by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, (December 22, 2017)

Google’s latest video series focuses on helping webmasters and search engine optimization professionals with short answers to their webmaster and SEO questions.

The series, available on YouTube, already has six short videos, each several minutes in length.

While the short-form format intended to educate the SEO community provides quick snippets of insights, it’s not much different from Mueller’s weekly series, the Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout, where he typically is joined by search experts via video to discuss pressing topics.

Webmaster Central brings in SEO professionals from around the world. The format is a little more relaxed, and it runs live. Both are intended to educate search marketers and webmasters.

This past week, Mueller invited guests — such as Chris from eBay and Veronica from the publishing house, Ringier — to his location in Zurich and streamed the discussion live.

During the hangout, Mueller discussed Google’s move to the mobile-first index. He said that as engineers continue testing the transition they are finding that responsive sites have less of a challenge — “you don’t really notice any big difference. We just crawl with the mobile user agent and the responsive site has the same content. And that’s how you would recognize it in the log files.”

Mueller said the desktop bot is crawling about 80% of the sites, and the mobile bot about 20%. Eventually, most of the crawling will be done with the mobile bot and less with the desktop. Google expects to put up a blog post by the end of 2017, noting some of the changes that could be done.

“It’s trickier with websites that use separate mobile URLs,” he said.

Things like the interlinking within the mobile pages should be with the mobile pages and the structured data URLs should point to the mobile pages, he said. The hreflang links should be within the mobile pages, so each type of site is linked together, he said.

Happy Holidays!

MediaPost.com: Search Marketing Daily

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