Google: Don't Follow Big Sites SEO, They Often Get It Wrong

Nov 12, 2015 - 8:17 am 19 by

Google Big Eats Small

John Mueller from Google replied to a question in the Stack Exchange forums about following up YouTube set up their structure and how it might impact them if they followed, from an SEO crawlability perspective.

John responded that it is often not a good idea to just blindly follow how big sites do things because they often get it wrong, he said.

The question was:

I've noticed that some sites are moving away from root-directory user profiles. For example, YouTube channel URLs are now /channel/ and /c/ instead of simply /.

For a site with user profiles (or in YouTube's case, channels), which is preferred?

John replied:

I would not blindly follow some big site's structure, in the hope that they must have planned everything in detail. All sites are different, and you'd be surprised at how often big sites manage to get things wrong :).

YouTube, a Google owned property, do something wrong? No way!.

In any event, John went in and explained what he should think about in detail in the thread.

Forum discussion at Stack Exchange.

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Search Video Recaps

 
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: March 31, 2025

Mar 31, 2025 - 10:00 am
Google Updates

Google March 2025 Core Update Impact Multiple Poll Results

Mar 31, 2025 - 7:51 am
Google News

Google To Pay $100 Million To Settle Old Ad Lawsuit On Clicks Outside Geo Target

Mar 31, 2025 - 7:41 am
Google Ads

Google To Allow Double Serving Ads In Different Ad Locations On Same Page

Mar 31, 2025 - 7:31 am
Google Search Engine Optimization

Google News Fully Transitioned To Automatically Generated Publication Pages

Mar 31, 2025 - 7:21 am
Google Maps

Google Business Profiles Bug Resurfacing Old Fake Removed Reviews

Mar 31, 2025 - 7:11 am
Previous Story: Google AdWords: New Temporary Structured Snippets For Black Friday & Cyber Monday