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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★★★ 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
★★★ Should You Use a 404 Instead of a 403 to Remove Pages from Google's Index?
John Mueller indicated on Twitter that, to signal to Google that a page no longer exists and to see it disappear from the index, a 404 code (Page not Found) should be preferred over a 403 code (Forbid...
John Mueller May 09, 2018
★★ Can You Really Harm a Competitor's Site with External Canonical Tags?
A method of performing negative SEO based on "canonical" tags issued from low-quality sites has resurfaced recently following an article on this subject. John Mueller has, for his part, indicated that...
John Mueller May 02, 2018
Should You Avoid Internal Links to Noindex Pages?
John Mueller explained on Twitter that there's no problem if a website creates many internal links to pages that are deindexed from the search engine......
John Mueller May 02, 2018
★★★ Should You Split Your Content Across Multiple Pages to Improve Google Indexing?
John Mueller indicated during a hangout that it was not a good strategy to split content across multiple pages solely to increase the number of pages indexed by Google because, by doing so, you also r...
John Mueller May 02, 2018
★★★ Should You Really Avoid Redirects in Hreflang Tags at All Costs?
John Mueller reminded us on Twitter that URLs specified in Hreflang tags should not be subject to 301, 302 or any other type of redirect. In other words, they must return a 200 code and not be redirec...
John Mueller Apr 23, 2018
Should You Use Canonical Tags or Noindex to Handle Duplicate Content?
John Mueller indicated that Google only uses the pages it has in its index for a given site to establish an overall quality score for the information source (which seems quite logical). He also explai...
John Mueller Apr 23, 2018
Does Your Site's Mobile Traffic Influence Its Migration to Mobile First Index?
John Mueller indicated on Twitter that the decision to migrate a site to the Mobile First Index was not dependent on the volume of mobile traffic on that site, but solely on whether the site is techni...
John Mueller Apr 23, 2018
★★★ Does Having an RSS Feed Actually Improve Your Google Rankings?
John Mueller indicated on Twitter that having an RSS feed on your site does not help it rank better in the SERPs, neither in Google nor in Google News....
John Mueller Apr 16, 2018
★★★ How Do You Effectively Manage Sitemaps When Your Site Exceeds 50,000 URLs?
In his "SEO Snippets" video series, John Mueller has just published one about Sitemaps and the Sitemap Index system that allows you to create such files when a website has more than 50,000 URLs....
John Mueller Apr 09, 2018
★★ How Long Does It Really Take to See Results After Cleaning Up Low-Quality Content?
John Mueller explained during a hangout that improving overall quality or removing low-quality content from a site could have an impact (positions/traffic) sometimes only after 6 months, the time it t...
John Mueller Mar 26, 2018
★★★ How Does Googlebot Really Crawl Your Website?
John Mueller published a video last week (the first "SEO Snippet" - videos succeeding those of Matt Cutts - since their launch), explaining how Google crawls a website and the way Googlebot works....
John Mueller Mar 05, 2018
★★★ Does Page Speed Really Impact Google's Mobile First Indexing?
John Mueller explained on Twitter that the Mobile First index and the page loading speed criterion were two separate things. Indexing and page ranking should not be confused, as some believe, especial...
John Mueller Mar 05, 2018
★★★ Should You Change Your XML Sitemap Name Daily to Improve SEO Rankings?
John Mueller explained in a hangout that it's not a good idea to modify the name of your XML Sitemap files daily (for example with a date, like sitemap-2018-02-12.xml, etc.) with numerous redundant an...
John Mueller Feb 12, 2018
★★ Does Page Loading Speed Really Impact Your Page Indexing?
Regarding last month's Speed Update, John Mueller and Gary Illyes indicated on Twitter that while this new algorithm would affect page rankings on mobile, it does not impact indexing in any way. A slo...
John Mueller Feb 05, 2018
★★★ Should You Really Include All Your Pages in Your XML Sitemap to Maximize SEO?
John Mueller has once again reminded us (as this has been stated several times in the past) that URLs present in the XML Sitemap file are often used by the search engine to define canonical page addre...
John Mueller Jan 15, 2018
★★★ Should You Delete Low-Quality Pages to Force Google to Index Everything?
John Mueller confirmed on Twitter that Google never indexes ALL pages of a website. And, as usual, following the search engine's well-oiled communication strategy, he added that the focus should prima...
John Mueller Jan 15, 2018
★★★ Why Does Google Ignore Images Declared in CSS Files?
John Mueller explained in a hangout that Google does not index images whose URL would be present in a CSS file. It only takes into account URLs present in the HTML code itself, and he recommended usin...
John Mueller Jan 15, 2018
★★★ Does Your Mobile Site Need the Same Structure as Desktop for SEO?
John Mueller clarified on Twitter that a site's architecture in its mobile version doesn't necessarily have to be the same as the desktop site, but this architecture must be crawlable by robots....
John Mueller Jan 08, 2018
★★★ Why Does a Noindex,Follow Page Eventually Become Noindex,Nofollow?
John Mueller indicated in a hangout that a "noindex,follow" directive in the meta "robots" tag will eventually be considered as "noindex,nofollow" because the links on the page will no longer be follo...
John Mueller Jan 08, 2018
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