What does Google say about SEO?

What Does Google Do When Your Site Sends Conflicting Canonical Signals?

John Mueller Aug 28, 2017 ★★★

John Mueller indicated on Twitter that when contradictory and/or conflicting signals are sent to Google regarding "canonical" tags (for example: an HTTPS URL containing a "canonical" tag pointing to the HTTP version which itself redirects with a 301 ...

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Does Googlebot Always Start Crawling from a Website's Homepage?

John Mueller Aug 28, 2017 ★★★

John Mueller indicated on Twitter that Googlebot generally crawls a site's homepage first, simply because it's the first page it finds. But that it's not mandatory.

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Can You Really Contact Google for Personalized SEO Support on Your Website?

John Mueller Aug 28, 2017 ★★

A few days after Gary Illyes indicated on Twitter that he doesn't provide SEO support for specific sites privately, John Mueller said the opposite by approving a user asking if they could send him a private message regarding technical issues on their...

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Does Your Choice of Browser Actually Affect Your Google SEO Rankings?

John Mueller Aug 28, 2017 ★★

John Mueller indicated during a hangout that to his knowledge, Google's relevance algorithm did not take into account the browser used by the user. Search results were supposedly the same on Chrome, Firefox, or Internet Explorer.

Algorithms Content AI & SEO International SEO

How Can You Prevent Google from Indexing Your Pre-Production Site?

John Mueller Aug 21, 2017 ★★★

John Mueller posted a fairly lengthy message on Google+ about the best way to prevent a test site (pre-production) from being indexed by Google, as we unfortunately see so often. If this mishap happens to you, the fastest solution according to John i...

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Why Aren't Your Rich Snippets Showing Up in Google Despite Perfect Markup?

John Mueller Aug 21, 2017 ★★

John Mueller indicated that there could be 3 reasons why rich snippets (or rich cards) don't appear in the SERPs for a site: technically incorrect code, an issue with official guidelines not being followed - therefore spam - or the fact that the site...

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Does URL Architecture Really Impact Your Google Rankings?

John Mueller Aug 21, 2017 ★★★

John Mueller indicated on Twitter that the URL structure (the fact that the hierarchy is shown in a page's address, as opposed to a site where all URLs would be at the root level, for example), has only very low importance (level 1 out of 7) for Goog...

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Does Google Really Consider Server Load Balancing as Cloaking?

John Mueller Aug 21, 2017 ★★★

John Mueller indicated on Twitter that redirecting a user to a faster server based on the load observed at a given time was not considered cloaking.

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Why Is Google Indexing More URLs Than Those Declared in Your XML Sitemap?

John Mueller Aug 21, 2017 ★★★

A user pointed out to John Mueller that in their Search Console, the XML Sitemaps report indicated there were more indexed URLs than URLs in the Sitemap. John responded that this likely came from the fact that the same URL was submitted in several di...

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What are the only two fields in an XML sitemap that Google actually cares about?

John Mueller Aug 21, 2017 ★★

John Mueller explained on Twitter that in XML files, the two most important fields are the URL () and the last modification date ().

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Do Internal and External Links Really Carry Different Weight for Google Rankings?

John Mueller Aug 21, 2017 ★★★

When asked "Are there differences in how Google treats internal versus external links?", John Mueller responded: "definitely".

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How Does Google Actually Handle Invalid or Non-Standard HTML Attributes in Your Page Code?

John Mueller Aug 21, 2017 ★★★

John Mueller explained on Twitter that when Google "parses" (analyzes) the HTML code of a page, erroneous attributes (badly coded, non-existent, non-standard...) of a tag are generally ignored.

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Should You Worry About Google Search Console's 10,000-Pixel Rendering Limit?

Google Aug 21, 2017 ★★★

The web page rendering in Search Console ("Crawl > Fetch as Google" section) stops at the 10,000th pixel according to a user's test. But, of course, all the HTML code is crawled and indexed. It's just the page image in this Search Console feature tha...

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Are PBNs Really Detected and Penalized by Google?

John Mueller Aug 14, 2017 ★

John Mueller indicated in a hangout that Google's algorithms detect PBNs without too much difficulty and, for those that slip under the radar, the "webspam team" loves diving into them...

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What's the Maximum Page Size Google Will Actually Crawl?

John Mueller Aug 14, 2017 ★★

John Mueller explained that Googlebot's current crawl limit for a web page is 200 MB (the last known limit in 2015 was 10 MB).

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Does disavowing poor-quality backlinks really carry a negative impact?

Gary Illyes Aug 14, 2017 ★

Gary Illyes indicated on Twitter that a disavowed site, therefore designated as providing low-quality links, was not negatively impacted subsequently by Google's algorithm. The links it provides are simply not taken into account.

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Does CSS File Size Really Impact Your SEO Rankings?

John Mueller Aug 14, 2017 ★★★

John Mueller indicated on Twitter that the size of a stylesheet (CSS) file does not impact the search engine's algorithm. It can be several tens of MB.

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Should You Use WWW or Non-WWW for Better SEO Performance?

John Mueller Aug 14, 2017 ★★★

A user asked on Twitter whether it was preferable in SEO to use a WWW address (www.yoursite.com) or not (yoursite.com) for a website. Another user replied that it had no impact on SEO. John Mueller agreed.

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Should You Still Use Geographic Meta Tags for Local SEO?

John Mueller Aug 14, 2017 ★★★

John Mueller indicated that Google does not take into account geo-type meta tags (, , ...) and had probably never taken them into account......

Content AI & SEO Domain Name Search Console International SEO

Should You Really Deindex Your Internal Search Results Pages?

John Mueller Aug 14, 2017 ★★

John Mueller explained on Twitter why Google requires internal search results pages from a website to be deindexed: they create infinite crawl spaces, are often low-quality pages, and frequently present pages empty of information (zero results for th...

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