the moon stuff and thinking what? Why? Here's some trivia for you According to michael bay 532 vehicles were destroyed in the film They were given away by an insurance company at no charge as all of them were flood damaged That old scam Nice, so i'm glad they were put to good use the driller Which is this epic Decepticon that rips through buildings that now I remember this is the one that's shot like an avengers film And I think they came out around the same time And it was bizarre because they both looked identical There's buildings getting ripped to shreds and this driller is freaking epic It's just eating these buildings going through them like wormholes Anyway, this thing is composed of 70 000 pieces It required industrial light and magic to use up its entire render farm and took 122 hours per frame 288 hours in the driller's attack on the skyscraper That is insanity The amount of rendering the amount of processing time for just that one section of the film It is truly a spectacle though and that's one thing about these bayformers They really are larger than life spectacles and you do have to appreciate the craft as far as the action goes And and the cinematography is pretty damn cool Even if it does have the michael bay stank to it Low camera shots in a 360 circle slow motion person standing up shots looking up at the sky It's very corny But you have linkin park in the mix That helps for sure It helps for sure this movie Just honestly, they're all pretty bad outside of the first one still watchable here Some people say this one's better than two Maybe I just don't really care about it. It had some cooler stuff in it for sure It's less of a shit show for sure, but I didn't like the new characters. I missed fox I missed that chemistry. So all this stuff outside of the action was just miserable Where are we at? Are we at age of extinction now? I think so Okay, Transformers age of extinction the fourth movie in the Transformers saga this one clocks in at two hours and 45 minutes for a hasbro toy line Gosh 2014 We lost everyone R.I.P Five years have gone by no more Whitwicky No more, uh, I don't think we even have the army guys. I don't think josh de mails in this one. I don't think uh, tyrese is in this one Yeah, instead we have newcomers mark wallberg as kade yeager. Yes. His name is kade yeager Nicola or nicola nicola pelts beck Beckham. Is she related to victoria beckham? She has to be nicola pelts beckham. Okay, whatever tj miller stanley tucci and kelsie grammar Here's the synopsis for five years after the decepticon invasion of chicago The autobots were granted sanctuary into the earth Believing they are a threat They were secretly eliminated by an elite cia unit with the help of a transformer bounty hunter lockdown Because of this optimus has since lost faith in humanity after the ambush that caused his injury and even considers leaving the plant Wow, i'm reading too fast. Hang on. Hang on because of this Optimus has since lost his faith in humanity After the ambush that causes injury Okay, i'm sorry. This is just written so terribly that i'm gonna have to kind of fix it It wasn't that i was reading too fast. It's that this doesn't make any sense Optimus gets injured He loses his faith in humanity and he goes into hiding In in kade jegar's barn kade jegar is a mechanic and he's And he convinces optimus to restore his faith in humanity after he helps him recover There's a scene that we've seen in the trailers where kades in there and he's like, oh, I think I just found a transformer I think I think this is a transformer and it is it was it was optimus Together with his family, they joined the otobots to exterminate the bounty hunter and reincarnated megatron in the form of galvatron Of course and the cemetery. Oh my god, and the cemetery wind Which is an elite cia cia unit tasked with killing transformers What is happening? This is insanity the reincarnated megan megatron megan megan trons in this one Megan fox is back as megan tron The reincarnated megatron is now galvatron And the cia elite task force is called cemetery wind Wow This is a two hour and 45 minute movie folks I hate this film. It's really bad They replaced a mountain dew machine at one point with a budweiser canon Kale Yeager definitely drinks from this thing too. He pops one of the bottles I think he transforms himself The budweiser made me stronger No, that didn't happen, but it might as well have this is the one that has dinosaurs in it I think this is the dinosaur one People were excited about I was kind of excited about that seeing the robot t-rex running around Optimus jumps on his back at one point Yeah, here's some trivia TJ miller reportedly did not get along well with director michael bay during the course of filming Miller compared it to a very bipolar experience working with bay who once told miller on set Nothing that you've said is funny tj not one thing all day. We hired you to be funny There's 300 people here.  So that would be hilarious to have seen TJ miller's been ousted from hollywood altogether Originally michael bay was not going to direct a fourth transformers movie But he had an experience that changed his mind And no jesus didn't come to him in the form of an Autobot what happened was after transformers dark of the moon Bay finally got to visit the transformers ride at universal studios Upon seeing fans waiting three blocks for the attraction. He realized he was not ready to leave the franchise yet That's honestly awesome That's not right is awesome. By the way, it's a cool ride Michael bay should be proud.  You know transformers isn't on the level of Jurassic park one But Jurassic park is such a good movie It's it's really just perfect for me that all the ones after I don't they're just like their own thing. We have Jurassic park. It's fine. It's great. It's a standalone Everything else is just some icing on the cake even if it's terrible You get you still get dinosaurs. You still get action. That's how transformers are to me You got one great transformers movie everything else is a saturday morning cartoon that occasionally has a good episode Speaking of episodes of transformers Here's one that's not good and that's the final one for michael bay. He goes out on the lowest note humanly possible Transformers the last night 2017 runtime two hours and 34 minutes. He actually scaled back like 10 minutes on this one It's still so long. Why are these over two hours? Here's the sin. Oh, I gotta give you the we got mark walberg's back Now we have isabel isabella mersaid mersay. I think as isabella mersay. I'm terrible with names She is dora the explorer In that in that movie that no one saw she's been another things cute little actress We have anthony hopkins. We got josh du mel's back josh du mel's back And stanley tucci who was in the previous film as well. Here's the synopsis I mean, I might have to like brace myself before I read this thing. Let me take a deep breath We've been running hot Okay In 484 ad. Jesus I don't know if I can do this king arthur played by liam garrigan And his knights fight a losing battle against the saxons elsewhere merlin Stanley tucci approaches the knights of ia con Or icon. Oh my god a group of transformers hiding on earth to help win the war They hand him an alien staff jesus before transforming together into dragon storm and turn the tide of the battle But war and more. Oh my god But war and merlin that a great evil will come for the staff in the present Meaning present time a year after the hong kong uprising Optimus prime crash lands on cybertron and meets his alleged creator quintessa She blames him for cybertron's destruction and brainwashes him into helping gain merlin's staff Which can absorb earth's energy to restore Cybertron Optimus is renamed nemesis prime Earth is revealed to be the slumbering Unicron the ancient enemy of cybertron and whose horns are emerging across the planet. What? What? There's no way a human wrote this AI has been around longer than we think there is no way a human wrote this.  It's almost impossible to sit through. It's long. It's a slog The action so played out and boring. Yes, it still looks very nice. Yes, it still has a bloated budget But no one seems to care at all about what's going on and I just gave you Crumbs as far as the plot goes. These are scraps of the plot If you can keep up with it.  I picture the hall of shame At tyrese's crib and he goes down this really long hallway and the lights go on kakush kakush kakush And on every side there's just transformers fast and the furious transformers fast and the furious just down the line Oh man, that's amazing. Here's another here's another fact for you another fun fact Michael bay originally wanted to pass on directing this movie But was persuaded to do one more by peter cullen peter cullen said one more ride He can't do his voice. No one can but peter and peter probably should have um Not said that Yeah, that's transformers the last night. I just remember he has a sword in it And I think the dinosaurs are back for some reason Who cares? Now we slow things way down I don't think I oh, I don't think I put the date on this one. Let's get the date on this first Let's get this all wrapped up in a bow for you We're talking bumblebee. Okay 2018. How long after that was the last one? 2017 was the last night not even a year later. Okay. Wow. That seems off One hour and 54 minutes. This is the first transformers movie to finally be under two hours Amazing It's directed by travis night who previously did kubo and the two strings I didn't see that movie. I heard it was really good. Didn't see it First movie michael bay didn't direct in the series and it's a prequel And I guess a soft reboot because we've now learned that the new movie Transformers rise of the beast is a sequel to bumblebee but not a prequel to the michael bay movies How confusing but who cares it's transformers. They they don't care This one's a fresh cast since it takes place way earlier. We have hailey steinfeld spider gwen herself is in this john sena jason drucker and george lendeborg jr. I'm sure I said that name wrong, but we're trying our best Here's the synopsis on cybertron the autobots led by optimus prime on the verge of losing