News
Mueller: why a large aggregator is crawled but barely indexed
John Mueller told a site owner that URLs indexed from a large product aggregator redirect to the homepage, and that such sites are hard to justify.
Technical SEO - crawling, rendering and indexing
What Technical SEO means
Technical SEO is the work of making a site reliably crawlable, renderable and indexable: correct status codes, canonical signals, sitemaps, robots directives, fast responses and stable URLs. It does not make weak content rank, but its absence reliably prevents strong content from ranking.
Reference: developers.google.com
News
Mueller: AI crawlers read sitemaps, Couldn't fetch explained
Google's John Mueller says AI crawlers can't submit sitemaps and that Couldn't fetch on a valid sitemap often comes down to host load or crawl demand.
Reports
How long Google takes to crawl, index and update results
All 23 typical and slowest times Gary Illyes showed at Search Central Live Barcelona, as recapped by ROAST, plus caveats and Google's own docs.
Tools
RSS feed validator: check RSS 2.0 and Atom feeds
RSS feed validator: paste feed XML to check RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 for parse errors, required elements, dates, guids, enclosures and URLs. Runs in-browser.
News
Google Ads allows business name mismatch with domain
Google Ads updated its business name requirements policy, permitting name differences from destination domains for verified brands while barring resellers.
News
Google removes Web Search Service API documentation
Google's partner-only Web Search Service API docs were refreshed in September and now return a 404. An archived copy shows them. Google has not commented.
Studies
SearchPilot: brand links on PDPs lift PLP traffic by 18%
SearchPilot split-tested turning unlinked brand text on product detail pages into links to brand category pages, finding an 18% uplift in organic traffic.
Tools
humans.txt generator
humans.txt generator: build a humans.txt file with TEAM, THANKS and SITE sections from the humanstxt.org template. Free, runs in your browser.
Algorithm Updates
Big Daddy update (2005): what changed and what it means now
Big Daddy was Google's 2005 to 2006 crawling and indexing upgrade. Matt Cutts named it and said it was fully deployed by 29 March 2006.
Algorithm Updates
Bourbon update (2005): what changed and what it means now
Bourbon was a staged 2005 Google update that a Google employee described in forum posts as 3.5 improvements in search quality.
Algorithm Updates
Caffeine indexing system (2010): what changed and what it means now
Google announced Caffeine complete on 8 June 2010: a new web index Google said gave 50 percent fresher results. It was an indexing change.
Algorithm Updates
Exact match domain update (2012): what changed and what applies now
Google's exact match domain update of September 2012 reduced low-quality exact-match domains in results, affecting 0.6% of English-US queries.
Algorithm Updates
Page experience update for desktop: dates and what to do
Google's page experience update for desktop ran 9 days, 22 February to 3 March 2022, bringing mobile's page experience signals to desktop ranking.
Algorithm Updates
HTTPS ranking signal (2014): what changed and what applies now
On 7 August 2014 Google made HTTPS a lightweight ranking signal, affecting fewer than 1% of global queries. What it changed and what applies today.
Algorithm Updates
Intrusive interstitials update (2017): what changed and what now
From 10 January 2017, Google said mobile pages whose content is hidden behind intrusive interstitials may not rank as high. Here is what applies today.
Algorithm Updates
June 2021 spam update: dates, what changed and what to do
Google's June 2021 spam update ran in two one-day parts, on 23 and 28 June 2021. What Google confirmed about it and what its spam policies say today.
Algorithm Updates
Mobile-friendly update (2015): what changed and what applies now
Google's mobile-friendly update began on 21 April 2015, boosting mobile-friendly pages in mobile results. The industry called it Mobilegeddon.
Algorithm Updates
Mobile-friendly update (2016): the ranking boost and what applies now
Google strengthened its mobile-friendly ranking signal in May 2016, fully rolled out by 12 May. Some in the industry called it Mobilegeddon 2.
Algorithm Updates
October 2022 spam update: dates, what changed and what to do
Google's October 2022 spam update ran two days, 19 to 21 October 2022, in all languages. Dates, what Google said and how to review your site.
Algorithm Updates
October 2023 spam update: dates, what changed and what to do
Google's October 2023 spam update ran from 4 to 19 October 2023 and targeted cloaking, hacked, auto-generated and scraped spam in many languages.
