John Mueller

★★★ Is it really a mistake to use generic keywords as your business name for SEO?

Small businesses and photographers often make the mistake of using a generic term as their brand name. It is more effective to use your own name as a brand because people can then easily find you by s...

Aug 07, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should you host your customer support on the same domain for SEO benefits?

Having a support site on the same domain name with a different subdomain, or even on a completely different domain name, is a perfectly normal configuration that causes no SEO problems whatsoever....

Aug 06, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does Google really prioritize support sites for help-related queries?

Google tries to recognize when a user is performing a search related to support and displays the support site in the results accordingly. Each site is shown in search results when it's appropriate....

Aug 06, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Subdomain vs separate domain: Does Google really make a difference for your SEO?

Google attempts to index both the main site and the support site, whether they're on different subdomains (support.example.com vs www.example.com) or on completely different domains. Both versions are...

Aug 06, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Do custom URLs on third-party platforms really hurt your SEO rankings?

A custom URL created on a third-party communication platform (such as a community forum) has no negative impact on the main website's search engine optimization. This configuration is perfectly accept...

Aug 06, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Already Be Optimizing Your E-commerce Site for Conversational AI Agents?

John Mueller suggests that e-commerce site owners should check whether their stores are accessible to AI agents, such as those used through ChatGPT for shopping. An experiment conducted in Switzerland...

Aug 05, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Is title truncation in Google search results actually hurting your SEO?

According to John Mueller, truncation of product names in Google search results does not constitute a violation of guidelines. Google can shorten titles displayed in search results for display reasons...

Jul 30, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Should You Use a Noindex Header to Protect Your llms.txt Files from Google Indexing?

John Mueller answered a question about llms.txt files and their potential impact as duplicate content. He explained that these files would only be considered duplicate content if their content was ide...

Jul 29, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Delete Past Event Pages or Keep Them for SEO?

John Mueller provided practical advice on the SEO management of web pages for shows, events or performances once they have ended. He compares this situation to that of out-of-stock products in e-comme...

Jul 29, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Can CSS Harm Your SEO Just Like JavaScript Does?

CSS is like JavaScript: it's perfectly acceptable to use it (everyone does), but it offers a lot of flexibility and power, which can sometimes lead to building things that don't work as intended for S...

Jul 24, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Why does Google fail to recognize hashtags generated through CSS ::before?

The indexation team reported a case where a site used CSS ::before to add the # symbol in front of keywords. The indexation system did not recognize these hashtags because the # symbol was not in the ...

Jul 24, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Why does Google require your CSS files to be crawlable?

Google's guidelines indicate that CSS files must be crawlable, which suggests they have a certain importance for the page indexation and rendering process....

Jul 24, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Can you display different prices based on geographic location without triggering an SEO penalty?

It is possible to display different prices for the same product across different US states on a website. Google can handle this price variation in search results, provided the implementation is correc...

Jul 22, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Is It Really Safe to Modify Your Website to Test and Improve Your SEO?

In the Search Off The Record podcast, John Mueller and Martin Splitt stated that it is perfectly acceptable to modify your site in order to test or improve your search engine rankings. However, you ne...

Jul 22, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Hide Information from Structured Data If It's Not Publicly Visible?

On Bluesky, John Mueller explained that information not visible to logged-out users should not appear in structured data. If content, such as a product's price, is only displayed to logged-in users, i...

Jul 22, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Why Does Google Struggle to Properly Index Your Login Pages and Member Areas?

John Mueller explained on Bluesky that login pages for services (such as analytics or billing interfaces) are difficult to rank well in Google or Bing search results. These pages requiring authenticat...

Jul 22, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Why Won't Google Index Your Content Despite Flawless Technical SEO?

On Bluesky, John Mueller indicated that if a technically sound site is poorly indexed by Google, it often means that Google considers its quality or relevance insufficient. Google does not index all c...

Jul 22, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Can you really control which sitelinks Google displays in search results?

Webmasters do not have precise control over which pages appear as sitelinks in search results. Google automatically determines these links based on their relevance and usefulness to users....

Jul 17, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should you block a page from being indexed just to prevent it from appearing as a sitelink?

The only workaround solution to prevent a subpage from appearing as a sitelink is to completely block its indexation. However, this approach will also prevent the page from appearing in all search res...

Jul 17, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Can you really control which sitelinks Google displays under your search results?

There is currently no direct way to prevent a specific subpage from appearing as a sitelink in Google search results. Google does not offer a granular control mechanism to manage sitelink display at t...

Jul 17, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available