Heads up, SEOs. Gary Ilyes—one of Google’s top industry experts on search—has been answering user questions directly on LinkedIn over the past few weeks.
And the most recent ones are pretty interesting…
Careful with that refresh
Gary says that if you redesign a website, there’s a big chance your rankings will become volatile. Or, in his words – “go nuts.”
Search engines use HTML to understand the content, so if you break up the paragraphs, remove header tags “in favor of CSS styling,” etc., you may accidentally disrupt your rankings.
To avoid the “nuts,” Gary suggests using “semantically similar HTMLs” and not adding tags you don’t need. Fair enough!
… And don’t be relative
Also, you should never use relative paths in your rel-canonical tags.
Yes, it may save a few bytes, but it could cause your website a bunch of other problems.
John Muller further explained in a Tweet that one of the problems has to do with “where the content was found,” or whether it’s from www or non-www, http or https, etc.
Canonicals and relative URLs, what's up with that? Find out more at https://t.co/gJenmsuFv6 from your friendly neighborhood house elf.
— John (@JohnMu) January 30, 2023
John says “It’s good to be specific.”
What to do instead
Spell out the entire URL path, of course.
Why we care
When Google’s experts explain particular SEO issues, it’s smart to listen to what they say… and act accordingly.
Also, these occasional “LinkedIn AMAs” are a nice practice and can definitely make SEO life’s easier. Here’s hoping the pros at Google and elsewhere do more of these!