English Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout 6 March 2018

English Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout Streamed live on 6th March 2018

Otto Rommel
This is to settle an argument with a developer. Is it considered cloaking that would incur a penalty if link HREF values are blocked by disallowing access to a JavaScript file. Example: blocking the HREF value to a link in a calendar that would create and infinite crawl path of years. Example: Blocking the HREF values to Sort By links in a table. Prior to the advent of JavaScript rendering, this was a way to stop bad URLs from being crawled. Thanks.

Marco Logmans
How will GDPR affect the use of Google Analytics? It looks like we can only track visitors if they allow us to add cookies…or not?

Eduard Paziuk
In which cases does Google recognize a french-translated page “” as a duplicate of an English one – “”? Hreflangs are correct but using the query “”, we see an English page not a French one.

Greg B
Is there a way to auto disavow some tld’s? It would help with the .ru domains that are linking to me that are 99% spam. New ones show up every few days.

Dmitry Voytenko
How can I improve the indexing of sites developed on a single CMS and having the same catalog of products with the same description on the product cards? Google indexes the site and excludes pages from the index in a month. Sites belong to different organizations but they were ordered from one developer.

Jack Waldenmaier | Composer / Producer
Hi John,

I have about 60 pages with duplicate TITLES and DESCRIPTIONS because they are part of WordPress CATEGORIES.

(They are all Rel=Prev or Rel=Next and have Canonicals but they still show up in Search Console as duplicates.)

Is there any solution to this problem?

Ben Cohen
We have different branch pages for our depots and we also have different GMB profiles for each branch and they have reviews on them. Can we put the text from some of these reviews on to the relevant branch pages and mark it up. We already have a link from the branch page going to the google plus page but we could also do a link going to the reviews section if need be?. What do you think?

Russell Meara

Is there any benefit/harm putting some of our USP in the Title tag if we already have the keyword phrase first.

Bill Allen | Dad, Husband and SEO Guy

Does Google have any issues or preference for indexing and ranking urls that have special characters (comma, ampersand, parenthesis, etc.) or issues/preference for indexing/ranking special characters used in French, Spanish, German, etc.?

Rob Cuppett
None adult site showing hard core adult ads in Google search results when searching for Every site on the VPS host is showing these ads. Is the IP address marked by google as adult? What would cause this? Here is a link to a webmaster help forum discussion with all the details and screenshots.

Antonio Dimitrovski
Earlier on Twitter we have conversation about translating content and still isn’t clear enough. If I translate article from another website to another language hreflang is a must to show proper language but how can i give him a credit if canonical is not good here? Should I just rank in other languages with my website? Link isn’t good, can’t canonical not the same content, what we need to do?

François Briod | Tech enthusiast & entrepreneur
Hey! It’s going to be my first Office Hours, I’m thrilled.

My question: how does google indexes texts generated by computers based on unique/proprietary meta-data such as a hotel description on (For example:

Let’s say that the meta-data are updated every day (reviews), would it make sense for Google to crawl this text every day?

Colin Manko
1) Does Google use other Google App data for search results? (ie; does Google use Gmail email opens or Google Chrome behavior to inform results past an individual basis?)
2) Can you explain the types/range of severity of algorithmic penalties? (ie; how do you receive an algorithmic penalty, how long does it last, does it affect a site on a page by page basis – or at the domain level?)
3) — Search Console Performance feedback (been a week since I’ve been in there):
—— – want to be able to filter off multiple operations in filters (ie; contains “some word” AND does not contain “some other word”)
—— – want filters to update the line graph – currently, it is just an overall view of the date range and search type you selected, even when filters are enabled (Is that right?)
—— – property sets would be nice (ie; aggregate both http and https for YOY analysis)
—— – option to download some time period of data and break it down by day for daily analysis away from Search Console interface (you can do this with the API, but that is over my head/don’t have time for it at the moment)

Thanks for everything you all do!

Glenn Gabe | Digital Marketing Consultant
Hi John. When a company fact checks an article using ClaimReview markup, is there a way to challenge that fact check?? If not, the fact check will show up in the SERPs even if it’s not entirely correct. It seems like there should be a way to challenge a fact check (like you can counter a DMCA takedown).

Also, would continual fact checks against an organization impact that site algorithmically at some point? Again, like DMCA takedowns funnel into the Pirate Algorithm?