Algorithm Updates
Page experience update (2021): what it changed and what it means now
Google's page experience update rolled out on mobile from 15 June to 2 September 2021, adding Core Web Vitals to ranking. What it means today.
Algorithm Updates
Page layout algorithm (2012): what it changed and what it means now
Google's page layout algorithm of 19 January 2012 demoted pages with too many ads above the fold. It affected less than 1% of searches, Google said.
News
Bing tests another expandable sitelinks interface
Bing is testing a sitelinks variant that reveals a description under a sitelink only when the cursor hovers over it, per a 24 September 2026 report.
Reports
Search engine market share, August 2026: Statcounter
Statcounter puts Google at 91.02% of worldwide search in August 2026, ahead of Bing at 4.55%, against 90.37% across the prior twelve months.
Reports
Median home page weight 2025: 2.86 MB desktop, 2.56 MB mobile
The 2025 Web Almanac puts the median home page at 2.86 MB on desktop and 2.56 MB on mobile, with images and JavaScript the two largest parts.
Research
Does Google use Analytics bounce rate to rank pages?
John Mueller said on record that Google does not use Analytics bounce rate for ranking. What that statement covers, and what it leaves open.
Research
Mobile vs desktop parity in the 2024 Web Almanac SEO chapter
HTTP Archive's 2024 Web Almanac SEO chapter compared mobile and desktop crawls. Titles, canonicals and word counts nearly match; a few gaps remain.
Research
Subdomain vs subfolder: what Ahrefs found in Mention.com
Ahrefs checked Mention.com's January 2016 move from subdomain to subfolder in Site Explorer. Traffic shifted, and only new content produced growth.
Studies
NFON merged its country domains into one gTLD, and Austria grew
searchviu's client case: NFON merged nfon.at into nfon.com/at/ and saw Austrian organic traffic up 90% in five months, with a Germany dip.
Reports
Mobile vs desktop request share: Cloudflare Radar 2025
Cloudflare Radar's 2025 Year in Review puts mobile at 43% of global requests, up from 41%, with mobile ahead in 117 countries and regions.
Tools
Image lazy loading and width/height checker
Image lazy loading checker: paste HTML to test every img tag for width and height, lazy loading on the likely LCP image. Free, runs in your browser.
News
Google switches hreflang doc examples to uppercase codes
Google now writes region codes in uppercase in its hreflang examples, such as en-GB, but its documentation says case does not matter to Google.
News
Google's Page Experience docs now list CrUX ad metrics
Google's Page Experience documentation now lists experimental CrUX ad metrics: ad count, ad density and ad weight. It does not call them a ranking signal.
Reports
Google Discover now drives 67.5% of Google traffic to news sites
NewzDash's analysis of 400+ news publishers shows Discover's share of Google traffic rising from 37.03% in 2023 to 67.51% in Q4 2025.
Research
HTTPS adoption in the 2025 Web Almanac: 97% of homepages
HTTP Archive's 2025 Web Almanac measured HTTPS on 97.3% of mobile homepages and 98.8% of requests. What the crawl method can and cannot show.
Research
How old are the pages that rank in Google's top 10?
Ahrefs checked the age of top 10 pages for 1.3 million US keywords: 72.9 percent are over three years old, and the average number one page is five.
Research
URL length and rankings: what the Backlinko study found
Backlinko's 11.8M-result study found shorter URLs correlate with slightly better Google rankings. Here is the method, the numbers and the limits.
Studies
On reports +67% Google traffic after prerendering its JavaScript site
On's Prerender.io case study reports +67% Google traffic and +98% Bing traffic after prerendering a JavaScript front end instead of building SSR.
News
Merchant Center documents Store ratings' review and star bar
Google added a requirements section to Merchant Center's Store ratings doc: a 100-review minimum, a 3.5-star floor, a 24-month window, per-country scoring.
News
Spammers are getting NotebookLM public pages indexed by Google
Black hat SEOs published spam through public Gemini NotebookLM notebooks and Google indexed over 12,000 pages; it removed the directory the next day.
