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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★★★ Does Google Really Perform a Seasonal Spring Cleaning of Its Index?
John Mueller indicated in a hangout that Google does not perform a "spring cleaning" of its index by removing, at that time of year, more low-quality pages. One might wonder why it would do that, anyw...
John Mueller Jun 12, 2017
★★★ How Long Can You Use a 503 Code Before Risking Deindexation?
John Mueller reminded us on Twitter that using a 503 code (Service Unavailable) is not a problem if it's implemented for a few hours (for a quick maintenance operation, for example), but it should not...
John Mueller Jun 12, 2017
★★ Should You Worry About a Drop in Your Site's Crawl Rate?
John Mueller explained on Twitter that the fact that a website experiences a lower crawl rate at a given time from the search engine's robots is not necessarily a negative signal for your future visib...
John Mueller Jun 12, 2017
★★ Will Google Launch a Public Sandbox to Test Mobile First Index Before Deployment?
In 2009, when Google launched its new Caffeine indexing structure, the search engine set up a "sandbox", or new version of its index on a specific URL, to test the new infrastructure being implemented...
John Mueller Jun 06, 2017
★★★ How can you know exactly how Google sees and understands your web page?
John Mueller explained on Twitter that if you want to know how Google sees your web page, it's better to use Search Console (Crawl section > Fetch as Google) than the "Cached" option available in sear...
John Mueller Jun 06, 2017
★★★ Does Nofollow Really Burn Your Crawl Budget?
John Mueller indicated on Twitter that using a "nofollow" attribute on links does not "burn" crawl budget for a website. Fortunately so. We can even say that this technique is rather beneficial in thi...
John Mueller Jun 06, 2017
★★★ Does Noindex Really Control How Googlebot Crawls Your Site?
John Mueller reminded us on Twitter that while the meta robots "noindex" tag allows you to manage whether or not a page gets indexed on Google, it is by no means a way to control how Googlebot crawls ...
John Mueller May 29, 2017
★★ Do Clicks on a 404 Page from Search Results Actually Trigger Deindexing?
Gary Illyes indicated on Twitter that if a user clicks on a link in a SERP and lands on a 404 page, this will not send a signal to Google to remove that URL. For this page to be deindexed, it will be ...
Gary Illyes Apr 24, 2017
★★★ How Can You Check the Canonical URL of Your Pages Directly in Google?
John Mueller reminded us in a hangout of a trick that is actually quite little-known in general: the use of the "info:[URL]" search syntax on Google to find out the address considered canonical for a ...
John Mueller Apr 24, 2017
★★★ Should You Really Remove the Priority Parameter from Your XML Sitemaps?
Gary Illyes indicated on Twitter that the priority indexing parameters in XML Sitemap files were a "bag of noise." Basically, this indication serves no purpose and, for once, we completely agree with ...
Gary Illyes Apr 10, 2017
Do You Really Need Backlinks for Google to Crawl Your Pages?
John Mueller indicated on Twitter that if a page had no backlinks, Googlebot would not crawl it. This is obviously false since a URL can be identified by the search engine via the XML Sitemap or be su...
John Mueller Apr 03, 2017
★★ Does Googlebot Really Use Cookies to Crawl Your Website?
Gary Illyes published one of his "DYK" (Do You Know) posts about cookies: Googlebot generally doesn't make use of cookies, but it can if it detects it cannot get to the content without them?. In other...
Gary Illyes Mar 27, 2017
★★★ How can you properly handle 503 errors during maintenance without losing your SEO rankings?
John Mueller provided some advice on Google's Webmaster Blog if you temporarily close your site for maintenance operations: block the payment system (for example via the robots.txt file), warn visitor...
John Mueller Mar 13, 2017
★★ Does Google Really Remove All URL Variants When You Submit a Removal Request in Search Console?
John Mueller also indicated that if you submit a URL removal request via Search Console, all versions of that address will be removed from the index: Http/Https, with and without "www". So it's worth ...
John Mueller Feb 27, 2017
★★ Should You Use Google's URL Inspection Tool to Speed Up Page Indexing?
John Mueller provided an interesting insight during a hangout about how Google indexes web pages on a site. In fact, there are two possibilities for this: the "classic" method (Googlebot finds a link ...
John Mueller Feb 20, 2017
★★ Can Google's Advertising Bots Actually Discover New Pages for Indexing?
John Mueller indicated on Twitter that Google's robots used for Adwords and Adsense advertising (examples: Mediapartners-Google, Mediapartners, AdsBot-Google and AdsBot-Google-Mobile-Apps) are not use...
John Mueller Feb 13, 2017
★★ Can You Still Trust the Site: Operator to Audit Your Page Indexation?
Gary Illyes indicated on Twitter that Google is not at all considering removing the "site:" query syntax, which allows you to obtain a sample of the pages that the search engine indexes for a given we...
Gary Illyes Feb 06, 2017
★★★ How Quickly Can You Remove a Google Penalty for Intrusive Interstitials?
Regarding the mobile interstitial penalty launched in mid-January, John Mueller indicated that if a site was penalized in this way and corrected the issue, the penalty would be lifted at the next craw...
John Mueller Jan 30, 2017
★★★ Is AMP Really a Google Ranking Factor for SEO?
John Mueller indicated on Twitter that AMP was not a relevance criterion for Google and that the fact that a page is available in this format does not factor into the search engine's algorithm calcula...
John Mueller Jan 30, 2017
★★★ Should You Really Resubmit Already Indexed URLs in Search Console Regularly?
John Mueller indicated in a hangout that it's not necessary to resubmit via Search Console a URL that is already indexed by Google. Well, obviously... :). This was in response to a question from a web...
John Mueller Jan 16, 2017
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