TLDR

Gary Illyes, a well-known industry figure at Google, has recently made waves on LinkedIn by sharing SEO advice...

Gary Illyes, a Google Analyst, provides advice on large robots.txt files, the SEO impact of website redesigns, and the proper use of rel-canonical tags.

Illyes is answering questions sent to him via LinkedIn direct message publicly, providing valuable insights to the SEO community.

Sharing SEO advice from a Google employee is already newsworthy. This is especially true given that Illyes isn't as socially active as colleagues such as Search Advocate John Mueller and Developer Advocate Martin Splitt.

Illyes has provided advice and guidance on the following topics over the last week:

  • Extensive robots.txt files
  • Website redesigns' SEO impact
  • The proper application of rel-canonical tags

Given the level of interest in his posts, more is almost certainly on the way. If you're not following him on LinkedIn, here's a rundown of what you've been missing.

Keep the robots. Txt Files Less Than 500KB

Regarding a previously published poll on the size of robots.txt files, Illyes issues a public service announcement to those with files larger than 500kb.

Illyes recommends keeping an eye on the size of your website's robots.txt file, especially if it's larger than 500kb.

Because Google's crawlers only read the first 500kb of a file, it's critical that the most important information appears first.

This can help ensure that Google crawls and indexes your website properly.

Website redesigns may cause ranking fluctuations

When redesigning a website, keep in mind that its search engine rankings may be affected.

This is because search engines use the HTML of your pages to understand and categorize the content on your site, as Illyes explains.

If you change the HTML structure, for example, by breaking up paragraphs, using CSS styling instead of H tags, or adding unnecessary breaking tags, the HTML parsers may produce different results.

This can have a significant impact on your site's search engine rankings. Alternatively, as Illyes puts it, it can cause rankings to "go nuts":

Illyes recommends using semantically similar HTML when redesigning the site and avoiding unnecessary tags to reduce the SEO impact.

This enables HTML parsers to better understand the content on your site, which can aid in the maintenance of search rankings.

Relative Paths Should Not Be Used In Your Rel-Canonical

When implementing rel-canonical tags, don't cut corners. Illyes strongly suggests that you spell out the entire URL path:

Saving a few bytes by using a relative path in the rel-canonical tag is not worth the potential problems.

When you use relative paths, search engines may treat it as a different URL, which can confuse them.

Spelling out the entire URL path eliminates ambiguity and ensures that search engines recognize the correct URL as the preferred version.

Conclusion

Illyes is giving back to the community and providing valuable insights on various SEO-related topics by answering questions sent to him via direct message and offering his expertise.

This demonstrates Illyes' commitment to assisting people in understanding how Google works. Send him a direct message, and your query may be answered in a future LinkedIn post.

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