Commentary

Google: Suggestions To Transition Websites Into 2020

There is a lot to pay attention to as marketers and webmasters head into 2020, especially as website content continually changes throughout the end of the year and into the new year to follow.

Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller answered top-of-mind questions on everything from crawl-rate settings in Google Search Console, to the differences between data in Google Analytics and Search Console.

He also discussed Accelerated Mobile Pages, saying there is no ranking benefit for ecommerce pages running AMP. It simply speeds the serving of the page.

In a video hangout Friday, Mueller suggested using crawl-rate setting to put limits on the amount of crawling across a website, not to increase it.

There’s a maximum setting on the crawl rate.

Even if a webmaster or marketer sets it to the maximum, the amount of times Google will crawl the site might be lower than the amount of times Google would naturally crawl the site without setting an amount.

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In a case where a website might have one million pages crawled daily, Mueller would recommend removing the crawl-rater setting and letting Google determine the amount.

“Even if you applied the maximum setting … it would be less than what we would naturally crawl,” he said in the video. “Usually what happens with the crawl rate, in general, is that we try to adjust it automatically over time. We go up to the maximum of the setting set. If you don’t have a setting set then we will try to go as high as we can. It’s something that happens over the course of several days, maybe weeks or longer.”

Mueller also answered a question related to seeing limited clicks to a website. He said Google filters some queries to prevent them from serving in analytics for privacy reasons, especially those sessions that take many clicks to complete a query.

Gilad Brandstetter, digital marketing manager at Maoz Systems, during the hangout described a discrepancy in click data when comparing the numbers in Google Search Console and Google Analytics.

“I would expect to see some amount of difference … when you’re looking at fairly low numbers like 60 visits a day,” Mueller said. “I can imagine the differences being pretty significant across the tools. The trends would be similar, but the absolute counts would be different.”

Mueller said Search Console tracks what people use to reach a website, what they click on, and Google Analytics tracks a variety of other types of events. Analytics might lose referring data points, depending on the way a website is set up it might not know if the click came from paid search or organic traffic.

“When more people search for your content, you will start to see more queries,” Mueller told Brandstetter.

1 comment about "Google: Suggestions To Transition Websites Into 2020".
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  1. Craig Mcdaniel from Sweepstakes Today LLC, December 27, 2019 at 8:19 p.m.

    Laurie, Happy Holidays.  You article gives me cold chills because slowing down the crawls will hurt the smaller to mid size websites the most. This will benefit the big sites because they have the dollars to advertiser more both through paid search and organic.  

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