Studies
Italiaonline: 841% video click growth after schema fixes
Google's case study on Italiaonline reports an 841% rise in video clicks and 353% more impressions after fixing VideoObject structured data errors.
Tools
Noindex, canonical and sitemap conflict checker
Noindex, canonical and sitemap conflict checker: see where one page's three signals contradict Google's own guidance. Free, runs in your browser.
Research
Page weight and rankings: what the Backlinko study actually found
Backlinko and Ahrefs analyzed 11.8 million search results and found no correlation between page HTML size and Google rankings.
Studies
Silly Santa's 7-country hreflang rollout: a Skalum case study
Skalum's case study on Shopify brand Silly Santa: hreflang across 7 ccTLDs, with UK organic users up 297.5% and Norway's local traffic share up to 93%.
Studies
Valery Real Estate: 324,580 404s, then a 1,379% traffic recovery
Croton Content's audit found 324,580 broken URLs after a rebrand with no redirects. Fixing them took weekly organic sessions from 974 to a 12,276 peak.
Tools
Open Graph tag checker for required og properties
Open Graph tag checker: tests pasted og meta tags for the four required properties, relative URLs, duplicates and og:type. Free, runs in your browser.
News
Google appears to be blocking scrapers and rank trackers harder
Since around September 13, 2026, rank-tracking and tracking tools report Google blocking more of their scraping, Nozzle citing an 80 percent data drop.
Reports
Portent: 1-second e-commerce sites convert 2.5x higher
Portent's aggregate analysis of 100 million page views across 20 sites found B2C conversion falls from 3.05% at 1 second to 0.67% at 4 seconds.
Studies
REI cut 34 million URLs down to 300,000
REI's technical SEO team told Botify's Crawl2Convert summit how it cut its site from 34 million URLs to 300,000, including faceted navigation.
Tools
Meta viewport tag validator for mobile and zoom
Meta viewport tag validator: checks the content string for unknown keys, width=device-width and zoom blocking under WCAG 1.4.4. Free, runs in your browser.
News
Bing now asks some searchers to verify they are human
Search Engine Roundtable reports Bing showing a verify-you-are-human checkbox before results. The trigger is unknown and the check was not reproduced.
News
Google Search profiles get new article cards and a lower bar
Google cut the follower requirement for Search profiles to 10,000, added richer article views, and lets one account manage up to 10 profiles.
Reports
Canonical tag adoption, 2025: 68% of desktop pages set one
The 2025 Web Almanac SEO chapter puts rel=canonical on 68% of desktop and 67% of mobile pages, up from 65%, with mismatches under 1%.
Reports
AI training now drives 52% of crawler requests, Cloudflare says
Cloudflare reports AI training made up 52% of identified crawler requests in June 2026, up from 22% in Spring 2025, with search crawling shrinking.
Reports
INP in 2025: 77% of mobile sites pass, but the top 1,000 lag at 63%
The 2025 Web Almanac's INP data: 77% of mobile sites have good INP, popular sites trail at 63%, and mobile home pages beat inner pages 80% to 69%.
Research
How accurate are sitemap lastmod values? Bing's study
Bing's study found 18% of sitemaps with lastmod set it wrongly, usually to the generation date, and Google says it uses only accurate ones.
Research
How you chunk a page changes whether AI retrieves it at all
A 36-method academic benchmark found paragraph-based chunking nearly doubles retrieval accuracy over naive fixed-size splitting across six domains.
Research
Sistrix CTR study: how SERP layout changes position-1 clicks
Sistrix analyzed 80 million keywords and found position 1 averages 28.5% CTR, ranging from 13.7% to 46.9% depending on the SERP layout.
Studies
Merchant Center feed fixes and three click gains, per Uproer
Uproer's published case study reports feed-level Google Merchant Center changes lifted clicks 130%, 116% and 3,500 for three unnamed ecommerce brands.
Studies
Log analysis cut a jewelry site from 16M to 730K crawlable pages
A JetOctopus case study: log files showed Googlebot spending crawl on filter, sort and pagination URLs, and closing them shrank the site to 730K pages.
Studies
Nuvemshop lifted good LCP from 57% to 96% by fixing image loading
Nuvemshop's web.dev case study: removing lazy loading on top images and adding fetchpriority took good LCP from 57% to 96% across its stores.
