John Mueller

★★★ 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 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

★★★ 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 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

★★★ 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

★★★ 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 image alt text in a link carry the same SEO weight as visible anchor text?

In a link containing both text and an image, Google treats the image's alt text essentially the same way as visible anchor text. They have equivalent value. The order does not matter. However, you mus...

Feb 04, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should you really block pages with robots.txt if Google can index them without any content?

Pages blocked by robots.txt can be indexed without content because Google cannot crawl them. The rel canonical and noindex directives are ignored on these pages. These URLs generally do not appear in ...

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

★★★ Does server response time really impact your Google rankings?

Average response time affects crawl rate (Google limits active connections), but has no impact on ranking. High response time results in a lower crawl rate. Google uses the actual observed response ti...

Feb 04, 2022 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Why Does Google Drastically Reduce Its Crawl Rate After a CDN Migration?

When a site undergoes significant hosting changes (migration to or from a CDN), the crawl rate becomes temporarily more conservative. Google crawls less at first, then progressively increases the rate...

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

★★★ What's the real secret to getting Google to index all your content?

To improve indexation, you need to make it easier for Google to identify important content: create less content but of higher quality, use internal linking (especially from the homepage), acquire exte...

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

★★★ 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 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

★★ 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