What does Google say about SEO? /
This category compiles all official Google statements regarding algorithmic and manual penalties, as well as practices identified as webspam. It encompasses manual actions enforced by Google's review teams, banned manipulation techniques such as cloaking, keyword stuffing, artificial link networks, and doorway pages. SEO professionals will find Google's authoritative positions on negative SEO attacks, black hat tactics, and their impact on website rankings in search results. Understanding these official communications is crucial to avoid penalties that can trigger severe visibility drops or complete deindexation from Google's index. This documentation helps practitioners identify red lines not to cross, distinguish legitimate optimization techniques from sanctionable manipulations, and build sustainable SEO strategies compliant with Google's webmaster guidelines. Regular updates to spam-fighting algorithms make continuous monitoring of official announcements essential for maintaining website compliance and protecting organic traffic. Whether dealing with link schemes, thin content, or sneaky redirects, these statements provide the definitive reference for understanding what Google considers spam and how to recover from penalties through proper remediation efforts.
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★★★ Should You Notify Google About Site Migrations or Redesigns for Better Crawling?
John Mueller, this time on Twitter, explained that Google does not need a tool allowing webmasters to inform the search engine of major changes to a site, such as during a migration or massive redesig...
John Mueller Jul 23, 2018
★★★ Are Links in Press Releases Still Effective for SEO?
Interesting remark from John Mueller in a hangout: when Google detects that a web page is republishing a press release, most of the links it contains are ignored by the search engine....
John Mueller Jul 02, 2018
★★★ Can Keyword Stuffing Really Get Your Site Blacklisted by Google?
John Mueller explained on Twitter that "keyword stuffing" techniques do not result in a site being "blacklisted" and that Google now has enough experience in this area to simply ignore texts containin...
John Mueller Jun 25, 2018
★★★ Should You Block Certain CSS or JavaScript Resources to Improve Your Site's SEO?
Once again, John Mueller explains in a hangout that he doesn't recommend blocking resources solely for Google, as this can affect how the search engine "sees" the page. And this can therefore modify i...
John Mueller Jun 06, 2018
★★ Does Shared Hosting Really Hurt Your SEO Rankings?
John Mueller stated repeatedly on Twitter that using the same IP address for multiple websites (for example in the case of shared hosting) does not cause any problems in terms of "search". And that th...
John Mueller May 21, 2018
★★★ Are Schema.org Structured Data Really Essential for Your SEO in 2024?
Gary Illyes indicated at the Pubcon conference that structured data tags (Schema.org) were here to stay because they allowed Google to better understand the content of a page....
Gary Illyes Feb 26, 2018
★★ Should You Include GPS Coordinates in Structured Data for Local SEO?
John Mueller explained in a hangout that the search engine does not take into account Schema.org structured data tags providing GPS coordinates in its algorithm....
John Mueller Jan 29, 2018
★★★ Could Your Localized Pages Be Flagged as Doorway Pages by Google?
John Mueller clarified his definition of a "doorway page" in a hangout, in addition to the official definition: it refers to numerous pages offering identical or similar content, where the only thing ...
John Mueller Dec 27, 2017
★★★ Does Google Consider Hiding Structured Data from Users as Cloaking?
John Mueller indicated on Twitter that showing structured data tags to Googlebot only and not to the average user was considered by Google as cloaking and that this type of technique was therefore rep...
John Mueller Dec 27, 2017
★★ Should You Really Ignore Spammy Links in 2024?
Still in a hangout, John Mueller explains that today, Google tends to ignore spammy links rather than penalize sites that use them. And that it is now impossible to know whether, precisely, such and s...
John Mueller Dec 27, 2017
★★★ Should Your Structured Data Really Reflect What's Visible on Your Pages?
John Mueller also indicated on Twitter that structured data tags (particularly Schema.org) inserted into a web page must absolutely describe the content visible to a user when they view the page in qu...
John Mueller Dec 04, 2017
★★★ Why Do Google's Panda and Penguin Filters Keep Evolving and How Can You Adapt?
Googler Eric Kuan indicated at the Pubcon conference that the engineering teams at Google continue to work on the Panda and Penguin algorithmic filters and that they evolve over time......
Google Nov 21, 2017
★★★ Should You Delete or Improve Low-Quality Content on Your Website?
John Mueller discussed in a recent hangout the approach to take when you have content considered low-quality on your site. According to him (and Gary Illyes as well, who often talks about it), the bes...
John Mueller Nov 06, 2017
★★ Does Google Really Use Disavow Files to Identify Spammy Websites?
Gary Illyes indicated on Twitter that the disavow file is solely used by Google to ignore certain links (those designated by the file) but that it does not use this data for other purposes, such as de...
Gary Illyes Sep 25, 2017
★★ Is Reporting Spammy Sites to Google Still Worth Your Time?
John Mueller explained during a hangout that Google does not read all the "spam reports" that are sent to them, but that the search engine's anti-spam teams attempt to process those that seem most imp...
John Mueller Sep 25, 2017
★★★ Do HTML ID attributes have an impact on natural search rankings?
John Mueller indicated on Twitter that the content of "id=" attributes in an HTML tag (example: <div id="content" class="content"...>) is not taken into account (in terms of text relevance analysis) b...
John Mueller Sep 18, 2017
★★ Why Aren't Your Rich Snippets Showing Up in Google Despite Perfect Markup?
John Mueller indicated that there could be 3 reasons why rich snippets (or rich cards) don't appear in the SERPs for a site: technically incorrect code, an issue with official guidelines not being fol...
John Mueller Aug 21, 2017
★★★ Does Google Really Consider Server Load Balancing as Cloaking?
John Mueller indicated on Twitter that redirecting a user to a faster server based on the load observed at a given time was not considered cloaking....
John Mueller Aug 21, 2017
Does disavowing poor-quality backlinks really carry a negative impact?
Gary Illyes indicated on Twitter that a disavowed site, therefore designated as providing low-quality links, was not negatively impacted subsequently by Google's algorithm. The links it provides are s...
Gary Illyes Aug 14, 2017
Are PBNs Really Detected and Penalized by Google?
John Mueller indicated in a hangout that Google's algorithms detect PBNs without too much difficulty and, for those that slip under the radar, the "webspam team" loves diving into them......
John Mueller Aug 14, 2017
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