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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★★ Do You Really Need Lots of Text on Your Pages to Rank Well in Google?
We asked John Mueller whether the amount of text on a web page could play a role as a quality criterion. In other words, could a significant number of pages on a website with very little text in their...
John Mueller Jul 31, 2018
★★★ Should You Really Avoid Combining Noindex, Canonical, and Disallow on the Same Page?
John Mueller, on Reddit this time, indicated that Canonical tags and meta robots "noindex" (just like Disallow: in the robots.txt file) should not be used at the same time because they are contradicto...
John Mueller Jul 23, 2018
★★★ Should You Notify Google About Site Migrations or Redesigns for Better Crawling?
John Mueller, this time on Twitter, explained that Google does not need a tool allowing webmasters to inform the search engine of major changes to a site, such as during a migration or massive redesig...
John Mueller Jul 23, 2018
★★★ Why Hasn't Google's Mobile First Index Been Fully Rolled Out After All These Years?
Again John Mueller, on Twitter, explained that the Mobile First Index was still being rolled out (we periodically see messages about this appearing in Search Console) and that there was still a lot of...
John Mueller Jul 23, 2018
★★★ Can 500 Errors Really Slow Down Google's Crawling of Your Site?
John Mueller explained on Twitter that when a server returns numerous 5xx errors (500 or similar), it can cause crawling problems. Indeed, in this case, Googlebot's crawl is slowed down and exploratio...
John Mueller Jul 16, 2018
★★★ Why Does Every Indexed URL Necessarily Have a Canonical URL?
John Mueller indicated on Twitter and during a hangout that every web page, therefore every URL indexed by the search engine, was associated with a canonical URL, which could be the same (if the page ...
John Mueller Jul 02, 2018
★★★ Should You Block Crawling of the robots.txt File in the robots.txt Itself?
John Mueller explained on Twitter that it's pointless to prevent search engines from crawling the robots.txt file by adding a "Disallow:" directive for that very file in the... robots.txt itself??....
John Mueller Jul 02, 2018
★★★ How Long Does It Really Take to Deindex a Page Through Search Console?
Google indicated on Twitter that the deindexing of a page, when requested through Search Console, is completed in less than a day....
Google Jun 25, 2018
★★★ Can Keyword Stuffing Really Get Your Site Blacklisted by Google?
John Mueller explained on Twitter that "keyword stuffing" techniques do not result in a site being "blacklisted" and that Google now has enough experience in this area to simply ignore texts containin...
John Mueller Jun 25, 2018
★★★ Should You Use HTML or XML Sitemap for Hreflang Tags?
John Mueller indicated on Twitter that Hreflang tags are processed in the same way, whether they are integrated into the source code of pages or in XML Sitemap files....
John Mueller Jun 18, 2018
Does the Order of URLs in an XML Sitemap Actually Affect Google's Crawling?
Once again, it's John Mueller (since Gary Illyes no longer seems to talk about SEO online at all, which, let's be honest, is no great loss...) who explains that the order of URLs provided in an XML Si...
John Mueller Jun 18, 2018
★★ Why Doesn't Google Images Crawl Images Embedded with DIV Tags?
John Mueller indicated on Twitter that when an image is embedded in the source code using a DIV tag, it is not, in his opinion, taken into account and crawled by the image search engine robot....
John Mueller Jun 18, 2018
★★★ Should You Really Worry About Crawl Budget for Your Website?
John Mueller indicated, again on Twitter, that the notion of "crawl budget" was often overestimated by webmasters. Focusing on this point can be effective for very large sites, not for smaller ones....
John Mueller Jun 06, 2018
★★★ Are PDF Files Penalized by Google for Not Being Mobile-Friendly?
John Mueller reminded us of an obvious fact on Twitter by explaining that a PDF document cannot be "mobile friendly" or at least that Google does not see them as such......
John Mueller Jun 06, 2018
★★★ Should You Block Certain CSS or JavaScript Resources to Improve Your Site's SEO?
Once again, John Mueller explains in a hangout that he doesn't recommend blocking resources solely for Google, as this can affect how the search engine "sees" the page. And this can therefore modify i...
John Mueller Jun 06, 2018
★★★ Does Frequent Crawling Really Improve Your SEO Rankings?
John Mueller, once again, explained on Twitter that regular crawling of a site was not synonymous with better rankings and that, as a general rule, crawl frequency has no direct correlation with ranki...
John Mueller Jun 06, 2018
★★★ Can You Really Use a Single robots.txt File to Declare Sitemaps for Multiple Different Domains?
Always John Mueller and always Twitter with the fact that a robots.txt file that would be identical and shared by several websites contains the addresses of several XML Sitemap files, one for each sit...
John Mueller May 28, 2018
★★★ Does Fast Server Response Time Really Boost the Number of Pages Google Crawls?
John Mueller indicated on Twitter that the faster a website's response time, the more pages search engine bots could crawl: "The faster we can crawl, the more we can crawl"......
John Mueller May 21, 2018
★★ Why Does Googlebot Still Refuse to Follow Certain Types of Links in 2024?
Let's wrap up with, once again, the Google I/O event and a presentation by a Google engineer outlining which types of links are followed by Googlebot on a web page. The following links will be followe...
Google May 14, 2018
★★★ How Does Google's Two-Phase JavaScript Crawling Really Affect Your Rankings?
At the Google I/O event, Tom Greenaway, a search engine engineer, indicated that Google crawls JavaScript pages using a two-phase process (largely due to available machine resource management): a firs...
Google May 14, 2018
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