John Mueller

★★ Should you really index fewer pages to prevent thin content?

Consider whether you really need all these individual pages to be indexed. Perhaps you should have something more comprehensive about the content itself as your indexed element, rather than individual...

Feb 19, 2021 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Is it true that passage ranking is independent of featured snippets?

Passage ranking refers to Google's capacity to dive into content and recognize that a page is relevant for something hidden at the bottom of the page. How Google displays it in the results is a comple...

Feb 19, 2021 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Is the number of backlinks really insignificant for Google?

Google does not differentiate based on the total number of links or the number of referring domains. Google views links quite differently, trying to understand what is relevant and how to weigh each l...

Feb 19, 2021 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ How does Google really handle canonicalization and hreflang on multilingual sites?

Google recognizes identical content across different country versions, clusters it, and chooses a canonical URL for indexing. With correct hreflang, Google displays the appropriate local URL in the re...

Feb 19, 2021 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Should you really worry if the homepage outranks your internal pages?

This is not necessarily something to fix if your homepage outranks your internal pages. For individual queries, Google attempts to recognize which is the most relevant result from your site and to dis...

Feb 19, 2021 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Can the disavow file actually harm your site?

The disavow file is a technical tool. Google looks at it and if you don’t want those links, Google removes them. It’s not something counted against your site. Google won’t say you must be a spammer be...

Feb 19, 2021 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Really Trust Google Patents for Your SEO Strategy?

John Mueller indicated during the same hangout that when Google files a patent application, it does not necessarily mean that what is described in the patent is integrated into the relevance algorithm...

Feb 15, 2021 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Remove User Comments from Your Pages to Boost SEO?

John Mueller explained during a webmaster hangout that if you remove user comments from a web page, there will inevitably be an impact on the page's ranking: "From our perspective, we consider comment...

Feb 15, 2021 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Do Short Domain Names and URLs Actually Boost Your SEO Rankings?

John Mueller explained on Twitter that using a short domain name or short URLs (number of words or characters) does not provide any "bonus" in terms of SEO....

Feb 15, 2021 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Do you really need a robots.txt file to get indexed by Google?

Having a robots.txt file is totally optional. If no robots.txt file exists, there are no restrictions for robots, and that is a perfectly acceptable setup. The absence of a robots.txt does not affect ...

Feb 12, 2021 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Are tags and categories really useless for SEO?

Blog tags and categories have no magical impact on rankings. They're just links that create additional pages (category or tag pages) that can be indexed and allow for discovering other articles throug...

Feb 12, 2021 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Why does Google only index a tiny fraction of your pages?

Google does not guarantee the indexing of all pages on every website. For most sites, only a small portion of the total content is indexed. It is normal for a site with 600 articles to have only 100 t...

Feb 12, 2021 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Is it true that the History API is really seen as a redirect by Google?

If Google detects that a page is using the History API to change the URL during loading, it classifies this as a redirect and will try to crawl and index the destination URL (the new URL) during the n...

Feb 12, 2021 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Is content freshness really a key ranking factor?

Google tries to take content freshness into account for certain queries, but it's not systematic. An older, higher-quality page can outclass more recent content. The relevance of freshness varies base...

Feb 12, 2021 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Merging and splitting sites: Why does Google never guarantee a stable ranking post-migration?

During migrations involving site mergers or splits (as opposed to a simple domain move), temporary and long-term ranking fluctuations are expected. The outcome may be stronger or mixed. Google needs t...

Feb 12, 2021 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Do social signals really influence Google rankings?

Google does not consider social share buttons, like counts, or social media activity as a ranking factor in search results....

Feb 12, 2021 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Why do your Core Web Vitals fixes take 30 days to impact your rankings?

Core Web Vitals field data takes approximately 30 days to be updated. A fix applied 10 days before an update is unlikely to be detected immediately. The measurement is not unique to a specific date bu...

Feb 12, 2021 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should you really implement hreflang between distant languages?

For content in significantly different languages (e.g., Swedish, Japanese, Korean), hreflang is generally not necessary. Google will not show the Swedish version to someone searching in Japanese. Href...

Feb 12, 2021 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Can you extend a page's expiration date using unavailable_after?

If Google recrawls a page and detects an updated unavailable_after meta tag with a new date, it will consider this new date. It's not fixed after the first specification. Google treats the page as noi...

Feb 12, 2021 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Should you really rename all your images for SEO?

Google advises in its image search guidelines to use helpful and descriptive file names for images rather than simple numbers. This specifically aids image search....

Feb 12, 2021 ⚡ Analysis available