John Mueller

★★★ Why do high-traffic pages carry more weight in your Core Web Vitals score?

For Core Web Vitals, Google examines a sample of your traffic through the Chrome User Experience Report. Pages with the most visits are the ones that matter most. Low-traffic pages don't affect your o...

Mar 14, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does user engagement really influence your Google rankings?

Google does not use engagement as a ranking factor. However, signals pass from one page to another through the site's internal links. If a page is considered very good with many external links, these ...

Mar 14, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should you still trust the site: operator to diagnose your indexation status?

The numbers displayed by site: queries are not intended for diagnosis. They are not a reflection of what is actually indexed, but merely a quick approximation. The figures can be wrong by several orde...

Mar 14, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does Google really use one global index for all countries?

Google does not have separate indexes for each country. There is essentially one global index. Even though there are multiple data centers, content that is crawled and indexed in one center quickly be...

Mar 14, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Are ranking fluctuations really normal, or could they be hiding a technical issue?

Ranking changes where pages move up and down in search results are completely natural. This isn't necessarily a sign of content quality or technical problems. Pages can even temporarily leave the inde...

Mar 14, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does Google Really Ignore All Links Placed in Widgets?

John Mueller explained on Twitter that Google simply does not take into account links integrated by widget designers to their site within the mini-application offered. These links are simply ignored. ...

Mar 14, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Still Be Using Google's Disavow Tool in 2024?

John Mueller explained on Twitter that Google doesn't use the disavow file submitted by webmasters to discover spammy links or link networks. Why? Simply because, according to him, "fake link networks...

Mar 07, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Does server speed really impact the crawl budget of large websites?

For very large sites, server speed plays an important role in Google's crawl capacity. If a web server is very slow, Google cannot crawl as much content. The amount of crawl affects what can be indexe...

Mar 05, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does the shift from 'Bad' to 'Medium' on Core Web Vitals really transform your Google rankings?

Google uses Core Web Vitals (not the 0-100 PageSpeed score) as a ranking factor, based on what real users actually experience. Google primarily focuses on the gap between 'reasonably OK' and 'very slo...

Mar 05, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Can you host your XML sitemap on a different domain than your main website?

It is entirely possible to host sitemap files on a different domain. Two methods work: having both domains verified in Search Console, or submitting the sitemap via robots.txt with 'sitemap:' followed...

Mar 05, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Is Google really ignoring 95% of your submitted URLs—and what does that say about your content?

When Google indexes only a tiny fraction of submitted URLs (86 out of 4,500), beyond basic technical checks, you need to seriously evaluate the site's overall quality with external people who aren't i...

Mar 05, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Is Google really cutting back on FAQ rich snippets in search results, and what does that mean for your SEO strategy?

Google has observed that many websites are adding FAQ markup to every page purely to occupy more space in search results. Google is therefore reducing the number of FAQ entries displayed in search res...

Mar 05, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Should you isolate your FAQs on separate pages to rank better?

Separating FAQs from main recipe pages into dedicated pages is a perfectly acceptable strategy for Google. This allows you to concentrate ranking power on the main recipe page. If the FAQ page is only...

Mar 05, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Can commodity content really survive in Google search results?

For commodity content that anyone can reproduce (public domain poems, well-known quotes, etc.), it is crucial to provide significant unique value. Sites based solely on this type of content are in a p...

Mar 05, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Why is Google completely ignoring your desktop version once mobile-first indexing kicks in?

For most sites that have switched to mobile-first indexing, Google only looks at the mobile version of your site. Differences on the desktop version aren't even known to Google and don't affect your r...

Mar 05, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Do you really need to pick one primary language per page if you're targeting multiple markets?

Google tries to understand a page's primary language to determine which search queries should display it. Pages intentionally mixing multiple languages make it harder for Google to rank the page corre...

Mar 05, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should you really avoid product structured data on category pages?

According to Google's policies, you should not implement multiple product schemas on a product listing page. Product structured data must apply to the main element of the page. On a category page with...

Mar 05, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Why is one x-default enough for your entire multi-domain hreflang configuration?

In an hreflang configuration, even across multiple domains, there must be only one x-default. For each page, all hreflang annotations must match and clearly indicate which version to show based on cou...

Mar 05, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Can structured data really replace traditional internal linking strategy?

Internal linking is one of the most important SEO actions you can take on a site to guide Google and visitors toward important pages. Structured data does not replace normal HTML links. URLs in hrefla...

Mar 05, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Can you safely use bidirectional canonicals between two site versions without any risk?

Duplicating content between two versions of a site (global and local) while providing a canonical tag is a perfect use of this tag. You don't need to apply the same direction for all content: one site...

Mar 05, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available