Over the past week or so, Gary Illyes from Google has been sharing some tips and what he is calling DYK, did you know, tweets about Google, SEO and webmaster topics. Most of these are pretty basic SEO tips for this site, so I figured I'd lump them all together in this single story instead of doing break out stories on each one of those tweets.
Again, most of this you all know but hey, it is a good reminder:
DYK Google doesn't have a duplicate content penalty, but having many URLs serving the same content burns crawl budget and may dilute signals pic.twitter.com/3sW4PU8hTi
— Gary Illyes ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ (@methode) February 13, 2017
DYK the "number of results" you see in search results is really just an approximation that's less accurate the more potential results exist? pic.twitter.com/o2odhwjsIA
— Gary Illyes ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ (@methode) February 11, 2017
DYK traffic drops after sitemoves are usually caused by missing or rogue tags/directives on the new site? Removed hreflang, extra noindex... pic.twitter.com/tNYirAXovo
— Gary Illyes ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ (@methode) February 14, 2017
DYK blocking a page with both a robots.txt disallow & a noindex in the page doesn't make much sense cos Googlebot can't "see" the noindex? pic.twitter.com/N4639rCCWt
— Gary Illyes ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ (@methode) February 10, 2017
DYK you don't necessarily need links to rank? Don't believe me? Here's an article from RandFishhttps://t.co/nfh1CCwFzr pic.twitter.com/CTQqIeSAQp
— Gary Illyes ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ (@methode) February 13, 2017
(note, this is from March 2016 - so not really updated)DYK we released an updated version of our Search Quality Raters Guidelines. Bored this Sunday? Here's the link:https://t.co/6MdO1i5P7k
— Gary Illyes ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ (@methode) February 12, 2017
DYK that HTTPS URLs in a dup cluster have higher chance of becoming canonical? pic.twitter.com/1qIz6JAOUg
— Gary Illyes ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ (@methode) February 8, 2017
DYK that after 18 years we're still using PageRank (and 100s of other signals) in ranking?
— Gary Illyes ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ (@methode) February 9, 2017
Wanna know how it works?https://t.co/CfOlxGauGF pic.twitter.com/3YJeNbXLml
DYK keywords have different weight depending on their position on the page & their surroundings? Footer text may weigh less than centerpiece pic.twitter.com/nq3ygULnUB
— Gary Illyes ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ (@methode) February 14, 2017
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 pic.twitter.com/IfXMKB1GFg
— Gary Illyes ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ (@methode) February 15, 2017
DYK that if Googlebot can't access the robots.txt file due to a server error, it'll stop crawling the site altogether? pic.twitter.com/ExhB2Mu5rg
— Gary Illyes ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ (@methode) February 16, 2017
DYK we render most pages we crawl, but we don't "click" on page elements? pic.twitter.com/3Z7tRou2jE
— Gary Illyes ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ (@methode) February 15, 2017
I do like these DYK tweets from Gary - so if you are reading, keep them coming.
Forum discussion at Twitter.