Welcome, Weirdos. I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Here you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved, and unexplained. This is a Fireside Frights episode where I strip away all of the sound effects, music, and fancy production. And it's just you, me, and this campfire, along with stories sent in by you, my Weirdo family. If you want to send in a story for a future Fireside Frights, just visit WeirdDarkness.com and click on Tell Your Story. If you're new here, welcome to the show. While you're listening, be sure to check out WeirdDarkness.com for merchandise, my newsletter, Twitter contests, to connect with me on social media. Plus, you can visit the Hope in the Darkness page if you're struggling with depression or dark thoughts. You can find all of that and more at WeirdDarkness.com.  Before we begin, I would like to say that we don't really have all that many to share this month for some strange reason. I'm guessing you were all pretty busy during the holidays. That's okay. I forgive you if you forgive me for bringing you a short Fireside Frights. But if you'd like to send your stories, I could definitely use them for next month. What you're about to hear are the only stories that I have not already used. We'll begin with Alastor. Hello. I have a story about a very strange day in the summer, I think. So it all started when I woke up one day. Now, I painted my nails the night before and put the nail polish bottles back where they came from. I think it's also important that I tell you about this weird earth light that goes from blue to white and then off, but the color changes if you tap it. I have a weird story about this earth light, but that's another story for another time. So I went to bed and the next morning my earth light was in the middle of my desk and turned on. The nail polish bottles were surrounding the light. I was obviously a little spooked because I know I put the nail polish back and I turned off that light. So a little while later I go to brush my hair and I point at the hair tie just so I know where it is and go get my brush from the other room. So I get the brush, I go back and guess what's missing? The hair tie and I go look for it and it's exactly where I put my brush so I couldn't possibly have moved it. Yeah, so that's about it. I hope you enjoyed reading this. Thank you, Elastor. I appreciate you sending in your story and I can't help but notice that this ghost poltergeist or whatever it is has issues with your personal care. It has issues with your hairstyle, obviously, because it moved the hair tie, so maybe try a style that doesn't use a hair tie. Maybe it will approve of the new look and maybe it doesn't like painted nails. I'm not a big fan of painted fingernails, so maybe it's some guy like me in ghost form. Very shallow, I understand, very judgmental, but you don't want it. It's a ghost. What are you going to do? What are you going to do? So anyway, I appreciate you sending that in. Thank you very much. This next one comes from Chad. He says, Hey there, and first of all, thank you for the podcast. I just found it a few months ago, so I've started at the beginning and I'm listening to it throughout the day at work and in my car until I get all caught up. Still about two years to go, but knocking out about a month or so every day. Anyway, I have a few stories to share with you. Let me first say that I used to be pretty skeptical about ghosts and paranormal activity, even though my first encounter came at a fairly early age. When I was about eight or nine, my family moved into a house in our town. It wasn't very long after that when I began having a recurring dream. Well, not the exact same dream, but the exact theme. I was always being chased by a man dressed in all black, including a black ski mask. Like I said, the dream was different, but the circumstance was the same, always being chased by the same figure. This went on for a while, and then one day while we were riding down the road, I overheard my mom telling my dad that ever since we had moved into that house, that she had been having the same recurring dream.  My mom and I were having the same dreams. I actually didn't say anything to her at the time. Now, fast forward a few months, my father worked third shift as a deputy sheriff, so in the evenings, it was just me, my mom and my brothers. On this one particular night, my mom and I were up late because I had pulled the ultimate grade school kid hijinks. I had waited until the day before to tell her that I had a science project due the next day, so I'm sorry. That reminds me of my own childhood, buddy. I did that. I was just thinking about that earlier today. I had a science project due the next day, and my parents found out about it. I wasn't going to tell them. I don't know how they found out about it, but they did, and I was supposed to gather leaves and put them in like a press book type of thing and label them and find out what tree those leaves belonged to and turn that in as a science project. I didn't space it off. I just completely ignored it. Science was not my thing. I have an interest in it now a lot more, but back then, that was homework, and I thought that was a stupid assignment, so I just didn't want to do it, and oh my gosh, it was I in trouble. Anyway, I'm sorry. I had to throw that in there. Anyway, you pulled the ultimate grade school kid hijinks. You waited until the day before to tell her you had a science project due the next day. She and I are sitting in our dining room table working on the project. It was probably close to midnight, and my brothers were already in bed. My mom had to go to the bathroom, and while she was gone, I glanced out of our dining room window and there, standing underneath the tree in our yard, was a man or a figure wearing all black and a ski mask. I screamed for my mom and told her what I saw. She immediately called dad. We moved out of that house later that very same week, and I never had another dream like it. So odd that you would have the dreams only in that house, and as soon as you left, you no longer had those dreams. That is freaky. Obviously, there is something that happened in that house or something attached to that house. I've never heard of a ghost being dressed in black along with a black ski mask. That is very new, so I'm guessing that something happened in that house. Maybe a burglary gone wrong, and maybe the burglar was killed during the robbery, and that's the way he was dressed. That's just a guess, but that is really, really creepy. Anyway, Chad has another story here. He says, in 2018, I had to take a business trip to Greenville, South Carolina. That evening, I got settled into my hotel room and went to sleep. At about 3 a.m., which I've heard many call the witching hour, I woke up because I heard what sounded like the door to my room open. I sat up in bed and looked around and saw nothing. I leaned far enough to see the door. Nothing. So I sort of just chalked it up to a dream and laid back down. Just a few minutes later, the top blanket on my bed was pulled off of me toward the bottom of the bed. I sat up again and still saw nothing except the blanket piled up at the foot of the bed. Needless to say, I was freaked out. I took a deep breath, took another look around, grabbed the blanket and pulled it back up, this time holding onto it with my hand as I turned over on my side to try and go back to sleep. So I had a grip on the blanket. Just a few minutes later, the blanket was snatched out of my hand and pulled to the bottom of the bed again. I sat up in the bed again, looked around, again, saw nothing. So I hollered out, leave me alone in the name of Jesus. I'm trying to sleep. Well, it worked. I laid back down, went to sleep, and wasn't bothered again. A couple of thoughts on that last story there, Chad. I'm wondering, do you have a pet? The reason I ask that is, could your pet have been under your bed? If the pet was under the bed, it could have tried to get out the door, but it was already in your room and the door was shut, so it couldn't get out, so it went back under your bed. Then it started playing with the blanket, which was hanging down on the floor, and it started playing with the blanket and it pulled it off that first time.  And then when you yell, that would be your pet knowing that you were angry and would stop doing it. That's the only thing I can think of, but if you don't have a pet, then I really don't know. You can take any one of those incidents and explain them away in some way, shape, or form. The door, yes, it could have just been in a dream because you looked up and you didn't see the door open. Then later, the blanket going down. I've actually had that happen to me once, and it wasn't anything paranormal, I think. It was just the blanket fell down to the ground. So I have a parasomnia, which means that you can move even while you're dreaming. It's not a bad case, but once in a while, I'll find myself kicking or trying to punch the air when I wake up. And that could very well have, I could have done that in my sleep and then knocked the blanket and felt the blanket go down to the floor, but only remember the part where it's falling and not remember me kicking or anything. So you can explain away things like that one at a time, but once you combine them all, it is really hard to explain away. Thank you very much for the email, Chad. Appreciate that. This next one comes from Tina. She says, Dear Daraan, attached is another story from my family history. It isn't particularly scary, but ties into the world, the weird coincidental events that have connected to the Douglas and Flournoy families for multiple generations. Thank you for the opportunity to reignite my love of writing, your weirdo sister in Christ, Tina Douglas, a.k.a. girl problems. Okay, Tina, so here is your story, and she calls it The Ring. When my mother passed away, there came a day when we daughters, I'm the oldest of three, had to divide her ring collection. Among the various rings she had collected over the years was one that I alone was familiar with. It was in a simple white envelope with the words Mrs. Flournoy's ring, carefully written in my grandmother's script. I recognized it from when my grandmother Flournoy, my mom's mother, had passed away. The ring had been tucked in a plain vinyl purse since the night it was placed in the envelope. The purse and ring had belonged to my grandfather's mother and was given to my grandparents along with other effects the night my great grandmother died following a horrible Christmas Eve auto-crash. The ring itself was 24 carat rose gold, quite thin and lacked any design other than being cleanly cut, so the ring might be removed from her swollen finger as the ER staff attempted in vain to save her. The staff member charged with that somber task was an older nurse who had only recently received her LVN credentials. She was also my father's mother. Though neither family knew about each other at the time, my father's mother had handed that ring to my mother's mother during what had to be one of the Flournoy's family's worst moments. Many years later my parents married after a whirlwind courtship. My mother learned the story of the family's chance meeting while living with my dad's family while he was away in the army during the Vietnam War. It was only after packing away my grandmother's effects after her death that my mother realized her mother had kept the purse with all its contents including the ring just as she had received it that night. Mom entrusted me with the purse