SEO statements by Gary Illyes

★★ What exactly is a web crawler and why does Google insist on this definition?

A crawler is software that retrieves information and resources from websites. For a search engine to index and rank content, it must first retrieve it using a crawler....

Mar 14, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Is Googlebot really just crawling without making any indexing decisions?

Googlebot is solely responsible for retrieving pages. It makes no decisions regarding indexation. Its only function is to fetch the content....

Mar 14, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ How does Googlebot actually crawl your web pages?

Googlebot is composed of three distinct systems: the fetcher that retrieves pages, a controller that merges links discovered in HTML with those from sitemaps, and a scheduler that orchestrates when an...

Mar 14, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does your crawl budget really depend on Search demand?

The crawl limit is not controlled solely by Search, but also by other Google services. If Search demand decreases, the crawl limit decreases as well. To increase crawl, you must convince Search that y...

Mar 14, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Does crawl budget really exist at Google?

Internally at Google, they don't think in terms of crawl budget. This concept was created in the documentation to explain to people that there are finite resources and limits to what can be crawled....

Mar 14, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should you block certain pages from Google crawl to optimize your crawl budget?

Google should not crawl all pages of a website. Certain pages such as shopping carts or hyper-filtered product pages are not useful as entry points from search results, even if they are useful for use...

Mar 14, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Is Google really running out of storage space to index your content?

Google must manage what gets put into the index and what gets excluded from it. Often, exclusion isn't due to low content quality, but simply because there's no more available storage space....

Mar 14, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Are natural links really more important than sitemaps for URL discovery?

For discovery purposes, natural links are more important than a sitemap. A natural link not only indicates that a URL exists, but also signals that it's important to crawl it faster by providing conte...

Mar 14, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does linking from your homepage really accelerate the crawl of your new pages?

The homepage is almost always the most important page of a site for Google. Creating links from the homepage to new important pages tells Google that it should crawl these pages earlier....

Mar 14, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ How does Google actually crawl your website pages?

Crawling is the process by which Google finds new or updated web pages using automated programs called crawlers, then downloads them to make them searchable....