House Elf and Chief of Sunshine and Happiness at Google. Tentatively active on Mastodon
Zurich, Switzerland
- Tweets 11,632
- Following 49
- Followers 43,737
- Likes 6,984
Whale, whale, whale... it's come to this. Now trolling on LinkedIn too: linkedin.com/in/garyillyes
(mostly posting it for @rustybrick)
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A: Your greatest weakness?
B: Interpreting semantics of a question but ignoring the pragmatics
A: Could you give an example?
B: Yes, I could
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The indexing system, Caffeine, does multiple things:
1. ingests fetchlogs,
2. renders and converts fetched data,
3. extracts links, meta and structured data,
4. extracts and computes some signals,
5. schedules new crawls,
6. and builds the index that is pushed to serving.
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My fav email today (so far):
Email: our site was heavily affected by the last core update and close to 100% of our traffic is gone. Our SEOs tried everything already
Reply: have they also tried removing those noindex directives from your pages?
i feel like I'm not snarky enough
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Oceans are salty because of the sharksies' tears. Be nice and help them, they're so awesome
imgur.com/gallery/gxecTYQ
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hands up if you asked us recently for how long you should keep redirects in place!
i have a concrete answer now: at least 1 year.
(but try keeping them indefinitely if you can for your users).
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We've updated PageSpeed Insights and you should care about this, because reasons webmasters.googleblog.com/20…
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Conservation Intl
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog:Getting your site ready for mobile-first indexing webmasters.googleblog.com/20… via @googlewmc
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I don't know whose bubble I'm gonna burst with this, but "achieving a SEO score 100" in Lighthouse just means that you can follow a handful of directions, not that you're great at SEO. But good job!
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Alright people. Please head over to Moz and have a read. Crawling, indexing, and ranking, while rely on each other, are all separate processes with distinct functions. If you work on SEO, you actually need to know this.
moz.com/beginners-guide-to-s…
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1. There's no meta robots ugc and sponsored, it won't do anything if you add that.
2. Meta robots nofollow is a hint now, like rel-nofollow.
3. I'll update the docs tonight to say this explicitly.
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"[Google to k]ill off URLs as we know them." 🤨
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Sit the heck down. The only thing that's proposed is to not show the URLs in the browser. Average users don't give a damn about them anyway wired.com/story/google-chrom…
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I'm creating slides for a deep dive in how search works for SEOs that I plan to use at conferences, including wmconf.
If you have (serious) questions or you'd like to have some things clarified, please leave a comment and I'll do my best to answer.
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The past couple weeks a few people asked about the cache date shown on the cache pages. To be clear, that date is when the page was last indexed or reindexed, not when it was last crawled. Googlebot may crawl a page, but indexing may occasionally decide to reuse an older version.
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New study finds that [insert something] hurts SEO. The study involved 1 site & includes a hand drawn graph that demonstrates how ranking of that 1 site keeps falling. New data points added in different color for visual stimulation & cos i ran out of pink ink.
#FantasticStudies
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just pressed the button to send a large batch of messages to sites which have been opted in to HTTP2 crawling. if something is not clear, follow the link in the message
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I don't know who needs to hear this but putting work in core web vitals doesn't mean that the site can't lose rankings over time.
I also washed my car hundreds of times and it still left me standing on the highway.
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More diversity in the search results (10 blue). Unrelated to core algo update.
If you lost traffic because of this, please tweet @JohnMu . If you gained traffic, feel very free to tweet at me. kthxbai
Have you ever done a search and gotten many listings all from the same site in the top results? We've heard your feedback about this and wanting more variety. A new change now launching in Google Search is designed to provide more site diversity in our results….
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Every now and then I feel the need to remind SEOs that understanding the basics is really not optional: it is a must. Based on the external emails in my inbox this is one of those times: go read a little, please!
If you're doing SEO, read these over the weekend:
google.com/search/howsearchw…
moz.com/beginners-guide-to-s… (not on your phone though)
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"Dear Mr. Illyes,
We inform you that we linked to your site, google.com/, from our very high DL blog. We're certain this will help you rank better on Google and other search engines.
Unless you transfer 0.00065 BTC to our wallet, we'll remove the link.
Good day"
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Why do people put QR codes on their websites or apps? How am I supposed to scan it if I'm browsing from the very phone I'm supposed to scan it with?
