Day 1, session not recorded

Links to other sessions 29

1. Stage D2-C393 Day 2 · Handling web duplication

   Google's speaker said that pointing rel=canonical from the pages of a paginated set to the first page can sometimes make sense depending on the goal, for example to make a category page more visible, but that it affects canonicalization and deduplication.

   contradicts
   Docs D1-C115 Day 1 · session not recorded

   Google's crawlers do not click buttons. Each page in a series needs its own URL and an <a href> link to the next page, should not use page 1 as its canonical, and rel=next and rel=prev are no longer used.

2. Stage D1-C271 Day 1 · Lightning session A: Automation and AI

   A community speaker said llms.txt files are not necessary, citing a third-party study from summer 2026 (heard as Ahrefs') that looked at almost 40,000 sites over one month: 97% had no AI agent hits on the file, and those that had any got about two hits a month.

   extends
   Stage D1-C060 Day 1 · session not recorded

   Speakers at the event were openly dismissive of llms.txt.

3. Stage D1-C278 Day 1 · Lightning session A: Automation and AI

   A community speaker said a block of content without semantic HTML or landmarks is just a div whose purpose an agent cannot tell, and recommended landmark elements (header, nav, main, article for independent sections, footer) plus p and h1-h6 for text.

   extends
   Docs D1-C131 Day 1 · session not recorded

   Google's guide for generative AI features says browser agents may read a site through screenshots, the DOM structure and the accessibility tree, and recommends semantic HTML because it helps users such as screen reader users navigate a page.

4. Stage D1-C279 Day 1 · Lightning session A: Automation and AI

   A community speaker described ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) as a set of attributes, not a programming language, that adds accessibility information to HTML: a div used as an 'add to favourites' button can get role=button, an aria-label and aria-pressed set to true or false.

   extends
   Stage D1-C118 Day 1 · session not recorded

   Attendees were told to check ARIA and accessibility.

5. Slide D2-C031 Day 2 · How is HTML interpreted

   Google extracts the rel=canonical link, through which site owners state their preferred canonical URL, and uses it in deduplication and in canonical selection.

   extends
   Docs D1-C128 Day 1 · session not recorded

   Google's canonicalization guide says some duplicate content on a site is normal and not a violation of its spam policies; Google clusters duplicate pages, picks the most representative one as canonical and crawls the duplicates less often.

6. Stage D2-C136 Day 2 · Lightning session D: Rendering and JavaScript

   Many SEOs still treat everything beyond the raw HTML as the developers' business, but developers often do not handle rendering problems, a community speaker warned.

   extends
   Stage D1-C121 Day 1 · session not recorded

   SEO is not only content; it has many parts.

7. Slide D2-C184 Day 2 · Lightning session D: Rendering and JavaScript

   Google follows links in <a href> elements; a link that only runs an onclick handler, or a hash pseudo-link such as href=#/products, may be invisible to Google.

   extends
   Docs D1-C115 Day 1 · session not recorded

   Google's crawlers do not click buttons. Each page in a series needs its own URL and an <a href> link to the next page, should not use page 1 as its canonical, and rel=next and rel=prev are no longer used.

8. Slide D2-C187 Day 2 · Lightning session D: Rendering and JavaScript

   A market or language selector built as a button works for users but leaves the whole cluster of alternate-language pages without crawlable links, so the cluster is orphaned for Google.

   extends
   Docs D1-C115 Day 1 · session not recorded

   Google's crawlers do not click buttons. Each page in a series needs its own URL and an <a href> link to the next page, should not use page 1 as its canonical, and rel=next and rel=prev are no longer used.

9. Slide D2-C195 Day 2 · Lightning session D: Rendering and JavaScript

   Content that loads only after a user action such as a click or a scroll is not in the DOM while Google renders the page, so Google cannot index it.

   extends
   Docs D1-C115 Day 1 · session not recorded

   Google's crawlers do not click buttons. Each page in a series needs its own URL and an <a href> link to the next page, should not use page 1 as its canonical, and rel=next and rel=prev are no longer used.

