John Mueller

★★★ How Much Longer Until Search Console Offers a Full Year of Historical Data?

John Mueller indicated in a hangout that the engineering team working on Search Console features has been working for a long time on providing a full year of data history instead of the current 90 day...

Dec 26, 2016 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Can You Really Rank on Google by Copying Your Competitors' SEO Strategies?

John Mueller indicated on Twitter that there is no universal recipe for ranking well on Google, due to the hundreds of criteria taken into account by the algorithm. Copying what a competitor site does...

Dec 26, 2016 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Do You Really Need Outbound Links to Avoid a Google Penalty?

John Mueller indicated on a webmaster help forum that Google does not give a "penalty" or negative score to a site that has no external links to other sites. This would therefore be a myth......

Dec 26, 2016 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ How Can You Actually Know for Sure If Your Site Is Penalized by Google?

Let's continue with penalties with an obvious point reminded by John Mueller in a hangout: only the owner of a site can know if it is penalized as part of a manual action (through Search Console in pa...

Dec 19, 2016 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does the Order of H1, H2, H3 Tags Really Impact Your Google Rankings?

John Mueller indicated in a hangout that the placement of H1, H2... H6 tags in the source code doesn't matter. The H2 can come before the H1, for example, it doesn't matter. This will have no impact o...

Dec 19, 2016 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Is Google Really Going to Block Scraping and How Will This Impact Your SEO Tools?

John Mueller and Gary Illyes recently reminded us on Twitter that "scraping" (copying/pasting) Google's search results using automated tools, sending queries to the search engine via software, was aga...

Dec 19, 2016 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Change Your URLs During an HTTPS Migration or Prioritize Fast Indexing?

John Mueller himself explained that it's not necessarily a good idea to take advantage of an HTTP to HTTPS migration to change URL slugs (to insert more keywords, for example), because the switch to H...

Dec 12, 2016 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Should You Really Worry About Crawl Budget for Your Site's SEO?

John Mueller indicated in a hangout that the notion of "crawl budget" (time allocated to Googlebot to crawl a site) was very often misunderstood or misanalyzed by webmasters and SEOs. Overall, accordi...

Dec 12, 2016 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Can You Really Trust Google's Official SEO Statements?

Gary Illyes recently indicated that he wasn't lying. John Mueller, for his part, reiterated that the notion of Google not telling the truth to webmasters was a myth and that they could definitely trus...

Dec 12, 2016 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ What's the Ideal Page Load Time for Google SEO Rankings?

John Mueller indicated on Twitter that an interesting metric for average page display time on a website was to keep this figure below 2 to 3 seconds, using the WebPageTest tool. For our part, we most ...

Dec 05, 2016 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does the Noindex Tag Really Save Google Crawl Budget?

An obvious point but reminded by John Mueller on Twitter: implementing a meta robots "noindex" tag will not save "crawl budget" (time allocated to Googlebot to crawl your site) since, to read this tag...

Dec 05, 2016 ⚡ Analysis available

★ Is the Google Cache Date Really Reliable for Measuring Your Pages' Crawl Frequency?

John Mueller indicated on Twitter that the date displayed when viewing a page's cached version (for example, using the "cache:" syntax) is not necessarily representative of either the page's crawl fre...

Nov 28, 2016 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Is Hummingbird Really an Anti-Spam Algorithm or Does It Serve an Entirely Different Purpose?

John Mueller indicated on Twitter that Hummingbird, launched in 2013, was not an algorithm specifically dedicated to fighting spam. This is clearly true, since Hummingbird (just like its legitimate su...

Nov 21, 2016 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does Your Domain Extension (.com, .fr, .edu, .paris) Really Affect Your Google Rankings?

John Mueller and Gary Illyes have both recently indicated (for the 3,687th time 😉) that Google does not assign a lower or higher score to a site based on its extension (.com, .fr, .edu...), and in par...

Nov 14, 2016 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Does Domain Registration Length Really Impact SEO Rankings?

John Mueller indicated on Twitter that purchasing (or renewing) a domain name for a longer or shorter period is not considered a relevance criterion by Google. The rumor suggests that the longer you r...

Nov 14, 2016 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Really Worry About the HTML Lang Attribute for International SEO?

John Mueller has indicated that Google completely ignores the HTML "lang" attribute ("lang=fr" for example). It's the Hreflang attribute that is taken into account....

Nov 14, 2016 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Request Frequent Recrawls of Your Site to Improve Your SEO Rankings?

John Mueller indicated on Twitter that if you request (for example via Search Console) that Googlebot recrawl a site, it will not negatively impact a site. And if the search engine's robots crawl a si...

Nov 07, 2016 ⚡ Analysis available

★ Should You Really Worry About Google's Announced Algorithm Changes Coming This Year?

John Mueller recently hinted during a hangout that Google could launch numerous new features on the search engine and its algorithm before the end of the year. But without any specifics. So, saying th...

Nov 07, 2016 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ How Does Google's Page Layout Algorithm Actually Penalize Ad-Heavy Websites?

John Mueller indicated in a hangout that the Page Layout algorithm, which penalizes pages offering too many ads relative to editorial content, was being updated in an automated fashion and not launche...

Nov 07, 2016 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Do Rich Snippets Really Mean Google Considers Your Site High Quality?

John Mueller indicated that the fact that "rich snippets" (stars, reviews, in particular) are displayed for a site does not necessarily mean that all Google algorithms consider that site to be of good...

Nov 07, 2016 ⚡ Analysis available