John Mueller

★★★ How Do You Create Quality Content That Truly Stands the Test of Time According to Google?

John Mueller "destroyed" a webmaster on a Google forum after analyzing his site. The publisher took quite a beating. Here's the translation of John's post: We don't index all the content on your site,...

Jan 14, 2019 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Really Avoid Changing Your Image URLs to Preserve Their Rankings?

John Mueller also indicated during a hangout that changing an image's URL can affect its ranking in the dedicated Google Images tool, particularly on sites receiving a lot of traffic from this search ...

Jan 14, 2019 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Can Quality Content Compensate for Poor Technical SEO?

John Mueller reminded us during a hangout that a technically flawless site (tags, UX, loading time, etc.) cannot rank on Google if it doesn't offer quality content above all else....

Jan 14, 2019 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Do Foreign Language Backlinks Really Hurt Your SEO Rankings?

John Mueller explained on Twitter that backlinks pointing to your site from pages or websites that are not available in your language (in your site's language) are not automatically considered "unnatu...

Jan 07, 2019 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Will Google refuse to index your content if too many pages already cover the same topic?

John Mueller explained on Twitter that Google crawls and indexes content on a given topic, even if the search engine already has numerous pages covering this topic extensively in its index. No matter ...

Dec 31, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Optimize the Max-age Parameter for CSS and JavaScript Files for SEO?

John Mueller also indicated on Twitter that the search engine does not take into account the "Max-age" parameter (notably used for cache systems) of JavaScript or CSS files......

Dec 31, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Do You Really Need a Trailing Slash at the End of Your Homepage URL?

John Mueller answered a question on Twitter about the slash ("/") at the end of a website's domain name: is it implicitly taken into account or not? In other words, is the address https://www..com (wi...

Dec 31, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Does Google Actually Count Links Passed Through iFrames for SEO?

John Mueller responded on Twitter to a question about iframes: when page A contains an iframe B that contains a link to C, can we say that, for Google, A links to C? John explains that this type of si...

Dec 24, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Should You Really Abandon Technical Tag Optimization After a Google Penalty?

John Mueller indicated on Reddit, regarding the Medic update of August 1st, that the work to be done if your site was impacted by this update was primarily to work in a general and macroscopic way on ...

Dec 24, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Should You Really Ignore Negative SEO Like Google Recommends?

According to John Mueller, Negative SEO is a waste of time and this concept doesn't exist. When asked "How can we be safe from negative SEO?" on Twitter, John replied: "You can just ignore it."...

Dec 24, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Can Switching Hosts or Migrating to a CDN Tank Your Google Rankings?

John Mueller indicated on Twitter, in response to a specific case of a company that migrated its site to Cloudflare and saw its rankings drop, that this case was merely speculation and that a hosting ...

Dec 17, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does Having Your Content Scraped Negatively Impact Your Google Rankings?

John Mueller indicated last week, again on Twitter, that having your content "scraped" (stolen, copied/pasted) by other websites is neither a quality criterion nor a relevance criterion for Google's a...

Dec 17, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ How Should You Structure Your FAQ to Leverage Question/Answer Structured Data?

Google launched structured data markup for "Question/Answer" type pages last week. The search engine took the opportunity to update its recommendations for this type of markup. An important piece of i...

Dec 10, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★★ Do Keywords in URLs Really Impact Your Google Rankings?

John Mueller reminded us (once again) on Twitter that the presence of keywords in a URL has very little impact on SEO. Matt Cutts had also said the same thing back in the day....

Dec 10, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Should You Create New Pages Every Year or Reuse the Same URL for Seasonal Content?

In a hangout with John Mueller, a question was raised regarding seasonal content that returns every year, such as Christmas offers, for example. Should you create new pages each time or update those f...

Dec 03, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ How Does Google Actually Measure Trust When Ranking Your Website?

John Mueller confirmed in a hangout that Google uses a certain number of criteria (without specifying which ones) to evaluate the quality of a site as a whole, and therefore the quality of the content...

Dec 03, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Abandon a Domain with a History of Spam or Hacking?

A webmaster asked John Mueller a question during a hangout about the historical value of a domain name that may have been used in the past for spam or hacking actions. Is there a reset - or something ...

Nov 26, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Why Does Google Crawl Your Pages But Still Refuse to Index Them?

In the new Search Console and its "Index Coverage" option, many pages are sometimes indicated as "Crawled - currently not indexed". Most of the time, these are pages that have not yet been indexed (th...

Nov 26, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★★ Does Buying Your Domain Name for 10 Years Actually Improve Your SEO?

John Mueller explained on Twitter for the 1,458th time 🙂 that the purchase duration or expiration date of a domain name with a registrar is not a relevance criterion taken into account by the search e...

Nov 26, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Do Business Accreditations and Certifications Actually Influence Google Rankings?

There are many organizations, particularly in the United States, that grant "accreditations" or scores to businesses based on numerous criteria. One of the most well-known is the BBB (Better Business ...

Nov 19, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available