10. Slide D2-C201 Day 2 · Lightning session D: Rendering and JavaScript

    Tab or accordion content fetched from an API only when a user clicks the tab, as in tab.onclick = () => fetch('/api/specs'), does not exist for Google until someone clicks.

    extends
    Docs D1-C115 Day 1 · session not recorded

    Google's crawlers do not click buttons. Each page in a series needs its own URL and an <a href> link to the next page, should not use page 1 as its canonical, and rel=next and rel=prev are no longer used.

11. Stage D2-C268 Day 2 · What is Google friendly JavaScript

    Content that loads only when a user clicks an element is not supported in the way Google renders pages for indexing.

    extends
    Docs D1-C115 Day 1 · session not recorded

    Google's crawlers do not click buttons. Each page in a series needs its own URL and an <a href> link to the next page, should not use page 1 as its canonical, and rel=next and rel=prev are no longer used.

12. Docs D2-C276 Day 2 · What is Google friendly JavaScript

    To make infinite scroll indexable, Google's lazy-loading guide says to support paginated loading: give each chunk its own persistent, unique URL, link sequentially to those URLs, and update the displayed URL with the History API when a new chunk becomes the main visible element.

    extends
    Docs D1-C115 Day 1 · session not recorded

    Google's crawlers do not click buttons. Each page in a series needs its own URL and an <a href> link to the next page, should not use page 1 as its canonical, and rel=next and rel=prev are no longer used.

13. Slide D2-C345 Day 2 · Handling web duplication

    Google's deduplication has three steps: identify and cluster duplicate web pages, pick representative URLs and index the unique pages, and forward signals to the representative URLs.

    extends
    Docs D1-C128 Day 1 · session not recorded

    Google's canonicalization guide says some duplicate content on a site is normal and not a violation of its spam policies; Google clusters duplicate pages, picks the most representative one as canonical and crawls the duplicates less often.

14. Slide D2-C348 Day 2 · Handling web duplication

    Google forwards the signals attached to every URL in a duplicate cluster, such as links, to the representative URL, so that nothing is lost by showing only one URL.

    extends
    Stage D1-C111 Day 1 · session not recorded

    Gary Illyes said there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty.

15. Slide D2-C369 Day 2 · Handling web duplication

    Google's slide on structurally similar content asked whether a new URL that fits a known duplicate pattern, such as /buy/seo-service, even needs to be crawled.

    extends
    Docs D1-C128 Day 1 · session not recorded

    Google's canonicalization guide says some duplicate content on a site is normal and not a violation of its spam policies; Google clusters duplicate pages, picks the most representative one as canonical and crawls the duplicates less often.

16. Stage D2-C380 Day 2 · Handling web duplication

    Many SEOs assume Google must follow their rel=canonical, but because people sometimes get it wrong, Google has to make its own judgment about the canonical.

    extends
    Analysis D1-C113 Day 1 · session not recorded

    The real cost of duplicates is control and crawling: Google may choose a canonical you did not want, and every copy is still crawled. Copied or scraped content is a separate spam-policy issue.

17. Docs D2-C395 Day 2 · Handling web duplication

    Google's 2013 post on rel=canonical mistakes says pointing rel=canonical from page 2 or later of a paginated series to page 1 is incorrect because the pages are not duplicates, and that it would result in the content on later pages not being indexed at all.

    extends
    Docs D1-C115 Day 1 · session not recorded

    Google's crawlers do not click buttons. Each page in a series needs its own URL and an <a href> link to the next page, should not use page 1 as its canonical, and rel=next and rel=prev are no longer used.

18. Slide D2-C397 Day 2 · Handling web duplication

    Google's duplication talk closed with the advice not to block agents, which the speaker said are sometimes really cool.

    extends
    Docs D1-C131 Day 1 · session not recorded

    Google's guide for generative AI features says browser agents may read a site through screenshots, the DOM structure and the accessibility tree, and recommends semantic HTML because it helps users such as screen reader users navigate a page.

