What SEOs should know about devs

0:10Hello and welcome to a new episode of Search of the Record, a podcast coming to you from the Google Search team where we talk all about search and maybe have some fun along the way. This totally didn't sound like John Miller. My name is Gary and I'm a Gary at the Google search team. And today we have Martin as a guest. Well, actually you're also a host sometimes. Everyone say hi. Hi. Hi. What is going I loved you today. That was amazing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Martin. Yeah. How are you? Okay, I think. Yeah. Okay. Just okay. Surf tests. Isn't that unusual for you? Maybe. I don't know. I'm usually sunshine and happiness.

1:07Yeah, exactly. I have this perception about you that you're always the adjunct chief of sunshine and happiness. because I'm the chief of sunshine and happiness. That's true. At Google. Okay. Wow. So you cannot be that too. I got a promo though. That's pretty nice. Okay. Let me tell you what I was thinking because for a change I was thinking. All right. So I thought we'd do a more human episode. You. With you. You. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. No touching. So we talk about our human side, because I read that some people are convinced that we are not quite humans. So this will be one of those episodes where we debunk some myths about us.

2:01Okay. Maybe we talk about some challenges that we might have. And I don't mean I, because I don't have challenges, because I'm the challenge. Oh, the turntables. Okay. But yeah, they turn. Shocking. Shockingly, you turn the tables. But Martin, why don't you say hi to this lovely audience? Actually, you already said that. My notes are horrible. Yeah. Sweetie, are you okay? No, no. Was I ever? But seriously, how about we do a more human episode where we talk about frustrations that we have and whatnot? Because I think at least some of the things that we are doing are very different from any other experiences I had before joining Google in 1777, which was 15 years ago.

3:06and you probably have the same feeling that some things are different from the things that were at previous companies. That's true. So what do you think? Yeah, that sounds nice. Let's do that. What do you think? Let's pull back the curtain. Okay, so you don't know the questions that I'm going to ask, which is... I'm only slightly worried. Yeah. You should be. A core part of our job is public speaking And I know you as the JavaScript goat. Like, no, not that goat. The greatest of all time. And, but I also know that you also do public speaking for the team about technical topics. Yes. Did you have prior experience with that?

3:57I did. You did? Yeah. What were you public speaking about? JOHN MUELLER - Oh, a lot of different topics. Mostly, like, web development, but I cast that net widely. JOHN MUELLER - Right, so technical stuff. JOHN MUELLER - Yeah, technical stuff. JOHN MUELLER - Like JavaScript and all that kind of stuff. JOHN MUELLER - JavaScript, CSS, backend stuff. JOHN MUELLER - And I imagine that was very different from the public speaking experience that you have when speaking for Google Search. JOHN MUELLER - Yes. Yes, that was very different. I touched a nerve. Yes. I see. The audience cannot see it, but I see Martin on my screen and he's blushing.

4:42So how is it different? So beforehand, I had pretty much an audience that I shared my background with, which were developers. I still do talks to developers or at developer events, which I really like. but even if you go to a developer event and talk about seo it is a strained relationship you're entering and i am particularly putting myself in between the two sides so it feels like there's a bit of a divide between developers and seos surprise surprise um and i am trying to so So when I used to speak, before I joined Google, when I used to speak to developers, I was one of them. And I was speaking about topics that they are thinking about as well.

5:34So it's like, oh, you have that problem as well. Interesting, because I did this and it kind of worked. I'm still struggling with these problems. Do you happen to know what to do here? So I was in their shoes. I was coming from their perspective. And I'm just like amongst people who kind of share the same view on topics generally. mostly i mean i had some situations regarding accessibility on the web where some people would disagree that i think the web should be accessible to as many people as possible but okay um and now i'm i'm kind of coming from an adversarial role so to speak it's like who he's a developer he's one of us and he speaks our language and he does the things that we do but he talks about this weird snake oily kind of thing and he probably wants to sell us something.

6:27And I'm like, no, I'm trying to help you do your job better and understand where the people who come to your desk and ask you questions or want your help come from. And sometimes that is met with positive feelings and reactions and sometimes that is met with negative ones. Yeah, that's different. How did you get into public speaking or why? um i think i think i got into public speaking through a meetup in germany um where they had a format called ignite uh and ignite is there's a different word for it but i i can only remember the the name i think ignite is a brand from aureli um but there's another term for it it's five minutes, 20 slides, they auto-advance, and you just talk through the slides.

