What does Google say about SEO? /
Google Search Console stands as the essential tool for SEO professionals seeking to optimize their website's organic visibility. This free platform delivers invaluable data on organic performance, indexation status, technical errors, and user behavior in search results. Official Google statements regarding Search Console are critical for properly interpreting coverage reports, performance data, URL inspection tools, and sitemap management features. SEO practitioners rely on these official positions to diagnose indexation issues, identify optimization opportunities, and monitor organic traffic evolution. Mastering functionalities like Core Web Vitals reports, structured data validation, internal and external link analysis, and page experience signals has become essential for modern SEO strategies. Understanding official recommendations helps avoid metric misinterpretation, optimize crawl budget efficiently, and make strategic decisions based on reliable data to sustainably improve SERP rankings. Whether troubleshooting mobile usability issues, monitoring manual actions, or analyzing search queries that drive traffic, Search Console insights combined with Google's official guidance provide the foundation for data-driven SEO decision-making and continuous performance improvement in an ever-evolving search landscape.
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★★★ Are Quantitative Metrics Really Useless for Evaluating Content Quality in SEO?
John Mueller responded to a tweet to indicate that none of these criteria were used by Google to define content quality: word count, number of backlinks, text-to-anchor link ratio, number of outbound ...
John Mueller Oct 15, 2018
★★★ Why Will the Mobile First Index Transition Take Several More Years to Complete?
John Mueller explained during a hangout that even though many webmasters have received messages in recent days indicating that their site has been validated in the Mobile First Index (MFI), the migrat...
John Mueller Sep 24, 2018
★★★ Should You Structure Your XML Sitemaps Differently Based on How You Submit Them to Google?
John Mueller explained during a hangout that if an XML Sitemap file was submitted via an anonymous ping, the URLs it contained had to be present in the directory (and subdirectories) of the Sitemap fi...
John Mueller Sep 17, 2018
★★ Should You Really Aim for 100ms Download Times to Optimize Google's Crawl?
John Mueller explained on Twitter that an interesting metric, in terms of page load times, could be to look at the Search Console, in the "Crawl > Crawl Stats" section, and then try to have the "Time ...
John Mueller Sep 17, 2018
★★★ Do You Really Need Third-Party Tools to Identify Toxic Links for Disavowing?
During a hangout, John Mueller indicated that, as part of a link disavow process, Search Console data (the "Links to your site" section) was most of the time sufficient to verify that no toxic links w...
John Mueller Sep 03, 2018
★★★ Should You Really Exclude All Redirected URLs from Your XML Sitemap?
John Mueller has said it repeatedly in the past: when you create your XML Sitemap files, don't include any redirected URLs (301 or otherwise). He reiterated this on Twitter recently. Google uses this ...
John Mueller Sep 03, 2018
★★★ Should You Really Force Google to Crawl Faster During an HTTPS Migration?
Gary Illyes indicated on Twitter that, in the case of an HTTPS migration, there was no reason to implement specific actions to obtain faster crawling from Google. The migration will be taken into acco...
Gary Illyes Aug 20, 2018
★★★ Does Google's URL Removal Tool Actually Delete Your Pages from the Index?
John Mueller indicated on Twitter that the "Remove URLs" tool in Search Console only hides the URL from search results. It will therefore continue to be crawled, analyzed, and indexed until the 90th d...
John Mueller Aug 13, 2018
★★★ Should You Worry About Search Console Data Variations Between July and August?
Google announced that a change had been made to the new Search Console to make the "Index Coverage" tool more relevant and accurate. The data provided since July 14th may therefore change, but this is...
Google Aug 13, 2018
★★★ Why Hasn't Google's Mobile First Index Been Fully Rolled Out After All These Years?
Again John Mueller, on Twitter, explained that the Mobile First Index was still being rolled out (we periodically see messages about this appearing in Search Console) and that there was still a lot of...
John Mueller Jul 23, 2018
★★★ How Long Does It Really Take to Deindex a Page Through Search Console?
Google indicated on Twitter that the deindexing of a page, when requested through Search Console, is completed in less than a day....
Google Jun 25, 2018
★★★ Should You Use HTML or XML Sitemap for Hreflang Tags?
John Mueller indicated on Twitter that Hreflang tags are processed in the same way, whether they are integrated into the source code of pages or in XML Sitemap files....
John Mueller Jun 18, 2018
Do Customer Reviews and Surveys Really Impact Google's Ranking Algorithm?
John Mueller (yes, him again) explained in a hangout that Google's algorithm doesn't use data such as survey results, reviews, ratings, critiques, etc. to assess a page's relevance for a given query....
John Mueller Jun 18, 2018
Does the Order of URLs in an XML Sitemap Actually Affect Google's Crawling?
Once again, it's John Mueller (since Gary Illyes no longer seems to talk about SEO online at all, which, let's be honest, is no great loss...) who explains that the order of URLs provided in an XML Si...
John Mueller Jun 18, 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
★★★ Can You Really Use a Single robots.txt File to Declare Sitemaps for Multiple Different Domains?
Always John Mueller and always Twitter with the fact that a robots.txt file that would be identical and shared by several websites contains the addresses of several XML Sitemap files, one for each sit...
John Mueller May 28, 2018
★★★ Should You Really Avoid Redirects in Hreflang Tags at All Costs?
John Mueller reminded us on Twitter that URLs specified in Hreflang tags should not be subject to 301, 302 or any other type of redirect. In other words, they must return a 200 code and not be redirec...
John Mueller Apr 23, 2018
★★★ Does Having an RSS Feed Actually Improve Your Google Rankings?
John Mueller indicated on Twitter that having an RSS feed on your site does not help it rank better in the SERPs, neither in Google nor in Google News....
John Mueller Apr 16, 2018
★★★ How Do You Effectively Manage Sitemaps When Your Site Exceeds 50,000 URLs?
In his "SEO Snippets" video series, John Mueller has just published one about Sitemaps and the Sitemap Index system that allows you to create such files when a website has more than 50,000 URLs....
John Mueller Apr 09, 2018
★★★ Should You Really Worry About 404 Errors in Search Console?
John Mueller released a new "SEO Snippets" video in which he answers a question about 404 errors that may appear in Search Console and correspond to an old version of a website. John explains that the...
John Mueller Mar 26, 2018
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