Notes from the Google Webmaster Hangout on 20th May 2016, when John Mueller discusses a wide range of SEO topics including redirect chains affecting crawl rate, and high authority sites with duplicate content outranking the original source.
Redirect Chains Slow Down Crawling
Redirect chains cause latency which can slow down crawling, particularly if there are more than 5 steps in the chain, which will be rescheduled to be crawled later.
Use HTTPS for New Sites
Google recommends HTTPS for all websites, particularly for new websites which don’t have to worry about a migration from HTTP.
Links Out Are Not a Ranking Signal
Links on a page can improve the quality of a page, but they are not directly measured as a ranking signal.
Hidden Content is Indexed But Has a Lower Weight
You can still rank for hidden content, but it’s given a lower weight than visible content.
Keyword Repetition Doesn’t Help
Repeating the same keywords doesn’t help.
Higher Authority Sites With Duplicate Content Can Outrank the Original Source
Duplicating your content on other websites can result in those pages ranking equally or better if Google thinks it makes more sense.
New Pages Can Rank Well Until Google Gathers More Data
New pages are sometimes shown in search results and given an opportunity to perform, which may change when they gain more ranking signals.
Google Might Stop Crawling Noindex Pages
If a page is Noindex for a long time, Google may stop crawling the page so it can’t pass PageRank.
