Google Discusses If It’s Okay To Make Changes For SEO Purposes via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google’s John Mueller and Martin Splitt discussed making changes to a web page, observing the SEO effect, and the importance of tracking those changes. There has been long-standing hesitation around making too many SEO changes because of a patent filed years ago about monitoring frequent SEO updates to catch attempts to manipulate search results, so Mueller’s answer to this question is meaningful in the context of what’s considered safe.

Does this mean it’s okay now to keep making changes until the site ranks well? Yes, no, and probably. The issue was discussed on a recent Search Off the Record podcast.

Is It Okay To Make Content Changes For SEO Testing?

The context of the discussion was a hypothetical small business owner who has a website and doesn’t really know much about SEO. The situation is that they want to try something out to see if it will bring more customers.

Martin Splitt set up the discussion as the business owner asking different people for their opinions on how to update a web page but receiving different answers. Splitt then asks whether going ahead and changing the page is safe to do.

Martin asked:

“And I want to try something out. Can I just do that or do I hurt my website when I just try things out?”

Mueller affirmed that it’s okay to get ahead and try things out, commenting that most content management systems (CMS) enable a user to easily make changes to the content.

He responded:

“…for the most part you can just try things out. One of the nice parts about websites is, often, if you’re using a CMS, you can just edit the page and it’s live, and it’s done. It’s not that you have to do some big, elaborate …work to put it live.”

In the old days, Google used to update its index once a month. So SEOs would make their web page changes and then wait for the monthly update to see if those changes had an impact. Nowadays, Google’s index is essentially on a rolling update, responding to new content as it gets indexed and processed, with SERPs being re-ranked in reaction to changes, including user trends where something becomes newsworthy or seasonal (that’s where the freshness algorithm kicks in).

Making changes to a small site that doesn’t have much traffic is an easy thing. Making changes to a website responsible for the livelihood of dozens, scores, or even hundreds of people is a scary thing. So when it comes to testing, you really need to balance the benefits against the possibility that a change might set off a catastrophic chain of events.

Monitoring The SEO Effect

Mueller and Splitt next talked about being prepared to monitor the changes.

Mueller continued his answer:

“It’s very easy to try things out, let it sit for a couple of weeks, see what happens and kind of monitor to see is it doing what you want it to be doing. I guess, at that point, when we talk about monitoring, you probably need to make sure that you have the various things installed so that you actually see what is happening.

Perhaps set up Search Console for your website so that you see the searches that people are doing. And, of course, some way to measure the goal that you want, which could be something perhaps in Analytics or perhaps there’s, I don’t know, some other way that you track in person if you have a physical store, like are people actually coming to my business after seeing my website, because it’s all well and good to do SEO, but if you have no way of understanding has it even changed anything, you don’t even know if you’re on the right track or recognize if something is going wrong.”

Something that Mueller didn’t mention is the impact on user behavior on a web page. Does the updated content make people scroll less? Does it make them click on the wrong thing? Do people bounce out at a specific part of the web page?

That’s the kind of data Google Analytics does not provide because that’s not what it’s for. But you can get that data with a free Microsoft Clarity account. Clarity is a user behavior analytics SaaS app. It shows you where (anonymized) users are on a page and what they do. It’s an incredible window on web page effectiveness.

Martin Splitt responded:

“Yeah, that’s true. Okay, so I need a way of measuring the impact of my changes. I don’t know, if I make a new website version and I have different texts and different images and everything is different, will I immediately see things change in Search Console or will that take some time?”

Mueller responded that the amount of time it takes for changes to show up in Search Console depends on how big the site is and the scale of the changes.

Mueller shared:

“…if you’re talking about something like a homepage, maybe one or two other pages, then probably within a week or two, you should see that reflected in Search. You can search for yourself initially.

That’s not forbidden to search for yourself. It’s not that something will go wrong or anything. Searching for your site and seeing, whatever change that you made, has that been reflected. Things like, if you change the title to include some more information, you can see fairly quickly if that got picked up or not.”

When Website Changes Go Wrong

Martin next talks about what I mentioned earlier: when a change goes wrong. He makes the distinction between a technical change and changes for users. A technical change can be tested on a staging site, which is a sandboxed version of the website that search engines or users don’t see. This is actually a pretty good thing to do before updating WordPress plugins or doing something big like swapping out the template. A staging site enables you to test technical changes to make sure there’s nothing wrong. Giving the staged site a crawl with Screaming Frog to check for broken links or other misconfigurations is a good idea.