Tools
Canonical chain and loop checker
Canonical chain and loop checker: paste url -> canonical pairs, follow every hop and catch loops and multi-hop chains. Free, runs in your browser.
Tools
Hreflang XML sitemap generator
Hreflang sitemap generator: turn language codes and URLs into sitemap XML with xhtml:link alternates, and check codes and URLs. Free, runs in your browser.
Tools
HTTP status code lookup for Google crawling
HTTP status code lookup: see how Google's crawlers handle each code you paste, plus a redirect hop count against the 10-hop limit. Free, runs in browser.
Tools
Nofollow link checker: rel sponsored and ugc audit
Nofollow link checker for pasted HTML: audits every link's rel against Google's sponsored, ugc and nofollow rules. Free, runs in your browser.
Tools
Robots meta tag validator with combined Googlebot result
Robots meta tag validator: check meta robots and X-Robots-Tag rules against Google's list, and catch bad values and conflicts. Free, runs in your browser.
Tools
URL normalizer: find duplicate URL variants
URL normalizer: paste a list of URLs, normalize them by RFC 3986 and your site policy, and find duplicate variants of one page. Free, runs in your browser.
News
Google Analytics rolls out drag-and-drop custom dashboards
GA4 Dashboards let you drag dimensions and metrics onto a grid canvas, combining six chart types into one KPI page instead of separate reports.
News
Search Central Live returns to India for a Bengaluru date in October
Google's Search Central team holds a free, one-day Search Central Live event in Bengaluru on October 30, 2026, its first India event since 2023.
Reports
Core Web Vitals by CMS, 2025: Duda and Wix lead, WordPress lags
The 2025 Web Almanac's CMS chapter breaks Core Web Vitals pass rates down by platform: Duda at 85%, Wix up from 55% to 74%, WordPress at 45%.
Reports
WebSite leads schema.org type adoption at 12.73% of mobile pages
The 2024 Web Almanac breaks JSON-LD down by schema.org type: WebSite tops out at 12.73% of mobile pages, Organization at 7.16%, Product at just 0.77%.
Reports
Google SERP volatility by category, mid-September 2026
Semrush Sensor's live index reads 2.1 out of 10 for mid-September 2026, but News and Finance run far hotter than Science or Health.
Research
SearchPilot test: a redirect over a canonical, inconclusive
A SearchPilot split test added 301 redirects atop an existing canonical tag for trailing-slash duplicates. The result stayed inconclusive.
Research
What a 10M-page site shows about links and crawl budget
Botify's case study of a US auto marketplace: 99% of pages uncrawled, then 19x more crawl activity after linking, robots.txt and sitemap fixes.
Research
Why title rewrite rate studies disagree: 33% vs 61% vs 76%
Ahrefs found a 33.4% title rewrite rate, far below Zyppy's 61.6% and Search Engine Land's 76%. The gap traces to how each study defines a match.
Studies
CoinStats: Good URLs and impressions up 3x
DebugBear's case study: CoinStats updated about 15,000 pages and moved off Base64 images; it reports Good URLs and their impressions up 3x.
Studies
IFTTT's internal linking fix and its 33% YoY traffic gain
Uproer's case study on IFTTT: searchbots reached only 59 pages via internal links until a fix, after which the site saw 33% YoY organic traffic growth.
Studies
Simms Fishing's Magento to Shopify migration: the real numbers
Inflow's case study: Simms Fishing saw organic traffic up 126% YoY and non-brand category traffic up 5,642% after a Magento to Shopify move.
Tools
Faceted navigation URL parameter checker
Faceted navigation URL checker: test a filtered URL's parameters against Google's crawling guidance and get a robots.txt block. Free, runs in your browser.
Tools
ccTLD vs subdomain vs subdirectory planner for international SEO
ccTLD vs subdomain vs subdirectory: rank four international URL structures against Google's documented pros and cons for you. Free, runs in your browser.
Tools
Meta refresh redirect checker: permanent or temporary
Meta refresh redirect checker: parses the delay and target, then shows whether Google reads it as permanent or temporary. Free, runs in your browser.
Tools
Pagination canonical tag checker
Pagination canonical tag checker: catch later pages canonicalized to page 1, repeated URLs and page numbers after a #. Free, runs in your browser.
