English Google SEO office-hours from September 2023

This is an audio-only recording of the Google SEO office-hours from September 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 - Introduction 0:30 - Is Google wrongly indexing the www version of my website? 1:31 - Why is filtered data higher than the overall data on Search Console? 3:17 - Why are the pages of my Google Sites website not being indexed properly? 4:25 - Our site has many buttons, when clicking on them they fetch links to other pages. Can Google crawl these links? 4:42 - Is a “guest post“ (to gain a backlink) against Google’s guidelines if I’m writing valuable content? 5:29 - Is content on an e-commerce category page valuable to improving overall rankings? 6:06 - Do incorrect semantic tags cause Google to have a poorer understanding of the website content? 8:00 - In GSC, the report for 404 pages has many URLs that appear to be from JSON or JavaScript. Should we ignore? 8:24 - Can sitemap index files have links to sitemap files on other domains? 9:32 - How does one reduce the likelihood of Google choosing their own meta-descriptions for websites? 9:57 - Is there a way to specify search engine bots not to crawl certain sections on a page? 11:15 - Do you recommend infinite scrolling on web pages? Are there any implications to the organic traffic/Googlebot? 11:37 - I have links shown on the mobile web version, but hidden on the desktop. Will Google de-value them? 12:15 - Does Google index PDF files that are saved to Google Drive that are not hosted on a website? 12:40 - How does Google crawl Scrolljacking content and will this approach to UX impact rankings? 13:47 - Why is the URL indexed, though blocked by on my GSC? 14:36 - We have unwanted AI content! How can I fix or remove it from my website? 16:04 - We got a spike in indexed URLs from one day to another. What are the reasons? 16:24 - Can Google use multiple file sizes in one favicon file? 17:08 - Does Google judge parts of a website differently when a different CMS lies behind them? 17:19 - In Google Search, our website displays a PDF download as the main page. Can the search result be changed? 17:56 - When I search for my website on Google Search, the first result is a product page and not my welcome page. Why? 19:09 - I received a SC alert for improving INP issues. How do you calculate this and what’s the easiest fix? 20:00 - How do I remove 30K URLs from GSC from a Japanese keyword hack? 21:05 - Why are my pages getting de-indexed after submitting them for indexing in SC? I’ve done this multiple times now. 22:05 - Thanks for watching! Check out past office hours → Subscribe to the Google Search Central YouTube Channel → #SEO #google