7:21There's a different term for it as well, but I keep forgetting what it's called. Isn't it a Japanese format? I think so. 20 slides, five minutes, or something like that. It has a name, but I cannot... Pecha Kucha. Yeah. I actually don't know where that comes from, but that. Well, that sounds Japanese. Okay. That was fun and a challenge. Because I kind of like talking to other people about the stuff that I worked on. And for my co-workers, eventually, you run out of topics because they know the things you do because they work with you. And my relatives and friends who are not in computer science and software engineering are quite bored.

8:10So I had to start public speaking, I guess. Oh, that was your reason for starting public speaking? No, no. So the reason was that... I imagine that you also had something like, I want to help people or something, not just because my family doesn't understand me, so I go and public speak. My actual primary reason was that I saw a lot of people moving away from the web, and I really, really liked the idea of the web because it's such a ubiquitous and low barrier medium and with reasons like oh but I want to build games and I'm like but you can do that in the browser or but I want to later on like 10 years later it's like oh but I want to build like something that works on mobile but you can do that on the web I want something that looks more like an app but you can do that on the web so I wanted to help people see and understand that the web has a lot of power that is not being used and I want to help people not run into those same problems that I ran into so so how is that different from uh what you're doing today because like conceptually doesn't feel all that different yes that's actually why i why i was interested in the job and why i'm so happy that i uh became part of the team i as a developer i see how often we build stuff that then no one finds and if no one finds it no one uses it and then it kind of goes down the the gather and that's unfortunate and i also to be fair i met a fair bunch of people who might not have been from the seo world who might not have been the easiest to deal with from a developer's perspective i also to be fair and to be frank met lots of developers who are not easy to deal with neither from the developer's perspective nor from seo's perspective so it's the the honest is on both sides to be nice people um what's different though is that now i am kind of trying to bridge a gap and i'm also trying to talk to two very different audiences and that is tricky and sometimes i have to talk well being the seos on or digital marketing on one end right and uh developers on the other And sometimes these roles and audiences fall into the same person, but it's not common necessarily.

10:29Yeah. And what's even worse is when I'm kind of like speaking by proxy. So I tell SEOs what to tell developers if they want something. So. Yeah. Do you think SEOs need to know some dev stuff? because I think when you start doing development, okay, I'm giving away my biases, but when you do some development, over the months, you start thinking in a different way about computer systems than before because you start seeing that, well, it's doing this because it was coded such. But it also, when you start developing stuff, you will start understanding the limitations that computer systems might have.

11:27Not all of the limitations, but some of the limitations. So back to the question, do you think SEOs should know some dev stuff? That's a tricky one. I think it's a similar debate to the do, should designers know coding um and for the designers versus coding thing i i don't have an answer and neither do i really have a strong stance on this but but it depends a little bit on where you draw the line to know dev stuff um i think in order to optimize a system or work with a system so deeply like seos do you have to understand some of the characteristics of the system so i think if you've never seen how http roughly you don't have to code in c sharp or c plus plus or javascript or whatever to build like your own crawler or to build why would you go to c sharp some people do i don't know why that came up probably because right now i have my glasses on so I see sharp.

12:41I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. Okay. That is how we wrap up this episode. I killed him. I killed him. Good. No, you don't have to code like your own low level network thing. I don't think you need to do that. But you should understand what is a header? How does HTTPS conceptually work? What's the certificate? How does that influence how the connection works uh right how does h2 differ from http to differ from http 1.1 these kind of things make sense to understand and so does understanding html and maybe maybe even understand a little bit about javascript again not necessarily like the in detailed bits and pieces but you should understand how it interacts with the page and how that could make your life easier or harder right so i think some knowledge is useful i don't think and that's that's the other tricky thing seo is such a broad field there are people who are amazing yes taking content international for instance i don't think they need to understand deaf stuff because they specialize on a much higher layer as in like the content and the structure and language and localization in different markets, they might not have to understand the technical bits and pieces.

14:08But someone who's like a general purpose SEO or someone who's even specializing on technical SEO, I think they should understand Devstaff. What do you think? I don't know if internationalization was the right. Okay, because there are technical, fair enough, there are technical, yeah. Yeah, but I get what you mean. Like, for example, if you are like, even if you are, I don't know, like media SEO, like they would want to know or they should know differences between the content formats and the content deliveries. Like, for example, if you are hosting video, then how are you hosting it? Like, are you streaming it in or are you just putting a static file somewhere on a server and then just like referencing it in a video container.