Tools
Robots.txt validator: whole-file syntax checker
Robots.txt validator: lint every line for syntax errors, unsupported fields, bad paths and relative sitemap URLs. Free, runs in your browser.
News
Google documents its EEA-only aggregator and supplier units
Google's September 2026 changelog documents aggregator units, supplier units and carousels: result formats limited to the EEA, South Africa and Turkiye.
Research
Who blocks AI crawlers: 60 robots.txt files, read in full
We read the robots.txt of 60 publishers and SEO vendors. News sites block AI crawlers almost universally. The SEO industry does not.
Studies
llms.txt is a vendor standard, not a publisher one
Only 14 of 60 major sites serve an llms.txt. Half of them sell SEO or hosting software. One is a news publisher. The file has an audience problem.
Tools
Redirect chain checker for hops, loops and mixed codes
Redirect chain checker: paste the hops you collected and check hop count, loops, mixed 301 and 302 codes and https drops. Free, runs in your browser.
Tools
Image alt text checker
Image alt text checker: paste HTML to find missing, empty, generic and keyword-stuffed alt attributes on every img tag. Free, runs in your browser.
Tools
robots.txt and llms.txt generator for AI crawlers
robots.txt and llms.txt generator for AI crawlers: allow or block GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended and 11 more by purpose. Free, runs in your browser.
Tools
Structured data markup helper: JSON-LD schema generator
Schema markup generator: build JSON-LD for Article, NewsArticle, FAQPage, VideoObject, Organization and BreadcrumbList. Free, runs in your browser.
Tools
Meta title and description checker with SERP preview
Meta title and description checker: measure title and meta description length in pixels and characters with a Google preview. Free, runs in your browser.
News
The August 2026 spam update finished in under 3 days
Google's August 2026 spam update ran from 18 to 21 August. Here is how to tell a spam-update drop from a core-update drop in your own data.
News
Search Central Live expands to Bogota and Ciudad de Mexico
Google's Search Central team adds Bogota to its live event roster and returns to Ciudad de Mexico in October, alongside a three-day Deep Dive in Barcelona.
Studies
How often Google rewrites a title tag: 61.6% to 76%
Two independent studies measured how often Google rewrites a title tag rather than using it as written: 61.6% in 2022, 76% by 2025.
Tools
Redirect map generator: CSV, .htaccess and Nginx
Redirect map generator for site migrations: map old URLs to new and export CSV, .htaccess Redirect 301 or Nginx rewrite rules. Free, runs in your browser.
News
Bing tests bolded HTTPS and snippets without site names
Two separate September 2026 Bing tests change result snippets: one bolds the https segment of the URL, the other drops the site name line.
Tools
Core Web Vitals checker for LCP, INP and CLS scores
Core Web Vitals checker: rate LCP, INP and CLS values as Good, Needs improvement or Poor and see if all three pass. Free, runs in your browser.
Studies
SearchPilot: removing a breadcrumb link cut organic traffic 5.5%
SearchPilot split-tested removing a self-referential breadcrumb link on PLPs. Traffic fell 5.5%, likely from a schema markup mismatch left behind.
Tools
Canonical tag checker for rel=canonical URLs
Canonical tag checker: test a page URL and its rel=canonical for absolute URL, HTTPS, self or cross reference, domain and tracking. Free, in your browser.
Tools
Robots.txt tester: check if a URL is blocked for a bot
Robots.txt tester: check if a URL path is blocked for Googlebot, GPTBot or any bot, and see the exact rule that decides it. Free, runs in your browser.
Tools
Sitemap vs robots.txt checker: find blocked sitemap URLs
Sitemap vs robots.txt checker: find sitemap URLs that a robots.txt Disallow rule blocks for Googlebot or any user-agent. Free, runs in your browser.
Studies
SearchPilot: canonicalizing to a variant lifted variant traffic 22%
SearchPilot canonicalized product pages to a variant's URL instead of self-referencing. Variant pages gained 22%; main pages stayed inconclusive.
Tools
Bulk meta title and description length checker
Bulk meta title and description length checker: paste many pages and see which titles and descriptions truncate, in pixels. Free, runs in your browser.
