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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★★★ 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
★★★ Does Google Consider Hiding Structured Data from Users as Cloaking?
John Mueller indicated on Twitter that showing structured data tags to Googlebot only and not to the average user was considered by Google as cloaking and that this type of technique was therefore rep...
John Mueller Dec 27, 2017
★★★ How Can You Tell If Your Site Has Moved to Google's Mobile First Index?
Regarding the Mobile First project, John Mueller indicated in a hangout that one way to know if a site has moved to the Mobile First index is to look at server logs and check Google's activity: if 80%...
John Mueller Dec 18, 2017
★★★ Should You Delete or Improve Low-Quality Content on Your Website?
John Mueller discussed in a recent hangout the approach to take when you have content considered low-quality on your site. According to him (and Gary Illyes as well, who often talks about it), the bes...
John Mueller Nov 06, 2017
★★★ How Can You Get Google to Index a New Page Quickly?
John Mueller shared an interesting tip on Twitter: if you want to quickly submit a new page to Google or resubmit an updated version, don't hesitate to use the Search Console and its "Crawl > Fetch as...
John Mueller Nov 06, 2017
★★★ How Does Google Really Index Hidden Content in Tabs with Mobile First?
John Mueller confirmed during a hangout that content inside a tab would indeed be taken into account, within the Mobile First index framework, with the same weight as content visible by default. Howev...
John Mueller Oct 30, 2017
★★★ How Many Hreflang Tags Can You Really Add to a Page Without Getting Penalized?
John Mueller explained on Twitter that there is no theoretical limit to the number of Hreflang tags integrated into HTML code. And that if you have many sites, targeting many countries, using an XML S...
John Mueller Oct 16, 2017
★★ Should You Really React to Every Google Algorithm Update?
We continue with Brighton SEO and the same Gary Illyes who maintained that 95 to 98% of Google's algorithm updates were not "actionable" by webmasters and SEOs. Basically, it was difficult or even imp...
Gary Illyes Oct 02, 2017
★★★ Do you really need to optimize your XML sitemap loading speed?
John Mueller explained on Twitter that an XML Sitemap file doesn't need to load faster or slower, as long as a timeout doesn't occur, of course. But the loading time of this file isn't taken into acco...
John Mueller Sep 18, 2017
★★ Does Noindexing 50% of Your Pages Actually Hurt Your SEO Rankings?
A Googler (Aaseesh Marina) indicated on a forum that noindexing a large portion of a site's pages (for example 50%) had no negative impact on the other pages that were indexed....
Google Sep 11, 2017
★★★ How Does Google Actually Detect Duplicate Content During Indexing?
Gary Illyes provided some insights on Twitter about how Google handles duplicate content phenomena: it's done through page comparison (not based on keyword analysis), the analysis is performed during ...
Gary Illyes Sep 11, 2017
★★★ Should You Really Remove All Hash (#) Links to Boost Your SEO?
John Mueller indicated on Twitter that Google completely ignores links like <a href="#"> (often used, for example, to open pop-up windows) since they lead "nowhere" according to John......
John Mueller Sep 04, 2017
★★★ What Does Google Do When Your Site Sends Conflicting Canonical Signals?
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 t...
John Mueller Aug 28, 2017
★★★ What Does the "Expired" Status in Search Console's URL Removal Tool Really Mean?
John Mueller explained what the "Expired" status means in Search Console and the "Remove URLs" tool. This status indicates that no specific action is needed to deindex the page, as it is covered by a ...
John Mueller Aug 28, 2017
★★★ Does Googlebot Always Start Crawling from a Website's Homepage?
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....
John Mueller Aug 28, 2017
★★★ Should You Worry About Google Search Console's 10,000-Pixel Rendering Limit?
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...
Google Aug 21, 2017
★★★ How Can You Prevent Google from Indexing Your Pre-Production Site?
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 happen...
John Mueller Aug 21, 2017
★★ What are the only two fields in an XML sitemap that Google actually cares about?
John Mueller explained on Twitter that in XML files, the two most important fields are the URL (<loc>) and the last modification date (<lastmod>)....
John Mueller Aug 21, 2017
★★★ Why Is Google Indexing More URLs Than Those Declared in Your XML Sitemap?
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 ...
John Mueller Aug 21, 2017
★★ Should You Really Deindex Your Internal Search Results Pages?
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 prese...
John Mueller Aug 14, 2017
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