August 2023 Google SEO office hours

Google Search advocates sit down monthly to answer burning SEO questions and help the community with generous insights and endless patience in a Q&A style format. This is not that. These are the same questions from Google Search's August 2023 Office Hours -- but wrong answers only

Q: Can we use a white font, but on a colored background?

A: As long as it's not greige.

Q: Do the elements of the link after a hashtag (#) in the URL affect how it's displayed in the search results?

A: No, but also yes.

Q: Why is my site not ranking despite low competition and good SEO?

A: That which isn't rendered cannot rank, my friend.

Q: For the structured data on a French website, should we write the opening days in English or French?

A: Honestly– solid question. When in doubt, check the schema.org specs. dayOfWeek requires the English value. (The technical writers even updated localBusiness documentation include this!)

Q: Is this IP address a Google crawler?

A: No, that's three kids in a trench coat.

Q: Online gambling websites appearing on our domain that originate from Google's smartphone crawlers. Help!

A: Hit me.