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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★★ Are you wasting your crawl budget on JavaScript files that add no value?
If a significant proportion of crawl budget (35% or 90%) is consumed by JavaScript files that add no content, it is recommended to consolidate these files or use X-Robots-Tag headers to prevent their ...
Gary Illyes Aug 25, 2022
★★★ Can you really manage your crawl budget from Google Search Console?
Webmasters can indirectly control their crawl budget through the crawl statistics in Search Console. They can limit the maximum number of requests per second (QPS) that Googlebot makes to their site t...
Gary Illyes Aug 25, 2022
★★ Are POST requests really eating up your crawl budget?
POST requests cannot be cached by Google, unlike GET requests. If your pages make POST requests to APIs, they will consume more crawl budget with each crawl because they cannot benefit from caching....
Martin Splitt Aug 25, 2022
★★★ What's Google's real definition of crawl budget—and which levers can actually move the needle?
Google defines crawl budget as the number of URLs that Googlebot can and is willing to crawl for a given site. This definition rests on two factors: crawl capacity (not overloading the server) and cra...
Gary Illyes Aug 25, 2022
★★ Should you block your decorative JavaScript files to optimize your crawl budget?
If JavaScript files are purely decorative and add neither content nor value to the page rendering, they can be blocked via robots.txt or X-Robots-Tag. Rendering will fail for these resources but this ...
Gary Illyes Aug 25, 2022
★★★ What does your "discovered but not crawled" URL status really reveal about your site?
If a large proportion of URLs appears as "discovered but not crawled" in Search Console, this indicates either a content quality issue (Google doesn't think users are searching for this content), or a...
Gary Illyes Aug 25, 2022
★★★ Are HTTP 503 and 429 status codes really killing your crawl budget?
HTTP status codes 503 and 429, as well as slow response times, signal to Googlebot that the server cannot handle the load. Googlebot will then slow down its crawl and the allocated budget will decreas...
Martin Splitt Aug 25, 2022
★★★ Does Google really index only a fraction of the web because of storage costs?
Google does not have infinite storage capacity. Indexing requires storage (hard drives, memory, SSDs) that costs money. Google therefore does not index all available content on the Internet, only what...
Gary Illyes Aug 25, 2022
★★★ Should you really be concerned about crawl budget for your website?
The vast majority of websites (over 90%) don't need to worry about crawl budget. It's a rare problem that only affects very large sites or sites with specific needs....
Gary Illyes Aug 25, 2022
★★★ Are 404s and robots.txt Really Wasting Your Crawl Budget?
HTTP status codes 404 and 410, as well as URLs blocked by robots.txt, do not consume crawl budget because Google only receives the status code without content. Conversely, soft 404s (pages that return...
Gary Illyes Aug 25, 2022
★★ Does HTTP/2 really boost your crawl budget?
Enabling HTTP/2 on your server significantly improves crawl budget utilization. HTTP/2 allows Googlebot to open a single connection and stream requests instead of opening multiple simultaneous connect...
Gary Illyes Aug 25, 2022
★★★ Does a new section inherit its crawl budget from your main site's quality?
When you launch a new section (like /blog), Google infers initial crawl signals from the main site. If the main site has strong quality signals (backlinks, popularity), the new section will benefit fr...
Martin Splitt Aug 25, 2022
★★ Is crawl budget a concept invented by Google or by SEO professionals?
For a long time, Google claimed it didn't have a concept of crawl budget. Following discussions within the SEO community, Google created a definition by working with several internal teams to map exis...
Gary Illyes Aug 25, 2022
★★★ What's the point of perfect structured data if Google can't actually crawl your pages?
The most important thing as a website owner is to first make sure Google can crawl your content. If Google cannot crawl your content, then it cannot find the structured data on your page....
Ryan Levering Aug 23, 2022
★★★ Can structured data errors actually hurt your search rankings?
Structured data problems affect only how that data is used in Google features. Having problems will not negatively affect other aspects of your page in the search index, and the data may still be vali...
Ryan Levering Aug 23, 2022
★★★ Why Does Google Refuse to Index Some SEO Content Even When It's Optimized?
John Mueller explained on Twitter that "a lot of SEOs and websites produce very low-quality content that isn't worth indexing (...) Just because it exists doesn't mean it's useful to users."...
John Mueller Aug 22, 2022
★★★ Is HTTPS Really Mandatory to Rank Well on Google in 2024?
John Mueller reminded on Twitter that having a website in HTTPS is absolutely not a requirement to be (well) ranked in Google's search results. Many HTTP sites are well indexed and rank in the top res...
John Mueller Aug 22, 2022
★★★ How Do You Count the 50,000 URL Limit in XML Sitemaps Without Making Mistakes?
John Mueller explained on Twitter that the 50,000 URL limit in XML Sitemaps applies only to the number of URLs submitted through the "loc" tag. If there are other URLs in the file, such as with the "a...
John Mueller Aug 16, 2022
★★★ Should You Abandon Dynamic Rendering for SEO in 2024?
Google has updated its documentation for JavaScript developers and now indicates that Dynamic Rendering is "a workaround and not a long-term solution for JavaScript-generated content issues in search ...
Google Aug 16, 2022
★★★ Can an iframe with noindex block the indexing of the main page?
John Mueller explained on Twitter that if a parent page containing a meta robots "index" tag displayed an HTML file (child) containing a meta robots "noindex" tag in an iframe, the parent page would b...
John Mueller Aug 08, 2022
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