the great after It was in the great after Is that a thing? Okay being defeated by the decepticons in the war on cybertron The autobot leader optimus prime sends b127 aka bumblebee to earth to establish an outpost and protect earth b127 surprises the training of a group of soldiers under the command of colonel jack burns and escapes However, he is ambushed by a decepticon that damages his memory core and voice box As happened time and time again with bumblebee the guy can never just talk in any of these movies But b127 defeats the enemy and transforms into a yellow 1967 volkswagen beetle In 1987 the 18 year old charlie watson finds the beetle in a junkyard and the owner hank gives the car to her The teenager is a great mechanic that misses her father and lives with her young brother and her estranged mother and her boyfriend My god, why is this so long charlie accidentally activates a signal and the decepticons track down b127 on earth Two decepticons head for earth to capture and destroy the autobot convincing dr. Powell And the army that they are a peaceful Enemy I lost myself dr. Powell and the army that they are peaceful and the enemy is a dangerous robot Meanwhile charlie befriends b127 and calls him bumblebee wow Probably didn't need to read all that Clearly I couldn't read all that I like bumblebee. It's a smaller film smaller scale smaller budget Smaller everything really bumblebee is the centralized character. There's a couple transformers here and there The beginning of this movie is fantastic. It has this epic war on cybertron It's like a 10 minute fan fan fiction gone, right Everybody likes this movie. I think I don't know anybody that doesn't I don't think it's as good as the michael bay first film, but I would definitely put it in the top We'll get to that in a second though. Here's some trivia Peter cullen the voice of optimus is the only cast member to appear in every theatrically released transformers film And he's going to be in the new one He had voiced the character in the transformers the movie in 1986 and reprised the role in the live action films including this one This is a funner fact a more fun fact Peter cullen revealed at a convention In 2020 that he didn't partially enjoy. I'm sorry particularly. He didn't particularly enjoy working on this film This is because the studio decided to use a different voice actor during production So they wouldn't have to pay cullen for multiple recording sessions. That's really shitty And only brought him in at the very end to record all the lines as such Cullen had to match the other actor's performance since the animation for optimus prime had already been completed and couldn't be Altered that's really crappy With a budget of 102 to 128 million somewhere in the ballpark This is the least expensive transformers movie to date Despite being the lowest grossing transformers film in the series with the worldwide gross of 468 million It was still considered a box office success following the failure failure Yes, because movies you have to double their budget and some usually it's two and a half times So if the movie costs a hundred million you you put it to around it needs to make 20 2,500, 2,500 million That's a great great way to say that And it made 468 so it's well on its way very much a success Oh And the last thing the last one was a failure Transformers the last night only it lost 100 million. I think I said that earlier, but we're back to it 100 million dollar loss Made up by the ride, of course Here's some q&a for you. I just a couple I asked people on youtube if they had any transformers related questions Just before I went live Edward Hall asks if you had to pick another director to helm a transformers movie, who would you pick and why? You know as much grief as we give Michael Bay. I think he did a damn good job I think the big problem is the scripts the writing in these movies is atrocious They should have kept it simpler the scale got way out of hand way too early Saving the world saving the trip the Autobots every single time is boring And so yeah by the fifth one we find ourselves with merlin and magical staffs because we've done everything else Right how much bigger do you go? And now this new one's got unicorn Which is a planet eating transformer who is already established as earth in transformers 5 That's why they're retconning that whole thing and that's the biggest transformer around it eats planets So if this is a trilogy they better damn well keep Unicron alive for it and i'm guessing they do i'm guessing he's the Thanos of the transformers world I think spielberg not producing and maybe directing would have been great Spielberg seems like the right kind of guy to handle this type of movie. He would have made it a little bit more magical. I think a little less Dude bro Would have been very fun to see one more question from chatman reviews. Which movie should they have stopped at? Yeah, um if we were to halloween this thing Where you you basically the first one exists, but then you take it from two on that's what i would do I would say scrap everything past the first movie and go from there So yeah, they should have they should have stopped after one I would have stopped after one. Let me look one more time and make sure there's no more questions I got one more Uh, I don't know how to say the name oteo.  I always wondered that having starscream shoot prime with megatron would have been epic plus tapes Why do they oh i'm sorry? Why do they hate the cgi designs? Yeah, that makes more sense. I'm like, I don't hate the the og designs I agree. I don't know why and when he says plus tapes. I think he means um star star screams shoots the tapes out of the tape player Or is that sound that's sound wave Do you say sounds great? So that sound wave does that Regardless, I don't know why they hate the original designs, but it looks like with this new one They're going back to it, which is great. It's about time It's about time Let's rank these things really quick I didn't even need to write them down because I know off the top of my head The the last one is the last night. That's the worst film in this franchise easily I would then just go in reverse order to be honest with you Last night and then we moved to age of extinction And from there we just head right on up to dark of the moon And after dark of the moon we go right into What's that one called revenge of the fallen? That's going to be in the third spot in second place for the second best transformers movie is bumblebee And then we do the bay former the 2007 one that started it all michael bay's opus Transformers simple elegant Simply transformers So you have it transformers in the number one bumblebee in the number two And then the rest I don't really care revenge of the fallen dark of the moon You can switch them if you want makes no difference But I think most people would agree with the top three on the list or at least the top two I think they're both universally acceptable And I think that uh We did this in a decent amount of time. I don't want to waste any more of it. We all have plans We all have things we have to do with our lives. So those are my thoughts on transformers a very messy franchise Still fun. You can still watch a lot of them. It sucks that they're so long And that's kind of where i'm at with fast and the furious I totally get why people like them. They're super large scale Hundreds of millions of dollars blowing up on screen But I do like to have a somewhat plausible or at least competent story behind it Otherwise, you're just really watching cutscene after cutscene from a video game wondering does any of this tie together Do I care about anything outside of boom boom explosions? Give it to me give me something and I'm hoping rise of the beast does that Give me some emotional drama. Give me some stakes. Give me some characters. I can enjoy again We'll see I want to hear from you though if you're watching on youtube You can throw a comment. What do you think of the transformers movies? Please rank them if you want If you're not on spotify or on apple podcast, this is going live there first It goes up in the mornings at 8 a.m Every monday. So and I do these live watch alongs at 8 p.m. So, you know, whatever you want to do is fine I appreciate it. You can also follow me there. You can follow me on youtube. You can subscribe I'm also on patreon at patreon.com slash adam does movies. There's a one dollar tier Ten dollar goes up to like a hundred bucks a month depending on how much you like my stuff But anything you can give I would appreciate this is a one-man operation It's a passion project and it takes a lot of time and a lot of energy to do I'm also on youtube at the join button. So you can do it there as well. It's the same thing There's different tiers. There's different perks A lot of a lot of good stuff behind the scenes that you get access to as well Okay, that's it. That's the transformers thoughts I will let you know how the movie is come later this week after I see it I'm excited and I know I promised last week. Well, I didn't promise but I said I was going to talk about the disney 3d animated movies or the pixar 3d animated movies I'm saving it because elemental is right around the corner I want to capitalize on that momentum and we'll talk about it then It just makes sense Okay, that's the show. I'll see you next time. Take care


