John Mueller

★★★ Are Links in Press Releases Still Effective for SEO?

Interesting remark from John Mueller in a hangout: when Google detects that a web page is republishing a press release, most of the links it contains are ignored by the search engine....

Jul 02, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Why Does Every Indexed URL Necessarily Have a Canonical URL?

John Mueller indicated on Twitter and during a hangout that every web page, therefore every URL indexed by the search engine, was associated with a canonical URL, which could be the same (if the page ...

Jul 02, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Block Crawling of the robots.txt File in the robots.txt Itself?

John Mueller explained on Twitter that it's pointless to prevent search engines from crawling the robots.txt file by adding a "Disallow:" directive for that very file in the... robots.txt itself??....

Jul 02, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does Google Analytics Really Penalize or Boost Your Organic Rankings?

John Mueller has repeated for the 345,754th time 🙂 that a website's Analytics data is not taken into account by the relevance algorithm. Similarly, simply using Analytics as an audience measurement to...

Jul 02, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does Google Actually Recognize Data-href Attributes for SEO?

John Mueller indicated on Twitter that link tags with a "data-href" attribute (<a data-ref="URL">) are not recognized as links (not followed, no PageRank transmission). Only tags with an "href" attrib...

Jun 25, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Can Keyword Stuffing Really Get Your Site Blacklisted by Google?

John Mueller explained on Twitter that "keyword stuffing" techniques do not result in a site being "blacklisted" and that Google now has enough experience in this area to simply ignore texts containin...

Jun 25, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★ Do Customer Reviews and Surveys Really Impact Google's Ranking Algorithm?

John Mueller (yes, him again) explained in a hangout that Google's algorithm doesn't use data such as survey results, reviews, ratings, critiques, etc. to assess a page's relevance for a given query....

Jun 18, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Use HTML or XML Sitemap for Hreflang Tags?

John Mueller indicated on Twitter that Hreflang tags are processed in the same way, whether they are integrated into the source code of pages or in XML Sitemap files....

Jun 18, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Do Forum Backlinks Still Work for SEO?

John Mueller explained in a Reddit discussion that including links (backlinks) in forum posts worked "very badly" for SEO....

Jun 18, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Why Doesn't Google Images Crawl Images Embedded with DIV Tags?

John Mueller indicated on Twitter that when an image is embedded in the source code using a DIV tag, it is not, in his opinion, taken into account and crawled by the image search engine robot....

Jun 18, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★ Does the Order of URLs in an XML Sitemap Actually Affect Google's Crawling?

Once again, it's John Mueller (since Gary Illyes no longer seems to talk about SEO online at all, which, let's be honest, is no great loss...) who explains that the order of URLs provided in an XML Si...

Jun 18, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★ Does Word Order in Title Tags Really Impact SEO Rankings?

John Mueller indicated on Twitter that changing the word order in a Title tag does not, in his opinion, modify the page's ranking in search results....

Jun 11, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ How Long Should You Really Wait After a Website Merger or Split?

John Mueller reminded us in a hangout that when multiple sites merge or "split" (one site broken into several different ones), it can take quite a long time for the search engine algorithms to fully p...

Jun 11, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Block Certain CSS or JavaScript Resources to Improve Your Site's SEO?

Once again, John Mueller explains in a hangout that he doesn't recommend blocking resources solely for Google, as this can affect how the search engine "sees" the page. And this can therefore modify i...

Jun 06, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Really Worry About Crawl Budget for Your Website?

John Mueller indicated, again on Twitter, that the notion of "crawl budget" was often overestimated by webmasters. Focusing on this point can be effective for very large sites, not for smaller ones....

Jun 06, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does Frequent Crawling Really Improve Your SEO Rankings?

John Mueller, once again, explained on Twitter that regular crawling of a site was not synonymous with better rankings and that, as a general rule, crawl frequency has no direct correlation with ranki...

Jun 06, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Are PDF Files Penalized by Google for Not Being Mobile-Friendly?

John Mueller reminded us of an obvious fact on Twitter by explaining that a PDF document cannot be "mobile friendly" or at least that Google does not see them as such......

Jun 06, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Subdomain or Subdirectory: Which Structure Should You Choose for Better SEO?

John Mueller, him again, confirmed in a hangout that Google treats subdomains (blog.example.com) and subdirectories (www.example.com/blog/) in the same way....

May 28, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Duplicate Your Page Title in the Main Image's Alt Attribute?

John Mueller indicated on Twitter that duplicating a page's title (Title tag) in the Alt attribute of that page's main image was not a problem in itself......

May 28, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Can You Really Use a Single robots.txt File to Declare Sitemaps for Multiple Different Domains?

Always John Mueller and always Twitter with the fact that a robots.txt file that would be identical and shared by several websites contains the addresses of several XML Sitemap files, one for each sit...

May 28, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available