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 switching to Evergreen Chrome revolutionize Google's page rendering?
The transition from Chrome 41 to an evergreen Chrome in the Web Rendering Service has been a major factor in improvement. Google has developed a sustainable strategy to keep pace with Chrome updates....
Martin Splitt Mar 24, 2021
★★ Should you create a separate page for each day of a multi-day event or canonize to a single page?
For a multi-day event, a single page with a single Event Schema markup is enough since you can define start and end dates and times. It is advisable to canonicalize to this single page....
Martin Splitt Mar 24, 2021
★★★ Does Googlebot really click on the JavaScript buttons and links on your site?
Googlebot does not click on any elements on the page (buttons, onclick links, etc.). Clicking is too costly in terms of CPU power for the Web Rendering Service. URLs must be discovered via standard hr...
Martin Splitt Mar 24, 2021
★★ Should You Remove Links That Are Only Present in the Initial HTML?
Google extracts URLs for crawling from both the initial HTML and the rendered HTML. Links that are only present in the initial HTML but absent from the rendered HTML may work, but consistency is prefe...
Martin Splitt Mar 24, 2021
★★ Should you really hide cumulative content from infinite paginations from Google?
For pagination, it is recommended that each page displays only its own batch of content (e.g., page 2 shows only items 11-20) for Google, even if the user experience cumulatively loads results. This p...
Martin Splitt Mar 24, 2021
★★ Has Googlebot really become foolproof when it comes to JavaScript?
Google has made significant progress in JavaScript rendering since 2018. The evergreen Googlebot functions very well, and issues related to JavaScript are less frequent. Most of the problems reported ...
Martin Splitt Mar 24, 2021
★★★ Is Server-Side Rendering really essential for SEO in 2025?
Server-Side Rendering (SSR) is recommended by Google. It makes sites faster for users and more robust for crawling. The best time to implement it is at the beginning of a new project, as retrofitting ...
Martin Splitt Mar 24, 2021
★★ Are supplemental feeds the secret to avoiding crawl delays for volatile data?
Supplemental feeds can add additional fields to the data from the main feed. For example, prices, sale notifications, and stock levels can be provided via supplemental feeds to be updated more frequen...
Alan Kent Mar 23, 2021
★★★ Which Merchant Center feeding method truly impacts your product visibility?
There are three approaches to provide your product data to Google Merchant Center: by crawling your website, by periodically supplying a full feed of all your products, or by using an API to update in...
Alan Kent Mar 23, 2021
★★★ Do structured data really improve the accuracy of Google Merchant Center crawling?
Using structured data on your pages can significantly increase the accuracy of product data collected during the crawling of your website by Google Merchant Center....
Alan Kent Mar 23, 2021
★★★ Should You Really Optimize Keywords in Your URLs for SEO?
John Mueller explained, also in a hangout, that the presence of keywords in a URL has very little weight for the user, and even less weight once the content is indexed: We use the words in a URL as a ...
John Mueller Mar 22, 2021
★★★ Does the Order of HTML Attributes Actually Impact SEO and Google Crawling?
An amusing question was asked to John Mueller on Reddit, to find out whether the position of the "rel" and "href" attributes (one before the other, in a given order) in a "canonical" tag mattered. Joh...
John Mueller Mar 22, 2021
★★★ Should you index the content generated by your users?
For Google, user-posted content is still considered part of the site's content. The owner must identify valuable content and promote it while using noindex for duplicated or low-quality content. It is...
John Mueller Mar 19, 2021
★★ Are breadcrumbs really useless for crawl and ranking?
Breadcrumbs probably don't provide additional information for crawl since links to higher levels already exist in the usual interface. Their main advantage is special display in search results, not im...
John Mueller Mar 19, 2021
★★★ Does Google really have a single index for all countries?
Google does not have different indexes based on countries. There is no content indexed differently according to location. Rankings may differ between countries, and with hreflang, Google can swap URLs...
John Mueller Mar 19, 2021
★★★ How can you avoid doorway page penalties when managing multiple sites with duplicate content?
For multiple sites with the same content (e.g., commercial sites), use rel=canonical to point to a central indexed version. This avoids spam issues (doorway pages), concentrates strength on a single s...
John Mueller Mar 19, 2021
★★ Should you really avoid staged deployments when transitioning to mobile-first indexing?
During a staged rollout, avoid being partially indexed in both versions (old and new). If possible, implement the change all at once rather than gradually to minimize SEO fluctuations. A gradual deplo...
John Mueller Mar 19, 2021
★★★ Why does Google refuse to index your videos if they're not publicly accessible on the web?
To be indexed by Google, videos must be publicly available on the web. If your videos are part of an app, make sure that each video also has a corresponding web page with a URL accessible by Google....
Danielle Marshak Mar 17, 2021
★★★ Are video sitemaps really effective for indexing your content?
Video sitemaps are another way to help Google find videos associated with your site's pages, and they can also include metadata tags to help Google understand the content of the videos....
Danielle Marshak Mar 17, 2021
★★★ How does Google truly identify videos on your web pages?
When Google crawls the web, it identifies videos on web pages using different signals, including page data such as video HTML tags and structured data, as well as separately submitted data like video ...
Danielle Marshak Mar 17, 2021
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