Gary Illyes

★★ Why does Google keep incidents 'open' on its status dashboard even after they're resolved?

For certain critical incidents, Google maintains the open status even after visible problem mitigation, rather than closing it immediately. This prevents having to reopen the incident if the system re...

Jun 06, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Should you worry about Google's minor technical incidents?

Historically, incidents classified as 'minor' internally at Google have never warranted external communication. These incidents involve isolated technical issues like a server running out of RAM or a ...

Jun 06, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does Google Really Only Announce Technical Incidents When Enough Sites Are Impacted?

Google decides to publicly communicate about an incident when multiple sites (more than three, ideally more than seven) are affected by the same problem. External pressure and problem visibility also ...

Jun 06, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Why isn't Google crawling your site as frequently as you'd like?

Some issues perceived by site owners as malfunctions are actually intentional. For example, if Google doesn't crawl a site as frequently as the owner wishes, it's not a bug but an algorithmic decision...

Jun 06, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Why does Google rely on pre-approved message templates during technical incidents?

To communicate quickly during incidents, Google uses templated messages pre-approved by legal and public relations teams. This allows the company to publish updates to its status dashboard without hav...

Jun 06, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Why isn't your content appearing in search results even after you've fixed your indexing issue?

After resolving an indexing or crawl problem, it takes time before changes become visible in search results. Google may close the incident while clarifying that complete reindexing is underway and use...

Jun 06, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Why Are Google's Search Experiments Causing Unexpected Incidents in Your Rankings?

Frequently, incidents are caused by experiments (tests) that interact poorly with each other or have unintended side effects. When an alert triggers, the SRE team can identify a faulty experiment and ...

Jun 06, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Will Google finally start sharing good news about its search engine?

Google is considering expanding the use of its status dashboard to include positive informational updates, such as indexing improvements or processing speed increases. Currently, the majority of commu...

Jun 06, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ What Happens to Your SEO Data When Your Pages Get Deindexed by Google?

On LinkedIn, Gary Illyes stated that Google Search Console retains almost no data on non-indexed/deindexed sites, though he specified that one element remains "if the URL comes back." This statement w...

May 21, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Why is Google admitting its own limitations with hreflang, AI, and migrations—and what should you actually do about it?

In a post shared on LinkedIn, Gary Illyes addresses several different topics. He notably admits his frustration with the hreflang tag, which indicates a site's language and regional variants, saying h...

May 07, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should you still optimize meta descriptions if Google ignores them anyway?

Google doesn't necessarily follow the meta descriptions written by webmasters. The search engine can extract any portion of text present on the page to create the snippet displayed in search results, ...

Apr 25, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Do you still need rel=prev/next for pagination in 2024?

The rel=prev/next attribute for pagination is no longer considered by Google. It has been deprecated and is now completely ignored by the search engine. Webmasters can remove it without any negative i...

Apr 25, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ How does Google really determine user location for local SEO?

Google does not rely solely on IP address to determine user location. The search engine combines multiple signals to provide the appropriate local version of a site or search results....

Apr 25, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Are IP geolocation databases really reliable enough for international SEO?

Databases mapping IP addresses to countries evolve very rapidly and require near-weekly updates to remain accurate. An outdated database can redirect users to the wrong localized versions of a site....

Apr 25, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Can Google really display rich results without schema markup?

Even without specific schema markup, Google can automatically add certain rich results elements to the SERPs, such as review stars. Schema markup is not always necessary to obtain these enriched displ...

Apr 25, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Can a Server Outage Really Destroy Your Google Rankings?

During the SEO Office Hours in April 2024, Gary Illyes explained that brief service interruptions, indicated by a 503 code, had no significant impact on the crawl rate. However, if these interruptions...

Apr 23, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Will Changing Your Web Host Hurt Your Google Rankings?

In the latest SEO Office Hours, Gary Illyes indicated that changing hosting providers has no negative impact on page rankings in Google search results, provided that downtime is minimal....

Apr 23, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Use Google's Indexing API to Speed Up Your Pages' Rankings?

Gary Illyes reminded us that the Indexing API is limited to job postings and event livestreaming: "It might still work, but since it's intended for these two things, I wouldn't be surprised if it sudd...

Apr 23, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Why does the text result remain the most strategic element of Google SERPs?

The text result is the most common visual element on a Google search results page. It comprises few components, but most are controlled by the website owner....

Apr 23, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Is Google really rewriting your title tags as often as people think?

The title link displayed in search results comes from the HTML title tag of the website, at least most of the time. It's one of the elements that website owners can control....

Apr 23, 2024 ⚡ Analysis available