but wanted to keep the ring in her possession. When we met to divide my mom's rings, we agreed that rather than chance any hurt feelings over who got which ring, we would number and draw for mom's rings. I drew the number attached to the very ring that held so much shared family history. It now resides once again in the plain vinyl purse along with a small collection of other items my great grandmother had with her that fateful night. That is incredible for your families to have had that experience together with before your parents got together. Very cool. Thank you for sharing that, Tina. I appreciate that. This next one comes from K.B. Hearst. She says, Hello Darren, you asked for more paranormal stories. I have a short one regarding an instance in a basement apartment I was renting for my parents. And here we go. Let's see how. This is not too long. Okay. We had moved into the new house and it had a setup where there was a fully renovated basement. So while my parents lived upstairs, I lived downstairs. It had an office area, bedroom, closet, living room, and a small bar. It was perfect for whenever I had friends over. We'd moved in in the dead of winter, so we didn't know anyone. I only saw my neighbors come and go, as it seemed we all had early shifts somewhere. I was usually gone before 7 in the morning to my day job. Spring had finally come, so one afternoon, I decided to leave and take a walk, as I often did in the neighborhood to clear my head. The neighborhood was your typical suburban paradise where everyone seemed to know each other and had your standard picket fence with perfectly trimmed green grass. On my way back from my walk, I noticed several cop cars parked across the street and one officer putting up yellow tape. Whatever happened, had happened while I was walking. Couldn't have been more than 40 minutes later. I went up the driveway and saw my mom talking to one of our neighbors. A young man living directly across the street from the house was shot dead. We were all in shock. Q one of those episodes of Dateline. I had noticed him before, but he was quiet and lived with his mother. I had never spoken to him. My mom did on occasion, as in your typical, hello, good morning, wave. A few days later, one of the neighbors told us that he had shot himself and died instantly.  Fast forward to a few weeks later, I had forgotten about it and didn't mention it to anyone. We'd all gone on with our lives. I was with a friend who was a professional reader and medium. We were hanging out in a New Age shop that I frequented. She and I were giving each other tarot readings while we waited for customers to come in. In another life, I gave tarot readings and helped at a New Age shop for a friend. Well, we were talking about an experience she had with some ghost of a man that wouldn't leave her alone. I thought it was odd, but I have heard stranger stories. While after telling her to burn some sage or say some prayers, she told me that she would call me the next day when she had done that, to update me. I thought nothing more of it and went home. However, later that night, I was woken up by my headboards hitting the wall. It was as if something or someone was pushing my bed and me, trying to wake me up. I was sleeping on my stomach as I often did and happened to first look at the clock on my table next to my bed, which said 5 a.m. It was still dark out, but the light was starting to come in from the sun rising outside, creating a purple illumination in the dark room. I felt something touching me and I was wide awake at this point and turned my head towards the side of the room that faced the basement window in my bedroom. I saw a young man with messy hair and his demeanor was very confused and stressed. I was now shaking, but not from fear. I was actually trembling from whatever this spirit was feeling. I didn't know what to do, but my first instinct was to say hello. I recalled an episode of Coast to Coast A.M. where George Norrie had a guest talking about shadow people. In that particular episode, a man called telling a story where a dark entity had tried to hug him but abnormally tight, so tight he could not breathe. So he said to the entity, Hello, I love you. Supposedly this was to cause whatever entity was attacking him to be repelled at the love rather than the fear. I recalled other guests calling out Jesus' name, but the man saying I love you to the ghost always made me chuckle. I never forgot that episode, and in placing it at that moment, I saw the young man's ghost and said hello to him. He faded. He was like watching a movie where a spirit would fade like smoke, but I was wide awake, looking at the entity as it disappeared. This was no movie. I believe that because of the proximity of that being showing up so close to when the neighbor of mine killed himself. It could have been him. I said a prayer for him that morning that hopefully he would be able to find some peace. That same day my friend called to tell me she had done the sage and said the Lord's Prayer and she told me the entity left her house and knew it wouldn't be coming back. She also told me she felt the young man had died by suicide. We had not talked about what had happened to my neighbor at all. I told her about the young man passing by suicide when she said this to me. We're both sure it was him. Great stuff, KB. Thank you very much for sharing that. The whole shadow person thing. I've actually been wondering the last few days. I think I've mentioned here in the podcast at some point that I'm working on a speaking presentation where I would go around the country and do a speech about 30 minutes to 60 minutes about some subject. And I had decided on doing urban legends and the true stories that are attached to them. But I'm really starting to think now that maybe I want to do it on shadow people or black eyed kids because I think there would be a big interest in that. And there's some certain materials that I think I could use for my presentation. So if you're listening and you have an opinion on that, drop me an email at darren at weirddarkness.com. Let me know what you think about that particular idea.  Let me know. I would really like to, I'd really like some opinions on that. And KB, thank you very much for that. And we have one last story. Like I said, it's going to be a short episode of Fireside Frights this month because I didn't receive very many. So please send your stories to me. Just go to WeirdDarkness.com, click on tell your story, and you can send me your true story, or maybe a story from somebody that you know. Okay, our last one comes from Bill. He says, Hi, Darren. Long time listener, first time contributor. It's great hearing that. It's such a radio thing to hear that. He says, I'll preface my story by saying that I'd always wanted to experience ghostly happenings, but through my childhood, it just never happened. A friend of mine who was a white witch told me that my third eye was not only closed but was sealed shut. She suggested I'd had some sort of psychic trauma either in this life or my last one. Anyway, when I was 35, I finally bought my own house. It was a small little bungalow in a decent neighborhood. Not long after moving in, however, I began to experience some strange things. It started small with the sound of someone coming into the side door of the house and walking up the few steps into the kitchen. I would check, but there would never be anyone there. Doors would open and close on their own in spite of there being no draft in the house. On more than one occasion, I'd wake up feeling like someone was trying to lift up my torso from the bed. The single weirdest event one night was when I was trying to put in an air conditioner in my bedroom window. I'm still not sure how I managed it, but I ended up breaking the storm glass. I cleaned it up and gave up for the night deciding to go to bed. About 15 minutes after I climbed into bed, I heard a thud from the kitchen, which was on the other side of my bedroom wall. After that, I heard giggling and the sound of feet running down into the basement. I got up and looked and a picture I had hanging in my breakfast nook had come off the wall, made a 90 degree turn and landed in the middle of the kitchen floor, all without breaking. I'd done some research by that point and knew the name of my ghost was Rose. She and her husband had lived in the house back in the 1940s. She had in fact died in the house in the early 70s. He stayed on till he passed in the mid-80s. I apologized to Rose for breaking the window, put the picture back on the wall and tried to go to bed. I say tried because for the next two hours I heard big band music coming out of my chimney which came up through a corner of the bedroom. I left a picture of Rose I had found in the attic on the wall when I moved out. I hoped the new people who bought the house treat her with respect, as I tried to do. On a side note, the experience of finally living in a haunted house apparently opened up something in me. I've had many ghostly experiences since and would be happy to share more later. Thanks for keeping up your weird work, signed Bill. Bill, yes, please, send in more of the stories. I could definitely use them and it's odd that you somehow had your mind switched on later in life in order to now be sensitive to this type of thing. I'm 54 years old and aside from the one incident that I have told people about with my sleep paralysis incident, I've never had a paranormal incident. I don't know if it's something that I would wish upon myself or not. I've always debated that. If it was to happen to me and it was to become a regular thing, I would just take it as maybe a spiritual gift from God and try to use it for good, I guess. But I don't know if it's anything that I would pray for. I'm wondering, did you tell the new owners of your house about Rose? Or are you going to let them find out on their own? Well then again, you know what? If they don't have the same open mind as you do, if their third eye isn't open or whatever you want to call it, maybe they won't have any experiences anyway. Hey, thank you again for sharing that, Bill. I do greatly appreciate you sending in your story. I appreciate everybody sending in your stories. Again, if you do like the show, please share it with somebody you know who loves the paranormal or strange stories, true crime, monsters, unsolved mysteries, and you can email me anytime with your questions or comments.  If you've got questions for me or just a comment, just send it to Darren, D-A-R-R-E-N at WeirdDarkness.com. That website, WeirdDarkness.com, it's also where you can find all of my social media, listen to free audiobooks that I've narrated, visit the store for Weird Darkness t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, phone cases, more merchandise, sign up for monthly contests, read movie reviews, find other podcasts that I host, find the Hope in the Darkness page if you or someone you know struggling with depression or dark thoughts like that story we had earlier about the young man who decided to kill himself, a very sad story. If you're having thoughts like that, you definitely need to reach out to someone, either call 988 in the United States or call 999 if you're in the UK, or go to that Hope in the Darkness page and find some sort of resource to help you get through everything. Weird Darkness is a production and trademark of Marlar House Productions, copyright, 2023. I'm Darren Marlar, thanks for joining me, everybody, for another episode of Fireside Frights in the Weird Darkness.


