Gary Illyes

★★ 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

★★ Does update frequency really affect how often Google crawls your pages?

Two distinct signals drive crawl decisions: content quality (the most important) and page update frequency. Pages that rarely change, like legal notices, are crawled less frequently....

Sep 19, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Why does Googlebot ignore your buttons and how can you work around this limitation?

Generally speaking, Googlebot does not click on buttons. Links must be accessible via standard HTML elements rather than requiring user interaction....

Sep 06, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Do you really need text on category pages to rank well in Google?

Don't create low-quality auto-generated text repeated across all your category pages. Add content that users will actually find useful, not content because you think Google requires it....

Sep 06, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Should you really worry about 404 errors generated by JSON and JavaScript in Google Search Console?

404 error URLs appearing in Google Search Console that seem to come from JSON or JavaScript code can be ignored, or you can add an HTTP noindex header for these URLs....

Sep 06, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Does Google really prioritize meta descriptions when page content is thin?

Google's algorithms generally use your meta description when there isn't much content on the page itself, or when the meta description is more relevant to the user's search query than the actual page ...

Sep 06, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Can infinite scroll really work for SEO when each section has its own unique URL?

Infinite scroll can work correctly for Googlebot if each virtual page section is also accessible and discoverable via a unique URL. Implementation is the key....

Sep 06, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available