19. Stage D2-C401 Day 2 · Lightning session E: Managing Duplicates and Site Moves

    Broken canonical tags can make the wrong pages of a site show up in search results.

    extends
    Analysis D1-C113 Day 1 · session not recorded

    The real cost of duplicates is control and crawling: Google may choose a canonical you did not want, and every copy is still crawled. Copied or scraped content is a separate spam-policy issue.

20. Stage D2-C408 Day 2 · Lightning session E: Managing Duplicates and Site Moves

    A community speaker advised auditing canonicals as whole canonical groups rather than pair by pair, paying special attention to each group's canonical leader.

    extends
    Docs D1-C128 Day 1 · session not recorded

    Google's canonicalization guide says some duplicate content on a site is normal and not a violation of its spam policies; Google clusters duplicate pages, picks the most representative one as canonical and crawls the duplicates less often.

21. Stage D2-C465 Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.

    Gemini in Chrome relies heavily on the screenshot it takes of a page.

    extends
    Docs D1-C131 Day 1 · session not recorded

    Google's guide for generative AI features says browser agents may read a site through screenshots, the DOM structure and the accessibility tree, and recommends semantic HTML because it helps users such as screen reader users navigate a page.

22. Stage D2-C521 Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.

    Structured data makes pages eligible to appear as rich results, Google's structured data talk said in its recap.

    extends
    Stage D1-C122 Day 1 · session not recorded

    Check and focus on rich results for Google.

23. Stage D2-C523 Day 2 · Using images to your advantage and Engaging Search users with videos

    Gary Illyes said images and videos drive a large amount of traffic to publishers.

    extends
    Stage D1-C116 Day 1 · session not recorded

    Images were stressed as important.

24. Stage D2-C525 Day 2 · Using images to your advantage and Engaging Search users with videos

    An image Google has extracted can appear almost anywhere Google shows results, including Discover, image search, web search and AI features, so its potential reach is immense.

    extends
    Stage D1-C116 Day 1 · session not recorded

    Images were stressed as important.

25. Stage D2-C525 Day 2 · Using images to your advantage and Engaging Search users with videos

    An image Google has extracted can appear almost anywhere Google shows results, including Discover, image search, web search and AI features, so its potential reach is immense.

    extends
    Analysis D1-C117 Day 1 · session not recorded

    With one in six AI Mode searches being multimodal, original images with descriptive file names, alt text and captions feed AI answers as well as image search.

26. Stage D2-C701 Day 2 · Deciding what goes in the index?

    When Google already has duplicate information for a document, for example when reprocessing it, index selection uses it to drop non-canonical duplicates from further processing, so that, as the speaker put it, only canonicals end up in search results (a simplification; see D2-C703).

    extends
    Docs D1-C128 Day 1 · session not recorded

    Google's canonicalization guide says some duplicate content on a site is normal and not a violation of its spam policies; Google clusters duplicate pages, picks the most representative one as canonical and crawls the duplicates less often.

27. Stage D1-C207 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Google clusters duplicate pages and selects one page per cluster as its representative, the canonical URL, so that users are not shown duplicates.

    repeats
    Docs D1-C128 Day 1 · session not recorded

    Google's canonicalization guide says some duplicate content on a site is normal and not a violation of its spam policies; Google clusters duplicate pages, picks the most representative one as canonical and crawls the duplicates less often.

28. Stage D1-C274 Day 1 · Lightning session A: Automation and AI

    A community speaker said AI agents understand a page through a combination of three inputs: a screenshot, the DOM (the HTML plus the changes rendered by JavaScript) and the accessibility tree.

    repeats
    Docs D1-C131 Day 1 · session not recorded

    Google's guide for generative AI features says browser agents may read a site through screenshots, the DOM structure and the accessibility tree, and recommends semantic HTML because it helps users such as screen reader users navigate a page.

29. Slide D2-C040 Day 2 · How is HTML interpreted

    Google cannot extract a link from an a element that only has an onclick handler, because Googlebot does not click, so the JavaScript is never triggered.

    repeats
    Docs D1-C115 Day 1 · session not recorded

    Google's crawlers do not click buttons. Each page in a series needs its own URL and an <a href> link to the next page, should not use page 1 as its canonical, and rel=next and rel=prev are no longer used.