Google analyst Gary Illyes provides guidance on large robots.txt files, the SEO impact of website redesigns, and correct usage of rel-canonical tags.
Illyes takes and publishes questions submitted via LinkedIn Direct Messages, providing valuable insights to those in the SEO community.
Google employees sharing their SEO advice is already newsworthy. This is especially true considering Illyes, who isn’t as active on social media as colleagues like his advocate John Mueller at Search and developer advocate Martin Split.
Over the past week, Illyes has shared advice and provided guidance on the following subjects:
- Large robots.txt file
- Website redesign impact on SEO
- Correct use of the rel-canonical tag
Given the engagement his posts are getting, more are likely to come.
Keep your Robots.Txt file under 500KB
Regarding previously published research on the size of robots.txt files, Illyes shares a PSA for file sizes greater than 500kb.
Screenshot: linkedin.com/in/garyillyes/, January 2023.Illyes recommends that you pay attention to the size of your website’s robots.txt file. Especially if the file is over his 500kb be careful.
Google’s crawler only processes the first 500KB of the file, so it’s important to ensure that the most important information appears first.
This ensures that your website is properly crawled and indexed by Google.
Website redesign could cause rankings to ‘go crazy’
When redesigning your website, it’s important to remember that it can affect your ranking in search engines.
As Illyes explains, this is because search engines use your page’s HTML to understand and categorize your site’s content.
Changes to the HTML structure, such as breaking paragraphs, using CSS styles instead of H tags, or adding unnecessary break tags can cause the HTML parser to produce different results.
This can have a significant impact on your site’s ranking on search engines. Or, as Illyes puts it, the rankings can get “crazy.”
Screenshot: linkedin.com/in/garyillyes/, January 2023.Illyes advises using semantically similar HTML when redesigning your site and avoiding adding unnecessary tags to minimize the impact on SEO.
This allows the HTML parser to better understand your site’s content and helps maintain your search rankings.
Do not use relative paths in Rel-Canonical
Don’t take shortcuts when implementing rel-canonical tags. Illyes strongly recommends spelling out the entire URL path.
Screenshot: linkedin.com/in/garyillyes/, January 2023.Saving a few bytes by using relative paths in rel-canonical tags is not worth the potential problems it can cause.
Using a relative path can cause search engines to treat it as a different URL and confuse search engines.
Spelling out the full URL path eliminates potential ambiguity and allows search engines to identify the correct URL as the preferred version.
In summary
By answering questions and offering their expertise via direct message, Illyes is giving back to the community and providing valuable insight on a variety of SEO-related topics.
This is a testament to Illyes’ dedication to helping people understand how Google works. Send him his DM. Your questions may be answered in his future LinkedIn posts.
sauce: LinkedIn
Featured Image: SNEHIT PHOTO / Shutterstock
