Gary Illyes

★★ Why do some migrated sites appear in Google within minutes while others take months to show up?

The time required for a migrated domain to appear in Google Search depends on the site itself and can range from a few minutes to several months. It is generally faster for higher quality sites....

Apr 12, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ How Does Google Actually Discover Your New Domains for Indexing?

Gary Illyes confirmed that Google examines domain name registrations to discover new domains to include in the Google search index. This information was shared in the Search Off The Record podcast. Re...

Apr 11, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Is robots.txt really sufficient (almost always) to block a staging site from being indexed?

To prevent indexation of a staging site, robots.txt is a simple and effective solution. In most cases, this works because Google cannot crawl the pages and therefore cannot make an indexation decision...

Apr 05, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does the no-index tag really block all indexing without any exceptions?

If you put a no-index tag on your pages, they will absolutely not be indexed, especially if you don't modify the head element in any way. It's the second choice after robots.txt for blocking a staging...

Apr 05, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Are orphaned pages really invisible to Google's crawlers?

If you don't create any links to a page and don't mention it anywhere, it's very difficult for Google to discover it. The internet is like deep space: without a link to a resource, it's practically im...

Apr 05, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Does Google really discover all your subdomains automatically?

Google examines DNS records for discovery, but this typically means discovering the main domain name (A record), not necessarily subdomains. If DNS doesn't announce CNAME records for subdomains, Googl...

Apr 05, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Should you really manually submit your key pages to Google when launching a new website?

When launching a new website, after removing the robots.txt block, it's recommended to go into Search Console (and Bing Webmaster Tools) to submit your homepage and a few other important pages for ind...

Apr 05, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Should you really be afraid to publish 7,000 articles all at once?

If your server has sufficient resources to handle a significant additional crawl (potentially 1,000 times more), launching 7,000 articles at once shouldn't cause any problems. Otherwise, you risk brin...

Apr 05, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does content quality really block bulk indexation?

When a site tries to get a million pages indexed simultaneously, two problems arise: Google can only crawl a few thousand URLs per day without overloading the server, and most importantly, content qua...

Apr 05, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Does a custom domain name really improve your brand memorability?

Using a personalized domain name rather than a free subdomain from a hosting platform helps with brand memorability. Users will remember the custom domain name rather than the hosting platform....

Apr 05, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Are IP whitelists really enough to protect your staging sites from Google crawling?

Using IP blocks or IP whitelists (restricting access to only specific IP addresses) is a method for securing a staging site, although it requires server management knowledge....

Apr 05, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Why Does Google Sometimes Index Your Pages Without Fully Rendering Them?

On Twitter, Gary Illyes indicated that in certain cases, Google may choose not to perform a complete "rendering" of a page before featuring it in search results or on Google News. This happens when Go...

Apr 04, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Worry About Googlebot's 15 MB Limit on Your Web Resources?

Google has added some clarifications to Googlebot's help documentation regarding crawling, to specify that the 15 MB limit for HTML code crawled by Googlebot also applies to each individual sub-resour...

Mar 28, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does Google really detect WEBP format through the HTTP header rather than the file extension?

Google recognizes image format (WEBP or others) primarily through the Content-Type header in the HTTP response, not by the file extension. The HTTP header is generally sufficient to identify the image...

Mar 09, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Should you choose a ccTLD over .com to target a local market?

For a Dutch website, it is preferable to keep a .nl domain rather than migrate to a .com. The .nl is a direct signal to all search engines that the site is local to the Netherlands, and migration carr...

Mar 09, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Is an XML sitemap really essential for Google to index your website?

A sitemap is not truly required to appear in search results. If Google cannot retrieve a sitemap, continue normally: the issue may disappear when algorithms re-evaluate the site's content....

Mar 09, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Did Google just hand you the ultimate robots.txt validation tool?

Google open sourced its official robots.txt parser in C++ on GitHub. It's the same version used internally by Google Search to analyze robots.txt files. This library is the single source of truth for ...

Mar 08, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ What kind of extreme testing does Google really put its robots.txt parser through?

Google's robots.txt parser is aggressively tested internally with fuzzer tests that bombard the library with random inputs to detect potential issues like memory overflows. The internal tests are far ...

Mar 08, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Is Authorship Really an Important Ranking Factor for Your SEO?

During the opening conference and Q&A session he gave at PubCon 2023, Google's Gary Illyes once again confirmed several pieces of information already known by professionals. The first concerns Authors...

Mar 06, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Really Disavow Your Backlinks or Are You Sabotaging Your SEO?

Finally, still during his Q&A session, Gary Illyes expressed some frustration regarding the abusive use of the link disavow tool, originally designed to protect sites from toxic links. He added that t...

Mar 06, 2023 ⚡ Analysis available