Gary Illyes

★★★ Should You Index Automatically Translated Content Without Human Review?

Gary Illyes indicated on Twitter that the official recommendation was not to index content that would be translated automatically (with software/algorithm like GPT-3) without subsequent human review. ...

Aug 24, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Should You Avoid JavaScript Redirects for SEO?

Gary Illyes explained on Twitter that implementing redirects from one URL to another (in this case based on the visitor's IP address to redirect them to a specific site depending on the country) was n...

Jul 13, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Really Be Using the rel=sponsored Attribute on Your Paid Links?

Gary Illyes indicated in a podcast that currently, approximately one million websites were using the "rel=sponsored" attribute in their links, 9 months after the official announcement......

Jun 22, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Do You Really Need to Configure International Targeting in Search Console to Rank Locally?

Gary Illyes on Reddit explained that indicating in Search Console the target country of a site ("International Targeting" option) was "an important indication that can help in the country in question,...

May 11, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Do All Your Hreflang URLs Really Need to Be Crawled and Indexed for Google to Recognize Them?

Gary Illyes explained on Reddit that for a site's Hreflang tags to be fully taken into consideration, all URLs referenced by these tags must be crawled and indexed....

Mar 09, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Does a Google Manual Action Leave a Permanent Mark on Your SEO History?

Gary Illyes (Google Zurich) stated on Twitter that a site that gets "caught by the patrol" and receives a manual action starts from scratch in terms of "trust" once the penalty is removed and the "cle...

Mar 02, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Really Use Google's Disavow Tool to Improve Your SEO?

Google has never been a big fan of people using the disavow tool, but it remains online because it can help certain sites that have been subject to a manual action. Gary Illyes from Google said at the...

Oct 21, 2019 ⚡ Analysis available

★ Do You Really Need a Backlink Audit for Your Website?

The same Gary Illyes explained on this occasion that a website should only invest in a backlink audit if the site in question had been a "victim" of questionable SEO methods in the past. In other case...

Oct 21, 2019 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Really Disavow Toxic Links After a Google Core Update?

Gary Illyes explained at the PubCon event that "core updates", implemented by Google on average every 3 months, have no impact on the "netlinking" aspect and that there was no point in updating your l...

Oct 14, 2019 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Is an XML Sitemap Really Essential for Your Google Rankings?

Gary Illyes (Google) indicated on Twitter that XML Sitemap files still remain the second source of URL discovery for the search engine today (he had already said this in 2014, so the situation has not...

Sep 02, 2019 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Do XML Sitemaps Really Impact Your Site's Ranking?

Gary Illyes indicated on Twitter that the content of XML Sitemap files did not impact a site's rankings in the search engine's results....

Jul 02, 2019 ⚡ Analysis available

★ Is HTTPS Really an SEO Ranking Factor You Can't Afford to Ignore?

Gary Illyes explained on Twitter that it's really important to consider whether a site is HTTPS as a non-negligible relevance criterion for the search engine. He notably explained that "this signal af...

Jun 11, 2019 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Should You Really Worry About Negative SEO and Use the Disavow File?

At the Pubcon Florida event, Gary Illyes explained that he had previously analyzed hundreds of "negative SEO" cases and that none of them, in his opinion, had any impact on the targeted site. He also ...

Mar 11, 2019 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does RankBrain Really Ignore Click-Through Rate and Time on Page?

Gary Illyes explained his vision of the RankBrain algorithm on Reddit: "RankBrain is a 'PR-sexy' machine learning component that uses historical search data to predict what a user would most likely cl...

Feb 11, 2019 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ How Does Google Actually Discover Your New Web Pages?

Gary Illyes indicated at the Pubcon event that the two main pathways Google considers for identifying new URLs to crawl are first the tracking of hyperlinks by its bots, and secondly XML Sitemap files...

Oct 29, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Why Does Google Take Several Weeks to Index Some Web Pages?

We know that the Google search engine no longer just reads the HTML code of pages in a basic way as it did years ago, but tries to analyze web pages as if they were displayed in a browser. This "rende...

Oct 23, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does Google Really Index Content Hidden in Accordions and Tabs?

Gary Illyes reminded us on Twitter that, contrary to what some recent studies had suggested, Google does properly index and gives "normal" weight to text content located in tabs or accordions. He indi...

Sep 24, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ How Do Panda and Penguin Really Penalize Your Site: Page by Page or Globally?

At the Search Masters Brazil conference, Gary Illyes confirmed that, while data was still collected by Google at the individual page level of a website, potential "algorithmic penalties" were subseque...

Aug 27, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Really Force Google to Crawl Faster During an HTTPS Migration?

Gary Illyes indicated on Twitter that, in the case of an HTTPS migration, there was no reason to implement specific actions to obtain faster crawling from Google. The migration will be taken into acco...

Aug 20, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Can You Really Use Hreflang Tags to Target Continents or Regions?

Gary Illyes reminded on Twitter that Hreflang tag codes only exist for countries and specifically not for continents or regions. Therefore, you cannot indicate in a page's Hreflang tags labels such as...

Aug 06, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available