What does Google say about SEO? /
The Crawl & Indexing category compiles all official Google statements regarding how Googlebot discovers, crawls, and indexes web pages. These fundamental processes determine which pages from your website will be included in Google's index and potentially appear in search results. This section addresses critical technical mechanisms: crawl budget management to optimize allocated resources, strategic implementation of robots.txt files to control content access, noindex directives for page exclusion, XML sitemap configuration to enhance discoverability, along with JavaScript rendering challenges and canonical URL implementation. Google's official positions on these topics are essential for SEO professionals as they help avoid technical blocking issues, accelerate new content indexation, and prevent unintentional deindexing. Understanding Google's crawling and indexing processes forms the foundation of any effective search engine optimization strategy, directly impacting organic visibility and SERP performance. Whether troubleshooting indexation problems, optimizing crawl efficiency for large websites, or ensuring proper URL canonicalization, these official guidelines provide authoritative answers to complex technical SEO questions that shape modern web presence and discoverability.
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★★ Can you really make Google crawl your site more often?
Webmasters cannot ask Google to crawl more. Google automatically detects server capacity and adjusts the crawl. It is only possible to limit crawling, not to increase it. Google's scheduler is smart e...
Martin Splitt Jul 14, 2020
★★★ Does the crawl budget really boil down to the simple sum of two variables?
The crawl budget consists of two elements: crawl rate (the speed at which Google can crawl without overloading the server) and crawl demand (crawl frequency based on content change frequency and not i...
Martin Splitt Jul 14, 2020
★★★ Does the crawl budget truly impact the rendering phase of your JavaScript pages?
The crawl budget affects not only the initial crawl but also the rendering, as Google needs to fetch additional resources (CSS, JavaScript, API). A poor cache can force Google to continuously re-downl...
Martin Splitt Jul 14, 2020
★★★ How does Google really detect content changes on your site?
Google employs several signals to determine crawl frequency: content fingerprint, structured data with dates, ETag, HTTP Last-Modified header, and modification date in the sitemap. If these signals do...
Martin Splitt Jul 14, 2020
★★ Should you ditch POST for crawlable APIs and switch everything to GET?
Google cannot cache POST requests, leading to greater crawl budget consumption. For rendering APIs, use GET requests. GraphQL can be employed to reduce the number of requests, but only in GET mode....
Martin Splitt Jul 14, 2020
★★★ Does crawl budget really only concern very large sites?
Crawl budget should only be a concern for sites with millions of URLs. For sites with fewer than one million pages, crawl budget is generally not an issue unless the server infrastructure is failing....
Martin Splitt Jul 14, 2020
★★ Should you canonicalize pages that share the same content but look visually different?
When displaying pages with the same text that appears different depending on the user, if the basic content is the same but the layout and appearance differ, canonicalizing is optional. However, it is...
金谷武明 Jul 02, 2020
★★ Should you be worried about the difference between / and /index.html?
If both a URL ending with '/' and '/index.html' exist on the domain's homepage and there are no redirects or canonical settings, Google recognizes them as separate URLs. One will be chosen as canonica...
金谷武明 Jul 02, 2020
★★ Should you really forgo a JavaScript fallback for native lazy loading?
When using the img element's loading="lazy" attribute (native lazy loading), there is no need to prepare a fallback for Googlebot since JavaScript is unnecessary....
金谷武明 Jul 02, 2020
★★ Could the canonical URL change based on a visitor's geolocation?
It is fundamentally difficult to imagine that the canonical URL could be representative of different conditions such as location. The canonical does not fluctuate based on any conditions....
小川安奈 Jul 02, 2020
★★ Should you really redirect Googlebot to www to bypass CORB errors?
It is technically acceptable to redirect only Googlebot to the www domain while keeping users on the non-www version to avoid CORB errors caused by a service worker. However, Martin recommends fixing ...
Martin Splitt Jul 01, 2020
★★★ Should you really remove hashes from sports event URLs to get them indexed?
For Google to index temporary sports event URLs (matches), the hash (#) must be removed from the URL. If these pages need to be discovered before or during the match, they must be available several da...
Martin Splitt Jul 01, 2020
★★★ Should you really hide consent banners from Googlebot to enhance its crawling?
It is technically acceptable not to show user consent pages to Googlebot and to load the main content directly, but this approach carries the risk of being detected as cloaking by Google's heuristics....
Martin Splitt Jul 01, 2020
★★ Is the content behind a login really invisible to Google?
Google cannot index content located behind a login. What happens once the user is logged in has no impact on SEO, and search engines do not care about it....
Martin Splitt Jul 01, 2020
★★★ Why will your hash (#) URLs never be indexed by Google?
URLs containing a hash (#) cannot be crawled or indexed by Google. For temporary content (e.g., sports match) to be findable in search before or during the event, clean routes without a hash must be u...
Martin Splitt Jul 01, 2020
★★ Should you really disable JavaScript on your pre-rendered pages for Googlebot?
If you’re using pre-rendering for Googlebot because JavaScript poses an issue, but then leave JavaScript active on the pre-rendered page, you need to check if it really resolves the problem. If not, i...
Martin Splitt Jul 01, 2020
★★ Should you treat Googlebot differently from users to manage redirects?
While it is technically possible to redirect only regular users to the www domain and not Googlebot, this approach makes testing and debugging more difficult. It is better to address the root cause of...
Martin Splitt Jul 01, 2020
★★ Can logged-in users be redirected to different URLs without facing SEO penalties?
It is acceptable to redirect users to different URLs based on the presence of cookies as long as Googlebot can access all content versions via links. This approach does not negatively impact SEO....
Martin Splitt Jul 01, 2020
★★★ How can you verify if your JavaScript content is truly indexable by Google?
To confirm if content loaded via scripts or widgets is indexable, use Google’s testing tools (URL Inspection Tool, Mobile-Friendly Test, Rich Results Test) and examine the rendered HTML. If the conten...
Martin Splitt Jul 01, 2020
★★★ Does rendered HTML really ensure JavaScript indexing?
To determine if content loaded by JavaScript is indexable, Google’s testing tools (URL Inspection Tool, Mobile-Friendly Test, Rich Results Test) should be used to examine the rendered HTML. If the con...
Martin Splitt Jul 01, 2020
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