What does Google say about SEO?

Should You Worry That Search Console Only Shows 35% of Your Performance Data?

John Mueller Aug 27, 2024 ★★★

John Mueller responded to concerns that Search Console only displays 35% of performance data and that a bulk export is necessary to monitor all the data. Google's Senior Search Analyst provided nuance by indicating that this percentage actually depen...

Domain Age & History Content AI & SEO JavaScript & Technical SEO Web Performance Local Search Search Console

Can Malicious Traffic Actually Penalize Your Site in Google?

Martin Splitt Aug 27, 2024 ★★★

Martin Splitt confirmed that an influx of malicious traffic (bad actor traffic) to a site, with the intent to discredit it in Google's eyes, does not directly harm its ranking in search results: "Simply sending traffic from dubious sources to a site ...

AI & SEO JavaScript & Technical SEO Penalties & Spam

Do nofollow and noindex attributes hurt your Google rankings?

Martin Splitt Aug 27, 2024 ★★★

Martin Splitt stated that using the "nofollow" and "noindex" attributes does not necessarily indicate a quality issue on the site: "It just tells us that you have links you don't want to be associated with, or that you have pages you don't want to se...

Domain Age & History Content Crawl & Indexing AI & SEO Links & Backlinks

Why is Google refusing to index some of your pages?

Martin Splitt Aug 22, 2024 ★★★

Google does not necessarily index every page on your website. Some pages will never be indexed, and this is normal behavior that does not always require corrective action.

Domain Age & History Crawl & Indexing AI & SEO

Should you really fix every single 404 error detected in Search Console?

John Mueller Aug 22, 2024 ★★★

If Search Console reports thousands of 404 pages, this can be normal if these pages correspond to intentionally deleted products. It's not automatically a problem to solve.

Domain Age & History E-commerce Search Console

Can the URL Inspection API truly replace manual inspections at scale?

Martin Splitt Aug 22, 2024 ★★

The URL Inspection API allows you to perform thousands of URL inspections in minutes, whereas the user interface requires you to do them one at a time.

AI & SEO JavaScript & Technical SEO Domain Name Search Console

Does the Search Console API really give you access to data that the interface hides?

Martin Splitt Aug 22, 2024 ★★★

The Search Console API offers far more data than the user interface, particularly for large projects. The data is also better structured in the API, facilitating the extraction of insights at scale.

JavaScript & Technical SEO Search Console

Why does Google Search Console cap your indexing reports at 1000 rows?

Martin Splitt Aug 22, 2024 ★★

Each indexing report in the Search Console interface is limited to 1000 lines of data, whereas the API could potentially provide significantly more data.

Crawl & Indexing AI & SEO JavaScript & Technical SEO Search Console

Did Google just give SEOs the data superpower they've been begging for?

Martin Splitt Aug 22, 2024 ★★

The data availability window in Search Console has expanded from 90 days (during the Webmaster Tools era) to 16 months today.

Search Console

Should you really fix every Google Search Console notification?

Martin Splitt Aug 22, 2024 ★★★

Many notifications in Search Console are simply informational and do not require action. You need to distinguish between true errors and simple notifications that indicate your site's status.

AI & SEO Search Console

Why won't Google diagnose your ranking problems?

John Mueller Aug 22, 2024 ★★★

Google cannot help definitively with ranking questions because multiple valid approaches exist: creating more content, removing unnecessary content, improving design, simplifying it, etc. No method is universally correct.

Content AI & SEO

Does Google finally have an SEO tool for non-technical users with Search Console Insights?

Martin Splitt Aug 22, 2024 ★★

Search Console Insights is designed for casual users like small business owners, offering a simplified view of performance without requiring deep technical knowledge.

Content AI & SEO JavaScript & Technical SEO Web Performance Search Console

How is the BigQuery integration transforming advanced SEO analysis beyond Search Console's standard limitations?

Martin Splitt Aug 22, 2024 ★★

Google offers a BigQuery integration for Search Console data, allowing advanced users to export and analyze their data in greater depth.

Search Console

Does Google really index all languages the same way?

Google Aug 21, 2024 ★★

Google processes content similarly regardless of the language used. If Swahili pages aren't indexed while English pages are, it's probably an internal linking issue. It's recommended to create cross-links between different language versions to facili...

Domain Age & History Content Crawl & Indexing AI & SEO Links & Backlinks International SEO

Do 404 errors really hurt your site's search rankings?

Google Aug 21, 2024 ★★★

404 errors do not affect the ranking of the rest of your site. They are normal and an integral part of a healthy website. You should not systematically redirect to similar pages, category pages, or the homepage because this creates a poor user experi...

Domain Age & History AI & SEO

Should you really redirect all 404 pages to improve your SEO?

Google Aug 21, 2024 ★★★

If a product has a genuine replacement, a redirect is appropriate. But if pages are simply similar, you should return a 404 code rather than redirecting. Redirecting to an irrelevant page frustrates the user and doesn't help your SEO rankings.

Domain Age & History E-commerce AI & SEO Pagination & Structure Redirects

Can you really reset Search Console data when you take over a website?

Google Aug 21, 2024 ★★

Data in Search Console is not linked to users. Anyone who verifies a site later will see this data. There is no way to reset the displayed data. To prevent a deleted site from showing up, use domain verification and submit a temporary removal request...

Domain Age & History AI & SEO JavaScript & Technical SEO Domain Name Search Console

Does Google really crawl URL variations that have no internal links or backlinks pointing to them?

Google Aug 21, 2024 ★★

Google generally doesn't randomly test URL variations. Systems rely on links to discover new URLs. Unless you create links to these subdirectories, Google probably won't discover them. And even if Google tried them and they returned a 404, that's com...

Crawl & Indexing AI & SEO Links & Backlinks Domain Name

Is the text-to-code ratio really a Google ranking factor?

Martin Splitt Aug 21, 2024 ★★★

The text-to-code ratio is not a ranking factor, Google Search does not care about it. Unminified CSS and JavaScript are suboptimal for users because they increase data volume, but have no direct SEO implications, even if it is a good practice.

Content AI & SEO JavaScript & Technical SEO

Do you really need to reply to every blog comment to boost your SEO?

Martin Splitt Aug 21, 2024 ★★

Leaving user comments unanswered on blog articles has no SEO impact whatsoever. They are simply text on the pages. Google Search doesn't check whether a comment received a reply or not. The text is either present and counts, or it's absent.

Domain Age & History Content Discover & News AI & SEO