Google Changes Format Of SEO Office Hours

Google’s John Mueller said there has been a change to the SEO office-hours format he hosts often on Google Meet and YouTube. The change is that Google will only record and post the video of questions submitted ahead of time, live questions will not be recorded and shared in the recorded version.

He also seems to be not answering all questions anymore, instead he is pushing many more questions directly to the Google Search Central Help Forums.

John said “so for this session, I want to try something slightly different,” adding that he may try “variations” of this over time to see what works best. John explained that he wants to “focus the recorded session on the submitted questions,” so the first 30 minutes he recorded and didn’t take any live questions, instead he just answered the pre-submitted questions.

He told those who joined live, they can ask their questions but after the first part of the ~30 minute session, he said they will have “to be a little bit patient” and will have to wait to ask their questions live until the “submitted questions are done and the recording is complete.” He did say that you can ask “clarifying questions along the way if anything comes up that seems confusing or is a little bit unclear.” No one in this recorded ended up doing that, instead it was just John reading off those questions and answering what he could.

Why the change? He said two fold (1) makes it easier for us to digest and (2) helps him and Googlers “kind of prepare for these sessions.”

He added that the questions that are submitted that are “too specific or that lead too far off topic from from the submitted questions,” he “would strongly recommend going to the help forums.”

Here is the video so you can watch that part at the beginning:

I do assume this will lead to less nuggets of information from his videos that I cover here, which is sad but I guess that is what Google is trying to avoid – well, trying to avoid confusion from those nuggets of information.

Some are liking the new format:

Thanks, Koray!

— 🦙 johnmu.xml (personal) 🦙 (@JohnMu) May 2, 2022

Forum discussion at YouTube Community.