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Penguin is now realtime and part of the core algorithm. It took a while to launch it, but totally worth the wait imo webmasters.googleblog.com/20…
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JFYI: based on @ajkohn 's recommendation, i added AJAX/XHR calls explicitly to the list of things that will consume your site's crawl budget.
webmasters.googleblog.com/20…
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If you're doing SEO, read these over the weekend:
google.com/search/howsearchw…
moz.com/beginners-guide-to-s… (not on your phone though)
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The Speed Update: helping users find pages that load fast webmasters.googleblog.com/20…
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DYK Google doesn't have a duplicate content penalty, but having many URLs serving the same content burns crawl budget and may dilute signals
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DYK that after 18 years we're still using PageRank (and 100s of other signals) in ranking?
Wanna know how it works?
infolab.stanford.edu/~backru…
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client: "this page needs to have at least 2000 words"
gary: "why"
client: "for seo"
gary: "this is a help article about how to click a button [to download a csv]. why would anyone need 2000 words for that?"
client: "just do it"
gary: "..."
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Hey Shalini! Thanks for the offer, but i think I'm doing alright. Appreciate the offer though!
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Look. If you changed the design of your site, moved to a new URL structure and a new protocol, OF COURSE you see traffic fluctuations!
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If you don't have anything better to do, @LizziHarvey and gary just published a set of docs about how certain search operators (site:, cache:, related:, src:, imagesize:) work, and also their limitations.
developers.google.com/search…
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Wanted more data in Search Analytics? Search Performance, the new SA, has 16 months of data! webmasters.googleblog.com/20…
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Dear JavaScript frameworks and plugins,
If you could stop putting invalid tags in the HTML head, like IMG and DIV, that would be great.
Yours truly,
Browsers
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The all new URL inspection dog found its way to Search Console! Wanna know more? Snoop around this blog post and have some patience until it's rolled out to your accounts! webmasters.googleblog.com/20…
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This is big, so send us your questions so we know what's not clear & what we need to communicate more about
webmasters.googleblog.com/20…
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We published new docs on rendering and debugging. Check them out NOW!
developers.google.com/search…
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Why don't we want machine translated content in the index:
"All boiled together After boiling, the sugar dissolves can be used. Do not let boil for long Coconut milk will be children"
Basically we don't want coconut milk to become children. Essentially.
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remember the good ol' days when gary wasn't allowed to touch documentation? @LizziHarvey remembers it
developers.google.com/search…
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DYK usually when you see more than 2 results from the same site in the SERP, that's because other results score much lower for the query?
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hundreds of hours of consideration, months of preparation, we finally arrived.
Today, we’ve announced two new link attributes - “sponsored” and “ugc” - that join “nofollow” as ways to identify the nature of links. All will now work as hints about which links Google Search should consider or exclude for ranking purposes. More details:
webmasters.googleblog.com/20…
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Dear Amrita Sen, Link Builders, Freelancer, from Kolkata, India.
I have enough links already, but thanks for the offer anyway. I know people who will be very happy to take a look at your portfolio!
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Spring cleaning continues: now you get to see in webmasters tools the Google selected canonical! webmasters.googleblog.com/20…
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This just in: we use eggs as a signal for canonicalization
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Index selection, while it's largely about (RAM/flash/disk) space, it's tightly tied to quality of content. If we have tons of free space available, we're more likely to index crappier content. If we don't, we might deindex stuff to make space for higher quality docs.
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Q: a page on my site keeps disappearing from search, but reappears when i submit to indexing in webmaster tools. Why?
A: the page is likely very close to, but still above the quality threshold below which Google doesn't index pages.
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Pro tip for searching on Google Images: if you're looking for example svg images, you can do a filetype search, eg:
[flower filetype:svg]
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This has been in the works for so long, so many tests and experiments, I'm super happy to see this go live!
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Mobile-First Indexing by default for new domains webmasters.googleblog.com/20…
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This is super cool and it works really well! You should really try it out if you have some minimal python knowledge (as in, it helps if you understand what the code does)
Hats off, @hamletbatista searchenginejournal.com/mach…
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Based on a question from @pierrefar , i just updated the Crawl Budget blog post to include the following:
Q: Do URLs I disallowed through robots.txt affect my crawl budget in any way?
A: No, disallowed URLs do not affect the crawl budget.
webmasters.googleblog.com/20…
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Don't think of Panda as a "penalty", it's part of core ranking algo & if you don't improve the site, a move won't help you untangle yourself
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If you have a WordPress site, consider signing up for the Site Kit beta test! It may make your life easier!
#bucket
Got a WordPress site? Sign up to beta test Site Kit: sitekit.withgoogle.com/ — our new free WordPress plugin that integrates essential Google products: Search Console, Analytics, AdSense, and PageSpeed Insights.