Can I take creepy awkward ten-year-olds hitting on other little ten-year-old girls for $500, Bob? Ooh, that's a hot mug, guys. And before I start, I should mention that I did forget to put the rating part in for the Magnificent 7 episode review. I don't know why I forgot it. It was a 5 out of 7, just letting you know. It was a 5 out of 7. Hey guys, this is my review for episode 2 of season 3. The kids are all right, and some of the jokes have not aged well in this episode. Don't get me wrong, some of the humor in this episode is actually pretty decent, and the chemistry between Dean and the kid is very good, and actually a lot of the pantomiming is very good, too. However, there's a few points, too, where it's just like... This episode is essentially their version of Children of the Corn. The episode centers around Dean and Sam coming to this town where Dean finds out that an old flame of his is living there, and because he's basically taking any chance to point anything he can find, he goes and meets her, and he finds out that she had a kid. And this kid is basically him. The jacket, the music taste, even the hair gel, even... the view of women. There's just this point where he goes into the bouncy castle, and he says, look out, ladies. I understand where the joke is coming from. They wanted to get as many Dean references for this kid as possible, and obviously Dean's a man with the ladies, and it just doesn't work when it's 10 years old. Other than that, though, I did enjoy seeing this kid kind of have the same mannerisms as Dean. At one point, they're both eating cake, and they both watch a mom pass them by. Very good direction by Phil Sigiri again. He's always been a very decent director. Admittedly, he's gotten a little bit lazier in later years, but that's also because the material's gotten a hell of a lot lazier, but this director has been consistent with the show almost since the beginning. And then there's Lisa. I'm actually kind of surprised at how much I forget she exists, considering how important she was to Dean for a period of time. Hell, she was even in a full season almost in season six. Lisa just doesn't have that much to her. She's a nice person. There really isn't much to her. And there's a reason why they eventually dropped her in season six, is there's just nothing to do for her. But then they start to see that some of the kids are not as they appear. We see that some of them are this kind of mommy clone thing. It does lead to one of the creepiest moments in this season, where putting the car in neutral and letting it slowly go into the water and thinking, my God, I just killed my weird robot mutant-knot-daughter-daughter. And then she goes back home and the daughter's there like, feed me, mommy! Super creepy! Some cool homages to the idea of children as horror images that was in Children of the Corn. And all the while this is happening, Sam and Ruby get to know each other a little bit more, and we find out that Ruby's a demon. But she also says, hey, check out your entire family history. Yellow Eyes has a hand in killing almost all of your family. And we're never really going to explain why. I don't understand what the point of this part was. I think this was, again, a writer strike thing that they threw in because they thought they might do something with it. And in the end, it really doesn't come of anything, as far as I know. Considering the writer strike and considering what happened to other shows during this time, it's not the worst thing because we still get to build this relationship between Ruby and Sam in a way that definitely changes in season four. The brothers find out that there's this monster, which I can't remember the name of right now, but it's basically creating these creatures. It's kidnapping the kids and replacing them with its own kind of entities. Weird because they kind of, when they kill the main thing, which kind of like a Star Wars Phantom Menace sort of idea, you kill the brain and all the others die, either way. It's cool to see the kids work together with Sam and Dean and for escaping. The episode ends with insinuating that Lisa and this kid will come back, which I don't even know if they came back in this season, but they obviously did come back. It's a fun episode. And while being kind of like a one-off and a humor episode, it also has some cool character building, adult building for Dean. So I do think this is a decent episode. It does have a few jokes that have not aged well, and there are some moments that are just kind of cringy, but otherwise I still find that this is a fun episode to watch. So in the end, I'm going to give episode two a five out of seven. So I asked you guys what your comments were, and I did also forget to read some of the comments for the Magnificent Seven, so I'm going to read those now. Season three, episode one, Kate Cassidy, enough said. I do like her version of Ruby. I don't mind the second version of Ruby. It works towards the narrative, but I definitely admit, I like Kate Cassidy's version of it. The Magnificent Seven is all right, kind of slow until they finally figure out it's the seven deadly sins. They hiked them up way too much, though considering they are killed off in one episode. The final conversation between the brothers is an excellent setup for the rest of the season, reiterating the hopeless situation Dean signed himself up for, and how he admits saving his brother was more for him than for Sam. I look forward to more Ruby and Dean's hilarious impulsiveness. I will admit that is an issue with the Magnificent Seven is that considering these are the seven deadly sins, they are beaten quite easily. I think it was kind of showing the magnitude of what they had done. Also, they didn't think the show was going to go on for another 12 seasons. Not a fan of the Magnificent Seven, memorable for Isaac being forced to drink Drano, other than that, not too much to note. And now I'm going to read you the comments for this episode. The kids are all right as by far the creepiest use of children in Supernatural. This episode also had me surprised from the deaths they pulled off in 2007.  Maybe it's just me, but the mother reacting towards the changeling version of Katie is how postpartum mothers get towards their children. As for Ben and Lisa, it would have been enjoyable if Ben was actually Dean's dad. What, uh, I think you mean Dean was his dad? Although season three is short, it would make a subplot of Dean being a dad not work really well. It actually works a lot better with Dean being the father that Ben deserved and needed in his life. But Ben being like a young Dean in his mannerisms makes me wonder if Ben was actually trying to act like Dean because he wanted a dad or if in general was just like being like Dean and the writers wanted to be funny. I feel like the acting is a lot better in this episode than the previous episode, except you can't beat Jim Beaver in his acting on Supernatural. He's always good. The end scene in a way rips your heart out as Dean's one year to live is showing if he didn't make this deal, maybe he could have lived a normal life rather than be so obsessed with having Sam in his life. I really love how each episode in the season adds a sense of foreboding with Dean's inevitability going to hell and that there's nothing that they can change despite Dean trying to be more open with his emotions and feelings. Exactly. This season is a very internal look at the brothers. It's a very on the moment, them going through the emotions sort of idea and it's very character focused on his plight and eventually dying. The kids are all right is just that. All right. It gives a little more momentum to the season, but I honestly just had it playing in the background and wasn't super engaged. A part of me wanted Ben to be somehow be Dean's kid. And I always laugh when they show the similarities and Dean's panics. I do like how they use this storyline to really hit heavy on the fact that Dean has less than a year to live and realizes he will never have a family future. However, I forgot how quickly they revealed Ruby's demon identity. If it weren't for the strike, I wish they had kept us in the dark for a little bit longer. And do they ever explain why all the family and friends that Mary knew are dead, but somehow some cousins show up in season six? The changelings are a creepy bunch, but I personally thought that their defeat was a little easy. They happened across the mother and lucky for the brothers burning her kills all of them. Yeah. Looking forward to the next episode as we get a bit more humor. And now give your guys's comments on what you thought of Bad Day at Black Rock. This is the first episode where Laura Cohen is introduced. It's going to be cool to see her in this episode, considering she would go on to be so successful in The Walking Dead. So make sure to leave your guys's comments and I'll read them off in the next episode review. Anyways, guys, that's all from me. See you guys next time.


Folks, sometimes other people say things so well that it can't really be improved upon. For millennia-ish, people have been trying to define the word science. My typical definition involves things like, it's a systematic approach to understanding natural phenomenon. Right? Right?  So, you know, I often call science a Lincoln-Loggy approach, right?   But you know what? In the book, authored by Cooper Here and Inherit, there's a definition that I really like for science. So, if you wonder why I click this thing, sometimes I'm just getting some references and here it is. So, I'm going to read you the entire definition for science because I find this quite nice. So bear with me as I look at this screen instead of you. All right. Science. A systematic approach to the understanding of natural phenomenon as evidenced by three things. Description, prediction, and control. Those three are the key, right? That relies on determinism as its fundamental assumption, empiricism as its primary rule, experimentation as its basic strategy, replication as a requirement for believability, parsimony as a value, and philosophical doubt as its guiding conscience. I mean, really, that's a freaking awesome definition. I wasn't going to improve upon it, so I read it word for word. Thank you, Cooper Here and Inherit, and whoever wrote that definition.


