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 favor certain languages in its indexing?
Google has no bias towards any particular language. The company pays considerable attention to ensure that each language has the same indexing potential, whether it’s smaller languages like Hungarian ...
Gary Illyes Jan 19, 2021
★★ Does Google struggle to index certain oral languages?
Google faces challenges with some languages that are not really intended to be written, even if they are today for preservation purposes. Indexing and ranking these special languages is very difficult...
Gary Illyes Jan 19, 2021
★★ Why does Google store recent news articles in the RAM of its index?
Recent news articles from major news outlets are stored in the fastest level of the index (RAM). Older articles, such as those from the previous year, are moved to slower and less expensive storage li...
Gary Illyes Jan 19, 2021
★★★ Is your content trapped on Google’s hard drive instead of in RAM?
Google uses different types of storage for its index based on the estimated frequency of service of documents. Documents likely to be served every second are stored in RAM, those that are less frequen...
Gary Illyes Jan 19, 2021
★★ Why are your academic contents disappearing into the depths of Google's index?
Old doctoral theses and academic publications are generally stored at the lowest levels of Google's index because they are not consulted as frequently as other types of content....
Gary Illyes Jan 19, 2021
★★ Is it true that Google is struggling to find enough quality content in certain Asian languages?
Google faces a challenge of insufficient content in certain Southeast Asian languages and vertical sectors. This is not an indexing issue but rather a lack of quality content created in these language...
Cherry Prommawin Jan 19, 2021
★★ How does Google really decide which pages to index?
Google uses the signals collected during earlier phases of indexing to decide whether or not a document should be indexed. This selection is a very sophisticated process that considers multiple factor...
Gary Illyes Jan 19, 2021
★★★ Why Does Google Flag a Redirected URL as Blocked by Robots.txt When It Actually Isn't?
SEO expert Glenn Gabe indicated on Twitter that, in Search Console, if URL A redirects to URL B which is blocked by robots.txt, URL A will be marked as also blocked by this file, even though, in reali...
John Mueller Jan 18, 2021
★★★ Does using noindex during migration mean you're losing all your SEO value in Google's eyes?
If you use noindex on old URLs during a migration instead of redirecting, all the value collected by those old URLs will be lost....
John Mueller Jan 15, 2021
★★ Why does Google rewrite your titles and meta descriptions even with your optimizations?
Google does not always display 100% of the title and description of all pages in the search results. The systems attempt to automatically determine which titles and descriptions are optimal, and can t...
John Mueller Jan 15, 2021
★★★ Does the URL removal tool really prevent Google from crawling your pages?
Using the URL removal tool in Search Console simply hides pages from search results for about 6 months, but does not stop crawling or indexing. Pages remain in Google's systems and continue to be proc...
John Mueller Jan 15, 2021
★★★ Does the URL removal tool really take your pages out of Google's index?
The URL removal tool does not remove pages from Google's systems but only hides their visibility in search results. The pages remain indexed and count towards the site. To truly remove content, you mu...
John Mueller Jan 15, 2021
★★★ Does Infinite Scroll Really Hinder Your Content's Indexing on Google?
For Infinite Scroll, having paginated links is very important for crawling and indexing. The History API alone is not enough as Googlebot does not trigger user actions like scrolling. Without paginate...
John Mueller Jan 15, 2021
★★★ Should you really worry about Google's transition to HTTP/2 crawling?
Google has started to deploy HTTP/2 crawling. The rollout is gradual with a sample of sites, and notifications are sent via Search Console. The goal is to proceed slowly to ensure that everything func...
John Mueller Jan 15, 2021
★★★ Why doesn’t Google's URL removal tool actually take your pages out of its index?
To truly remove content from Google's index, you need to return a 404, 410 code, or use the noindex tag. The URL removal tool merely temporarily hides pages from the results without taking them out of...
John Mueller Jan 15, 2021
★★ Do homepage links really boost crawl frequency?
Google crawls pages that receive links from the homepage more frequently. These internal links help Google recognize that these are important pages for the site that deserve to be crawled more often....
John Mueller Jan 15, 2021
★★★ Should you really include HTML pages in an image sitemap instead of just JPG files?
Image sitemaps must reference the URLs of HTML pages that contain the images, with the image extension to indicate which images are present. Submitting only image files in a sitemap is ineffective, as...
John Mueller Jan 15, 2021
★★ Does HTTP/2 really boost crawl budget or does it just overload your servers?
With HTTP/2, Google can crawl more pages because requests are managed differently. However, some servers may be under the same strain as before. Google adjusts the crawl volume based on the reactions ...
John Mueller Jan 15, 2021
★★ Is it really necessary to add nofollow to every link on a noindex page?
If an entire page is marked as noindex, Google already sees that no signals should be transmitted. Adding the sponsored or nofollow attribute to individual links may help machine learning systems but ...
John Mueller Jan 15, 2021
★★★ Are Your HTML Buttons Sabotaging Your Crawl Budget?
HTML button elements are not considered links by Googlebot. For a link that looks like a button, use a normal HTML link styled in CSS instead of a button with JavaScript....
John Mueller Jan 15, 2021
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