All right, welcome, everyone, to today's Webmaster Central Office Hours Hangouts. My name is John Mueller. I am a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google here in Switzerland. And part of what we do are these Webmaster Office Hours Hangouts where people can join in and ask their questions around their website and web search. And we try to find some answers or make sure that we pass some feedback on to the team here as well. I hope you're all doing well and that you're enjoying summer if you're in an area where you have summer at the moment or I guess fall or winter if you're in the southern hemisphere. I hope you all find some time to take off in between as well despite all of the crazy situations around coronavirus.  But if any of you want to get started with the first question, you're welcome to join in and jump in now. Hi, John. Hi. Maybe you remember that in the last Webmaster, I asked you about the problem of a favicon that disappeared since now it's three months. And I was suspecting that was related to the site not being in the root because subdomain for each language. And you told me to wait still a couple of weeks to see if something changed. And I waited, but nothing happened. So still a favicon not showing. Now it's about three months. So maybe there is something weird. Maybe I can drop the site in the chat. Yeah, if you can drop it into the chat, I'm happy to pass that on to the team to double check. Here it is. Because I don't know if it can be related because I double check that the guidelines of Google should be followed, the dimension of the icon. I think it's fine. And so after so long, it's strange. Because I think that the favicon can input the click to rate. I imagine it because people maybe it's more likely to click on an icon instead of the generic word icon, maybe. I don't know. I think that would be hard to see if that's directly the case. I think it probably helps people, especially those that understand the site already. But I don't think it would change much in behavior for generic users that don't know your site yet. But still, regardless of what exactly it would change, it seems like this is something that we should be able to fix on our side. OK, I put it on the chat. Cool. Thanks. Yeah, I saw you also mentioned what the problem is. That makes it a lot easier because I get the chat transcript afterwards. And sometimes I have to puzzle which site was what. But that's perfect. OK, thanks. Hey, John, how are you? Hi. OK, my question is regarding something which is called entity corrosion. Like if you search for something like mobile games or video games, Google shows a corrosion at the top in CRP. So what we can do or how we can optimize to be there or how Google picked these entities? And is there something that we can do to optimize our website or to improve our chances being in there? It essentially tries to understand the entities on the page directly. So it's not that you have to do any special kind of markup or do anything specific on your pages, but more that we understand that this is kind of an entity that is talked about on the web in general and is not something that's just limited to your specific website. So in practice, that means when we crawl and index the whole web, we find a lot of these items. We can recognize that they're talking about the same entity. They have same information. And then based on that, we can try to figure out where this entity fits in with the rest of the web. But it's not that you need to do any special kind of markup or kind of code to your pages for that. OK, so it's basically about the signals that Google collects from different sources. Yeah, yeah, it's from information that we recognize from across the web. Because it's important to us to understand that this is not something that's unique to one particular site, but rather like other people understand that this is an entity. And based on that, we can say, well, we should treat it as an entity as well. OK, thank you. Hey, John. Hi. How's it going? Pretty good. How are you? I'm doing great. Thank you very much. John, I have a question regarding the URL inspection tool. Are there any sort of crawling issues at the current time, especially with new sites? Not that I'm aware of. I know that sometimes we have fluctuations in our pipelines that things get a little bit slow, and sometimes that ends up being visible in the URL inspection tool. But I'm not aware of anything broader that's kind of blocked there. Are you seeing specific problems at the moment, or? Yeah, I mean, that's the thing, the new sites that we're working on. We've seen it 10 times. OK, so you're submitting the home page for indexing, essentially, or? It's not getting in there. Yeah. Hard to say. Yeah, it's hard to say. But I think the important part also with these tools, especially when you're submitting things to indexing, is that we just don't index all content that we see. And sometimes we see things in the URL inspection tool, and our system's like, ah, we don't know if we need to index this right away. But the more signals that we have about content, the more likely we end up going there and trying to get it indexed as well. So especially if you're seeing things like new sites not being indexed immediately, then I would tend to give it a little bit more time and maybe try to work on other ways to make that site known, which could be a variety of different things, I guess, like working with the sitemap file, making sure that everything is lined up properly from a technical point of view, those kind of things. Thank you. Boy, it's like a crawling issue or an indexing issue. You submit it. Nothing happens in the search response, so I think we need to set it there ourselves. I think we've tried multiple sites, but it's not working out. No, I don't know. It's hard to say. I'm not aware of anything that would mean that that's blocked completely. I think if that were the case, then we would see a lot of complaints on Twitter and in the forums. So it might just be something temporary that you should try it again a little bit later. If you're seeing this regularly happening, then I just recommend starting a thread in the forum together with your URL so that folks there can double-check to see if things are kind of aligned with regards to crawling and try with their own tools, or maybe they have general feedback for the site overall. Sure, thank you very much. All right. Any last questions before we jump into the submitted ones? I have a question, John. Hi. Sure. So actually, I have two questions, actually. So my first question is, recently when I start, when I Google my brand name, on the first or second page of the results, there's a site review website that pops up, and it has a rich result snippet with the rating and stuff, and it's just a lot of user-submitted reviews about the website. And I'm not sure what impact this actually has, whether directly or I suppose there would be an indirect impact if a user sees the reviews and they are looking for reviews about the website. So I know there is that aspect of it, but I was wondering if there is any other aspects or any other impact on my site based on links that I may have shared in the reviews, or I know Bert can sometimes be used to understand context of a page. So if there's a negative sentiment generally on the page, could that have any sort of impact on the performance or ranking of my website? I don't think you'd see any effect on the ranking of your website from that. I think, at most, what might happen is that people stumble across that in the search results for your company name. They're like, oh, what does this mean? And then they get lost in that website, kind of. But it's not that the existence of such a page would negatively affect your site. Even if there are some negative reviews on there, I mean, on the internet, there are all kinds of things. That's something where I wouldn't directly assume that that would have a negative impact. Sometimes it makes sense to try to create other kinds of content that go up, especially for things like a query for your company name. But it's always a question of where you invest your time. If people are already searching for your company name, they kind of know where to go anyway. So it's, I don't know, it's not always straightforward to say, like, oh, you should create more pages with your company name on it just so that you can cover the whole search results with your favorable content. Right, OK. So basically, don't need to worry about that too much. Yeah, I wouldn't worry about it. OK, good. And then I had another question. It was, yeah, OK. So my website has a forum. It's located on a subdomain of the main property. So it's not part of the same domain. And it's a really old forum. So there's, I think, over 100,000 users. And I'm realizing recently that a lot of these users, maybe more than 90% of them, are very new. And they're using the user profiles for link building schemes, essentially. And I'm wondering what this could do to my subdomain the forum, or whether it could affect my main site at all. And I know the subdomain is sort of seen differently from the main site, but it links, I would say, it links pretty well to the main site. Like, we have the nav menu that goes to all the main categories on the main site. And it's a lot of the user-submitted content, a lot of the posts and stuff will also include links to the main site. So there's a lot of pages. So I'm wondering, should I go in and clean up all those links, remove all those user profiles? And if so, what's the best way to handle that? No follow, no? Yeah. I think no follow is definitely the first step I would take there, especially if you're unsure about those profiles. And people are using them for link building, then making sure that those pages have no follow on them sometimes makes it less interesting for people to kind of abuse the forum for that. So that's kind of the first thing I would take there, but I would also try to see if you can find ways to kind of algorithmically recognize this kind of abuse and spammy content and no index it by default. So that might be something where if you can tell that a user has been around for a certain period of time or they've contributed positively to the forum, then make their profile indexable and otherwise keep it no index, these kind of things. Because it's, on the one hand, the links can have an effect there that our algorithms might look at this and say, if we can isolate those profiles, then we can just ignore those links. If we can't isolate the profiles, which is often the case, then maybe we'll be ignoring all of the links from the forum. And if this is on a subdomain, then it might be that our algorithms are not able to completely understand the relationship between the subdomain and the main domain. And they ignore all of the links across the whole domain. So that's something where I try to clean that up as much as possible. It's probably something where you don't see an urgent or critical change if you