John Mueller

★★★ Does restructuring your site really hurt SEO?

Changing the structure of a site with new URLs and a new internal linking can affect rankings. If an important page loses its internal links, it may impact its ranking. The new structure may rank bett...

Oct 30, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Are 301 redirects really enough during a site migration?

301 redirects are just a part of a site change. There are many more elements involved, such as internal structure, internal linking, and layouts. All these elements can affect how Google understands a...

Oct 30, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should you really optimize your pages for featured snippets passages?

You should not attempt to specifically optimize for passages. These changes occur because web pages are often messy. Making a clean page disorderly to make it work with this system would offer no adva...

Oct 30, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ How can you structure your pages so that Google recognizes indexable passages?

For Google to recognize sections of a page as part of passages, it is recommended to have clear headings and well-structured content. If you already have clean pages with clear headings and structure,...

Oct 30, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Is it true that passages serve as a separate index in Google?

Passages are not a core update. Instead, they are about better ranking extracts from existing pages, recognizing that a large page can contain a particularly relevant part for a query. There is no sep...

Oct 30, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Why does keeping your old sites live kill your new domain?

Maintaining two old sites active with links to a new central site prevents the new site from gaining visibility as the value is not transferred. Without redirects, the new site struggles to rank and w...

Oct 29, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Can you really migrate multiple sites to a single domain using Google's Change of Address tool?

The Change of Address tool in Search Console only allows for migrating one domain to another, not multiple domains to a single one. You can still perform the migration with 301 redirects but cannot us...

Oct 29, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Do 302 redirects really end up being treated as permanent 301s?

There is no definitive timeframe, but Google eventually treats a 302 redirect as a 301 if it remains in place for a long time. The timeframe is more about months than days, as some 302s stay temporary...

Oct 29, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Does Google instantly change the canonical URL after removing a redirect?

When a redirect is set up and then removed, the canonicalization algorithms do not perceive the site as deceptive. They look at the current state. Google tends to be persistent with the canonical URL ...

Oct 29, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Do 302 redirects really pass on as much PageRank as 301 redirects?

Google uses numerous signals to determine the canonical URL: 301/302 redirects, rel canonical, internal/external links, sitemap, appearance of the URL. A long-term 302 can be treated as a 301 if it st...

Oct 29, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Can your website's language versions really have completely different designs?

The English and French versions of a site can have a completely different design when implementing hreflang. Audiences, content, and keywords can vary drastically from one language to another. This is...

Oct 29, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Are Quality Raters really evaluating your site to lower its ranking?

Quality Raters do not manually rate individual sites to request their demotion. They test algorithm changes by comparing A/B results. Their evaluations serve to improve algorithms overall, not to modi...

Oct 29, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Should you hide GDPR consent banners from Googlebot to avoid cloaking?

Excluding Googlebot from consent banners via user-agent could be interpreted as cloaking. However, if the banner is only shown to European users and Googlebot crawls from the USA, it won’t see it anyw...

Oct 29, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Is it true that Google still indexes Flash content, or should everything be migrated to pure HTML?

Google indexes pages with Flash solely based on the visible HTML content in the rendered DOM, not content within Flash files. The removal of Flash from browsers should not affect site traffic as Googl...

Oct 29, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does FAQ structured data really need to be 100% visible on the page?

The content of FAQ structured data must be visible word-for-word on the page. Algorithms check that the text is present to avoid promising something in the results that the user cannot find on the pag...

Oct 29, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Do structured FAQs really help improve rankings on Google?

Structured FAQs do not improve a page's ranking; they merely allow for potential display with FAQ snippets in the results. It's not a matter of competitiveness in terms of ranking, but rather visibili...

Oct 29, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Is EAT really a ranking factor or just a Google smokescreen?

EAT is primarily used in the guidelines for Quality Raters; it is not a simple algorithmic factor. EAT recommendations reflect what regular users are also searching for. Improving EAT enhances the sit...

Oct 29, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Do outbound links that are 404 really harm the perceived quality of a page?

Having a few outbound links returning 404 on a page does not lead Google to consider the page as low quality or outdated. Google adds these links to the scheduler, and if some are 404, it’s not a prob...

Oct 29, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Can paged pages really disappear from Google search results?

There is no meta tag to tell Google to index paged pages but not show them in the results. If they are indexed, they may theoretically appear. In practice, page 1 usually appears first as it is strong...

Oct 29, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should you really index all your pagination pages?

You need to decide whether pagination pages should be indexed based on whether they are critical for discovering products. If products are well linked elsewhere on the site, pagination does not need t...

Oct 29, 2020 ⚡ Analysis available