All right. Welcome, everyone, to today's Google Search Central Office Hours Hangout. My name is John Mueller. I'm a search advocate at Google. And part of what I do is these office hours where people can join in and ask questions around their website and web search, and we can try to find some answers. And, wow, lots of people joining today. Lots of questions submitted. This is good. Cool. Bunch of things were already submitted. But if any of you want to get started with the first question, you're welcome to jump on in. Hi, John. Hi. I have actually two questions. The first one is about changing website. So one of our clients, they change their website. They move the website from WordPress to Drupal. Fortunately, we are keeping the same URL, like WordPress. So the URL structure will not be changed. The only thing they are going to change is the design of the site and content. They are going to add more content. Now, the question is the ranking they have for those who are at this moment. If they make this content change and design change, will that affect the ranking? It can. Yes. I mean, anytime you change your website, then that's something that should be reflected in your rankings, right? So if you add text to your pages, if you remove text, if you change the internal linking, if you change the layout so that you have different things as headings and titles, then that's something that should be reflected in search. So keeping the URLs the same, I think, makes it a lot easier, because we just can keep a lot of those signals already. But we still need to look at the content, like what is on these pages, how they're linked between each other. And it's not the case that there will always be a negative change. A lot of people do these kind of migrations because they want to improve things. Because it's like, well, I noticed my internal linking is bad with my old CMS. And I moved to a CMS that does internal linking a lot better, so that helps me to kind of get my site crawled better, for example. And the next question is about backlink. So how does Google measure the weight of a backlink? Some people get business listing. Some people get backlink from the content. Some people get backlink from the regional site, like .com.au. Some people get backlink from .com site. Does Google differentiate that, OK, these are Australian site. They're getting backlink from .com.au. We are giving more importance because they are getting .com.au. Or it's the same getting backlink from .com and .com.au. And what about the other type of backlink, business listing, or getting backlink from content? That gets really complicated. So I mean, what we wouldn't differentiate is just because they're different top level domains. So an AU site and a .com or UK site or whatever, it's not that we would say they have different weights or individual types of links. But we do try to differentiate by the type of link that it is and to figure out what is its importance with regards to the context that it provides. Is it something that tells us a lot about the page that it's linking to, or is it something that is more like, oh, by the way, we're also here, kind of thing, which is more like, well, OK, we saw it, and that's OK. Thank you, John. Hey, John. Good morning. Morning. I have a question about archiving. So we have a site with a large number of press release pages. These are quite old, right, maybe from 2015 and maybe even older. And the thing is they have accumulated a large amount of backlinks, but they don't get any traffic. But these are quite high authoritative domains according to them. But now we want to clean them up because they are taking up the real estate, or at least it becomes a bit too big there. Now the thing is, so I was thinking of, OK, we can move it to an archive. But I still would like to benefit from the SEO power these pages have built up over time. So is there a way to do this cleverly? So basically, so moving them indeed to an archive, for example, sub-directory, but then still, let's say, benefit from the SEO power.  If you have an archive section for this kind of older content, which is very common, then kind of moving the content there and redirecting the URLs there, that essentially tells us to forward the links there. But we were also thinking, because a lot of them so they need to be there still for, let's say, legal purposes, for example. But I still would like to say, OK, the crawler doesn't need to access these folders for me all the time. So I was thinking about disallowing that folder. But will disallow a sub-directory? Will this also mean that the build up SEO power will be ignored from that point onwards? Because in a sense, I was thinking like this, what you say is to the crawler, hey, you don't have to crawl this folder anymore. But I don't think we say ignore the build up SEO power, or do I see this wrong? So probably we would already automatically crawl less if we recognize that they're less relevant for your site, not the case that you need to block it completely. If you were to block it completely with robots.txt, we would not know what was on its pages. So essentially, when there are lots of external links pointing to a page that is blocked by robots.txt, then sometimes we can still show that page in the search results. But we'll show it with a title based on the links and a text that says, oh, we don't know what is actually here. And if that page that is being linked to is something that is just referring to more content within your website, we wouldn't know. So we can't indirectly forward those links to your primary content. So that's something where if you see that these pages are important enough that people are linking to them, then I would try to avoid blocking them by robots.txt. The other thing kind of to keep in mind also is that these kind of press release pages, things that collect over time, usually the type of links that they attract are a very time limited kind of thing where a news site will link to it once. And then it's like when you look at the number of links, it might look like, oh, there are lots of links here. But these are really old news articles which are in the archives of those news sites, essentially. It's also kind of a sign, well, they have links, but those links are not extremely useful because it's so irrelevant in the meantime. Thanks so much. I appreciate your time. Thanks. Hey, hi, John. I want you to know something very basic about copied content. So as we all know, the copied content is against Google guidelines and is also not a good practice in general. So I just want you to know how Google determines if a particular piece of content is copied or not, and who is the actual original source for that content. I'll determine if it's copied. I think it's kind of tricky in some aspect. In some aspect, it is really easy because if you take a piece of text and you search for it, then if exactly the print text is on the web or on other pages, then that's a pretty good sign that this is copy content. But it's also something where it would not hide a default thing that copies it. So for example, if you have copied content that is more along the lines of boilerplate text, like you have, I don't know, a legal disclaimer on the bottom of your site, which is something that you have across all of your pages of your site. And technically, that's copied content. But practically, for us, that's not really an issue because these are things that people are generally not searching for. It's not that they're searching for the legal disclaimer and they want to find your site. It's more they're looking for your primary content. And in that regard, it's something where we try to kind of weigh the copied content appropriately, but also kind of still look at the rest of your site. So I don't know actually if that helps with regards to your question. So that's kind of like the thing is like it's easy to recognize that there is copied content on these pages, but it's hard to figure out what we should do about that copied content. Regarding the author or the owner of that content, I don't think we go and make any judgment in that regard because that's really tricky. Like we can't determine who is the owner. And sometimes the person who wrote it first is not the one, for example, that is the most relevant. So we see this a lot of times, for example, with our own blog posts, where we will write a blog post and we'll put the information we want to share on our blog post. And someone will copy that content and they will add a lot of extra information around it. It's like, here's what Google really wants to tell you. And it's like reading between the lines and the secret to Google's algorithms. And when someone is searching, maybe they want to find original source. Maybe they want to find kind of this more elaborate, I don't know, exploration of the content itself. So just because something is original doesn't mean that it's the one that is the most relevant when someone is looking for that information. All right. Thank you for the long explanation. All right. Anything else before we jump into the questions? I submitted my question, but I can jump in now if that's fine. So if you recall, I'm checking in again about our domain migration. We migrated our domain at the beginning of August. Had almost total traffic loss after connecting in a few of these sessions. It was indicated that Google Engineering was able to make a partial fix for us. That was towards the end of September. And then we did start to see slow, but some recovery. We were weak in our way to almost 50% after about four months and right before the broad core update. And now we dropped to basically back where we were post domain migration. So my question is, if you think it's possible that the partial fix that we were able to get via the engineering team possibly got reverted or just otherwise how we should try to make sense of what happened with the broad core update. Or of course, trying to look through that lens just neutrally and try to think about what we can do to improve the site. But with where we were before the domain migration loss and where we are now, it's a little hard to not think that we're still just dealing with domain migration issues. And if that seems likely to you, and any advice from here? I don't know. I think it's kind of awkward that these kind of issues pop up with domain migrations. Sorry that you're struggling with this. I think with the issue that you're seeing now, I don't think that would be related to kind of the fix in the domain migration being reverted or kind of being blocked. My assumption there is that it's more that the general core update is also affecting your site. And this combination of those remaining lingering issues plus the core update is essentially what you're seeing there. So I will definitely take a look with the team to see if there's something more specific that's going on there that we need to watch out for. So that's now, I don't know. So one of the things that we ended up doing specifically after running through your issue is trying to figure out how many other sites might be affected by these kind of site migration issues. And it seems like it's extremely rare, which doesn't really help you that much. I don't know. It's like a special case kind of thing. But at least that a little bit calming on my side, but it's something where I still think we should be able to do a better job handling these kind of migrations and not run into issues where people have to contact us essentially personally with regards to kind of, I don't know, getting things back to normal again. But so if I remember correctly, your site is about the kind of university reviews. Yeah, it's mostly focused on online education. Yeah. I could imagine that the core update is something that you might want to look into there. It's like the post that we have. Yeah. And I know there are a bunch of other SEOs that have kind of dug into all of those details of what you need to watch out for with expertise, authority, trust, those kind of topics. So I would