Search Off the Record
Search Off the Record takes you behind the scenes of Google Search and its inner workings! In each episode, the folks from the Search Relations team will give you background info on the decision-making behind launches, feature prioritization in Search Console, and the projects Google Search teams are working on. They will share fun stories from the many conferences they attend as well as from their day-to-day working life at Google. They will also dive into the currently trending conversations in the SEO community at large. Have a listen!
Episodes
We sat down with Mihai Aperghis, a Google Product Expert (PE) for Search, when he visited the Zurich office for the PE Summit this year. In this episode we talk about how he started his SEO agency, the tools he built, and his role as a Product Expert in the Search Central Help Community.
Mihai explains how he built tooling to get data from Search Console into Google Sheets and how he automated this process...
In this episode of SOTR, John Mueller, Lizzi Sassman, and Gary Illyes talk about misconceptions around crawl frequency and site quality, what's challenging about crawling the web nowadays, and how search engines could crawl more efficiently.
Resources:
Episode transcript → https://goo.gle/sotr079-transcript
Gary's post on LinkedIn → https://goo.gle/3YAT55q
Crawling episode with Dave Smart → https://goo.gle/3WShUsf
If-Modified-...
Managing websites that use different languages and serve different countries is no easy task. That's why Lizzi, Gary and Martin sat down to talk about all things internationalization, hreflang and what's making managing international, multi-language websites easier.
Resources:
Episode transcript → https://goo.gle/sotr078-transcript
In this episode, Zoe Clifford from the rendering team joins Martin and John from Search Relations to talk about how Google Search deals with JavaScript sites, how rendering works and what the mysterious "iteratorect" was. They also discuss what's the DOM, if all pages get rendered, how long it takes and what website owners should look out for when building JavaScript-driven websites.
Resources:
In this episode of SOTR, Lizzi and John sit down with Elizabeth Tucker to go behind the scenes of Search Quality product management. Listen along as they discuss using data science to measure quality and make improvements, how search behavior is changing over time, and how to think about E-E-A-T and the Search Quality Rater Guidelines.
Resources:
Episode transcript → https://goo.gle/sotr076-tr...
How does Google address incidents that affect Search results, like indexing problems or crawling issues? Join John, Lizzi, and Gary in this episode of Search off the Record as the team discusses internal processes Google uses to detect, investigate, and communicate these incidents to users and website owners.
Resources:
Episode transcript → https://goo.gle/sotr075-transcript
In this episode of Search off the Record, John and Lizzi invite Michael Chidzey and “Jo” Juliana Turnbull to talk all things SEO Office Hours. Listen along as they discuss why they picked this format, whether community building has an impact on SEO, and how you can get involved in this growing community of SEO practitioners.
Resources:
Episode transcript → https://goo.gle/sotr074-transcript
...What's the best way to handle outdated content? Does old content affect SEO? In this episode of Search Off the Record, Lizzi Sassman and John Mueller discuss the importance of addressing old content and updating it to continue being useful to users today. Listen along as Lizzi and John discuss content decay’s effect on Google Search results and practical steps to tackle it.
Resources:
In this episode of Search Off the Record, Gary Illyes, Lizzi Sassman, and John Mueller put Large Language Models (LLMs) to the test and compete to create the best social post using generative AI. Listen along as they weigh the pros and cons, assess how accurate the posts are, stumble on some owl facts, and see how Google’s own GenAI tool, Gemini, can be used as a creativity tool.
Resources:
In this episode of Search Off the Record, John Mueller and Lizzi Sassman are joined by Rick Viscomi from the Chrome Web Performance team to discuss the importance of understanding what users seek to accomplish and optimizing accordingly, rather than focusing solely on metric scores. Listen along as the Search team touches on metrics like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and the latest Inte...
In this episode of Search Off the Record, Gary Illyes and Lizzi Sassman take a deep dive into crawling the web: what is a web crawler, and how does it really work? Listen along as the Search team is joined by an expert web developer in the SEO community, Dave Smart, for an in-depth and technical discussion of all things crawling, and maybe dispel some myths along the way.
Resources:
In this episode of Search Off the Record, John Mueller and Lizzi Sassman sit down with Aaseesh Marina, Product Support Manager, to discuss the Search Central community forums. Did you know there is a group of Product Experts and community members that can help you navigate your SEO questions? Listen along as the Search Team takes a deep dive into the Search Central help community forum and discover why it should be you...
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