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If you're waiting for a new episode of Search Off the Record, we're probably going to miss our schedule. Sorry about that
More at linkedin.com/posts/garyillye…
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If you're a news publisher, we put together a short FAQ that might be in your interest when you move to HTTPS.
plus.google.com/b/1142438199…
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If you're an SEO and you're recommending against going HTTPS, you're wrong and you should feel bad.
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This is great https://moz. com/blog/how-to-get-backlinks
How to Get Backlinks in 2020 [Series]:
1) Unlinked mentions
2) Unlinked images
3) Linked 404s
4) Recently lost links
5) Move backlink targets
6) Backlink gap analysis
7) Sites w/ Topic/industry sites + Geo info
8) Relationship building
by @BritneyMuller moz.com/blog/how-to-get-back…
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DYK we released an updated version of our Search Quality Raters Guidelines. Bored this Sunday? Here's the link:
webmasters.googleblog.com/20…
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Fun fact: changing a site's underlaying infrastructure like servers, IPs, you name it, can change how fast and often Googlebot crawls from said site. That's because it actually detects that something changed which prompts it to relearn how fast and often it can crawl.
#cattax
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Hey #SOB2019 folks!
Since i got a bunch of questions about Discover that i couldn't answer properly:
1) you don't need AMP for Discover, *but* you need to fill a form if you don't have AMP (link below)
2) best optimization: add great images to your posts
support.google.com/webmaster…
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Hey LinkAloud!
Thank you so much for the offer, but I'm not really interested in buying "do-follow" links for $100 a piece. I did find your offer very... 🤔... useful, for other purposes.
So, thank you!
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Isn't it great there are more people outside Google who can "authoritatively" talk about RankBrain, than inside? I think it's amazing!
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Reminder: if you have both "noindex" and "index" on the page, noindex will win. It's always the most restrictive robots directive that wins.
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DYK that if Googlebot can't access the robots.txt file due to a server error, it'll stop crawling the site altogether?
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Some SEOs: i can't do my work because there is too much spam to compete with!
Also some SEOs: how dare you report spam to google, you snitch!
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URL: I'm redirecting to this other page
Caffeine: ok, I'll update the canonical
URL: actually, I wanna redirect to this yet another page.
Caffeine: umm, ok. Updated the canonical.
URL: or this other one?
Caffeine: [screw this, I will just pick something on my own]
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Our latest quality improvements for Search - blog.google/products/search/…
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Hey Jon! I don't know if this will reach you, but your email address bounces. Just wanted to say thank you very much for sending over that spreadsheet with over 700 link seller domains! We made sure their links are worthless!
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I love it when prominent SEOs specializing on linking and link cleanup call rel="nofollow" simply "no follow".
.
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And then use it like that in HTML...
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DYK people often think ranking takes place during indexing, but the index is only a storage. Ranking actually happens during serving.
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Estás interesado en SEO y marketing digital? Ven a "SEO On The Beach" en junio!
instagram.com/p/B52vOe6gYLO/…
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We spent over half an hour with @suzukik looking at hreflang examples with MENA, EU, ASIA, etc. region codes in hreflang and I'm happy to report they are not working. We don't extract a language even from something like fr-eu, let alone use it in ranking.
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If you're a CMS plugin or publishing platform developer whose plugin/platform generates structured data, could you reach out, please? We has idea
R/T appreciated
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You want great meta descriptions to help users find exactly what they're looking for!
webmasters.googleblog.com/20…
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Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: A reminder about links in large-scale article campaigns webmasters.googleblog.com/20…
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Wanna know what Googlebot thinks about "crawl budget"? If the answer is no, I don't buy it, so head over to webmasters.googleblog.com/20…
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Indexing API for all your job posting ... Err... Jobs! Maybe we shouldn't just stop at jobs though, what do you think? 😉 webmasters.googleblog.com/20…
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Don't oversimplify search for it's not simple at all: thousands of interconnected systems working together to provide users high quality and relevant results. Throw a grain of sand in the machinery and we have an outage like yesterday.
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DYK if you read out loud the text on your page and it doesn't sound natural, that piece of text may weigh much less during ranking
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when you spend 2 hours arguing with a prominent SEO that 'HTTPS headers' is not a thing, finally ruining their day by telling them we definitely won't change our dev docs to say 'HTTPS headers' instead of HTTP headers
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Pro tip: if you actually want to have a snippet in search results, you do have to have *something* other than the cookie/login interstitial on the page. Having a little content that search engines can rank helps a lot with ... you know... ranking, too!
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