As you know, John Mueller of Google has consistently preached out important consistency is when it comes to your web site for SEO purposes. He has said this numerous times. The purpose is for you not to confuse search engines and tell search engines clearly and consistency about your site content, architecture, URLs and all those yummy SEO signals.
In fact, John went as far to say SEO lives and dies by consistency.
So when John said on Twitter "In practice: if you want something to happen, your job as an SEO is not to confuse search engines about it" it was no surprise to me.
Here is that thread:
We have this fairly well documented :). I'd check it out there, it'll also cover any follow-up questions you might have.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) July 12, 2021
In practice: if you want something to happen, your job as an SEO is not to confuse search engines about it.
Yeah, that sounds like a bad setup :)
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) July 12, 2021
SEOs should aim to not only be consistent and not only not confuse search engines but lead them to the path you want these search engines to take when it comes to understanding your sites.
Oh, here is a separate tweet from John but kind of adds more of how John feels about this stuff:
I know you're probably asking about SEO, but there's a lot of documentation on technical SEO too, and I really have a pet peeve about incorrectly using basic technical elements like gears when trying to make the case for using things technically correctly.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) July 12, 2021
Forum discussion at Twitter.