Reports
How Google's scaled-content spam enforcement moved through 2026
From the May 2026 spam-policy revision to the August spam update, tracing enforcement against mass-produced, low-value content across 2026.
Research
Site reputation abuse: what the evidence actually shows
Google has enforced its site reputation abuse policy since May 2024. Here is what is documented versus what is anecdotal case tracking.
Studies
DOM.RIA's internal linking rebuild and its Googlebot crawl visits
JetOctopus's case study on real estate site DOM.RIA, reworking links to poorly-crawled directory pages more than doubled Googlebot visits.
Tools
Hreflang tag generator and checker
Hreflang tag generator: build link rel=alternate hreflang tags for localized URLs and check codes, self-references and x-default. Free, runs in browser.
News
Google fixes a favicon bug and a Search Console crawl stats gap
Google fixed a bug replacing site favicons with a default globe icon in search results, and separately restored a two-day gap in Crawl Stats data.
Reports
How five llms.txt trackers reported five different adoption rates
Five independent trackers measured llms.txt adoption since late 2025 and reported 7.4% to 28%, because none counted the same thing.
Tools
SEO-friendly URL checker and structure analyzer
SEO-friendly URL checker: test a URL's separators, parameters, length, depth and opaque IDs against Google's URL guidance. Free, runs in your browser.
Tools
XML sitemap validator: syntax, limits and tags
XML sitemap validator: check sitemap XML for parse errors, namespace, loc, lastmod, changefreq, priority and URL limits. Free, runs in your browser.
Studies
How long domain migrations take to recover organic traffic
A 892-migration study found the average new domain took 523 days to match the old domain's organic traffic, and 17% never did within 1,000 days.
Tools
Meta robots tag generator and X-Robots-Tag builder
Meta robots tag generator: build noindex, nofollow, max-snippet and other rules as a meta tag or X-Robots-Tag header. Free, runs in your browser.
News
IETF's AI Preferences group is still drafting, not shipping
The IETF's AI Preferences group is standardizing AI training and search signals that extend robots.txt. Still an Internet-Draft, not a shipped standard.
Studies
Google's own data: Rakuten and Vodafone Core Web Vitals A/B tests
Google's web.dev logged two named A/B tests: Rakuten 24 saw 53.37% more revenue per visitor, Vodafone saw 8% more sales after a 31% LCP gain.
Tools
Google search operators query builder
Google search operators builder: combine site:, filetype:, quotes, minus, intitle: and OR into one query and open it in Google. Free, runs in your browser.
Research
Do internal links still track with Google Search traffic in 2026?
Zyppy's 23-million-link study and Google's own crawling documentation show why pages with few internal links struggle to get discovered and clicked.
Studies
SearchPilot: promoting an H2 to H1 lifted organic traffic 4.5%
SearchPilot split-tested changing a travel site's top heading from an H2 to an H1. The change produced a statistically significant 4.5% traffic increase.
Studies
JSON-LD structured data adoption grew from 34% to 41% of pages
HTTP Archive's Web Almanac found JSON-LD on 41% of pages in 2024, up from 34% in 2022, while RDFa and Open Graph stayed the most common formats.
Studies
Deloitte: 0.1s faster mobile speed lifted retail conversion 8.4%
Deloitte's 2019 study of 37 brand sites found a 0.1s mobile speed gain lifted retail conversion 8.4%. Shopify data adds a 100ms benchmark.
Studies
Mobile vs desktop Core Web Vitals: INP gap widest, CLS flips
HTTP Archive's July 2025 data broken down by metric: INP splits mobile and desktop by 20 points, LCP by 12, and CLS reverses the pattern entirely.
Research
Pagination and infinite scroll: what Google actually indexes in 2026
rel=next/prev has been dead as an indexing signal since 2019, per Google's own words. Infinite scroll without real URLs is the same mistake in new clothes.
Research
Hreflang error rates: what's actually sourced, and what isn't
Two widely repeated hreflang error statistics do not trace to any real source. Here is what could be verified instead, from Google's own documentation.
Studies
SearchPilot: nearby-region links lifted organic traffic 7%
SearchPilot split-tested linking each of 8,000 regional pages to its 6 nearest neighbors. Linked pages saw a 7% organic traffic uplift over controls.
