Notes from the Google Webmaster Common questions & Myths Hangout on the 6th of December, 2016.
Duplicate Content Makes Large Sites Harder to Crawl
For large websites, duplicate content makes it harder to crawl.
Small Sites Don’t Need to Worry About Crawl Budget
If you have a ‘reasonably’ sized site (under several thousand pages), you don’t need to worry about crawl budget.
Crawl Errors are not a Quality Metric
Google considers crawl errors to be technical reponse, and aren’t considered a quality metric which would impact rankings.
Valuable Site Search Results Pages Can be Indexed
Google will crawl a site’s own search results pages if they are linked, and may index them if they show content which Google thinks is valuable.
Google Can Use Site Search for Discovery
If Google can’t crawl a site normally because of a lack of internal links, and it can detect a search form, it might try to find new URLs in the site search results by running searches.
Don’t Change Content During a Domain Move
If you are moving domains, don’t change the content at the same time.
Very Slow Performance Affects Rankings
Google only differentiates sites which are very slow and take ‘forever’ to load. However small differences in speed can impact user engagement, which can have an indirect impact on rankings.
Redirecting to 404 is OK
A 302 redirect to a 404 page is OK.
