Gary Illyes

★★ Is double URL encoding silently killing your crawl budget?

Double percent encoding of URLs (encoding an already encoded URL) represents about 2% of issues. Google decodes URLs once, but if they have been encoded twice, the URLs remain incorrect and the site c...

Feb 03, 2026 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Are your WordPress calendar parameters secretly destroying your crawl budget?

Calendar and event date parameters account for 5% of issues. Certain WordPress plugins create infinite calendar URL spaces on every path of your site, which prevents Google from detecting soft 404s an...

Feb 03, 2026 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Should you really get rid of session IDs in your URLs?

Session IDs in URLs are an obsolete practice from the 2000s. Crawlers don't need to access session IDs because they don't maintain session persistence. These parameters can be blocked via robots.txt....

Feb 03, 2026 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Are short URL parameters really draining your crawl budget?

Irrelevant parameters (UTM, session IDs) make up 10% of reported issues. Google handles standard parameters well like session_id, j_session_id or utm_medium, but short non-standard parameters (like s=...

Feb 03, 2026 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Is Google really acting as a technical consultant for WordPress plugin developers?

Google's Search Relations team identifies WordPress plugins generating crawl problems and submits issues on their open source repositories. WooCommerce quickly resolved a reported problem concerning a...

Feb 03, 2026 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Are action parameters in your URLs sabotaging your crawl budget?

Action parameters (such as add_to_cart=true or add_to_wishlist=true) in URLs represent approximately 25% of crawl problem reports. These parameters can double or triple your crawlable URL space. Googl...

Feb 03, 2026 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should you really block faceted navigation in robots.txt?

To control the crawling of faceted navigation, the most reasonable method is to use robots.txt to block these paths. Google's robots.txt file provides examples of parameter combinations to allow or bl...

Feb 03, 2026 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Is faceted navigation really eating up half of your crawl budget?

Faceted navigation (filters and sorting on e-commerce sites) accounts for nearly 50% of crawl problem reports received in 2025. It creates URL combinations that can overwhelm servers because Googlebot...

Feb 03, 2026 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Should you really have all your automatic translations checked for SEO purposes?

For automatic content translations, it is necessary for a person to verify the quality to ensure that the translation is at least comprehensible. A simple method is back-translation to verify that the...

Dec 18, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Does traditional marketing really matter for ranking higher on Google?

With high competition, you need to convince users to visit your site through marketing techniques: social networks, creative advertising, etc. When people visit your site naturally, Google is more lik...

Dec 18, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does Google's search index really have a hard capacity limit?

Google's index has a technical limit and is not infinite. However, it is dynamic: pages enter and exit the index. If you publish higher-quality content than a competitor, that competitor may be remove...

Dec 18, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Is your CDN or firewall silently blocking Googlebot without you even knowing it?

CDNs and firewalls can add rules that automatically block Google's traffic, sometimes without your intervention. It's important to regularly check your CDN or firewall to ensure no rules are blocking ...

Dec 18, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does content quality directly impact your Google indexation rate more than you think?

To improve indexation rates, you must publish content that users will find useful and of high quality, created with expertise. If content is not useful or interesting to users, indexation rates decrea...

Dec 18, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Is SEO really dead or just undergoing a transformation right before our eyes?

The first mention of 'SEO is dead' dates back to 1998. SEO has never stopped existing; it has simply evolved with search engines and users. Current changes are primarily driven by Generation Z, which ...

Dec 18, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Do you really need to optimize your site differently for Google's AI Overviews?

For AI Overviews and Google's AI mode, the technical infrastructure remains the same as traditional SEO: standard indexing and crawling. There are no additional structured data or specific optimizatio...

Dec 18, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ How to Adapt Your SEO Strategy to the Death of Blue Link Lists?

In response to a Microsoft article about how AI search is changing conversion measurement, Gary Illyes, analyst at Google, admits that even for him, "change is hard to accept." Having started his care...

Nov 25, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ How does Caffeine actually ingest Googlebot data into Google's search index?

Caffeine is Google's indexing system that ingests the protocol buffers produced by Googlebot. It collects signals, normalizes HTML, and adds the processed information to the search index....

Nov 03, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does CSS really influence the SEO weight of your H1-H6 tags?

Google normalizes all header tags (H1, H2, H3, H4, etc.). Through rendering, Google analyzes the CSS style applied to these tags to determine the relative importance of the H tags in relation to each ...

Nov 03, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Why does Google normalize your HTML even when it's broken?

Google normalizes HTML through a lexical analyzer because the Internet is generally broken at the HTML level. Even with malformed HTML, Google tries to make sense of the content by normalizing it duri...

Nov 03, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Is the meta keywords tag still worth anything for SEO in 2025?

Google has never used the meta keywords tag for SEO purposes. This tag has no effect on your ranking in Google search results....

Nov 03, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available