definitely look into that. But usually when it comes to core updates, it's something where it's not just one small thing that you can fix and it gets better. It's more of a long-term approach that you have to kind of look at there. Yeah. Yeah, we're doing that internally. And we've been working with Marie Haynes and Glenn Gabe and some other SEOs. It's hard to not feel like it's our domain migration that is still having an extremely large impact on us. And I'm honestly not sure what else to do except to check in here when I can. No, I mean, it is perfectly fine to keep pushing for this. Because I mean, I try to watch what is happening with those discussions internally. But it's also good to see kind of from the external side, like, oh, it's still a problem. So we still need to look for it. Yeah. OK. Thank you. I'll definitely double check, though. Specifically around the core update, if there's something that might be kind of uniquely happening with your site, that maybe we need to fix in that regard. OK, thank you. Sure. OK, let me run through some of the submitted questions. And if you have any questions along the way, feel free to jump on in as well. In Search Console, we noticed that our pages are marked as crawled, currently not indexed. Looking into the detail, we see that Google has found our user declared canonical but then picked a completely different unrelated page for its Google-selected canonical. Any idea why this might be? So usually, this kind of situation is something where I'd need to look at the details. So it's a bit tricky without having any URLs there. One thing you could perhaps do is post in the help form and try to provide some details, some examples there so that the experts there can take a look and maybe give you some tips or escalate that to the search team if needed. One of the places where I have seen this happen is when a website is set up in a way that it's hard for us to tell which parts of a URL are actually relevant. So that could be, for example, if you have a number of different websites that all have the same backend system and the same URLs lead to the same content across the different domains, then it could be that our systems say, well, actually, the domain name isn't so relevant here. We will pick any one of these domains as the canonical for this kind of URL pattern. It could also be that you have a URL structure that maybe something in the path or in the URL parameters is deemed as being irrelevant to our systems. In that sense, it's not irrelevant in that the content is bad kind of thing, but it's irrelevant in that when we look at a number of different parameters, we see always the same content, and therefore our systems kind of learn over time that actually this URL pattern is something that doesn't lead to unique content, but rather we can pick one of the URLs that is kind of in this group of URL patterns and pick that as a canonical. And that happens regardless of what the actual content is on individual pages once we've learned that pattern. So that makes it a little bit easier for us to kind of deal with canonicalization without having to crawl the whole site and get stuck in all of these URL patterns that are essentially leading to the same content. And in a case like that, it could happen that you have a URL structure that, for a large part, leads to similar content where we get confused, but there are individual pieces in there which does do lead to unique content. And then it could happen like this that our system say, well, all of this is irrelevant. We will pick one here, and we don't realize that actually, well, this one here is kind of an exception. So if you think that might be the case in your situation, one thing you can do is try to figure out, do you perhaps have this kind of pattern of URLs that all lead to the same content? You could do something like look at your server logs to see which URLs are being crawled. And based on those, try those URLs out in your browser and see, is this something that is all leading to the same content? Is Google somehow getting stuck with URL parameters or with crawling of the website? And based on that, you can work to kind of exclude the discovery of these irrelevant URLs and focus on the ones that you really do want to have in. I noticed that often when we publish a new article on our site, the article's ranking starts to improve as time goes by. For example, in this case, it took five months from the date of publication of the article to reach a stable ranking. This happened despite the fact that the article has not changed in five months. It's the same from the beginning. So I would expect the article ranking to be the same right away. Obviously, this is not the case. So what happens on Google's side in the time between publication of a new page and its stabilization and ranking? I didn't take a look at that specific example, but it is very common that it takes some time for our signals to kind of settle down and to better understand what is on a specific page. And this is something that is very visible. For example, if you have a new website, then you might publish that new website. And in the beginning, Google might go, oh, it's a new website. We found it. Like if someone is explicitly looking for it, we'll probably show it. But over time, over a couple of months, we will try to understand, well, what is the relevance of this new website? In which regards is it important for the web? And then we'll show it maybe for more and more queries over time. And that's not something where our systems, I don't know, it's essentially just something that takes time for us to collect all of the signals that are associated with these pages. And it's not something that can happen from one day to the next. And it can also happen for individual pages as well. So it's not just specific to new websites like that. For some queries, I see Google ranking websites which have a high amount of ad content, which is creating a poor search experience. How is Google dealing with those sites? It's hard to say without having examples. But there are various things that we do take into account with regards to the user experience side of things. So on the one hand, we did, I think, a couple of years ago, an update where the above the fold content is something that we weighed a little bit more. So that's something where if there's a lot of ad content above the fold, then perhaps it might be affected by that. There are other updates that have happened in the past with regards to speed. There's the Core Web Vitals, which is going to be launched, I think, in May with regards to ranking in search results, which also helps there. But the other thing also to keep in mind is we use a lot of different factors to determine ranking in the search results to try to understand what is relevant for users in individual times. And it can very well happen that a page is extremely relevant in some regards, but still has a really bad user experience, and we will still show it in the search results. And sometimes we show it highly in the search results. So just because a page has a bad user experience, and if we were to take that bad user experience into account, it doesn't mean we would never show that page. This is something that is really common. For example, if you search for a website's name, then you would expect to find that website. Even if that website is kind of like doing weird things, has a really bad user experience, you would still expect to find that website. And there is a broad range of different kinds of queries and kinds of understanding of relevance that flow into things like that. So with that said, it's always possible to find these kind of pages in the search results. It's extremely rare for us to manually go in and say, we will completely remove this website from search, so it never shows up for any queries. We usually reserve that specifically for cases where the whole website is essentially irrelevant, where the whole website is just scraping content from the rest of the web, and there's nothing unique of value at all on the website. Then that's something where the web spam team might go in and say, this is a pure spam website. There is nothing of value here. Then we'll remove that from search. But for everything else, it's kind of like, we can't still show it. And in some cases, the other factors play a larger role. I think this is also really important because a lot of people don't know everything that they should be doing on the website. They don't know all of the details of what is important or what they should not do. They don't know those tricks that they heard from friends. Are they really bad, or are they just kind of bad, or do they kind of work sometimes? And they end up doing lots of weird things. And all of these websites that do things which are kind of suboptimal, where as an expert, you might look at it and say, oh, they should not be doing this. This is so clearly black hat against the webmaster guidelines.  And in cases like that, I think we should definitely still continue to show that website. It's not that it's completely irrelevant for users. Maybe they're just doing things in ways that they don't know any better. Let's see. Updating the design of a website plus a few URL changes. Content remains largely the same. But getting a few updates when necessary, there's about 2,000 URLs. Given the core update is still rolling out, should I hang on for a week or push the Go Live button now? I would just move forward. So the core updates that we do tend to be focused more on kind of like broader changes in the search results. And it's not something where if you make a change right at the same time, then it suddenly clashes and breaks anything. So in that regard, I would not hold off and kind of artificially hold myself back. If you're making improvements on your website, and usually if you change things like this across the site, then I would classify that as improvements. And I would just move forward and do those improvements so that they're live as early as possible. Thanks, John. Cool. Let's see. We changed our website's domain name. The old one's search ranking was decreased to zero. However, the new one's search ranking is much lower than the old site's ranking. This reminds me of a different question. However, let's see. Some experts said it takes up to six months to achieve original rankings. How can we speed up the SEO results? Some backlinks link to the old site. Do we need to change the links to a new site? Now, for the most part, I think one of the things I would strongly recommend is just making sure that you're following the guidelines that we have, specifically for site moves, the details as much as possible, especially if this site move is still fairly fresh, then making sure that you have things like all of the redirects set up so that all of the old content is really moving to the new site. That's something I would do. I would double check all the settings in Search Console so that you have all of that lined up. But in our guidelines, we also mentioned the links to the site. And we do mention that it does make sense to get those updated as well. In particular, with the links to the site, we use that for canonicalization. So if we're not sure if we should show the old one or the new one, then if we see that there are lots of links to one of these versions, then that helps us to try to make that decision. It sounds like canonicalization is less an issue there if you are seeing that there's already no traffic going to the old domain. But still, I think updating some of those links where you can make sense, where you're going to run into the same kind of issue on our side as well when we did the migration to Google Search Central from Webmaster Central. Because I think the Twitter pages or the YouTube main account pages, they don't redirect for whatever reasons. So we're also kind of discussing internally if we should ask people to help update the links, which is kind of weird. But I guess everyone has to do that. In general, it can take a while