Latest Technical SEO News - Page 5
Crawling changes, algorithm updates, rendering fixes, and structured data developments as they happen.
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Mueller can't confirm splitting sitemaps by age changes crawling
Mueller gave five reasons sites split XML sitemaps. File limits and hreflang size justify a split; splitting by content age is a theory he could not confirm.
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Blocking CSS and JS in robots.txt breaks how Google renders pages
An r/TechSEO poster saw 79% of crawl requests go to CSS and JS files. The replies say keep them crawlable, as Google's docs do, and find out why they are refetched.
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Google drops its advice to test pages with JavaScript turned off
Google cut its advice to preview pages with JavaScript off. URL Inspection shows Googlebot's view, but other crawlers may still read only the raw HTML.
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A Shopify review app adds broken FAQ schema to product pages
A Reddit report traces Main Entity Missing errors to FAQPage JSON-LD from Yotpo's Shopify app, with a theme.liquid removal script that Googlebot may not see run.
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A wildcard DNS record got made-up subdomains indexed and ranking
A dating network's wildcard DNS left gibberish subdomains indexed and drawing traffic. Google's canonical docs back a path-preserving 301 to the www host.
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Indexing API got ordinary pages indexed fast in a Reddit test
A site owner's split test got 94% of Indexing API pages indexed in a week, against 8.4% by sitemap. Google supports the API only for job and livestream pages.
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Pages that rank on Google can still be invisible to AI search
Googlebot runs JavaScript, but many AI crawlers do not, and robots.txt rules or CDN bot filters can block them. The fixes start with rendering and access.
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Cloudflare can redirect AI training bots to your canonical URLs
The AI Crawl Control toggle sends GPTBot and ClaudeBot a 301 to same-origin canonicals, so every page canonicalized elsewhere drops out of their crawls.
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Mueller: odd canonical picks often trace to what Googlebot saw
John Mueller lists why Google treats URLs as duplicates, from bot challenge pages and unrendered JavaScript shells to mobile comparison and parameter guessing.
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A domain move needs 1:1 redirects first and no catch-all rule
An r/TechSEO migration case study covers redirect rule order, rewriting legacy 301s to final targets, and testing host-based rules on staging with a hosts override.
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Google cut breadcrumbs from mobile results; the links still work
Sitebulb's guide argues breadcrumbs matter for internal linking and crawling after Google's January 2025 mobile change, and lists six BreadcrumbList markup errors.
