Gary Illyes

★★ Should you really be happy when Google removes SEO features?

When Google removes a feature, it reduces the workload for site owners who no longer need to implement and maintain that feature....

Nov 07, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does Google really have to publicly announce every SEO feature it removes?

When a feature is removed and doesn't require work on the website side, Google may not announce it publicly. However, if the feature required implementation by webmasters, the documentation must be up...

Nov 07, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Does Google really limit search results to just one per domain?

Google does not limit search results to one per domain. For specific queries, showing multiple results from the same site can better serve the user by offering them more relevant options....

Nov 07, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Is robots.txt really enough to control crawling on specific sections of your website?

By using robots.txt, publishers can define controls over the crawling or processing of specific areas of their website....

Nov 01, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Can you really block Google Extended to prevent your content from training Bard and Vertex AI?

With the Google Extended user agent and robots.txt, web publishers can manage whether their sites help improve Bard and Vertex AI, including future generations of models that power these products....

Nov 01, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Are Backlinks Really No Longer Among Google's Priority SEO Signals?

At PubCon 2023, Gary Illyes stated that backlinks weren't even among the top three ranking signals used by Google. He also declared that this had been the case for quite some time, and that there wasn...

Sep 26, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Does Google really filter certain topics during crawling and indexing?

At the crawling and indexing stage, Google is not particularly demanding about a page's subject matter (legal, technical, etc.). What matters is the quality of the content and how it is written, not t...

Sep 19, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Can Google really crawl a page without indexing it if the content doesn't make sense?

If a page's content is gibberish or unintelligible, Google can crawl it but probably won't index it because the system cannot extract useful words or meaning from the page....

Sep 19, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Is duplicate content really safe for your SEO?

It is normal to have duplicate content on a site and you should not worry too much about it. However, excessive duplication can accidentally harm the site because Google will be very enthusiastic abou...

Sep 19, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Can affiliate links coexist with a high-quality SEO strategy?

Affiliate links are not a problem if you create useful and original content, such as a genuine product review. Simply copy-pasting the description provided by the affiliate without added value is not ...

Sep 19, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Should you really have humans review your machine-translated content before publishing?

For machine-translated content, it is strongly recommended to have translations reviewed by humans because machines make errors. Google itself uses machine translation but with human review....

Sep 19, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Why does Google rely on links from 'normal websites' to evaluate your site's authority?

Links from normal websites (not profile pages or suspicious sites) are very useful for estimating a site's importance for indexation. The more natural links a site receives from legitimate websites, t...

Sep 19, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Why Can Your Indexed URL Count Suddenly Skyrocket in Search Console?

In the September SEO Office Hours, Gary Illyes explained why it's sometimes possible to observe a sudden spike in indexed URLs in Google Search. There are multiple reasons that can explain this, but G...

Sep 19, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does content quality really impact every single Google ranking system?

Content quality affects practically all Google search systems: from sitemaps to crawling, ranking, indexing, index selection, and ranking. Different systems use quality differently, but they all use i...

Sep 19, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Does Google really give preferential treatment to new homepages?

For a new site, Google generally gives the benefit of the doubt to homepages and crawls them without bias or prior predictions. The homepage will likely be indexed unless the content is of very poor q...

Sep 19, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does Google really prioritize high-quality pages when deciding what to crawl?

The crawl scheduler makes predictions about the quality of pages to crawl and in what order. It establishes an ordered list of URLs to crawl, with higher-quality URLs being crawled with priority....

Sep 19, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Is Googlebot really that dumb, or is Google hiding something about how crawling actually works?

Googlebot is simply a wget or curl instance that fetches pages with no inherent intelligence. It's the crawl scheduling system that makes the smart decisions about what to crawl and when, based on qua...

Sep 19, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does page quality really determine how deeply Google crawls your website?

When Google discovers a new page on a website, it examines the quality of the homepage or previous pages to predict whether it should crawl this new page or not....

Sep 19, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Is Google really penalizing entire sections of your site based on quality patterns?

Google can learn that certain URL patterns on a site contain lower-quality content and treat them differently. For example, a user-generated content section may be crawled less frequently if the overa...

Sep 19, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Does moving low-quality UGC content really unlock your site's crawl potential?

SEOs have observed improvements in how Google crawls certain sections of their site after moving low-quality UGC content away from the main domain. Improving quality allows you to escape 'crawl prison...

Sep 19, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available