make that cleanup, but it would have kind of a longer term effect. If we can really understand this is good content and this is what you want to have published and it's tied to your other website, which is also really good content, then that helps us a lot more versus if we understand, well, this website is OK and this one is filled with spam. And it's like they're connected. So should they kind of be forwarding signals back and forth or should they be completely separated from our side? It's hard to say. OK. But so just to confirm, so you're saying there is a risk that the main site's links could be seen as spammy as well because of the sort of a lot of spam on the subdomain? Yeah, it's not so much that we would see them as spammy, but our algorithms could learn to ignore those links. And essentially, that's something that automatically happens. We see a lot of user-generated links on a site and we think, well, probably the webmaster isn't aware of what's actually happening here. We will just ignore these to kind of be on the safe side. And that might end up with us ignoring the other links on your site as well, which is probably not what you want. Right, yeah. OK, and then the other thing is a lot of these profiles, I notice that there are amongst our most backlinked pages. So they're getting hundreds of thousands of, on top of hundreds of thousands of backlinks from very low quality, more spammy type of sites from the people who put the links in the user profiles clearly buying the links or something. So is that something to be worried about? Should I disavow those links? Should I just leave them? I don't think you really need to do anything there. If you noindex those profile pages in the end, then that all kind of disappears anyway. But that's really popular tactic. And a lot of times, that's just completely automated that people will drop links here and they see they're not nofollowed. Therefore, they'll start building links to those profile pages. And a lot of times, that's just some scripts that keep running forever. So it's not, I wouldn't say it's something that you need to urgently worry about, because we see that all the time as well. And we can usually deal with that fairly well. OK, so adding nofollow and noindex to those pages, I wouldn't then need to disavow the backlinks themselves. No, no. And they will, if I noindex them, those backlinks are just disappear on their own over time, or will they kind of always be there? I imagine they will remain for a while, even after they drop out of the index. But essentially, they wouldn't have any effect there, especially if the pages are nofollowed and they essentially stay there and they don't get forward to the rest of the site. And it's also something where I don't think you would be seeing any positive effect from those backlinks. So it's not that you have to worry about causing a problem by cleaning up the spam. OK. OK, thank you. But John, it sounds like a lot of work. Yeah. Yeah, Sparuk? John, follow up to that, because you also mentioned there were some low quality sites that are good. Like, I don't know, people have this whole DA thing and this thing, there are sites that low quality ones that you were mentioning in a Twitter feed that are OK, right? Like startups, for instance. Oh, OK. Oh, I see what you mean. So if it's just like random sites linking to your site, yeah, that's usually less of a problem. So just because it's a site that is less known doesn't necessarily mean that it's a problematic site. But in the case of these kind of profile links, that's something where these automated tools essentially build link networks across all of these user-generated sites and try to promote their stuff that way. And that's something where I'd say it's not like low quality links. It's just pure spam that we can essentially ignore. But in her case, if she wants to really clean it up, she can build like an AI tool and then kind of filter out the explicit words or give a way back maybe to users that are making a difference. I think it's possible to do a lot of things, but probably just taking a really rough approach and saying using something really simple like has this user contributed multiple times to the forum over a course of maybe a couple of months that automatically catches all of those really basic spam bots. So that's something where I don't think you need to do anything really fancy, magical. It's something that's probably fairly easy to implement. So moving forward, disavowing pretty much, that's it. Like, there's no need because your algorithm just is very good at it. I think for these kind of things, I definitely wouldn't worry about disavowing because these are all similarly kind of affected user generated content sites. And that's something we've seen since, I don't know. Before I joined Google, it's like those bots have been around. Those scripts have been around, dropping links in forums and profile pages. We have a lot of practice with that. But it's something where we can try to get it as much as possible. But if you can take care of it by cleaning it up on your side and preventing it in the first place, that's always a much better solution. So, John, follow up on the backlink quality things. We know that if there's a page with this highest authority that have a lot of backlink to link that page and that link to my website's pages, they will pass link juice in a page authority. So my question here is that you know that how page link work is largely based on what those source pages backlink, that passing link juice to me. But in the situation that, let's say that there is a page, let's say the other website, and they have very great content. And they write, for example, they talk about breast cancer and write a very good content about that. They have thorough backlink. And they rank very well, perform very well. And that page linked to my article about breast cancer, too. So it's very semantically related. And they rank very well, perform very well, but they don't have any backlink. Would that link benefit my page? I think if people are linking naturally to your site, then I wouldn't worry about if they benefit your page or not. If people are recommending your site as a good resource, that's always a good thing. So I wouldn't worry too much about how much value I'm getting out of this random link that someone has added, because you can't really control that yourself anyway. Yeah, I understand what you're saying. What I want to actually ask about this question is that we know that backlink is highly concentrated on the source pages' backlink. But do source pages' content also participate in the algorithm of the backlink's quality? I don't quite follow. What do you mean? So we know that a backlink is available when the source page has backlink, right? We all know that. But is the source page's quality also pay a role here? I think that always plays a little bit of a role. I think it is very easy to try to isolate links and just focus on PageRank and things like that. But PageRank is just one really small part of the bigger Google algorithm. And when we see recommendations from other websites, we try to understand what that recommendation means. How is that website interacting with the rest of the web? What are the anchor texts involved? What is the text around those links? All of that plays a little bit of a role with regards to understanding how this page should be treated. So it's something where it's easy to go in and say, well, this link counts so much PageRank. And that's what I want. But there is always just so much more than just pure PageRank out there. I see. Thank you so much. Sure. OK, let me run through some of the submitted questions so that we don't lose track of them completely. It's totally awesome to see so many active people here in the Hangout, though. Let's see, is there any impact on COVID-19 on the visibility in event schema-rich results? We have an event discovery platform. We've been getting consistent visibility for events in rich results for many years. In March, it suddenly went to near zero. We were not able to correlate this with any Google public announcements. Tried to post on Webmaster Forum, but that had helped. So I'm not 100% sure if we made any changes with regards to events. But I have heard something similar from other folks as well. Hi, John. I'm here. We are for a trip, but I'm with you. Oh, OK. OK. How are you? OK, your question. Awesome. So I'm not 100% sure if anything particular happened there, but I have heard something similar from other folks. We have implemented online attending mode changes in our rich, I mean, schemas and all. But I don't think there's an effect broadly like this. We consistently got more than one luck with each part through event rich results. So my question is, does this happen suddenly? Is there any reason or something else? My feeling is we shifted, essentially, most events over to the online events, and that's something that we started showing a little bit more. But I don't know what the general plans are here, or if this is something that might be different from region to region. It's really hard to say. I have tried for open event schemas results and type my random all events. So still my events are not showing there. So is there any blocking from your side? I don't know if we have anything specific kind of holding back events at the moment. My feeling is that it's something that we're essentially trying to do organically now. But I don't know if there's anything specific happening there. I haven't heard from other people who run events with regards to event markup recently about this, so it's hard to say. But I think in the Webmaster Forum, you also included your site URL. Is that correct? Yes. And my second question is I'll ask in the Webmaster Forum. So some SEO experts suggest me, workshop events are not actually events. It's business promotion. So is this correct or not? Workshop? Workshop. I don't know, depending on how you frame it. I do see sometimes that people frame things as events that are not actually events. If it's something, for instance, like an online course that you have or a saying that is currently taking place, then that's something we