Research
Noindex does not save crawl budget, per Google's own documentation
A common crawl-budget fix is backwards. Google's own documentation says noindex still costs a full request before the page gets dropped from the index.
Research
NavBoost: what the DOJ trial and the API leak actually confirmed
Court testimony and a leaked Google document, read together, describe a click-based ranking system Google spent years declining to confirm in public.
Research
Core Web Vitals and rankings: what the correlation shows
CrUX data and a 20,000-URL ranking study both show a link between Core Web Vitals and rank, but Google's own docs put content relevance first.
Research
Googlebot's two-wave rendering: how long JS content actually waits
A 2024 Vercel and MERJ study measured the real gap between crawl and render at scale. The median was seconds; the tail stretched to a full day.
Research
What Google actually names in its own ranking systems guide
Google publishes a real, maintained list of the named systems behind Search ranking. Read directly, not summarized secondhand.
Reports
How three CTR trackers reported three different position-1 rates
Three trackers measured 2026 organic CTR by position and reported position 1 anywhere from 27.6% to 39.8%, because none used the same method.
Reports
Mobile-first indexing, from 2016 test to 2023 completion
Tracing Google's mobile-first indexing announcements from 2016 to the 2023 completion notice, and its documentation on mobile-desktop content parity.
Research
x-default's real history: what Google has actually said, on record
x-default has been explained by Google at least three times since 2013. Here is the real, dated wording each time, and what current documentation says.
Research
HTTPS as a Google ranking signal in 2026
Google called HTTPS a very lightweight ranking signal in 2014 and has never revised that number. Adoption data now shows why it barely needs to.
News
Bot traffic passes human traffic on Cloudflare's network
Cloudflare's CEO says automated requests for HTML pages now outnumber human ones, ahead of his own 2027 forecast.
Reports
How much link equity does a 301 redirect actually pass?
Google has never published a percentage for how much link equity a 301 redirect passes. The 90-99% figure in circulation comes from somewhere else.
Research
Featured snippet stats: which numbers are real, and which aren't
Featured snippet prevalence and CTR figures vary by nearly 2x across sources. Here is which trace to a real, dated study, and which don't trace anywhere.
News
Google removes FAQ rich results from Search
FAQPage markup no longer earns an expanded snippet in Google Search as of 7 May 2026, though the markup stays valid and Google says leaving it is harmless.
Reports
How often Google rewrites a meta description: three studies compared
Portent, Ahrefs and Search Engine Journal put Google's meta description rewrite rate at 71%, 62.78% and over 70% in 2020. Only two are real studies.
News
IndexNow keeps growing, but Google stays out
Bing's own published numbers show IndexNow submissions climbing steadily since 2022, yet Google still has no roadmap to join the instant-indexing protocol.
Reports
The page experience update: the real 2021-2022 rollout timeline
Google's own dated posts trace the page experience rollout from 2020 to its 2022 desktop finish, and what the 2026 docs now drop.
News
The May 2026 core update finished after 11 days, its second this year
Google's May 2026 broad core update ran 21 May to 2 June, its second confirmed core update of 2026. What the dates mean for reading your own traffic.
Reports
AMP's traffic record: five publishers, five different outcomes
Independent.ie gained 55% mobile traffic on AMP. Kinsta lost 59% of its leads. Here is what really happened across five documented, named case studies.
Reports
Schema.org's vocabulary hit 823 types with version 30.0 in 2026
Schema.org's own release notes put the vocabulary at 823 types and 1,529 properties as of version 30.0, alongside a new Google-backed usage dataset.
Reports
Google's review-fraud scale, and its April 2026 policy tightening
Google's own Maps blog states 2025 review-fraud enforcement scale, and its April 2026 update bans staff review quotas and naming employees in reviews.
Studies
SearchPilot: breadcrumb placement has no impact on SEO
SearchPilot split-tested moving breadcrumbs to the top and bottom of listing pages. Both tests were inconclusive, showing placement does not alter rank.
Studies
SearchPilot: capitalizing title tags lifts traffic by 17.5%
SearchPilot split-tested full and partial capitalization in title tags on listing pages, finding a 17.5% organic uplift led by mobile search gains.