Mueller said that changes for SEO can’t be tested on a staged site, which means that whatever changes are made, you have to be prepared for the consequences.

Listen to The Search Off The Record from about the 24 minute mark:

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Luis Molinero

Google’s June 2025 Update Analysis: What Just Happened? via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google’s June 2025 Core Update just finished. What’s notable is that while some say it was a big update, it didn’t feel disruptive, indicating that the changes may have been more subtle than game changing. Here are some clues that may explain what happened with this update.

Two Search Ranking Related Breakthroughs

Although a lot of people are saying that the June 2025 Update was related to MUVERA, that’s not really the whole story. There were two notable backend announcements over the past few weeks, MUVERA and Google’s Graph Foundation Model.

Google MUVERA

MUVERA is a Multi-Vector via Fixed Dimensional Encodings (FDEs) retrieval algorithm that makes retrieving web pages more accurate and with a higher degree of efficiency. The notable part for SEO is that it is able to retrieve fewer candidate pages for ranking, leaving the less relevant pages behind and promoting only the more precisely relevant pages.

This enables Google to have all of the precision of multi-vector retrieval without any of the drawbacks of traditional multi-vector systems and with greater accuracy.

Google’s MUVERA announcement explains the key improvements:

“Improved recall: MUVERA outperforms the single-vector heuristic, a common approach used in multi-vector retrieval (which PLAID also employs), achieving better recall while retrieving significantly fewer candidate documents… For instance, FDE’s retrieve 5–20x fewer candidates to achieve a fixed recall.

Moreover, we found that MUVERA’s FDEs can be effectively compressed using product quantization, reducing memory footprint by 32x with minimal impact on retrieval quality.

These results highlight MUVERA’s potential to significantly accelerate multi-vector retrieval, making it more practical for real-world applications.

…By reducing multi-vector search to single-vector MIPS, MUVERA leverages existing optimized search techniques and achieves state-of-the-art performance with significantly improved efficiency.”

Google’s Graph Foundation Model

A graph foundation model (GFM) is a type of AI model that is designed to generalize across different graph structures and datasets. It’s designed to be adaptable in a similar way to how large language models can generalize across different domains that it hadn’t been initially trained in.

Google’s GFM classifies nodes and edges, which could plausibly include documents, links, users, spam detection, product recommendations, and any other kind of classification.

This is something very new, published on July 10th, but already tested on ads for spam detection. It is in fact a breakthrough in graph machine learning and the development of AI models that can generalize across different graph structures and tasks.

It supersedes the limitations of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) which are tethered to the graph on which they were trained on. Graph Foundation Models, like LLMs, aren’t limited to what they were trained on, which makes them versatile for handling new or unseen graph structures and domains.

Google’s announcement of GFM says that it improves zero-shot and few-shot learning, meaning it can make accurate predictions on different types of graphs without additional task-specific training (zero-shot), even when only a small number of labeled examples are available (few-shot).

Google’s GFM announcement reported these results:

“Operating at Google scale means processing graphs of billions of nodes and edges where our JAX environment and scalable TPU infrastructure particularly shines. Such data volumes are amenable for training generalist models, so we probed our GFM on several internal classification tasks like spam detection in ads, which involves dozens of large and connected relational tables. Typical tabular baselines, albeit scalable, do not consider connections between rows of different tables, and therefore miss context that might be useful for accurate predictions. Our experiments vividly demonstrate that gap.

We observe a significant performance boost compared to the best tuned single-table baselines. Depending on the downstream task, GFM brings 3x – 40x gains in average precision, which indicates that the graph structure in relational tables provides a crucial signal to be leveraged by ML models.”

What Changed?

It’s not unreasonable to speculate that integrating both MUVERA and GFM could enable Google’s ranking systems to more precisely rank relevant content by improving retrieval (MUVERA) and mapping relationships between links or content to better identify patterns associated with trustworthiness and authority (GFM).

Integrating Both MUVERA and GFM would enable Google’s ranking systems to more precisely surface relevant content that searchers would find to be satisfying.

Google’s official announcement said this:

“This is a regular update designed to better surface relevant, satisfying content for searchers from all types of sites.”

This particular update did not seem to be accompanied by widespread reports of massive changes. This update may fit into what Google’s Danny Sullivan was talking about at Search Central Live New York, where he said they would be making changes to Google’s algorithm to surface a greater variety of high-quality content.

