This is an audioonly recording of the Google SEO officehours from April 2024 a transcript is available at https://goo.gle/SEOapril24.

These sessions cover topics submitted around anything search and websiteowner related like crawling, indexing, mobile sites, internationalization, duplicate content, Sitemaps, Search Console, pagination, duplicate content, multilingual/multiregional sites, etc. The answers are compiled by the Google Search Relations team.

Need sitespecific help? Post your question in the Google Search Central Help Community, and get answers from our Product Experts and other experienced web professionals: http://goo.gle/scforum.

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: https://goo.gle/seooh.

Chapters:
0:00 Intro
0:33 Is it likely my rankings have dropped because Google found out I have two websites?
1:10 Does it matter if one uses underscores or hyphens to separate keywords in the URL?
1:45 How do I tell Google not to crawl and index only paginated search results on my site? Should I use "follow, noindex"?
2:56 Should I continue counting impressions and clicks from an old domain after a new address relaunch?
3:13 Should I use hashtag color or ?color in the URL for a Tshirt product with different colors in a dropdown?
3:51 How do I remove my website from Google Search?
5:01 When linking to a URL with a highlighted text feature, does the PageRank flow to the page in the same way?
5:55 If my site is down (503 status code) 4 times a week, for 1015 mins, is that a concern for SEO?
6:40 I changed the Facebook page URL to a new one. What do I need to do next?
7:24 My site disappeared from search results after it was transferred from WordPress to selfpublishing.
7:58 If we switch to another website hosting provider, will this have a negative and lasting effect on our SEO rankings?
8:23 Google is indexing URLs from my website which seem to have been created by a bot in Chinese.
9:07 We have blocked some IPs from App Engine and when we submit sitemaps, we get the HTTP 403 error.
9:33 How do I remove the old cached version of my site from Google Search results?
10:15 Can I use Indexing API for a real estate ad?
10:44 Is it ok to integrate headlines in images as HTML text (e.g. as an H1 tag)?
11:13 Is there any sanction if a website has a hidden burger menu with the same links as the desktop menu?
11:28 Can you use multiple hreflang tags to indicate preferred locations if a domain is using a regional subdomain?
12:08 Should I create a new Search Console property when moving my website from HTTP to HTTPS?
12:27 How can I fix fake 404s hitting my site from an external source? Is it related to a ranking drop?
13:02 Does the Google account used to verify a domain in Search Console have to match the owner of the new website?
13:39 Does a sitemap file name have to be sitemap.xml or sitemap_index.xml? And is it mandatory to have a sitemap?
14:08 Should I redirect my mobile site URL to my desktop URL instead of responsive web design or dynamic serving?
14:44 Wrap up

Check out past office hours → https://goo.gle/gscseooh
Subscribe to the Google Search Central YouTube Channel → https://goo.gle/SearchCentral

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