for things to settle down after site migration. But it should, for the most part, be fairly straightforward. The one situation where I have seen issues with regards to site migrations, well, I guess the more common one where I've seen issues is when the new domain name, the one that you're moving to, has a really weird history associated with it, then that's something where it can get tricky for us to understand what does this migration mean. So in particular, if the old domain used to be hosting a lot of web spam content, then, the new domain is hosting a lot of, or was hosting a lot of web spam content, and you move there, then we have all of these kind of spammy signals that are associated with the domain name that you move to, plus the new signals from your old content. And that mix is sometimes hard for us to figure out what does this mean. So that's something that you might want to look into. In general, if you're moving to a domain, if you're starting a website on a new domain, looking at the domain's history is something I'd still recommend doing. There are lots of things that you can clean up with regards to kind of taking on a used domain name, but some things are a lot more time intensive than others. So in particular, if a website was deeply involved in web spam and has a lot of really problematic links from across the web, then that's something that you might want to clean up ahead of time, which takes a lot of time. Another situation where you might want to kind of keep in mind that it will take a bit of time is if the domain that you're moving to used to host a lot of adult content, then we might have that domain in our safe search list, essentially. And as we see that your content is now hosted there, then that will update automatically. But it can take a bit of time for us to kind of switch from, oh, we should be filtering this domain using Safe Search to this is actually a completely normal domain with traditional content, let's call it. So those are kind of the situations that I would watch out for. A subdomain, like m.domain to www.domain.com, the site is now responsive, and the mobile version is no longer needed. Should I use a change of address tool and search console? You can use it, you don't need to use it. So the change of address tool in particular helps us when you're moving to a new domain name, because then we can forward those kind of more domain level signals a little bit easier than if we had to do that on a per-url basis. But if you're moving just between subdomains within the same domain, then that's not something you'd need to do that. It also doesn't cause any problems. So if you've done that in the past, and you're like, oh, no, I should revert it, don't worry about that. We're exploring web stories and using Tappable, which we have embedded in our site. When I test the URL in the Inspect URL tool, it doesn't show up. What can we do about it? I don't know what Tappable is, so it's hard for me to say what exactly to do there. Web stories are based on AMP pages. So for web stories, you would use the AMP testing tool to see that they work well, that the structured data there is recognized properly. So that might be something to check out. With regards to whether or not these URLs are indexed, web stories by design are normal AMP pages, like I said. So they can get indexed individually. And they're set up in a way that they're canonical AMP. That means it's not like AMP pages that are associated with the rest of your website where you have the canonical as the traditional HTML page and the AMP HTML alternate version. For web stories, you only have the AMP version. And essentially, that can get indexed like any other normal content. We currently don't show web stories in all places, all countries, I think. But we do show AMP content, pretty much, I think, in all countries. So if you have a web story, what will happen is it might be shown in these web story specific surfaces if you're in one of those countries. But if you're not in one of those countries, it'll be shown in the normal web search results. So it'll be shown just like any other web page might be. Since it's also a normal web page like any other, you need to think about the usual SEO aspects there, too. So things like titles and headings and text on the page, all its attributes for images, all of the usual things, they all apply to web stories. It's a bit trickier with web stories because traditionally, you want to make it visually impressive, which means you don't have this big box of text on these web stories. But you still need textual content so that we can rank those pages properly. Question about AMP. My website is 97% traffic is from desktop users. Should I need to be worried about AMP? Because in the Search Console, I can see some AMP errors on my website. Is it worth spending time and effort on to fix those issues since the majority of the traffic is from desktop? Will it impact ranking in the long term? So AMP pages are responsive. So essentially, you can use them on desktop, too. It's not something that is purely mobile. There are lots of sites that use AMP as their primary framework for making content, and that's perfectly fine. So that's something where just because you have a lot of desktop users doesn't mean you should not use AMP. For example, I think the AMP.dev site is completely written in AMP. And if you look at it in a desktop browser, it looks like a normal website. With regards to AMP errors, what happens with AMP pages when we recognize there are errors on these pages is we understand that they're not valid AMP pages. And that means that those pages would not be kept in the AMP cache and would not be treated as AMP alternates. If you have kind of the setup with the traditional HTML on the AMP alternate pages, if you have errors in the AMP version, then we would not show those AMP alternate URLs in the search results. So it's not that there would be a ranking effect from that, but more that you're not getting the full value out of your AMP pages because we can't put them in the cache. We can't serve them immediately when people click on them. It's more of a usability kind of thing. It's like you're already doing a big part to make those AMP pages work, but they're not completely valid, so we can't actually use them as AMP pages. By mistake, I created a lot of tags and sometimes of the same name with the main category. It ends up that the tag pages score better in the search results than my categories, with the use of rel canonical help so that I can send the juice back to the main category. How long will it take until this change is implemented? So sometimes it can happen that you have a lot of different pages on a site and the wrong ones end up ranking. And cleaning up the site structure makes it a lot easier for us to pick out which pages you really want to have shown in the search results. So cleaning up the URL structure means, on the one hand, removing or reducing the amount of internal links to those kind of pages. And on the other hand, using technical elements like the rel canonical or setting up redirects to point at the pages that you do want to have shown in the search results. So in that regard, if you're kind of seeing that you have a bunch of similar pages and the wrong ones are ranking, then cleaning that up definitely helps. It can improve the ranking of those pages because if we can concentrate all the value in fewer pages, then we can make those pages a little bit stronger in search. They can be a little bit more relevant. With regards to how long that takes, it's really hard to say. In particular, we have to crawl these pages. And on a per URL basis, we have to understand, oh, this is the same content. You have a rel canonical here. We should switch indexing to the other page. And on a per URL basis, that takes a little bit of time. The crawling itself also takes a little bit of time. And crawling is not something where there's a fixed time frame involved. It can be that we re-crawl some pages within, I don't know, a couple of days, other pages within a couple of weeks. So that's something where it's really hard to say how long it will take. Accessibility question, we're going to make invisible headings for some sections of our pages. For example, main navigation kind of highlighting, how will Google understand that this is not cloaking? So we probably would not understand that this is not cloaking. But this kind of hidden text is something that is super common on the web. And we essentially just deal with that. So that's less of an issue for us. Even if we were to recognize that this is kind of hidden text on a page, it's not that we would say, oh, this is a spammy page because it has hidden text on it. But at most we might say, oh, well, maybe this piece of text here is not super relevant for this page because users never see it. So in your situation, if you have main navigation as kind of a heading for people who are using kind of voice browsers, essentially, then people are probably not going to search for main navigation on Google to try to find your site. They're going to look for your actual content, which is something that would be visible there. So in that regard, even if Google were to recognize that this is something that is less relevant for your site, it wouldn't negatively affect the rest of your site. We're facing consistent impression spikes on Google Webmaster tools. Oh, no, that's a really old tool. You should switch to Search Console. Usually, we average between 2,000 and 3,000 per day. On Fridays, it goes up to 10,000 on certain keywords. Any suggestion on what could be causing the impression spikes? It is really hard to say. On the one hand, this could be something that users are just searching more on some days. And this is really common depending on the type of website that you have that you see kind of like a weekly cycle through the number of impressions that are taking place for your site where you have either on the weekends a lot of impressions or during the week a lot of impressions or during the daytime or during the evening. These kind of cycles are really common. So perhaps you're seeing something there. What I also sometimes see is that some of the rank checking tools leave behind traces in Search Console, and you also see kind of side effects like this. For the most part, these are things that we do filter out in the rest of our pipeline, but sometimes they just linger on in Search Console a bit like this. We're about to run an A-B test for meter paywall with different variations, so each variation and its paywall schema. We're embedding the roadblocks through a third-party tool. We can't know which versions are aimed at which users because it's on a fly. Is there an option to fit only one paywall schema for all the different tests? Sure. So the usual setup that people do, well, at least the setup that I've seen, is that they essentially provide this paywall markup for the version that or in a way that matches what users would always see. So if there is, for example, a kind of a lead-in that you would always show all users and some users see more content, some users see less content, or some users can see more pages, or some users see the paywall immediately, then you kind of add the paywall markup in a way that matches what everyone would see, kind of like the lowest common denominator there. And that way, we can understand that. And it's not the case that we need to have the 100% exact, correct paywall markup on all of these pages if we can recognize that there is a paywall markup there, then that already helps us to understand that, oh, you're implementing a paywall, and it's different by user type, or by location, or whatever you use, kind of as parameters. And that's totally fine for us. How do you test the structured data for specifically the paywall structured data? Essentially, you would use a rich results test, like with any other kind of structured data. I think the tricky part with some of these paywall implementations is that Googlebot, of course, needs to be able to