Gary Illyes

★★ 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

★★ Is it really worth your time to provide feedback on Google documentation?

Google strongly encourages users to submit feedback on its official documentation. Even though responses are not always visible, this feedback is read, analyzed, and leads to many tangible improvement...

Dec 08, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ How does Google truly validate its algorithm changes before deployment?

Before deploying algorithmic modifications, Google conducts tests with real users (live experiments) and human raters who provide feedback on results side-by-side to validate that changes genuinely im...

Dec 08, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Do user comments really influence organic SEO?

Comments can help with SEO if they are useful and relevant. However, low-quality or inappropriate comments can negatively affect rankings. The usefulness of comments for SEO depends on their content a...

Dec 08, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does the central content of a page really carry more SEO weight than the header and footer?

Google detects the main part of the content at the center of the page and assigns it more weight for ranking in terms of relevance and theme. Content located outside of this central area, such as in t...

Dec 08, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Is footer content really useless for Google SEO?

Google detects that footer content, which typically contains a lot of links, is not very useful for users. As a result, this content does not significantly help in ranking in search results....

Dec 08, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Can toxic comments on your website harm your SEO visibility?

If a family-oriented site like cookie recipes receives thousands of inappropriate or vulgar comments, it can confuse Google’s Safe Search algorithms and penalize the content when Safe Search is enable...

Dec 08, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should you really mark all comment links with rel=UGC?

For links in comments (user-generated content), it is recommended to use the rel=UGC attribute, or at minimum rel=nofollow, in order to comply with Google's guidelines and indicate that these links ar...

Dec 08, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Nofollow: Did Google really implement its changes on the announced dates?

Google announced two dates for nofollow changes: September 1 for potential use in ranking algorithms, and March 1 for use in crawling and indexing. No official announcement has been made regarding the...

Dec 07, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Will Google finally utilize nofollow links to speed up the discovery of new domains?

Google is developing projects to use nofollow links to help webmasters get their new sites discovered faster, especially when redirecting to a new domain with a nofollow link....

Dec 07, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Can nofollow links really help Google spot malicious sites?

Nofollow links could be helpful in discovering malicious sites, such as those that force downloads or spread spam. Google is studying this possibility but has not made any concrete announcements....

Dec 07, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Should we expect a shake-up of nofollow links in Google’s algorithm?

Gary Illyes is working on three sub-projects testing the use of nofollow links. If any of these are launched, Google will announce it publicly as a ranking official has requested public communication....

Dec 07, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Are the rel sponsored and ugc attributes truly optional or should you adopt them?

New rel attributes like 'sponsored' are being used on millions of sites, although Google has clarified that they are completely optional. They can help train machine learning models, but webmasters ar...

Dec 07, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Was Google really the only search engine treating nofollow as an absolute directive?

While working on the changes to nofollow, Google discovered that all other search engines had already been using nofollow as a hint for a long time. Google was the only one not to do so....

Dec 07, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Why doesn't Google index your non-canonical AMP pages?

Non-canonical AMP pages (AMP as an alternative format) are not indexed. Google only indexes the main HTML version and presents AMP as an alternative format in search results for users....

Nov 16, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available