Google's John Mueller has been doing Google SEO office hours for what feels like a decade or so. It is when John Mueller would answer questions live from SEOs and then that would be published on YouTube for all to watch later. We would cover a lot of those recordings here and even ask some questions live.
Well, as you know, John recently stopped doing these hangouts live and only really takes pre-submitted questions and spends about 30 minutes answering those pre-submitted questions. This format change started a couple of months ago and we have seen a difference in terms of new useful nuggets we are getting from them.
More so, John use to conduct these about four or more times per month. I think his schedule was two hangouts in English and German, every other week.
Now John said he is switching to doing these shorter, less interactive, SEO office hour hangouts, only once per month.
John said on Twitter "I'm currently aiming for about 1/month, so unfortunately that's even less frequent than you're recommending." "They're always quiet time-intensive for me, so I need to find a workable balance," he explained.
We have been able to pull out a couple of nuggets from some of the videos in this format, but it has so far proven to give us less new information to cover. Maybe that is the goal or maybe that will change over time.
It is a shame but I have to imagine John is doing this for good reason and we should give John the benefit of the doubt here.
Forum discussion at Twitter.