Congratulations, bad office hours class of 2024

Ladies and gentlemen of the BOH class of '24, wear sunscreen. If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it.

For SEO matters, consider the sage advice of June 2024 Google SEO Office hours with John Mueller and Gary Illyes. If that sounds like too much work, try this.

Q: How can one be transparent in the use of AI translations without being punished for AI heavy content?

A: Make them not terrible.

Q: Does an auto translation of my website for other regions affect my ranking negatively?

A: Are they terrible?

Q: We've just bought a domain name, but the cache hasn't reset and it's not showing up in Google results. How do we fix this?

A: You went through all the trouble of finding and submitting a question to office hours… but not…. Verifying your site? I'm not even mad. That's impressive.

Q: Should I fix all broken backlinks to my site to improve overall SEO?

A: Sometimes dead is better. Ayup.

Q: I canonicalized part time course pages to full time course pages on a university website as the content was 93% same. Is this a good strategy?

A: You do you*

( * Gary does not require our services.)

Q: Can broken HTML and errors in browser console cause a negative impact on a website?

A: How broken are we talking here?

Q: Is it "against" webmaster guidelines if we use AI tools to generate initial content drafts but have hired editors to humanize and review them, and to implement brand and SEO guidelines?

A: *incoherent mumbling caused by mouth full of glue pizza*