wouldn't see as an event. This type of workshop, we already mark as a block through robots and no index no follow. But still I have a question if there is any genuine workshop. So still this workshop or account as a promotion or something like that? If it's blocked by robots text or no index, then we wouldn't index it. So that would be fine. No, no, no. My question is low quality workshops are no index by oversight. But quality was and quality workshops are counter promotions or not? I think it depends on how you frame the workshop. I don't think like I would make that. Because every competitor are using this workshop, event rack, 10 times, everyone. So I would not focus on what the competitors are doing. And just because especially if you know that this is something that you shouldn't be doing, then I wouldn't just copy what the competitors are doing because it's essentially not really going to help your website in the long run. No, I just ask you. Everybody is doing workshops and all this kind of stuff. That's right. Yeah, OK. Cool. I think for these kind of questions, well, you're not sure if this is the right markup for that, then that's something I would definitely post in the Webmaster Help Forum because the folks there have seen a lot of edge cases where they realize this is maybe problematic, maybe not problematic. So what's your suggestion? What can I do for get my traffic back? I think get your traffic back seems like a different question than the kind of rich results in the search. If you're talking about getting traffic or rankings back, then that feels like something where you need to work on the website overall, rather than just focusing on the rich results types. OK, cool. Thank you so much. Sure. OK, we added the no-site links search box tag on our home page for over two months, but we still see the site links search box in the search results. What's up with that? I don't know. If you can send me the URL, either dropping it as a comment in the YouTube comments there or send me a note maybe on Twitter, I'm happy to take a look at that with the team. Usually, the site links search box settings do take a little bit longer to be updated, but over two months seems a little bit long. We're planning to launch a microsite, which do you prefer, a subdomain or a subdirectory? If you say subdomain, should I have to create a separate site map, or can I use the same site map of the main domain? And finally, what are some things that we considered when creating a microsite? So from our point of view, you can use either a subdomain or a subdirectory. I realize there is a lot of contention in the SEO sphere about subdirectories and subdomains, but essentially either one of those would work from our side. I think in practice, I would try to use a subdirectory for this kind of thing, because it sounds like you're trying to create a new view of your existing content. It's not that you're trying to create something completely separate, but essentially it's like a landing page or maybe a handful of landing pages that are connected for a specific product that you're already selling or a service that you're providing on your main domain already. Then I would just try to tie that in with your main website. The advantages that you have there is that from a technical point of view, everything is a lot easier.  Whereas if you create a subdomain, then you suddenly have a separate host name that you have to maintain, or you have to watch out for things like redirects. You have to verify it separately in Search Console. If you're not doing domain verification, you have to watch out for sitemap files. All of these extra hassles that are involved with a subdomain, if you're essentially creating something that's essentially part of your main domain. If this is something that's completely separate from your main domain, then maybe a subdomain is a good approach. Maybe even a separate domain is a good approach. Maybe still a subdirectory is also fine. But like the way you frame it here as a microsite for something that probably you're already doing in some way, I would definitely go for a subdirectory and keep it as easy as possible. Make it easy for you to maintain. Make it easy for you to migrate. Should you need to make changes over time? That's kind of what I would focus on there. Sean, I have a follow up on that if you have time for it. So where would you draw the line between something that is separate from the main site and something that is still similar to the main site? If I'm doing the same thing, so this is for publishing. So if I'm doing the same thing, I'm just publishing more articles. But it is on a topic that may not be the, it's like related, but it's not quite the same thing. And I'm thinking maybe there would be different audiences for the new thing than for the existing content. Like is that kind of where I should do a subdomain instead of a subdirectory? Yeah, I think the situation that you mentioned in the beginning where you had a forum and kind of the main website, I think that's a perfect situation for something like a subdomain. Because those are clearly kind of separate entities or separate items that you're kind of maintaining, the people going to the forum might not be the ones that go to your main site. And similarly, the ones going to your main site might not be the ones that would go to your forum as well. So that's kind of, I think, an optimal situation for something like a subdomain. Also from a technical point of view, it's a lot easier to maintain because they're completely separate backends involved, all of that. If you're just publishing content, I think for the most part, I would just keep it on the main domain. If it's just informational content, just I try to keep it as simple as possible. If you have things like, I don't know, a consumer-facing side of an e-commerce site and then a dealer login, maybe that dealer login section would be a separate login or a separate subdomain. But even there, sometimes from a content point of view, it makes sense to keep it all on one site. But yeah. So I think if it's really just about different types of content and not different functionality, I try to keep it together on one site. OK. Like even if I have sports and then, I don't know, politics, it would still be OK to have it on one site. Yeah. I think that still makes sense. Because then you can kind of build up that combined site overall over time. And that kind of gains value as a bigger group. Whereas if you split things up into subdomains, then you have these small islands that are somewhat connected, but more loosely connected rather than tightly connected to your main site. OK. I'm asking this because I read the How Google News Works document. And there was a line in there about the audience and how an audience that turns to the site for one topic that could pass off like an authority and signal for that site like, I guess, being authoritative or being an expert in that topic. Because so much of the users who are interested in that topic, I guess, rely on the site or trust the site. So that's kind of where I'm getting at. Like if the audience is, if I'm publishing a lot of different topics on one big site and I have kind of audiences very fragmented, like is that something that could maybe disadvantage my site overall? So I don't know about Google News. I don't know if they do something special there. But in general, from a web search point of view, I don't see a big problem there. The one place where I would watch out for this is if you have a mix of adult content and kind of general content, then that's something where our safe search algorithms might have trouble understanding where the separation is. And then putting out on a separate subdomain makes it a lot easier to say, this is the content that can be filtered by safe search. And this is the general content. That's a lot easier. But kind of different themes like sports and politics, I don't think for the most part, it would make sense to separate that out into separate subdomains. OK, perfect. Thank you. John, can I ask another question if you have five questions? All right. So I have a follow-up on that about the safe search part. Let's say in a case that you have from, that you get a lot of spammy links using porn-related anchor text. And we are seeing some scenarios that people are actually coming to our sites and writing down on comment section adulty words. And they're also sending links using. And is there any way that it's going to harm us in a long way? Because we know based on documents, safe search filter is supposed to be on a URL basis. But are they in sort of, I don't know, domain-wide algorithms that might affect the whole site? Now, so in particular, when it comes to things like safe search, we try to be as fine-grained as possible with the way that we deal with this. But it's not always possible. So it's something where if we can't isolate the part of the site fairly easily, automatically, then we quickly end up in a situation where we say, well, safe search applies to the whole domain. So that's something I would definitely watch out for with regards to people writing things as comments on your website. Keep in mind, we do try to understand which parts of the website have comments and which parts of the pages have comments and try to understand that. But ultimately, the content that you're publishing includes these comments. So if you don't want your website to be found for things like that, or if you don't think that these comments are providing value to your website, then that's something I would take action on. Because ultimately, it's your website, and if other people are contributing content to your website and you're saying, oh, this is fine, then you will have to kind of live with the situation that search engines think, well, this is a part of what you want to stand for on the web, and maybe we will send you traffic for these comments, or maybe we will look at this content and say, oh, this is kind of gibberish. We don't know what to do with this website overall. So that's something where I wouldn't completely ignore random user-generated content on your website, kind of the comments that you get like