14:54Like from my perspective, and usually the SEOs that I talk to slash work with will know at least the basics of the internet workings. And I don't know if my biases just keep me away from SEOs who lack that knowledge, but generally the SEOs that I talk to, they are pretty good at this. But of course, the group that doesn't know much or at all about some of the basic stuff on the internet can cause or have the potential to cause some headaches, both for the sites. Like I see that daily in the crawl issue report form where they installed a random plugin. And this is a large agency. They installed some random calendar plugin for all their clients for whom it makes sense.

15:54And suddenly we discovered sometimes 100 million URLs, new URLs because of that calendar plugin. and basically the blame was on us, not on, well, you added 100 million new URLs to your site and we started crawling them like, what? Maybe not the best example either, but... But they can cause headaches for the sites. Do you think they can cause headaches from our comms perspective?

16:33yes and to be fair i think and again this is not all se it was no no no no no it's it's i think there's a there's a mindset situation as well like i think the people who don't know and they are upfront about it they don't cause as many headaches and they usually don't cause as many issues it gets dangerous when you're in the dunning kruger kind of trough where you think you know things and then you don't and that happens to me every now and then that i and i love talking to everyone who wants to talk to me i'm i'm excited to hear their perspective their experiences but sometimes they come in basically yeah flexing their technical skills and from the flexing you can tell like no no no it's it's not there and it's it's okay but the problem is by pretending that they know they kind of take away the opportunity for me to explain things to them um that is that is tricky to navigate and sometimes you are in in a situation where you're being asked a question that is very contextual and you notice that the person asking is having the necessary contextual knowledge.

17:49And I'm not even saying like, oh, SEOs, oh, they don't know their stuff. No, no, no. What I'm saying is, and SEOs should know this, and they do know this, that one website and another website might be very different from what they need to be looked at or what needs to be looked at, what needs to be done and what the requirements are. Someone who is like serving a very specific niche with highly regulated content in a single country in a single language might have very different requirements than a multi-language multinational brand that sells everything to everyone and then you have someone who asks a very specific question in a very specific context and i can tell this person knows their context very well but there's like other people listening as well and that's fine that's how it should be you shouldn't ask us one-on-one you should ask us in public forums yeah um but then i answer this person and we kind of have like established aha okay so this is your context this is the situation you are in right now with this client or with your company um in this case xyz do do this do that and then look at this and see if it gets better but if we say that out loud then someone else might listen who are in a completely different contexts.

19:11They might do something completely different. Their client might have the opposite needs. And then they just go, aha, so I'll do that. And that might actually be harmful. That's tricky. Yeah. But I mean, that applies on pretty much any comms situation. Like, for example, if you are a work correspondent and then you do one-on-one with someone and then someone overhears and then they put that in different context and it suddenly it's very different or there were big cases about how cropping images for example which is another mode of communication changes the meaning of the image quite a bit so that's true yeah true what What you are saying is that it depends?

20:03It depends. COM is hard. Yeah. And what I mean, especially like war for correspondence might actually be an interesting example, because I think they are the challenges that you have different parties with very differing confronting and conflicting agendas. and what i what i vary is in in developer communities generally you don't have that everyone just wants to build stuff better faster whatever um in in the seo community i sometimes see that some people try to make it into a confrontational and conflicting kind of situation where they have an agenda they want to push and then everyone else has a different agenda or like some some player a has and i'm not saying like we are exempt of that we have an agenda that is by definition the case because we want to build the best search engine there is um if we always succeed i don't know i don't think so we are striving to do our best and by that we want certain things for the web we want it accessible we want it fast we want it joyful to use and and some people might disagree with some of our points or some of our our goals I think that's fine but it it often makes things tricky because people might cherry pick and might pick one thing you said take that out of context and use it as an example why people should follow their agenda rather than ours.

21:52And I think, again, that's fair game. If I say it in public, you can definitely use it however you feel like. But sometimes I'm saddened or scared by how out of proportion that can get and how quickly that can get out of proportion. And that's unfortunate. How would you fix that? Oh, boy. Because to me, it goes back to standard communication challenges. It's not like we are doing any different from other public speakers who also have an agenda. They might want to sell a book. They might want to lobby for something. Quite literally, everyone has an agenda, some sort of agenda. true it feels like to all the the headaches well i didn't want to say that i kind of like you sometimes oh thank you so yeah not often but sometimes i like always

