An intimate live evening with Google

I was very fortunate to get invited to a live evening with Google here in Bali (The Island of the Gods) on Wednesday so wanted to share the experience and the content with everyone at Wealthy Affiliate. I will present this primarily in note format.

Two presenters

• Aldrich Christopher .. Trust & Safety Outreach APAC @ Google (based in Singapore)

• Oisin O’Connor .. Product Specialist in CMS @ Google (based in Ireland)

Context

To give a context here is Google’s Mission Statement: “To organize the world’s information so it make it universally accessible and useful". That is a very amazing Mission when you think about it!

Topics

The topics for the evening were:

• Google Search
• Google SiteKit

How search works

1. Crawling ... Google Bot ... there is a schedule ... you don’t need to do anything ... you can help by using a site map but it only makes a small difference
2. Space Indexing ... can tell google how to search … this was above my “paygrade” so I will not elaborate on it.
3. Algorithm ... there are constant changes, 6 to 7 changes a day. So don’t focus on what might be the top algorithm items at the moment. It includes a synonym algorithm so no need or point in “keyword stuffing” (infact it is detrimental because the Bot is smart enough to pick it up).
4. Best user experience

New updates:

• The Google Bot is now evergreen .. It always operates on latest Chrome compatibility (previously it lagged Chrome updates)
• The Google Bot now has a smartphone .. so it uses mobile first indexing, any new sites will automatically be crawled using mobile

Some specific ranking considerations

There are over 200 ranking factors .. here are a few that were mentioned specifically

• Content is still king (and consider the Synonym algorithm … my thinking is that it is just necessary to write naturally but on topic).
• Speed is a ranking factor … 53% will leave your site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load (this fits with “user experience”)
• Https .. is one of the ranking factors … between 2016 and 2017 there was a 32% increase in hacked sites (they also talked about setting up redirects if you are changing from Http to Https but that should not be an issue with a Wealthy Affiliate site because we have been on Https for so long)

A key focus of Google is the Quality and the Safety of websites.

From the security aspect, Search Console is set up to help you with quality and security issues. If there is an issue it will report in Search Console and also copy to your email. I have had this as a personal experience … my thinking is everyone should be using it.

Structured data was explained and while it is NOT a ranking factor it IS a requirement for “Featured Snippets” and “People Also Ask” that shows at the top of the Search results.

Summary to focus on

• Quality Content
• Search Friendly
• Mobile Friendly
• Fast
• Secure
• Structured

There are also a lot of resources available from Google. There are forums, webinars etc. Some of them are location or language specific so if you are interested then Google it!

SiteKit

I had read about SiteKit before and put a question here at Wealthy Affiliate. I am at two minds as to whether this should be a separate Post.

SiteKit is a Google plug in for WordPress. And this part of the presentation was a real “eye opener”.

4 Google modules out of the box:

• Search Console
• Analytics
• Adsense
• PageSpeed Insights

SiteKit shows the high level basics of the above modules then links to more detail on Search Console/Analytics.

It will generally not slow down your site (in some case there will be a very tiny difference) ... that could change in future depending on what modules are added.

It is currently in Beta although very stable but Google will not guarantee it.

My “take-ways” from the evening.

Firstly it reinforced that my decision to use Wealthy Affiliate and SiteRubix more than 3 years ago was correct. The two reasons for this were 1) It takes away a lot of technical issues. 2) The amazing support structure.

Everyone at the event was using WordPress and from the questions the presenters asked and also from the Q & A I knew more than 70% of the people there, which was a bit amazing considering my “paygrade” is not that high!

The presentation from Google has given me a better context for what I am doing although I knew maybe 80% of it already.

There were some things that I did not completely understand and what I have said here is my interpretation so I will not definitively claim anything as 100% Google policy or stated by Google!

If there is anything here I have not got completely correct or needs elaboration feel free to add it in a comments.

Cheers, William.