John Mueller

★★ Does Content Placement on a Page Really Impact SEO Rankings?

John Mueller indicated on Twitter that the geographical location (top, middle, bottom) of text on a page doesn't matter to Google. If the text is interesting and relevant, it will be taken into accoun...

Aug 20, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Can a Single Toxic Link Trigger a Manual Google Penalty?

John Mueller reminded on Twitter that a manual action is never decided by the search engine's Search Quality Team based on a single "toxic" link. The problem must be much broader, and many low-quality...

Aug 20, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does Page Popularity Really Influence How Often Google Crawls Your Content?

John Mueller reminded us on Twitter that the most important and popular pages for Google on a website are crawled more frequently than others....

Aug 20, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does Google's URL Removal Tool Actually Delete Your Pages from the Index?

John Mueller indicated on Twitter that the "Remove URLs" tool in Search Console only hides the URL from search results. It will therefore continue to be crawled, analyzed, and indexed until the 90th d...

Aug 13, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Are EMD (Exact Match Domain) Names Really Useless for SEO?

John Mueller provided several pieces of information in a hangout regarding the presence of keywords in domain names: keyword domain names (EMD for Exact Match Domain) do not perform better, according ...

Aug 06, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Should You Fear Amazon and Marketplaces for Your Product SEO?

When a user asked John Mueller on Twitter whether listing his products on marketplaces like Amazon would impact his own website's rankings for those products, Mueller responded in an amusing (and indi...

Aug 06, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Do Hn Tags (H1, H2, H3) Really Impact SEO Rankings?

John Mueller indicated on Twitter that clearly and cleanly structuring editorial content using Hn tags (h1, then h2, then h3, etc.) could potentially help Google understand the content, but that it wo...

Jul 31, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does Google Really Honor the Canonical Tag Every Single Time?

John Mueller, on Twitter, explained that the "canonical" tag is not a guarantee that Google will consider a page as canonical or duplicate. Multiple signals are used and some can sometimes be contradi...

Jul 31, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Do You Really Need Lots of Text on Your Pages to Rank Well in Google?

We asked John Mueller whether the amount of text on a web page could play a role as a quality criterion. In other words, could a significant number of pages on a website with very little text in their...

Jul 31, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Really Avoid Combining Noindex, Canonical, and Disallow on the Same Page?

John Mueller, on Reddit this time, indicated that Canonical tags and meta robots "noindex" (just like Disallow: in the robots.txt file) should not be used at the same time because they are contradicto...

Jul 23, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Notify Google About Site Migrations or Redesigns for Better Crawling?

John Mueller, this time on Twitter, explained that Google does not need a tool allowing webmasters to inform the search engine of major changes to a site, such as during a migration or massive redesig...

Jul 23, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Why Hasn't Google's Mobile First Index Been Fully Rolled Out After All These Years?

Again John Mueller, on Twitter, explained that the Mobile First Index was still being rolled out (we periodically see messages about this appearing in Search Console) and that there was still a lot of...

Jul 23, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Does Pogosticking Really Impact Your Google Rankings?

John Mueller explained in a hangout that pogosticking, or the measurement of user behavior in the SERPs, is not a relevance criterion in terms of page ranking and that the potential back-and-forth mov...

Jul 23, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Really Structure Your Content with H1 to H6 Tags for SEO?

John Mueller explained in a hangout that using H1 to H6 tags is a good practice. They help the search engine understand the content structure and the relationships between different blocks of informat...

Jul 16, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Can 500 Errors Really Slow Down Google's Crawling of Your Site?

John Mueller explained on Twitter that when a server returns numerous 5xx errors (500 or similar), it can cause crawling problems. Indeed, in this case, Googlebot's crawl is slowed down and exploratio...

Jul 16, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Do JavaScript Links Actually Pass PageRank and SEO Value?

A user asked Google whether links placed in code using <div href> + JavaScript were recognized by the search engine. John Mueller indicated that while these links could be used to identify certain URL...

Jul 16, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Worry If Competitors Use Domain Names Similar to Yours?

Again John Mueller who, in a hangout, explained that each website was treated uniquely and that if several sites had very similar domain names (example: abondance.com, e-abondance.com, aboundance.com ...

Jul 16, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Really Include a Self-Referencing Hreflang Tag on Every Multilingual Page?

Google recently updated its online documentation on Hreflang tags. On this subject, John Mueller reminded on Twitter that indicating in the source code of a page - using these tags - the corresponding...

Jul 09, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ How Does Google Really Identify Synonyms for SEO?

Still John Mueller and still the question of synonyms. On this subject, Google's SEO spokesperson indicated that the algorithm's learning of synonyms is not based on tables created beforehand by human...

Jul 09, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Are Synonyms Really an Effective SEO Strategy to Improve Your Rankings?

John Mueller indicated during a hangout that using synonyms in a legitimate and moderate way could be a good approach to optimize content in terms of SEO, especially if the different forms were used b...

Jul 09, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available