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Gary Illyes

Analyst at Google
814 statements Period : 2016 - 2026
Gary Illyes is an analyst on the Google Search team. Known for his candor and technical expertise, he regularly speaks at SEO conferences and on Google's official podcasts. His statements often focus on the technical aspects of crawling, indexing, and how Google's algorithms work.
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★★ Does Search Console really lack privileged support from Google?
Search Console is a search product and is thus governed by the Fair Results Policy. Google cannot provide privileged assistance for the verification or use of Search Console, even though this frustrat...
Dec 09, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available
★★ Should you escalate your SEO issues to Google's management?
Escalating an SEO request through managerial hierarchy changes nothing. The fair results policy is very clear about what the team can or cannot do. Escalations only add frustration and can create a ne...
Dec 09, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available
★★★ Should you really rely on Google’s public channels to solve your SEO issues?
To get help with search issues, use public channels: John Mueller’s Office Hours (weekly, announced on YouTube), Webmaster Help forums, or public questions on Twitter. These channels ensure fair acces...
Dec 09, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available
★ How does Google handle systemic search bugs internally?
Internally at Google, there is a form (go/bet) that allows for the escalation of search issues that seem systemic. It’s not a general debugging forum but a historical record that helps identify patter...
Dec 09, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available
★★★ Does the meta keywords tag still hold any significance for SEO?
Google does not care at all about the meta keywords tag. This tag has no value for SEO in Google Search and is not taken into account in the processing of pages....
Dec 09, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available
★★ Does CSS styling of Hn tags really influence their SEO weight?
Google normalizes H1, H2, H3, H4 tags during processing. The system attempts to understand the style applied to H tags to determine the relative importance of these tags to one another....
Dec 09, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available
★★★ Does the noindex truly prevent Google from processing a document?
Google places a particular emphasis on the meta name robots tag. If the noindex value is detected, Google stops processing the document and does not add it to the index....
Dec 09, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available
★★ Could a <div> in the <head> ruin your technical SEO?
If body-related HTML elements (like iframe, div, p, span) are found in the head tag, the HTML lexer automatically closes the head just before these elements and starts the body from there. This is cru...
Dec 09, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available
★★★ Can Google really tell the difference between your soft 404s and legitimate content on error pages?
Google detects error pages that return an HTTP 200 status (soft 404). The system has a large corpus of error pages and tries to match text to identify these pages and stop their processing. This can s...
Dec 09, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available
★★ Should You Really Deindex Your Out-of-Stock Product Pages?
Google considers that out-of-stock pages without additional functionality (like sign-up for alerts) generally do not add value for users in the index. The answer depends on context: for a unique vinta...
Dec 09, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available
★★ Does Google really index all file formats beyond just HTML?
Google Search can index many formats beyond HTML: PDF, spreadsheets, Word files, and even Lotus files. These binary formats are converted to HTML for processing. Google notably uses a licensed Adobe d...
Dec 09, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available
★★★ Caffeine: How does Google turn crawling into indexing?
Caffeine is the external name for Google's indexing system. It ingests the protocol buffers produced by Googlebot, collects signals, normalizes HTML, converts formats, detects errors, and adds informa...
Dec 09, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available
★★ How does Google really normalize broken HTML on your pages?
The internet is generally broken in terms of HTML, but Google still tries to understand it. All HTML is processed through an HTML lexer to normalize the code before processing, making it easier to ana...
Dec 09, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available
★★ Why is the SEO workload surging during economic crises?
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the workload for SEOs increased instead of decreasing, likely because more businesses moved their activities online and needed additional SEO support....
Dec 08, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available
★★ Is it true that remote work hasn't simplified the collaboration between SEO and developers?
Contrary to expectations, it did not become easier for SEOs to work with developers during the pandemic. Many reported that things remained similar, if not more difficult, despite the online environme...
Dec 08, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available
★★★ Can Google really notify you in time when its search engine goes down?
Google has developed a protocol to better communicate about search outages after incidents in 2019. This protocol defines what to communicate, when, to whom and where, to inform SEOs more quickly abou...
Dec 08, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available
★★★ Has Twitter become Google's internal monitoring tool for detecting search outages?
Google utilizes Twitter reports to detect search outages. If many tweets per hour indicate a problem, the team escalates internally to check with monitoring teams. Twitter is surprisingly accurate in ...
Dec 08, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available
★★★ What caused your pages to be unindexed despite Googlebot crawling them?
A recent outage that seemed to be an indexing issue was actually a crawling problem. Googlebot was overwhelming the indexing system with too many new documents, preventing the export of new content to...
Dec 08, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available
★★★ What exactly is a 'document' to Google and why does it change everything for your indexing?
In the context of Google Search, a 'document' is any content retrieved by Googlebot and processed by the Caffeine indexing system. This can be HTML pages, DOC files, spreadsheets, or any other indexab...
Dec 08, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available
★★★ Why can Google reveal its crawling secrets but not its ranking secrets?
Google can explain crawling and indexing in more detail without fear of creating exploitable spam vectors. Spam is not a major concern for these aspects, unlike ranking where more details could pose p...
Dec 08, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available
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