English Google SEO office-hours from May 2023

This is an audio-only recording of the Google SEO office-hours from May 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: Resources: Site names → Site moves → Favicons → Glenn Gabe - Favicon issues → Chapters: 0:00 - Introduction 0:35 - If a domain gets penalized does it affect the links that are outbound from it? 1:01 - Are results generated differently in the URL Inspection Tool & Rich Results Testing Tool rendered html tabs? 2:00 - Is doing off page SEO submissions to directory and social bookmarking sites worth it? 2:09 - Why are collection pages excluded as noindex on my site? 3:39 - Links to my site appear to be coming from Russian websites - how do I block these links? 4:12 - Does the backend of a website matter for ranking? 4:39 - Do you plan to allow more than one Site Name for snippets? 5:07 - Should it take over six months to index my 16,000 pages? 5:49 - For permalinks, is it better with contractions to have “-will-not-“ vs. “-wont-“ in the URL? 6:32 - Does it make it hard for Googlebots to crawl and index an image if it is having many levels in the image URL? 6:57 - A lot of spam backlinks point to my website, how to stop them? 7:30 - Is it possible that Google Search Console shows me wrong queries? 8:25 - Full HTML page via server side rendering for search engines & client-side rendering for users. Is this OK? 9:04 - How important are descriptive file names for images? 9:35 - What’s the best way to get your traffic up after a redesign? 10:33 - Does Googlebot for organic search crawling render every page crawled? If not, how often does this happen? 10:56 - Can it hurt to have schema markup on a page that is invalid? 11:22 - How to change from a redirect 302 to a redirect 301? 12:00 - Does extensive boilerplate content harm the website? 12:25 - How do I prevent Googlebot from calling an expensive external API when rendering the Javascript on a page? 13:06 - Is there any certain method to change domain names without losing seo rankings? 13:33 - My brand favicon was uploaded over a month ago. However, on Google my webflow favicon is still there. Why? 14:38 - If a website writes posts in multiple languages (translated by hand), what is the best practice to divide the content? 15:09 - Does Google accept links in HTML dropdowns? 15:52 - unreachable in Google Search Console. Why? 16:37 - If a sitemap has hreflang URLs mentioned, how do properties like lastmod or priority affect it? 17:45 - Should I block affiliate links in or lift disallow and prevent affiliate links from being indexed? 18:11 - Wrap up Check out past office hours → Subscribe to the Google Search Central YouTube Channel → #SEO #GoogleSearch