English Google SEO office-hours from December 2023

This is an audio-only recording of the Google SEO office-hours from December 2023 - a transcript is available at These sessions cover topics submitted around anything search and website-owner related like crawling, indexing, mobile sites, internationalization, duplicate content, Sitemaps, Search Console, pagination, duplicate content, multi-lingual/multi-regional sites, etc. The answers are compiled by the Google Search Relations team. Need site-specific help? Post your question in the Google Search Central Help Community, and get answers from our Product Experts and other experienced web professionals: Do you have a question about Google Search or SEO? It might be a good fit for the office hours. You can submit your question for Google SEO Office Hours here: Chapters: 0:00 - Intro 0:32 - Are meta tags required to ensure that the contents of an iframe is associated with the page using the iframe? 1:35 - Which category structure: hierarchical or flat structure for my website? 2:27 - How do I tell Googlebot not to search for links in selected scripts tags? 2:51 - I built a new site on Core MVC and moved it to HTTPS and I have problems with indexing the new pages. 3:25 - What is the recommendation for non-English page URLs? 3:46 - What does Googlebot do when it finds meta name = “rerender-status-code“ content=“404“? 4:22 - New website launch with UI/UX improvements and new pages: is it better to change the design one at a time? 5:46 - What is the SEO impact of using double slashes in a URL? 6:25 - How can I find the problem “video outside the viewport“ in Google Search Console? 6:55 - Product image URLs have changed and hosted elsewhere. How to transfer the image rank? 7:31 - My site had a lot of 404 pages, which I requested to be removed after a few published articles. 7:59 - The site returns HTTP 200 status for 404 pages. Is it considered a soft 404 or cloaking? How bad is this? 8:55 - How can I recrawl my website so that my students will find the new information? 9:41 - Can the sitemap file link itself or the sitemap page itself be indexed? 10:13 - A large increase in 404 errors based on Google picking up API paths in our raw JSON and crawling them. Help! 10:51 - Why doesn’t my service based business show up in the Search results? 11:52 - If a PDF ranks in the SERPs, can the user download it then be redirected to the site where the PDF is found? 12:17 - Is accessibility important for ranking? 12:50 - Buying links from third arty websites is one of the violations on Google Webmasters. Why? 13:19 - I have reported thousands of paid backlink reports with no noticeable enforcement by Google. How can I help? 13:49 - I have URLs with noindex and blocked by . Few weeks ago, I saw Google was indexing them. Why? 14:17 - Why does my site’s impressions decrease even though I have updated new products according to trends? 15:11 - How do I remove content from Google index on my website? 15:37 - Are company-owned blogs eligible to be included in the Google News feed? 16:10 - How does Google handle special characters in search results? 17:15 - Why is the GSC position significantly different from the SERP search results? 17:58 - Can I arrange SEO directly with Google for free? 18:06 - Our business is closed but Google is still showing website results. Why? 18:22 - With SEO reporting, should I trust GA4 or Search Console? What are the differences between both? 18:53 - Can a URL contain periods as part of a SKU as long as not immediately after each other? 19:12 - How to know if my SEO is perfect? Are there any tools, apps, or websites available for it? 19:51 - Wrap up Check out past office hours → Subscribe to the Google Search Central YouTube Channel → #SEO #google