that. Obviously, it's hard to draw a line and say, well, I will approve manually every comment that is made on a website. If you have tons of comments, then that's essentially impossible to do. But you can kind of work to figure out what kind of comments are useful, maybe let users flag comments so that you can manually review those, or maybe have something like a bad word list that you try to use in a simple way to figure out, are these comments actually useful, or is this maybe something I don't want to have published on my site? The no index works in this case. No index works pages. The list works. Sure. I mean, if you no index those pages, that's kind of a big hammer because then the whole page is gone. But if it's no index, then we don't use that for indexing. Thank you. Sure. Okay, some more questions. Most of the important questions answered by Matt are decade old and a lot has changed since then is it possible to have them answered again? Sure. I mean, we've been recording lots and lots of videos, so I'm happy to answer more questions, but let us know what kind of videos you think would profit from a modern take because we have gone through a lot of those older videos from Matt and a lot of the things they still stand. There are lots of timeless answers there with regards to how you can improve things for your website, particularly around search, and a lot of these things don't change that much over time. So just because something is old isn't really a reason for us to say we need to delete it and do it again because having a fresh face on a video makes things so much better. I think Matt did a fantastic job with a lot of these videos. But like I said, if you run across any that you think definitely need to be replaced or definitely need to be taken down because there's no longer relevant, by all means, let us know. Are rich results from the structured data markup always on the first page of the search results or can they be shown beyond the first page? They can definitely be shown beyond the first page. That's something that's not tied to the first page of the search results. Some particular kinds of elements in the search results are sometimes more visible on the first page, but they're like all the different rich results types, as far as I know, can be shown on any page in the search results. Hey, Sean, follow up on that, that's my question. So a lot of time I see that there's a, we go to a GSC, a Google Search Console. They have, I see something like, they have rich results, but it's in like 50 position or something, but they have very high impression. Like an impression looked like it's on the first page. So what does that mean in GSC? I think that's really confusing sometimes. And I don't know what it means in your particular case, but the tricky part with the search results page is it's not just like those 10 links below each other anymore. We have all of those one boxes and side bars and different navigational elements on a page where it's easy possible that you have maybe 20, 30, maybe even some paces, 50 links that are shown on one search results page. And they will all see impressions. They will have kind of the position number in Search Console and that can sometimes look a little bit confusing. So sometimes we see it that it looks like something is on the first page, even though it's position, I don't know, 20 or 30 or 40. Sometimes we see things that we say, oh, this is position number two, and you look at the page and it's like, where is my website? It's not showing up at all. And it ends up being maybe one of those images in a thumbnail on top, which for Webmaster is like, well, technically it's a link to my website, but practically it's not as visible as a big text block. So it's sometimes tricky to, I guess, to understand what is shown in that search performance report. And this is something where you also see differences across different kind of ranking checking tools if you use anything like that. Because everyone has a different opinion on how you should count the position on a page. And I don't know what the final answer there will be, but it's also something that we're looking at from time to time to see how can we make that position number a little bit more useful for people so that they understand what this number actually mean. Is my site visible? Is it very visible or just slightly visible on a page? It's sometimes hard to judge. Thank you so much. Do you know if, so sometimes there's a knowledge panel at the top of the, I'm talking about mobile search results where you kind of go through tabs to access the content. And sometimes you, let's say, flip to a news tab or interesting finds or something, and then there is a load more. So if you're in, if you only rank after you hit the load more, does that still count as average position one or whatever the actual knowledge panels position is in Search Console? That's only counted when people see your site in the search results. So it's not, well, not when they see your site, but rather when your site is loaded with a link in that search results page. So if you have to click the load more button in order for kind of the next part of the links to be shown, then that wouldn't count as the first page. That would only count when someone actually clicks on that. OK, so the position would be much lower or would it not? How would that appear, I guess? It would be higher. It's kind of like going to page two. OK. OK, thanks. What are the recommendations from Google for indexing and ranking audio? Nowadays, some publishers produce audio, just have two main ways to index and rank this content, Google Podcast, or embed it in a news article surrounded by text. What are some options? Are there any plans to give more visibility to audio in the search results? So I can't say much about the plans. On the one hand, I'm not aware of anything specific being planned there, but we also generally try not to pre-announce things. With regards to audio in general, I think the best approach is really just to work with transcripts. And especially if you're doing something like a podcast where people are talking, then if you have a transcript, then that's something we can look at and see from a web search point of view.  We can rank this page based on this text. So that's kind of the main approach I would take there. It's something where I imagine at some point in the future we'll be able to go in there and do kind of voice understanding of what is being said and index the audio content based on that. But I don't think that will happen within the next couple of weeks or anything like that. So making sure you have a transcript text together with the links to your audio files, that's probably what I would aim for. The structured data testing tool will be greatly missed. Are there any plans to expand the scope of the rich results testing tool? Yeah, I know lots of people have been very vocal about wanting the structured data testing tool to remain. I think it's something from a technical point of view it makes sense for the team to focus on one tool rather than two tools. And one of the pieces of feedback we've received with structured data in general is that it's sometimes hard for people to understand which types of structured data actually have an effect in search. And that's why we focus on the rich results tool, which focuses on the things that we would show as Google in the search results. So that's kind of the background there. We are planning on expanding the rich results testing tool. We've been looking at all the feedback that we're getting where people are like, oh, this is like terrible Google because this one use case I have only works in the structured data testing tool. And we try to take that kind of feedback, understand what it is that people are trying to do, and to make sure that we can implement that with the rich results testing tool. Also, the structured data is not going away just now. So it's not that you originally have to jump over. But by all means, make sure to send us feedback if there's something specific that you will miss if the structured data testing tool goes away. And try to make that feedback as actionable and as understandable as possible. Sometimes we just get feedback that's like, oh, Google, you're terrible. You shouldn't do this and take away our toys. But you don't tell us what we should change. And we can't really work with that kind of feedback. So make sure that the feedback is something that we can take to the team and say, look at this smart person here with this smart piece of feedback around their specific use case. Makes total sense. We should make sure that this works. So that's kind of what we would like. Follow up on some schema that Google used, some schema they don't. So we know that a lot of the SEOs just said suggestion to use organization markup. But I know it is not in the market of this in the development guide. So is Google actually use it? Or is that any benefit? And also, generally, if there is some schema marketing, schema.org website, but it's not listing the Google Developer Guide, can it be benefiting me anyway in SEO specifically? Yeah, so that's I think one of the trickier questions with regards to all of the structured data in that we have a lot of things that we use to try to understand the page and the content on the page that we don't necessarily show directly in the search results. So in the rich results test, we focus on the things that actually have direct visible effects or can have direct visible effects. But a lot of things help us to better understand the content and the context of a particular page. And those are things within kind of like this general schema.org markup, which you can do various things. And that's kind of, I'd say, almost a shame that we don't highlight that in the rich results test. But it's also something where it's very easy to go overboard because there are just so many different things you can mark up with schema.org. And you can spend a lot of time marking up all of those individual elements. And there's like an absolutely zero effect on your search results, even if we were to process that. So if there are things where you feel we desperately need to understand