see the full content so that we can understand what it is that we should be showing your site for. And with that, we should be able to see the paywall markup as well. So if you're showing the paywall markup, depending on kind of like the user there, keep in mind that probably users don't need to see the paywall markup. It's really important that we see it, though, especially if you're serving Googlebot the content and not showing it to users in some cases. Let's see. Across so many sites, about once a week, I get a notification from Search Console that data vocabulary that org has been phased out. It's no longer actual issue for any of the sites, so I'm curious how long Google will store and process the HTML for. Some of the pages that pop up had their last crawl up to three years ago, and even on the HTTP versions of the site, which have been redirected to HTTPS for even longer. I don't know, like once a week, that sounds pretty excessive. I thought we just sent out that notification like once for all sites that were using it. So if you're watching this and can send me some details of what you're seeing, like that would be really useful. Because this notification is something that we should be doing just once for the site. Usually with these kind of notifications, we focus on what we last had indexed for those sites. So it's less a matter of when we last crawl those, but rather like, oh, we know that this markup used to be on your site or is on your site based on the last version that we have indexed for your site, and then we'll notify you about that. And like I said, this should be something that should be a one-time thing per site rather than a weekly notification. And it's mostly just meant to let you know that it's like, by the way, if you still have this here, you should probably switch it out. It shouldn't be something that's super annoying. But if you can send me some details, then I'm happy to take a look to see what might be happening there. I recently tweaked the meta title and description to improve quality of the words and made it more fresh, as I wanted updated for a while already. After I updated it, for one of the search queries, I noticed my site is being indexed with just that one word, that keyword search, that makes me worry that the rank might never improve again, as I recently saw a drop in ranking for that particular keyword before the tweak. Can you explain why Google Search can rewrite a meta title up to an extent where it only leaves one word as a meta title? I suspect you're seeing something very specific, so it's really hard to say. But it is something where we do sometimes change the titles of pages, in particular, when we can recognize that the title on a page is perhaps not the most relevant one to show to users based on their current query. So based on the query, we can show different titles based on the kind of title that you have specified on your site. We might show a different title. For example, if you have the same title across a lot of different pages, then we might assume, well, maybe this title is not so relevant for any individual page. Or if you have something really common and shared on your title, like you just have home for your home page, then we wouldn't show home as a title. We would try to figure out, well, what is this home page about, and try to show something from that as a title. And that's something, when we change the titles like that, it's not a sign that we're changing the rankings, that the site is not ranking for what it has and its titles. It's more that we're just saying, well, the title that you have on your page is not something that encourages a lot of people to actually click through. So perhaps we should show something that is more relevant for your individual pages. If you're seeing this very often across pages on your website, then I would take a step back and try to look at the titles that you have specified on your site. Also the descriptions, maybe, if you're seeing it with the snippet. And think about what you could be doing perhaps differently to make it a little bit clearer what actually is a useful title here for users. So a really common example that I see where we do sometimes rewrite titles is if you just include a big collection of keywords. And you say, oh, I want to rank for these keywords. I will put them all in my title. When we look at that, we say, well, this is like a collection of words. It's not a description of a page. So maybe we should rewrite that. And similarly with descriptions and snippets, it's kind of the same thing. If we recognize that this snippet is essentially just a bunch of variations of kind of like SEO phrases you want to rank for, then we'll try to pick something either from the snippet that you have there or from a part of the page. And we'll try to show that to users when they search. Just a quick follow up on that. When Google starts rewriting titles, is that kind of a good sign that you should make them and try to improve them? And that will actually help you become more relevant since Google apparently doesn't think you're relevant enough. I don't know if it would help you become more relevant. But I think what it would help you definitely immediately in kind of the short term is that more likely we will show the title that you have on your page. And if that title is better in the sense that it matches what users are looking for, it matches their intent, then that gives you more traffic. And then indirectly over time, maybe those users recommend you and your site improves in ranking overall. But it's not so much that we would say, oh, this title is now good enough to show, therefore the website is better. No, I'm thinking in cases like, as you mentioned, maybe the title is home or something like that. And the title does play a role in how relevant that page is. And you change it to red widgets, I don't know, something that is more relevant, then shouldn't that lead to the page becoming more relevant for red widgets since you're now actually using those words? Sure, sure. I mean, but that's kind of the, I would almost say less common situation. The more common one I see is someone where the title is red widgets, blue widgets, green widgets, all widgets. It's like widgets, plural, singular kind of thing, like a title like that. And if you just change it to red widgets, then it helps us a little bit. But just including all variations of all keywords there doesn't make a page relevant automatically. OK, and just to be sure, when you're changing the title, does that mean you're actually ignoring whatever is in the HTML code per se? I mean, you're completely ignoring the user-generated title tag when you're not. No, it's really just the title that we show in the search results. So it's not that we say, oh, we will skip this. We will not use it for ranking. It's just we don't show it for this particular query because it also depends on what people are actually searching. Sure, yeah. John, John, is it query agnostic then? I mean, does it change on the fly? So can't page titles and meta descriptions change to improve what? If you like search result diversification, so they pick something out and change the actual page title and meta description to sort of vary the results, I don't know. I don't know if we would do it to vary the results, but we do try to use it in a way to better explain what a user would expect when they go there. So I don't think. It wouldn't change depending on the query. Would it depend on the document rather than the query? That's what I'm saying. It would change based on the query. So that's something that you often see, especially in a case where you have a very generic title as like home, for example, for a page, then you often see, depending on how you search, you see either home or you see kind of a rewritten version or you see a name of the company or something like that. So it would change based on the query, but it's not the case that we would change the titles based on what is shown as titles for the other pages in the search results page. Right, OK. So it wouldn't be used in Pavelka's collection of the top 10 or whatever, just to sort of switch things up and make sure there's a range of different types of results. No. OK. All right, John, regarding this, I have also seen one case where one page was ranking for three keywords. For two queries, the original title it was showing, but for third query, it was rewriting the title. So it is all the time it is not like very simple thing where we can go and just think like this title is not relevant. Sometimes it is like we have to go ahead with the same title. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's tricky. We've also discussed internally options like having a meta tag saying, like, I know what I'm doing. Always show my title kind of thing. But that's also really tricky. And it makes things complex in various ways. We also had a project underway at some point where in Search Console, you could specify a title for a handful of pages and say, like, I always want this title to be shown. And there also we just noticed that there are lots of weird edge cases where showing a title algorithmically just makes it much easier for users to recognize that this is actually a good page to match what they were looking for. Maria, I think you had a question. Or you raised your hand, at least. You're muted. We can't hear you. We can't hear you, Maria. Sorry, I was muted. Sorry. Again, so yeah, I did have a question. However, when Don Anderson asked the question, it kind of clarified the question I had. However, going back again to Titles and Descriptions, sorry to ask, maybe this has been commented before. One thing we are seeing at work, as I said with small businesses and some clients they do, is they saturate because someone told them or something, they saturate their title or their description only with commercial keyboards. Because they said it works for such and such person. For example, you can see in some websites like Distin Brighton, Flower Delivery Brighton, Wedding Flowers President, and just all that in a description. Is still, why still is, I don't know if that is against practices, why does that keep happening? People do it because they say it works. Is that against practices? Is there a, I don't know. It doesn't look right, but when the clients comes to me and I see that the first thing I say is this has to change. It doesn't look right. But I don't know. I just want to hear your point of view. Why? Yeah. Yeah, so. If I make sense. Yeah, yeah. So it's not against our webmaster guidelines. So it's not something that we would say is problematic. I think at most it's something where you could improve things if you had kind of like a better fitting title because we understand the relevance a little bit better. And I suspect the biggest improvement with a title in that regard there is that if you can create a title that matches what the user is actually looking for, then it's a little bit easier for them to actually like click on the search result because they think, oh, this really matches what I was looking for. Whereas if you're looking for, I don't know, flower delivery, Brighton, and as a title in the search results, you see flowers, green flowers, yellow flowers, blue flowers, Brighton, and like all of the cities nearby, then you might look at that and say, well, is this like, I don't know, some SEO result? Or is this actually a business that will do a good job and create some nice flowers for me? So that's something where I almost think it's more a matter of improving the click-through rate rather than improving the ranking. And if with the same ranking, you get a higher click-through rate because people recognize your site as being more relevant, then that's kind of a good thing. Sorry, sorry, I just know because I saw a comment saying something about funeral flowers. And yeah, I thought, I don't know. Thank you, yeah, it makes sense. I mean, it's not a practice I follow. It's just I wanted the reason I'm asking this is because normally I always send the