Gary Illyes

★★★ Does the noindex tag really only affect individual pages, or can it impact your entire site?

The noindex rule applies to individual pages or other resources on a site. To add a noindex rule to HTML pages, you must add a meta robots tag with the noindex value in the HTML head element of the pa...

Jul 18, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Does Google really use RSS feeds to discover and index new content on your site?

Google can use RSS feeds referenced on a site to discover new URLs or other URLs on other sites, similar to sitemaps. RSS feeds are mentioned in the official documentation on sitemaps....

Jul 18, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does the order of H1, H2, H3 tags really affect your Google rankings?

Having headings in semantic order is excellent for screen readers, but from Google Search's perspective, the disorderly use of heading tags doesn't matter. The SEO Starter Guide is regularly updated t...

Jul 18, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Why Does Google Crawl Your Pages But Never Index Them?

During his presentation at SERP Conf 2024, Gary Illyes explained the reasons why a page could be crawled but not indexed. This can be due to content duplication, general quality issues, or technical e...

Jul 09, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Why Should a Sudden Spike in Googlebot Crawling Worry You Rather Than Please You?

In a LinkedIn post, Gary Illyes explained that sudden spikes in Googlebot activity could indicate a problem. The most common first reason is the presence of infinite spaces (calendar pages, infinitely...

Jun 25, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should you really keep your XML sitemap lastmod dates up to date?

Gary Illyes explained that the "lastmod" signal present in sitemaps is treated in a binary fashion. In other words, Google either fully trusts it or ignores it....

Jun 18, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Really Block Action URLs in Your Robots.txt File?

Gary Illyes reminded us of the importance of using the robots.txt file to block action URLs such as "add to cart" or "add to wishlist." This prevents crawlers from wasting server resources by accessin...

Jun 18, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Are site: searches polluting your Search Console data?

Search Console data includes results from searches performed with the site: operator....

Jun 13, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Should you really worry about buying an expired domain?

Buying a previously owned domain should not cause any issues. Simply publish high-quality content and wait for indexing. Use Search Console to monitor and correct any potential errors....

Jun 13, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Can poor machine translation really tank your SEO rankings?

Low-quality automatic translation can negatively affect your rankings. You must ensure that a native speaker reviews and corrects translations to guarantee the content is useful to users. Blocking cra...

Jun 13, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Should you really fix every single broken backlink pointing to your site?

You should fix broken backlinks that would be useful for users. It's impossible to fix them all, especially for large sites....

Jun 13, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Can you safely canonicalize pages that are 93% identical without damaging your SEO?

Canonicalizing part-time course pages towards full-time course pages with 93% identical content is an acceptable strategy. From Google's perspective, this does not matter in any particular way....

Jun 13, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should you really worry about toxic backlinks pointing to your site?

Google is very effective at ignoring irrelevant links pointing to a site. It is recommended to ignore these toxic links. If necessary, you can use the disavow tool or report spam....

Jun 13, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Should you really match your page title and H1 tag?

It's not important that your title text matches the H1 tag. Do what makes sense from the user's perspective....

Jun 13, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Why does Google discourage using site: queries to verify indexation?

To verify indexation, it is recommended to use Search Console rather than third-party tools or site: queries, as the latter are unreliable and can return variable results depending on which data cente...

Jun 13, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Do JavaScript console errors really hurt your site's search rankings?

The impact of errors in the browser console depends on what's broken. An error on a benign element like a paragraph probably won't affect the site, but an error on the head element could be problemati...

Jun 13, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Do you really need a dedicated page per video to rank in rich video results?

For rich video results with features like key moments, you need to have a dedicated page for each video where the video is the main focus of the page. Consult Google's video guidelines for more inform...

Jun 13, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ How Does Google Really Decide When to Tell Us About Search Outages?

In the latest episode of the Search Off The Record podcast, Gary Illyes and John Mueller explained how Google manages communication around incidents affecting crawl and indexing. The Site Reliability ...

Jun 11, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Is Google really deleting 7% of its video index and how can you avoid being part of it?

Google has begun indexing more short videos, which required freeing up space in the video index. To do this, Google removed underperforming videos from its index, resulting in approximately a 7% reduc...

Jun 06, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Why do indexing incidents cripple news sites so severely?

During an indexing incident in February 2024, search results became outdated and Google struggled to index new content. This particularly affected news portals that couldn't reach their users, and use...

Jun 06, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available