the relationships of the items on your page is a little bit better, then go ahead and add that markup to the page. But if it's just like, oh, there are five different types of schema.org that could apply to this page, therefore, I'll mark it up, that's probably not providing any value. So a really common use case is to mark a page as a web page. We do that on the Google.com home page as well. So it's not us making fun of everyone else. But it's something where, as a search engine, you look at that web page and it's like, it's a web page. And it says it's a web page. What else could it be? It doesn't give us any extra value. So finding things that are really high level, important for your pages, and adding the markup for that, even if it's not visible, I think that's perfectly fine. Going overboard and just adding all types of markup that you can find, it's not going to harm your site, but it's kind of a waste of time. OK, thank you so much. Sure. John, I have a quick mobile-first indexing-related question for you to check out a moment. So I manage a lot of sites. They're in the mobile-first index. And generally, they get crawled at about 90% mobile, maybe 10% desktop crawler. One of the sites, and again, it's an adaptive platform rather than fully responsive. So there are some differences. But one site in particular, it's my larger sites, that's getting crawled at about 40% desktop, 60% mobile. Is that a, does that create problems? Is that, I mean, it is, again, it is in the mobile-first index. Is that a bad thing? Is that something I should be working to fix? Is, can you explain a little bit about that? I don't think that would be a sign of a bad thing. My hunch is that it depends a little bit on the type of content that you have on a site. So for example, I'm not sure if for Google Shopping we would use the smartphone Googlebot or if we'd use a desktop Googlebot. So if it's an e-commerce site that's visible in Google Shopping and we crawl kind of shopping results with the desktop Googlebot, then you'll probably see more crawls with the desktop Googlebot in a case like that. I'm not 100% sure if that's the case with Shopping. It might also be similar with kind of the ad spot, the landing page check, those kind of things. But depending on the type of content, we might be using slightly different requests on our side to crawl the site. And that could result in a slightly different skew of desktop versus mobile when it comes to the overall crawling when you look at your log files. Cool. Thank you. Follow up on e-commerce very quick. So a marketing awareness ago, Martin said that Google Merchant Center bots don't render JavaScript. So in that case, if I switch my product page schema markup from HTML-based to JavaScript, will it still be able to show up in rich resulting shopping related term? I don't know. I don't know what specifically Martin said there. I would check with Martin, especially when it comes to rendering, he knows everything there. I see. Thanks. I was already asking, but he don't know anything about Merchant Center. Thanks. Oh, OK. Yeah. So I think everything around shopping is something that is kind of sneaking up on us on the web search side, because a lot of the shopping things are now kind of being merged a little bit within the organic search results. And they're no longer kind of this separate paid experience. So I imagine over time, we'll have a little bit more information to share around that. OK, thank you. Cool. OK, we didn't get through like a ton of questions, but if there's anything in the questions that you really need to have answered, feel free to drop that into the next thing out. I need to jump off to another meeting, so I can't stick around a little bit longer. But maybe on Friday, we'll have a bit more time. Thank you all for joining in. Thanks for all of the fantastic questions from you all. I hope you found this useful. And hopefully, we'll see each other again in one of the future Hangouts. Bye, everyone. Thank you, John. Bye. Thank you. Thanks.


We are Pro Cannabis Media. Hi, everyone. Welcome to We Talk News. I'm Jimmy Young, the founder of Pro Cannabis Media. Kurt Dalton from cannabis.net is my usual co-anchor, but he's on assignment this week. Filling in is the Rye Russell from weedbudsradio.com. We call him the main man. So, Rye, what is We Buds Radio? We Buds Radio is a fantastic podcaster. We have amazing guests from all over the cannabis industry coming to break down policy, science, and draw a connection for the audience. Sounds like Pro Cannabis Media. I like that. You know, you have big shoes to fill, right? But we'll start in your home state of Maine. They open for adult use retail sales on October 9th and a handful of locations around the state, but not in Portland, Maine, the state's biggest city. That's where 12 out of 43 applicants have been disqualified for a variety of reasons. So what is going on in Maine's biggest city? Can you explain the Portland license-scoring matrix? I don't know that anybody can explain that matrix, Jimmy, and I think that's part of the problem, is that they broke away from what we were seeing in a lot of other districts and municipalities. There was a much more streamlined, much more effective process. And I think that reduced ambiguity. I don't think that these applications were poor by any stretch of the imagination. I think that they were up against some pretty tough criteria. There you go. And I know that the city manager, John Jennings, is involved with this. Is he not? I see the entire city of Portland really struggling. You know, it's something that everybody wants, but politicians have a way to make things a little bit more confusing than they need to be. Well, he was an assistant coach with the Celtics way back when in the 90s when he was a regular on Jimmy Young Sports World on NECN, and maybe a little phone call to my old friend, John, might help the process, although I doubt it. Now, you know, that's not the only New England state or city that's holding up the growth of the cannabis industry. Just when you thought Vermont was going to be open for retail sales, the governor, Phil Scott, is insured the legislation on his desk that already has been approved by the Vermont House and the Vermont Senate goes far enough on social equity, even though expungement of cannabis possession records is part of that bill. Right. You got any insight on what's going on in Vermont? Same type of situation, Jimmy. If you have your branches of government saying that they've got a program ready and you have a population that is telling you they're ready. There was an interesting statement, though, that the social equity has been challenged by some.  Now, and who knows who Phil Scott is listening to on his private counsel on this, but it obviously upset a lot of the advocates in the state. But stay tuned. We'll have to see what happens in Vermont. Now that that bill is on their governor, Phil Scott's desk. Now it's time to go to the Big Apple for our weekly Wall Street report with Green Market reports. Deborah Borcher dead. You may recall a couple of weeks ago. Ianthus said its shareholders approved of a recapitalization plan that effectively dropped the shareholders ownership to less than 3% of the company. Well, one group fought back and as a result, the judge said that Ianthus must now go to the CCCA, which is basically bankruptcy court in Canada. This week, Juicy Holdings announced rising revenue after releasing preliminary financial results. The company is estimating revenue of $24 million for the third quarter that ended in September. That's a sequential increase of 61%. The guidance for revenue for the fourth quarter ending in December is now expected to be at the high end of the previously announced range of $25 to $30 million. And they said they expect to report positive adjusted EBITDA billionaire investor Nelson Peltz has resigned as senior advisor to Aurora Cannabis. The company made a big deal about this last year when they brought Peltz on because it gave them a little investor star power. Well, the divorce was quietly noted in an annual meeting update. And that's the big news this week. I'm Deborah Borechart with the Green Market Report for We Talk News. There are a half dozen states that will be voting on the legalization of cannabis in the November election. And just when you thought Arizona would be a slam dunk, a recent poll has shown now there was just a 50-50 shot of it passing. 600 Arizonians were asked whether adult use of cannabis should be legalized and 46% said yes, 45% said no. That means there are still 9% undecided. Amazingly, that same question was asked in July and 62% said yes then and 32% said no. So any idea what's going on there, Rye? Oh geez, I think when you have a population that is cooped up inside for too long, they might expand their mind and evaluate some decisions a little bit differently. So I've been to Arizona, they've got great cannabis and I am very hopeful they can pull this together. There they go. And hopefully the citizens have been enjoying that. Anyway, Nebraska's who advocated for a ballot question to legalize medicinal cannabis were shut down by a state Supreme Court decision a few weeks ago. The court explained their decision was based on the complicated wording of that question. Did that stop the movement? No. Now they're crafting a simpler question and have started a new campaign that should be ready for the next election. Rye, this is why lawyers are the best investment in the cannabis industry. We need to have them. Every business probably should be investing in really strong representation because whenever you leave anything to politicians in one central office, we see how easy it is to blame others and to hold up a process that doesn't need to be held up. Hey, speaking of politicians, now onto Washington, D.C. where the word cannabis appears on the latest house proposal on the COVID relief bill more times than the word jobs. Now here's vote pro podcast co-host Phil Adams with our D.C. Report Bill. Hi, I'm Phil Adams from vote pro podcast and this is the We Talk News D.C. Report. The coronavirus relief legislation released by House Democrats on Monday once again includes banking protections for the cannabis industry. The new COVID legislation contains the text of the Secure and Fair Enforcement Banking Act and could get a floor vote within the week. The Safe Banking Act as it's known protects financial institutions that service state legal cannabis businesses from federal regulators. As a standalone bill, the Safe Banking Act has significant bipartisan support. GOP lawmakers, however, continue to question the relevance of cannabis provisions within a COVID relief bill. Steve Fox, president of cannabis consulting firm VS Strategies, said of the Safe Banking Act, quote, at a time when businesses all over the country are relying on electronic transactions to protect public health, cannabis businesses are being forced to exchange currency. This bill is timely and necessary. For the first time in four years, U.S. marijuana arrests fell in 2019 according to a new federal report. Although cannabis arrests were expected to decline with the rise of state level legalization, that decline had proved elusive from 2016 to 2018. The FBI's uniform crime reporting program shows however, that federal prosecutions of cannabis related offenses dropped by nearly 18 percent last year, as in previous years, the vast majority of those prosecutions were for simple possession. