John Mueller

★★ Should you encourage 'sneaky' SEO experimentation to develop better expert-level skills?

SEOs who test 'sneaky' techniques to learn develop technical understanding that remains useful in a legitimate professional context. Once established in a real company, they can leverage these technic...

Feb 17, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Can you test SEO techniques that violate Google's guidelines without risk?

Testing SEO techniques, even those that go against Google's guidelines, is acceptable on your own site to verify their impact, as long as you accept the consequences. The problem arises when these tec...

Feb 17, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should you really build your own website to master SEO effectively?

It is strongly recommended for people learning SEO to create their own website to test and validate what they learn, and to understand the real difficulty of SEO tasks. This makes it easier to underst...

Feb 17, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Really Optimize Your Code-to-Text Ratio to Improve Your SEO?

John Mueller and Gary Illyes reminded on Reddit that the "Code-to-Text" ratio (the volume of text displayed on the page compared to the volume of source code) is not an SEO criterion: "The code-to-tex...

Feb 14, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Can You Safely Change Your Title Tags Every Day Without SEO Risks?

John Mueller explained during a webmaster hangout that there is no particular problem with modifying a Title tag every day if necessary. However, Google is not guaranteed to pick up this tag daily in ...

Feb 14, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Really Update Your Content Publication Dates to Improve SEO?

John Mueller stated on Twitter that it's acceptable to modify the publication date of content, such as a blog post, only if the content has undergone a significant modification: "When you write someth...

Feb 14, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Why Aren't Your FAQ Rich Snippets Showing Up in Google Despite Correct Implementation?

Other information provided by John Mueller in this same hangout with 3 reasons why the content of FAQPage markup on a web page does not appear in the SERPs: technical errors in the implementation of t...

Feb 07, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does Google Really Penalize Reciprocal Links?

John Mueller also reminded us during this webmaster hangout that reciprocal links ("I link to you, you link to me") are not necessarily against Google's guidelines, as is often believed. If you have a...

Feb 07, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Do Emojis in Title Tags and Meta Descriptions Really Improve Your SEO?

John Mueller reminded during a webmaster hangout that using emojis in Title tags and meta descriptions of web pages does not help in terms of ranking in the SERPs and that, in any case, many of these ...

Feb 07, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should you worry about changing page titles frequently—or is Google totally fine with it?

Changing page titles daily (for example to update prices) has no particular SEO impact. Google doesn't give special weight to titles that change frequently. The main challenge is that Google may not r...

Feb 04, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Why does changing only the title of copied content fool absolutely nobody?

Copying content from a website and simply rewriting the title is not a good practice. Changing only the title of a copied article does not make it a good article. For cases of complete copying, the DM...

Feb 04, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Are backlinks to your non-indexed pages really wasting your SEO potential?

If Google decides not to index a page, it will not transfer the value of the links pointing to that page to the rest of your site. Without an indexed destination for these links, Google cannot do anyt...

Feb 04, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Why does Google crawl pages it never adds to its index?

The statuses 'URL crawled but not indexed' and 'URL discovered but not indexed' should be treated essentially the same way. Just because Google crawled a page doesn't mean it will automatically be ind...

Feb 04, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Should you include your brand name in news article titles for better search visibility?

For news websites, it is recommended to add the brand name in titles. Google attempts to display the site name in title links for lower-level pages, so including it yourself guarantees that this infor...

Feb 04, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Can you really erase the SEO past of a purchased domain?

When a domain is reused for a new activity, Google organically learns over time that it's a new site and treats it accordingly. There is no specific timeframe for this transition. What matters is clea...

Feb 04, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does retouched product photography actually hurt your review rankings?

For product reviews, Google strongly recommends using unique, original photos created by your site — not retouched or artificial images found online. While systems don't automatically detect fake phot...

Feb 04, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does adding categories to your URLs really boost your SEO rankings?

Adding categories to your URL structure (for example /category/article instead of /article) produces no notable SEO changes. It can make it easier to track analytics for identifying popular categories...

Feb 04, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should you really update your backlinks after a domain migration?

During a domain migration, beyond redirects and the address change tool, you must contact important sites that had links to the old domain so they update their links. This prevents Google from continu...

Feb 04, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Do server errors really kill your Google rankings?

Server connectivity problems do not affect page quality or ranking. However, if Google cannot access your robots.txt for a certain amount of time, some pages may be removed from the index. Pages are t...

Feb 04, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Should you really be putting dates in your article titles?

For news articles, including the date in the title can help Google identify the primary date of the page. However, there is no particular SEO bonus to adding the date. For pages updated daily manually...

Feb 04, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available