John Mueller

★★★ Should You Use WWW or Non-WWW for Better SEO Performance?

A user asked on Twitter whether it was preferable in SEO to use a WWW address (www.yoursite.com) or not (yoursite.com) for a website. Another user replied that it had no impact on SEO. John Mueller ag...

Aug 14, 2017 ⚡ Analysis available

★ Are PBNs Really Detected and Penalized by Google?

John Mueller indicated in a hangout that Google's algorithms detect PBNs without too much difficulty and, for those that slip under the radar, the "webspam team" loves diving into them......

Aug 14, 2017 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Does Googlebot Send a Referrer When Crawling Your Pages?

John Mueller indicated on Twitter that Googlebot, when crawling a page, does not return a referrer URL, as a user would when browsing on a browser. A Googlebot visit is therefore similar to direct tra...

Aug 14, 2017 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Should You Really Deindex Your Internal Search Results Pages?

John Mueller explained on Twitter why Google requires internal search results pages from a website to be deindexed: they create infinite crawl spaces, are often low-quality pages, and frequently prese...

Aug 14, 2017 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does CSS File Size Really Impact Your SEO Rankings?

John Mueller indicated on Twitter that the size of a stylesheet (CSS) file does not impact the search engine's algorithm. It can be several tens of MB....

Aug 14, 2017 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Can You Combine Noindex and Canonical Tags on the Same Page?

A user asked John Mueller the following question: "if a page contains both a 'noindex' tag and a 'canonical' tag, does the canonical transmit the indexing prohibition to the canonical page?" John Muel...

Aug 14, 2017 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Still Use Geographic Meta Tags for Local SEO?

John Mueller indicated that Google does not take into account geo-type meta tags (<meta name="geo.position" content="latitude; longitude">, <meta name="geo.placename" content="Place">, <meta name="geo...

Aug 14, 2017 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ What's the Maximum Page Size Google Will Actually Crawl?

John Mueller explained that Googlebot's current crawl limit for a web page is 200 MB (the last known limit in 2015 was 10 MB)....

Aug 14, 2017 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does the Last-Modified Meta Tag Actually Help Your SEO Rankings?

John Mueller explained on Twitter that Google ignores the "Last Modified" meta tag (<meta http-equiv="last-modified" content="YYYY-MM-DD">) indicating a page's last modification date. Therefore, it ha...

Aug 14, 2017 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does the Order of URLs in an XML Sitemap File Actually Matter to Google?

John Mueller explained on Twitter that you can structure your XML Sitemap file absolutely however you want in terms of field order, and this won't cause any problems for Google. The file is read autom...

Aug 07, 2017 ⚡ Analysis available

★ Do Google's Quality Raters Really Influence Your Site's Rankings?

John Mueller indicated in a hangout that quality raters were there primarily to evaluate and even help correct Google's algorithms, but that their purpose was not to assess the sites appearing in sear...

Aug 07, 2017 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does Capitalization in Hreflang Tags Really Affect International SEO?

John Mueller indicated on Twitter that it was possible to specify language and country codes in Hreflang tags in lowercase or uppercase, regardless of case: fr-FR, fr-fr or FR-fr, everything will work...

Aug 07, 2017 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Do Commas in Title Tags Actually Hurt Your SEO Rankings?

A user asked John Mueller on Twitter whether using commas as separators in Title tags posed a problem. Unsurprisingly, John replied that he could do as he pleased in this regard....

Aug 07, 2017 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Can You Use 301 Redirects in Hreflang Tags?

We asked John Mueller whether a URL in a hreflang tag could be subject to a 301 redirect. His answer was clear: URLs in hreflang tags must be canonical. This therefore rules out the use of such redire...

Jul 24, 2017 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Can Googlebot Really Crawl Your Site If You Use Cookies?

This has been known for a long time, but John Mueller recently reminded us: Googlebot crawls a site using a stateless protocol, meaning it doesn't take cookies into account. It's therefore up to you t...

Jul 17, 2017 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Really Avoid Automatic Redirects Based on Visitor IP Addresses?

We've said it often on our site, and John Mueller recently reiterated it on Twitter: don't redirect your visitors to one site or another automatically based on their IP address (and therefore their ge...

Jul 17, 2017 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Does the Position of Internal Links Really Affect Their SEO Weight?

John Mueller reminded in a hangout that the position of an internal link on a web page doesn't matter in terms of indexation: top of page, footer, sidebar, etc. In all cases, the link will be detected...

Jul 17, 2017 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does Geographic Hosting Location Still Impact Your Site's SEO Rankings?

John Mueller indicated on Twitter that the geographic location of a server no longer matters to Google. To establish the target country of a site, the search engine primarily relies on the domain exte...

Jul 17, 2017 ⚡ Analysis available

★ Should You Nofollow Links to Legal Pages and Terms & Conditions?

John Mueller indicated during a hangout that links to pages such as "About", "Terms and Conditions" or "Legal Notices" can be set to dofollow. For our part, we recommend nofollow (especially for large...

Jul 17, 2017 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Really Put a Canonical Tag on EVERY Page of Your Website?

John Mueller confirmed in a hangout that it was beneficial to implement a "canonical" tag on all canonical pages of a site pointing to themselves to avoid DUST (Duplicate URL, Same Text, more explanat...

Jul 17, 2017 ⚡ Analysis available