English Google SEO office-hours from August 2023

This is an audio-only recording of the Google SEO office-hours from August 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 0:50 - How many URLs can a sitemap index file have? 1:13 - Does setting ARIA attributes improve SEO? 1:54 - Should I redirect canonicalized “domain/en“ to “domain,“ or is being canonicalized enough? 2:41 - Do the elements of the link after a hashtag (#) in the URL affect how it’s displayed in the search results? 3:28 - Why is my site not ranking despite low competition and good SEO? 4:29 - How can I see if my newly bought site has a penalty? 5:06 - Is it okay to use product rich snippets for real estate properties? 5:54 - Can hreflang be used to link similar content targeting different countries, even if not direct translations? 6:30 - Can we use a white font, but on a colored background? 6:44 - Does the use of an article HTML tag have an impact on Google? 7:24 - Is it a problem for SEO to have a mix of relative and absolute links on our website? 7:46 - For structured data on a French website, should we write the opening days in English or French? 8:37 - Is the IP address a Google crawler? 9:29 - Does Google treat certain tags as a signal that the website is attempting to give a good UX? 10:17 - Why does the Google cache page show a 404 error for my site? 10:43 - Online gambling websites appearing on our domain that originate from Google’s smartphone crawlers. Help! 11:57 - Wrap up Check out past office hours → Subscribe to the Google Search Central YouTube Channel → Resources: Build and submit a sitemap → #SEO #google