Gary Illyes

★★ Do you really need to master SQL and BigQuery for SEO in 2025?

Writing SQL queries in BigQuery is essential for extracting and analyzing web data at scale, though you must be mindful of the associated costs by optimizing queries....

Apr 23, 2026 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Is Google finally revealing how it really analyzes your pages with HTTP Archive?

HTTP Archive is used by Google to analyze how web pages evolve in terms of performance, JavaScript usage, and other essential SEO metrics....

Apr 23, 2026 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Why is Google suddenly sharing massive data on robots.txt usage?

Google has integrated new metrics to analyze robots.txt files through HTTP Archive, allowing for large-scale data extraction with BigQuery to better understand and document the most widely used rules....

Apr 23, 2026 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Does your website's overall size really hurt your SEO performance?

In the context of weight and size, it's more relevant to talk about webpages rather than websites. The notion of a 'heavy site' doesn't really make sense in SEO — it's the weight of individual pages t...

Mar 30, 2026 ⚡ Analysis available

★ Should you really cap your images at 1 MB to satisfy Google?

Internally at Google, a linter prevents the submission of images larger than 1 megabyte on documentation sites intended for Search developers. This limit helps maintain lightweight pages....

Mar 30, 2026 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Is lazy loading really a must-have SEO performance lever you should activate systematically?

Lazy loading (deferred loading) allows you to load only heavy resources such as images when the user scrolls toward them, rather than loading everything upfront. This reduces the initial page load....

Mar 30, 2026 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Does network compression really optimize user device storage space, or is it just a temporary fix?

Network-level compression helps reduce data transfer time, but it does not solve the storage space problem on the user's device. Once decompressed, data occupies its full size on disk....

Mar 30, 2026 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Is page size really still hurting your SEO in 2024?

Large pages continue to pose problems for users with slow connections or limited storage space on their devices, even as networks become faster. Speed is partly related to size because the more data t...

Mar 30, 2026 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Is exploding web page weight hurting your SEO? Here's what you need to know

According to the Web Almanac 2025, the median weight of a mobile homepage rose from 845 KB in 2015 to 2.3 MB in July 2025—a threefold increase. This growth substantially exceeds the improvement in Int...

Mar 30, 2026 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does optimizing page size actually benefit users more than it benefits your search rankings?

Every size optimization helps not only with search engines but especially with end users. Users definitely prefer responsive websites, and overly heavy pages harm that responsiveness....

Mar 30, 2026 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Does structured data really bloat your HTML and hurt page performance?

Adding structured data (structured metadata) can considerably increase the weight of an HTML page because these are metadata intended for machines, not users. Google supports many types of structured ...

Mar 30, 2026 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Has mobile page weight really tripled in just one decade?

According to the Web Almanac 2025, the median weight of mobile homepage pages has increased from 845 KB in 2015 to 2.3 MB in July 2025, representing a three-fold multiplication over 11 years....

Mar 30, 2026 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Has mobile page weight tripled in 10 years? Why should SEO professionals care about this trend?

Data from the Web Almanac 2025 shows that the median weight of a mobile homepage has grown from 845 KB in 2015 to 2.3 MB in July 2025, representing a threefold increase over 10 years....

Mar 30, 2026 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Why does Google allow PDFs to be 32 times larger than HTML pages before hitting the crawl limit?

For PDF files, Google Search applies a crawl limit of approximately 64 megabytes, significantly higher than the standard 2 MB for HTML. This higher limit is necessary because PDFs are naturally larger...

Mar 12, 2026 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does Google's 2 MB crawl limit put your content at risk of being truncated?

For Google Search specifically, the crawl limit is reduced to 2 megabytes for most content. This limit can be adjusted depending on the content type (PDFs, images) to optimize processing....

Mar 12, 2026 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does Google really impose a 15 MB crawl limit on every single page?

Google's crawl infrastructure has a default 15 megabyte size limit. When this limit is reached, the crawler stops receiving data. This limit is set at the infrastructure level and applies to all crawl...

Mar 12, 2026 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does Google really protect your crawl budget automatically from server overload?

Google's crawl infrastructure automatically slows down if connection times repeatedly increase. It slows down even more in case of HTTP 503 response, indicating server overload. 403/404 errors do not ...

Mar 12, 2026 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Is geoblocking putting your site's crawlability at risk with Google?

It is strongly inadvisable to rely on geoblocking if you want to be crawled reliably by Google. The primary crawling infrastructure comes from the United States and alternative capabilities are extrem...

Mar 12, 2026 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Why doesn't Google aggressively crawl your geo-blocked content?

Google has IPs in other countries to bypass geo-blocking, but these exit points don't have the capacity to support massive crawling. Google is very economical in its use of these IPs and reserves them...

Mar 12, 2026 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Why does Googlebot crawl primarily from the United States, and what does that mean for your SEO strategy?

Googlebot's typical IP addresses (starting with 66.249) are assigned to the United States, specifically Mountain View, California. This is the default location for Google's crawling as officially docu...

Mar 12, 2026 ⚡ Analysis available