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is suing a Maryland dispensary operator for sexual harassment of dispensary employees. In a lawsuit filed last week in U.S. District Court against Maryland Health Management and AMMA Investment Group, the EEOC charges that the former general manager of the nature's medicines dispensary in Ellicott City, Maryland, subjected at least three employees to a sexually hostile work environment. The EEOC is requesting a jury trial to determine compensation, as well as an order for the defendants to provide anti-harassment workplace training. That's the Weed Talk News DC report for this week. I'm Phil Adams from Vote Pro Podcast. One more note from our nation's capital. The IRS has asked a federal judge to dismiss Harborside Supreme Court Challenge over the tax rule 280E that bars cannabis companies from taking business deductions like any other business. What do you think that federal judge will rule? Rye against the IRS or for Harborside? I wish I was a judge and I could give this ruling because thankfully I'm on the media site. I'll tell you though, they have deemed this essential, this is an essential business. And when you put those words together, it's very clear to me that if you want jobs that you need to support businesses. So I hope they do the right thing, but who am I? That's right. And even judges have to file their taxes, don't they? I mean, at least we think that's what they have to do. Now in the meantime, on the research front this week, migraines and menopause, another health issue that research shows can be positively affected by cannabis. Did you know 39 million people in the U.S. suffer from migraines? Well, according to the app tracker, migraine buddy, 82% of migraine sufferers have been helped by using cannabis. So right. Do you have or have you know people who suffer from migraines? Absolutely. I've seen it a lot and I think this is going to be a fantastic tool. I was looking at the app store and there's actually quite a few tools available for consumers to download and keep track of what it is they're consuming, how are they consuming it and how it will treat their ailment. That's right. And can a dose is one herb tracker is another. There's quite a few other ones out there of course. Just go to the app store and search cannabis tracking apps and you'll find quite a few. Now, as far as menopause is concerned, that's another issue that women have to deal with and men get a pass on this one. But as partners, it's an issue. Trust me. Sure enough, a recent study by the midlife women's veterans health group in California found that women who experience hot flashes and insomnia can get relief from cannabis 27% of the women surveyed reported cannabis use helps them with those symptoms. But right, this is a veteran study and of course the VA hospital cannot recommend medicinal use because of the schedule one classification. Another reason why it should be decriminalized at the federal level, right? We have to support our veterans. This is not a new concept and so they're make sacrifices for us every day. I think that we can make some sacrifices for them and so this is another way that we can look at ways to not just support the medical uses of cannabis, but also just support those on the front lines. Absolutely. And one nation that does not have this problem with veterans is Canada. That's where it's federally legal and that's where MJ biz dailies International reporter Solomon Israel delivers his Canadian cannabis report Solomon. I'm Solomon Israel from marijuana business daily International and this is your we'd talk news Canadian cannabis report Ontario's government operated online cannabis store says it's beating black market prices. The Ontario cannabis store says the average price for a gram of marijuana from their website was $7.05 Canadian during the first quarter of their fiscal year. In comparison, they said the average price for a gram from illicit marijuana websites was almost $8.00. Meanwhile, Ontario is still lagging behind other Canadian provinces in terms of the number of bricks and mortar cannabis stores with fewer than 200 licenses to date, but that's going to change in the near future. The province has doubled its pace of approvals for marijuana stores and is now issuing 10 new licenses every week and Aurora cannabis is no longer working with billionaire investor Nelson Peltz Peltz had signed on with Aurora last year as a strategic advisor. This week, Aurora said he had resigned from that role to pursue other commitments. You can read all those stories and more at mjbizdaily.com. I'm Solomon Israel from marijuana business daily. Just a reminder that the mjbizdaily 2020 fact book is on sale now at mjbizfactbook.com mjbizdaily announced their hemp industry daily division has formed an alliance with the data analytic mega company Nielsen to provide insights on the CBD and hemp markets for both humans and their pets. One more note from California state cannabis regulators are suing the parent company of cushy punch for manufacturing over $64 million in unlicensed edibles. A 2019 raid found 58 pounds of concentrate at this unlicensed facility and their parent company vertical bliss. Well, they've had their license revoked at another location where they were licensed. But the unlicensed market are now becoming the rightful targets of law enforcement and isn't that a good thing in this legal world or at least the legal word we're trying to create things like this. Jimmy are a stain on the industry. When we are trying to pioneer something, we're trying to build trust with our community activities like this. They really have no place. So I don't think that we're going to find much debate that we're going to find a lot of support when activities like this are conducted no matter where in the country. All right. And did you know that there's a new documentary about to be released by the cannabis International Foundation that proposes that the leaves of the cannabis plant might be the next superfood. And according to cannabis now Dr. William Cortnett explains that when fresh raw cannabis leaves are juiced and introduced to your system, its restorative properties are increased. So that's pretty cool. Do you know anybody who juices marijuana leaves? So I actually just started trying this a few weeks ago. I was invested in a small juice bar many years ago. And so I'm a big proponent of juicing. And so I just attempted this the other day. I'll tell you, I need to do a little work on the taste, but otherwise I am a firm believer. Okay. So here's a tip that I heard from others who are juicing leaves effectively add carrot juice in with those leaves and that'll help your taste. How about that? Is that a good tip? I love carrot juice. So I'm going to take that up immediately. All right. And finally this week, social media platform TikTok has been in the news for many reasons as its ownership has now been taken over by a pair of US based companies. Well, CBD companies are taking advantage of TikTok's reach. CEO of Cannabombs, Lindsey Corum, created a short video that has now reached 1.9 million views, turning into $25,000 in sales about 50 times more than usual for the CBD bath bomb that they use in Cannabombs. Have you ever heard of a CBD bath bomb, right? Absolutely. I have been buying bath bombs for my grandmother and my sister for years and I just tried one about six months ago and every now and then, I'm not a big bath guy, but every now and then that tranquil bath. But I'll tell you, it's just like some of the topicals that we've used. It felt really good on my joints and it was made my skin feel really soft. Well, that's very important, Ry Russel from weedbudsradio.com and I so appreciate you filling in for Curt Dalton this week, but that will do it for this week's Weed Talk News. Special thanks to Ry Russel from weedbudsradio.com for filling in. In the meantime, I'm Jimmie Young from Pro Cannabis Media. Remember, it's a whole new world of weed out there. Use it responsibly. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. We Talk Now, We Talk News and In the Weeds are all available on most major podcast distributors like iTunes, Spotify, Google Play and our friends at clnsmedia.com and our flagship, cannabis.net. So subscribe, share and like our videos on all the social media networks out there, including LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, The Weed Tube and YouTube. Weed Talk and In the Weeds are two productions of Pro Cannabis Media supported by Revolutionary Clinics, one of the top medical cannabis dispensaries in the Massachusetts area. Now with three locations in Greater Boston, two in Cambridge and one on Broadway in Somerville. Rev Clinics has a patient-first mission. They will customize your needs as a medical patient with the proper titration and combination of strains, flavors and products. Rev Clinics, where the patient comes first.