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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★★★ Should you really keep your XML sitemap lastmod dates up to date?
Gary Illyes explained that the "lastmod" signal present in sitemaps is treated in a binary fashion. In other words, Google either fully trusts it or ignores it....
Gary Illyes Jun 18, 2024
★★★ Should You Still Optimize Your Desktop Site in the Mobile-First Era?
Following the transition to mobile-first indexing, John Mueller wanted to provide some clarifications by emphasizing that while Google now focuses on indexing mobile versions of websites, it remains c...
John Mueller Jun 18, 2024
★★★ Can poor machine translation really tank your SEO rankings?
Low-quality automatic translation can negatively affect your rankings. You must ensure that a native speaker reviews and corrects translations to guarantee the content is useful to users. Blocking cra...
Gary Illyes Jun 13, 2024
★★★ Could showing all product variants to Googlebot alone be quietly destroying your search visibility?
Showing all product variants to Googlebot but not to humans is considered cloaking and violates anti-spam rules. The recommended alternative is to use Merchant Center to submit product variants, which...
Google Jun 13, 2024
★★ Should you redirect or completely disable an unused subdomain for SEO?
If users access the old subdomain, set up a redirect to appropriate new pages. If only crawlers access it, disabling the subdomain entirely is acceptable. Removing the DNS entry prevents the server fr...
Google Jun 13, 2024
★★ Should you really worry about buying an expired domain?
Buying a previously owned domain should not cause any issues. Simply publish high-quality content and wait for indexing. Use Search Console to monitor and correct any potential errors....
Gary Illyes Jun 13, 2024
★★ Why does Google discourage using site: queries to verify indexation?
To verify indexation, it is recommended to use Search Console rather than third-party tools or site: queries, as the latter are unreliable and can return variable results depending on which data cente...
Gary Illyes Jun 13, 2024
★★ Can you safely canonicalize pages that are 93% identical without damaging your SEO?
Canonicalizing part-time course pages towards full-time course pages with 93% identical content is an acceptable strategy. From Google's perspective, this does not matter in any particular way....
Gary Illyes Jun 13, 2024
★★★ Should you really block AI-generated automatic translations from your site with noindex?
There is no special markup to signal automatic translations. If automatically translated pages are of good quality and useful to users, their indexation is not problematic. Otherwise, use the noindex ...
Google Jun 13, 2024
★★ How Does Google Really Decide When to Tell Us About Search Outages?
In the latest episode of the Search Off The Record podcast, Gary Illyes and John Mueller explained how Google manages communication around incidents affecting crawl and indexing. The Site Reliability ...
Gary Illyes Jun 11, 2024
★★★ Why do indexing incidents cripple news sites so severely?
During an indexing incident in February 2024, search results became outdated and Google struggled to index new content. This particularly affected news portals that couldn't reach their users, and use...
Gary Illyes Jun 06, 2024
★★★ Why isn't Google crawling your site as frequently as you'd like?
Some issues perceived by site owners as malfunctions are actually intentional. For example, if Google doesn't crawl a site as frequently as the owner wishes, it's not a bug but an algorithmic decision...
Gary Illyes Jun 06, 2024
★★ Will Google finally start sharing good news about its search engine?
Google is considering expanding the use of its status dashboard to include positive informational updates, such as indexing improvements or processing speed increases. Currently, the majority of commu...
Gary Illyes Jun 06, 2024
★★★ Is Google really deleting 7% of its video index and how can you avoid being part of it?
Google has begun indexing more short videos, which required freeing up space in the video index. To do this, Google removed underperforming videos from its index, resulting in approximately a 7% reduc...
Gary Illyes Jun 06, 2024
★★ Why isn't your content appearing in search results even after you've fixed your indexing issue?
After resolving an indexing or crawl problem, it takes time before changes become visible in search results. Google may close the incident while clarifying that complete reindexing is underway and use...
Gary Illyes Jun 06, 2024
★★ Why does Google separate web indexing and image indexing?
Google has separate indexes for web search and image search, which is why an image can appear in image search while being reported as unindexed in Search Console....
Google May 30, 2024
★★ Is it really impossible to selectively target image indexing?
It is not possible to block image indexing in Google Images while retaining thumbnails in web search results. Robots.txt or HTTP headers block access everywhere, preventing Google from recognizing dat...
Google May 30, 2024
★★ How can you regain Google's trust using lastmod tags?
If lastmod in the XML sitemap has been used incorrectly (fake dates to force crawling), Google will recognize it and ignore it. However, if the lastmod becomes accurate again, Google will eventually t...
Google May 30, 2024
★★★ Should you use noindex on hosted third-party pages to stay in Google's good graces?
If a site hosting third-party content uses the noindex tag on these pages, it aligns with Google's policy on site reputation abuse and is not seen as a violation....
Google May 30, 2024
★★★ Why is the removal tool not suitable for normalizing URLs?
Using the removal tool to normalize URLs (for example, removing the HTTP version during an HTTPS migration) is a bad practice. The correct method is to use the canonical tag and 301 redirects....
Google May 30, 2024
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