webmaster videos to my clients. And I say, watch for minutes, x to z. And this is a common practice I see with people that come from that they launch their own website and they try to give it a go to their own. They're learning SEO in one of the most common activities I've seen is saturated with keywords, titles, and descriptions. So OK. Yeah, I mean, it's really a common tactic because we say as well, we use the keywords in your titles as part of our ranking systems. And then people say, oh, then I need to add all keywords to my titles. And then you end up with something like that. But just because they are used for ranking doesn't mean that you need to put everything in there. And sometimes I suspect the bigger aspect is really the click-through rate from Search rather than the ranking effect, especially for small businesses. It's like you don't have a lot of chance to be visible in search results in lots of places because you're probably more focused on your regional area. And having a title that is really good that matches your business, that's a lot more important than having all of the keywords in there. Does it have the opposite effect, John? How do you mean opposite effect? Well, if you see, take the example that Maria has just provided of the florist, big florist selling flowers in every town or city in the UK or the US or wherever. And all of the page titles say, florist in Brighton, florist in Southsea, florist in Hampstead Heath, blah, blah, blah. Can that sometimes, because they're kind of almost competing against each other as clusters, can that almost have the opposite effect to them ranking well and detracts away from maybe just everything? Because they're all candid at Sullivan-Suddenfield with very, very tiny variations. Sometimes I think I see that sometimes on big sites. They actually cannibalize themselves. With different pages or with the same page? We're just competing with themselves with different pages, with many, many different pages, with small variations, with page titles being one of the quite aggressive ones that there's not a lot of difference on, if that makes sense. Yeah, that's definitely something that kind of happens there. And I think, I mean, on the one hand, I understand the interest in having pages for individual topics, but if the variations are so small, you're essentially just diluting the value of your content across those pages. And then you have a lot of pages for individual topics, but they all don't rank well, versus you have one page for more, slightly more general topic, and it is very well concentrated there. Then it's a lot easier for us to say, well, this is really competitive page for that topic, and we should show it more. So it's not to build fewer pages, but better. Yeah, exactly. Are they really competing against each other, those pages? So if, if Flowers is one of the typical examples where you genuinely do need a geographic page because they might have a genuine network, whereas a lot of these pages plumbers in and then name every single area within 200 miles, they're not, they're just doorway pages, but florists have kind of the longest established e-commerce network anyway of that distribution method. And I think that goes back to what you were saying, that those pages aren't competing with each other and they're not competing for the main homepage title and description. They should be genuinely standing alone. And florists have, if I remember correctly, they have the highest click-through rate of any e-commerce business because no one searches for it unless they're buying it. Does it depend on genuine network availability then? I think it's the point that Rob's making. I think it's probably one of those things where it depends as much as nobody wants to hear that, where you kind of have to figure out or for your specific use case is a critical that you have them kind of separated out like this. Do you actually have unique value that you're providing there? Or is it something that you can combine a little bit more? I've seen this happen with, for example, if you're a hotel site, people search for hotels in Zurich, but they might search for accommodation in Zurich, travel packages and everything like that. So I've seen sites kind of do individual pages for each of these, just so they don't stuff the title with all of these keywords. But I think and what I've been using as a, I don't know how good of a practice it is to kind of alternate some of the keywords in the title with some of the keywords in the heading. And I've noticed that Google sometimes, if you're using hotels in the title and accommodation in the heading and people are searching for accommodation, Google will sometimes just use the heading instead of the title in the search results, if that makes sense. So can that be a kind of a good practice to avoid kind of creating multiple pages for what it basically is the same user intent? Yeah, I mean, the other thing to keep in mind is that as kind of the whole machine learning side expands and it's like, it has expanded for a long time now, it's something where we understand a lot better what these words actually mean. So especially synonyms, like you mentioned, accommodations and hotels, like we kind of know that these are the same things. And you don't need to mention kind of those different words on the same page because we understand it's the same thing. And I imagine for a lot of the city names, it's very similar where we understand, well, these cities are right next to each other. So if someone is searching for one city, we could show content from the other one. Whether or not the user would click through and say, well, actually I really need like a florist in my city or maybe this city is across the border and it's like right next to me, but I can't easily get there for whatever reasons. So it's kind of tricky there, but for at least for the synonyms side of things, I think we are a lot better there. Yeah. Hi, John, I have a question. Sure. With adult websites, it's very unclear which sort of schema is basically allowed there because in some articles you mentioned that this schema is definitely not allowed for adult websites, but on the majority of them it's just not mentioned. So how can an adult website do this? Should it just implement everything and hope for the best or how can we actually know which one is supported and which one not? For example, the live one. Live is used a lot on blogs nowadays on some podcasts, but adult websites cannot use live, but it's not written there that it's not supported. So how can we know? I think in our rich results guidelines, we say like none of them are useful for adult websites, but I haven't checked recently. I don't know if anything has changed there, but at least as far as I know, all of the types of rich results that I'm aware of are explicitly not meant for adult content websites. And I imagine, so I don't think there's any kind of manual action or web spam action that takes place in something like that, but it's more that our systems recognize, oh, this is an adult website and it wants to show these rich results types, but since it's an adult website, we just won't show them. So it's not like it'll be loaded or anything. Then I have a second question. Let's say that a company has an adult business and all these scheme are not supported. They launched a second business, which features, let's just say, no nudity, but schemas are also not picked up there because Google still thinks that's an adult website. So what makes a website adult is my question. What makes a website adult? I don't know. So it's... There's one of those, if you have to ask, you probably already know the answer. Yeah, I mean, there's, let's say a website such as Twitch. I mean, Twitch has all of these things supported. Let's say that we make websites like Twitch. It's still not gonna get picked up, and I wonder why. Yeah, so the thing is, I think with a lot of the safe search filters is we try to apply them to a kind of a broader URL pattern on a website. So if we see that the whole domain is adult content for the most part, and you have some small part that is not adult, then probably we would filter the whole domain because it's just... Okay, yeah. I mean, our systems are just kind of like we want to stay on the safe side there. If you have individual subdomains where some of them are adult and some of them are not, that makes it a little bit easier. If you have separate domains, then that obviously makes it a lot easier for us to understand that these are completely separate websites that should be treated differently. So it's something we also see, I think, sometimes with... My safe search done is adult pretty much. Sorry? If it's filtered by safe search, then it's adult pretty much. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't think we make any clear distinction between filtered by safe search and adult and porn or whatever the different categories are there. It's mostly like we recognize it's filtered by safe search and then probably we wouldn't show any rich results there. It also happens the other way around where some sites might have, I don't know, classified sections which are for adults, and then if that section is embedded within the main website in a way that is hard to separate out, then we might say, well, we don't know how much of this site should be filtered by safe search.  On the other hand, if you move that to a subdomain, then it's a lot easier to say, oh, this subdomain should be treated like this. The other subdomain should be treated differently. Okay, understood. Does Webmaster Tools tell you if your site is held under safe search? Does it? No. Yeah, I think it's one of those things. Probably you know if your site is really adult content, but if it's kind of a tricky thing, then I've also seen that happen that they go to the forum. My site is not showing up in search and then someone will say, oh, well, if you turn off the safe search filter, it is showing in search and then they try to figure out how did safe search get confused or why is safe search so picky in this particular situation. Because it's one of those things where different cultures have different thresholds almost of what they would consider to be problematic or adult content. And we, in our algorithms, we have to make some call out somewhere. I don't know whether you saw that there was a case, well, it was not really a case study. Fabio from Transferwise did a little bit of an investigation into why something just suddenly just tanks. And he found adding excletives seems to have a bad impact. Is that the case, John? Because sometimes it's quite difficult communities, etc. And he found, I don't know whether it was just correlation versus causation, but when lots and lots of swear words got added to some content, it seemed to have a very adverse impact on the rankings. Is that something that might happen or is that just correlation versus causation? Yeah, I don't think that's something that would be by design. It's more of a side-effect kind of thing. Also, if it's any site with a forum or comment section, I mean, literally every comment section in the world would... I know, exactly. Yeah. He just seemed to think that that was something that had impacted and I don't know. I don't know. I didn't see that. Sounds interesting though. But I don't think that would be by design. Just adding some curse words to a page shouldn't make that page less relevant suddenly. Okay. Cool. Okay. I have to jump off to another meeting soon. Maybe I'll pause here. I have another Hangout lined up for next Friday, so it's not the last one this year. And if any of you want to join then feel free to jump on in. I think it'll probably be a little bit looser because it's like last Friday before the holidays. We'll see. But thank you all for joining in. It's been really interesting. Lots of good questions, lots of feedback also to pass on to your teams. I hope you all found this useful and maybe we'll see each other again in one of the next Hangouts. Thanks everyone. Bye. Bye, John. Bye.