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Today I’ll be recapping the Google Office Hours with Google’s John Mueller from January 21st, 2022. As always, I’ll provide a synopsis of the question and answer, my opinion, and a link to the question in the video. The video ran an hour, I’ll try to summarize this for you in about 15 minutes.

Full Show Notes / Blog @ https://opinionatedseo.com/s2e16

Questions seemed to focus a bit on internationalization, and internal linking. Hope you enjoy:

The value of internal links in header, footer, or in content?

https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=41

Seeing links - they are paid, and the sites are ranking #1, why is that contradiction from what Google says?

https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=88

Some links are not crawling according to Google Search Console.

https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=203

25% of the pages have dropped being indexed, quite dramatically a few months ago. Submitted pages dropped by 50%. They thought it might be structured data that’s not valid.

https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=342

Seeing images in organic search results, not the image tab. There isn’t documentation in google Search Central. 

https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=655

Multiple websites for each location but just a different phone number and address.

https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=833

Allright, then it was my turn. 

We have a strong US presence and moving into international. Should we go with ccTLDs or a single domain with subfolder country / language. Technology isn’t an issue, and I think being able to target Google Search Console to each unique domain by country may be the most advantageous option.

https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=1217

Is there a way to capture a folder without a trailing slash in Google Search Console adding a new property?

https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=1998

Site downtime, and how that affects indexing.

https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=2064

Splitting the domain, what should we do in search console?

https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=2321

This is kind of a reverse internationalization, removing the countries from the site and just focusing on one. But all the countries were already in subfolders, so would moving the main language to the root have a big impact on ranking?

https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=2684

This person really asked, can we trust the answers given. 

https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=2868

Internal Linking, more important than URL structure?

https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=3058

I then had a chance to talk to John again and ask about client side rendering issues a client was having, this particular client was having trouble replicating the issue as GoogleBot sees it.