Gary Illyes

★★★ Does crawl frequency really affect your SEO rankings?

The fact that a page is crawled more often does not improve its ranking in search results. This is a common misconception: increasing the crawl frequency of a page that doesn't change provides no SEO ...

Jan 20, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Will Google crawl your site less often in the name of sustainability?

Google is working to optimize the frequency of its refresh crawls (revisits of already-discovered URLs) to reduce its environmental impact. The goal is to better estimate when to return and crawl a pa...

Jan 20, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Why Does Google Actually Ignore the lastmod Tag in Your Sitemaps?

Google typically doesn't use the lastmod tag in sitemaps because it's unreliable: webmasters often don't understand what constitutes a real modification or manipulate this date thinking they can force...

Jan 20, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Is IndexNow Really Worth Implementing for Google Indexation, or Is It Just Another Overhyped Protocol?

Google is conducting experiments with the IndexNow API to optimize crawling, but probably not in the form expected by the market. Google's system will prevent repetitive abusive submissions of the sam...

Jan 20, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Should you really ping your sitemap every time you publish new content?

Pinging Google's sitemap endpoint with every publication (for example every second for a news site) is pointless. A ping every 10 seconds or even once per minute is more than sufficient....

Jan 20, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Is Google really experiencing more downtime than before?

The impression of an increase in Google outages stems from the fact that Google now communicates more about incidents, including those affecting only a small portion of the web or a specific geographi...

Jan 20, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does HTTPS and page speed really matter for Google indexing, or is it just hype?

HTTPS and loading speed are not part of the basic requirements for indexing in Google Search. These elements should not appear in the Webmaster Guidelines that define minimum prerequisites....

Jan 20, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Is Google finally fixing its confusing Webmaster Guidelines—and what does it mean for your SEO?

Google plans to restructure its Webmaster Guidelines by separating technical directives from quality directives, clarifying language, adding concrete examples, and removing outdated content dating bac...

Jan 20, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does Google really tolerate geographic cloaking without penalties?

Serving different content to Googlebot and users for legal or compliance reasons (such as geographic restrictions) is technically cloaking, but Google will very likely not penalize this practice if th...

Jan 20, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Are multi-location websites doorway pages or a legitimate SEO strategy?

Having one website per US state because you own physical stores there can technically match the definition of doorway pages, but isn't necessarily a violation if the intent isn't to manipulate search ...

Jan 20, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Are Google's core updates really just reminders about the guidelines?

Google's core updates focus on the guidelines that Google has been publishing for 20 years: write good content, don't buy links. These updates optimize relevance and quality algorithms without penaliz...

Jan 11, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Are core updates really neutral, or do they hide disguised penalties?

Core updates are not punitive actions against websites. Google is optimizing its relevance and quality algorithms. A site may lose positions not because it has done something wrong, but because the al...

Jan 11, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Core Update: Does Google Really Refuse to Provide Specific Details?

Google's official advice for websites affected by a core update is to follow the Webmaster Guidelines. Google cannot provide more specific details about what is affected in each update....

Jan 11, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Are Google’s core updates really designed to enhance user experience or to reshuffle rankings?

The goal of core updates is to deliver better results to users by optimizing relevance and quality algorithms. When one site moves up in rankings, another must necessarily move down within the 10 disp...

Jan 11, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Why does Google refuse to reveal what core updates really involve?

The Google team understands what core updates do and comprehends the changes, but cannot share more details than the general recommendation to follow the guidelines. This frustrating limitation preven...

Jan 11, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★ Who really created Google's robots.txt parser?

Google's original robots.txt parser was written by Jeff Dean in 1998-1999, after Matt Cutts proposed the idea of supporting the protocol. It was very basic at first, with only a few lines of code....

Dec 21, 2021 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Is it true that Google completely refuses to modernize the robots.txt format?

Google refuses proposals to move robots.txt to the .well-known directory or to convert it to JSON. The simple text format at the root of the site has worked for 25 years, and adding complexity brings ...

Dec 21, 2021 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does the robots.txt file really prevent the indexing of your pages?

The robots.txt file is used to control crawling by automated bots. Google can index URLs blocked by robots.txt without retrieving their content, based solely on external links pointing to those pages....

Dec 21, 2021 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Does Googlebot really follow links or does it work differently?

Googlebot doesn't 'follow' links as it's often described. It's a fetching system that downloads content from a list of URLs. The terminology 'following links' gives Googlebot too much autonomy....

Dec 21, 2021 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Is it true that Google's open source robots.txt parser is really used in production?

The robots.txt parser that Google has made open source is exactly the same code used in production. Changes to the open source code are deployed in production within 1 to 2 days....

Dec 21, 2021 ⚡ Analysis available