Search marketer Glenn Gabe tweeted that he saw some sites that had been affected by the “Helpful Content Update,” also known as HCU, had surged back in the rankings, while other sites worsened.

Although he said that this was a very big update, the response to his tweets was muted, not the kind of response that happens when there’s a widespread disruption. I think it’s fair to say that, although Glenn Gabe’s data shows it was a big update, it may not have been a disruptive one.

So what changed? I think, I speculate, that it was a widespread change that improved Google’s ability to better surface relevant content, helped by better retrieval and an improved ability to interpret patterns of trustworthiness and authoritativeness, as well as to better identify low-quality sites.

Read More:

Google MUVERA

Google’s Graph Foundation Model

Google’s June 2025 Update Is Over

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Kues

Google’s John Mueller Clarifies How To Remove Pages From Search via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

In a recent installment of SEO Office Hours, Google’s John Mueller offered guidance on how to keep unwanted pages out of search results and addressed a common source of confusion around sitelinks.

The discussion began with a user question: how can you remove a specific subpage from appearing in Google Search, even if other websites still link to it?

Sitelinks vs. Regular Listings

Mueller noted he wasn’t “100% sure” he understood the question, but assumed it referred either to sitelinks or standard listings. He explained that sitelinks, those extra links to subpages beneath a main result, are automatically generated based on what’s indexed for your site.

Mueller said:

“There’s no way for you to manually say I want this page indexed. I just don’t want it shown as a sitelink.”

In other words, you can’t selectively prevent a page from being a sitelink while keeping it in the index. If you want to make sure a page never appears in any form in search, a more direct approach is required.

How To Deindex A Page

Mueller outlined a two-step process for removing pages from Google Search results using a noindexdirective:

1. Allow crawling: First, make sure Google can access the page. If it’s blocked by robots.txt, the noindex tag won’t be seen and won’t work.
2. Apply a noindex tag: Once crawlable, add a noindex meta tag to the page to instruct Google not to include it in search results.

This method works even if other websites continue linking to the page.

Removing Pages Quickly

If you need faster action, Mueller suggested using Google Search Console’s URL Removal Tool, which allows site owners to request temporary removal.

“It works very quickly” for verified site owners, Mueller confirmed.

For pages on sites you don’t control, there’s also a public version of the removal tool, though Mueller noted it “takes a little bit longer” since Google must verify that the content has actually been taken down.

Hear Mueller’s full response in the video below:

What This Means For You

If you’re trying to prevent a specific page from appearing in Google results:

• You can’t control sitelinks manually. Google’s algorithm handles them automatically.
• Use noindex to remove content. Just make sure the page isn’t blocked from crawling.
• Act quickly when needed. The URL Removal Tool is your fastest option, especially if you’re a verified site owner.

Choosing the right method, whether it’s noindex or a removal request, can help you manage visibility more effectively.

Google Answers Question About Structured Data And Logged Out Users via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Someone asked if showing different content to logged-out users than to logged-in users and to Google via structured data is okay. John’s answer was unequivocal.

This is the question that was asked:

“Will this markup work for products in a unauthenticated view in where the price is not available to users and they will need to login (authenticate) to view the pricing information on their end? Let me know your thoughts.”

John Mueller answered:

“If I understand your use-case, then no. If a price is only available to users after authentication, then showing a price to search engines (logged out) would not be appropriate. The markup should match what’s visible on the page. If there’s no price shown, there should be no price markup.”

What’s The Problem With That Structured Data?

The price is visible to logged-in users, so technically the content (in this case the product price) is visible for those users who are logged-in. It’s a good question because a good case can be made that the content shown to Google is available, kind of like behind a paywall, in this case it’s for logged-in users.

But that’s not good enough for Google and it’s not really comparable to paywalls because these are two different things. Google is judging what “on the page” means based on what logged-out users will see on the page.

Google’s guideline about the structured data matching what’s on the page is unambiguous:

“Don’t mark up content that is not visible to readers of the page.

…Your structured data must be a true representation of the page content.”

This is a question that gets asked fairly frequently on social media and in forums so it’s good to go over it for those who might not know yet.

Read More

Confirmed CWV Reporting Glitch In Google Search Console

Google’s New Graph Foundation Model Improves Precision By Up To 40X

Featured Image by Shutterstock/ViDI Studio