22:59oh anyway um like there's no real solution to to the problem right like We can ameliorate some of the issues. Like, for example, abandoning my pet peeve, it depends. And then instead of saying it depends, actually say out the whole thing, or at least the major things that the thing depends on. True. but ultimately there's no solution to the problem basically it's just like it's part of your job description true true yeah i i think it would be nice i'm this is wishful thinking but i it would be nice if people if people at least like try to not only look behind what we are saying but what other people are saying as well like why is this person saying this now at this point in time especially if it confirms your own bias i'm the first one to admit that sometimes if something confirms whatever i was thinking in the first place i'm like haha i knew it um but it makes sense to think about like wait does this apply to me does this make sense and i give you an example out of out of the blue out of the field basically i was at a underwater photography workshop where we were in a pool it was extremely brightly lit it was extremely clear water uh the pool was made of out of polished aluminium or steel or whatever it was but it was very bright and very reflective and everyone was using their strobes everyone was lighting this pool up as if there is like a major thunderstorm going on and i was looking around going like what the hell why are they doing that because my pictures i think come out fine without even switching on the lights because the one thing we have plenty of right now is light and i think like sometimes people just blindly follow any kind of guidance or any kind of like guru they heard and that that leads to these kind of things right i read books i watched videos and i saw things uh with regards to underwater photography.

25:20And yes, of course, light is there's not much light underwater generally. So you need to bring light. So you have strobes or video lights. But that doesn't mean that you should just blindly apply them to everything you do. And I think if we were to think about that, that would be nice. Would that be the one thing that you'd change about how we come? Like how we communicate? I mean, that's not necessary. What would be the thing that you think we can do to make our situation better? That's a really good one. Other than quitting. Other than quitting. Damn it. You're taking me away from my options.

26:02No, I think we're trying to do that. that I think we can do more of explaining the context or repeating the context in which an answer appears. And I try to do that. In one of the last conferences I spoke at Tech SEO Summit, where it's a very technical audience. And you know me as the JavaScript person and a bunch of people know me as the JavaScript person. I just wanted to grab people's attention. Sorry, sorry, sorry, JavaScript goat. okay javascript code you know me as a javascript code in a presentation about performance optimization i said don't use javascript on a slide i agree yeah yeah okay great fantastic uh i had like a remark on that slide saying like there's context missing here and then i gave all that context and i think if you can avoid javascript for what you're doing then absolutely definitely avoid it and people are like martin split says that and i'm like but that's the reality that's what you should do the problem with me saying that isn't probably this this podcast is going to come back and bite me the problem with me saying that in general is that people will just take that one sentence and ignore everything else i said before or after and say like google says don't use javascript so what i did instead is i explained javascript is necessary for a bunch of stuff javascript can be used in a simple website because that's the other thing people are like oh but if i build a website there's no place for javascript i'm like that's not true if you want your website to work offline you need javascript so making these broad statements is tricky and i'm trying to avoid making these broad statements unless i give a lot of context i actually spoke i think like five minutes about the context for that statement and it's much much broader than what i I would say here right now, but I try to give as much context as possible, and I hope people will take the context into account before just blindly blasting messages like that.

28:14Yeah. You know that particular example that you just brought up, that is the reason why we don't share our slides? Yeah. Yeah. Basically, our slides without context, they are useless. Yes, that is true. Martin? And unfortunate. Yeah? Are you feeling better now? I'm feeling so much better. Thank you so much for the therapy session, Gary. This is great. OK. You know that this felt like the coffees that we've been doing during COVID? Yes. We should do them more often. like what what covid no not covid the coffees the conversations oh not even the coffees i don't care particularly about coffee okay fine you don't have time for me anymore well i do and you're wrong okay well fine that's okay fine it's okay okay how do you feel about wrapping up this episode okay fine it was nice all things should come to an end was it i think it was nice I liked it I really like it when we don't have a structure for the episode and we are just like randomly talking about well to our listeners let us know in the comments if you prefer those episodes as well that would be interesting to get why do you ask them so many questions because I care like tell us I want to know I don't know maybe they're like oh god no why is this happening again and then we should do less of it well on the other hand it's our podcast we can do whatever we want, right?

29:52On our last day, for sure. Well, that was for this episode, dear listeners. So, Martin, people can find you on LinkedIn and on Blue Sky something. Blue Sky. Mastodon. Yes. There's not that many Martin splits, I believe. TikTok, TikTok. TikTok, TikTok. No, not really. On TikTok too? No? You don't really? OK. Well, it was really nice chatting to you. And I say that from the bottom of my heart, which doesn't exist because I'm a machine. And listeners, thank you very much for listening. And goodbye. OutroBot3000 generic greetings.

30:46We've been having fun with these podcast episodes. I hope you, the listener, have found them both entertaining and insightful too. Feel free to drop us a note on LinkedIn or chat with us at one of the next events that we go to if you have any thoughts. And of course, don't forget to like and subscribe. Thank you and goodbye.