Google Search Team Explains The “It Depends” Response via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

Google’s Search Relations team has explained why their SEO advice often sounds vague or comes with conditions, such as “it depends.”

In a recent Search Off the Record podcast, team members Martin Splitt and Gary Illyes shared the challenges that prevent them from providing clear-cut answers.

The discussion was part of what the team referred to as a “more human episode.”

The Googlers acknowledged they sometimes come across as robotic and used this episode to show a more human side.

The Context Problem

Splitt works as Google’s bridge between developers and SEO professionals. He provided an example of how good advice can be distorted when people overlook the broader context.

At a Tech SEO Summit, he presented a slide with a bold statement about JavaScript performance. To prevent confusion, he added a note stating that the slide lacked context and provided a full explanation during the talk.

But even with that, he said the statement still got pulled out and repeated on its own.

“I had a remark on that slide saying there’s context missing here, and then I gave all that context… The problem with me saying that in general is that people will just take that one sentence and ignore everything else I said before or after.”

He clarified that JavaScript plays an important role in many web experiences, like enabling offline support. But that nuance often gets lost when single lines are quoted in isolation.

Why Google Doesn’t Share Slides

This loss of context is one reason why Google teams don’t typically share their presentation slides.

Illyes confirmed that slides on their own can be misleading:

He stated:

“Our slides without context, they are useless.”

The team sees what happens when advice meant for one specific situation gets used everywhere. This can hurt websites that have different needs.

For example, advice that works for a small local business might be wrong for a global company with websites in multiple languages.

The “It Depends” Situation

Both Google reps know the SEO community gets frustrated with “it depends” answers.

Splitt even called it his “pet peeve.” But they explained why they can’t give simple yes-or-no answers.

Splitt noted:

“Someone who is serving a very specific niche with highly regulated content in a single country in a single language might have very different requirements than a multilanguage multinational brand that sells everything to everyone.”

They try to give more complete answers by explaining what factors matter. But this makes their advice longer and more complex.

The Google team also worries about how people use their quotes. Splitt said people often pick one statement while ignoring other important information.

Splitt explained:

“It often makes things tricky because people might cherry pick and might pick one thing you said, take that out of context and use it as an example why people should follow their agenda rather than ours.”

While they know public statements can be quoted freely, both reps feel bad when selective quoting gets out of control.

What This Means

The Google team’s openness about their struggles affirms the experience of many SEO professionals.

Google’s guidance often feels cautious because it needs to account for a wide range of use cases.

Instead of seeking simple answers, focus on the factors that influence Google’s recommendations.

Understanding the “why” behind Google’s advice is more useful than chasing one-size-fits-all solutions.

Listen to the full podcast episode below:

Featured Image: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock

Google Offers Voluntary Buyouts To Core U.S. Teams Amid AI Push via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

Google is offering voluntary buyouts to employees across several of its core U.S.-based teams, including Search, Ads, engineering, marketing, and research.

The offer provides eligible employees with at least 14 weeks of severance and is available through July 1, according to reporting from The Verge and The Information.

The buyouts are limited to employees in the U.S. who report into Google’s Core Systems division, and exclude staff at DeepMind, Google Cloud, YouTube, and central ad sales.

An Exit Path, Not a Layoff

While Google has conducted layoffs in other departments earlier this year, the current program is being positioned differently.

It’s entirely voluntary and framed as an opportunity for employees to step away if their goals or performance no longer align with Google’s direction.

In a memo obtained by Business Insider, Jen Fitzpatrick, the Senior Vice President of Core Systems, explained the reasoning behind the move:

“The Voluntary Exit Program may be a fit for Core Googlers who aren’t feeling excited about and aligned with Core’s mission and goals, or those who are having difficulty meeting the demands of their role.”

Fitzpatrick added:

“This isn’t about reducing the number of people in Core. We will use this opportunity to create internal mobility and fresh growth opportunities.”

While the message downplays the idea of forced exits, this move bears a resemblance to earlier reorganizations.

In January, Google began with internal reshuffling in its Platforms and Devices division, which later led to confirmed layoffs affecting Pixel, Nest, Android, and Assistant teams. Whether the current buyouts will lead to further cuts remains to be seen.

New Return-to-Office Rules

Alongside the exit program, Google is updating its hybrid work policy.

All U.S.-based Core employees who live within 50 miles of an approved return site are being asked to transfer back to an office and follow the standard three-day in-office schedule.

Fitzpatrick noted that while remote flexibility is still supported, in-person presence is viewed as critical to collaboration and innovation.

Fitzpatrick wrote:

“When it comes to connection, collaboration, and moving quickly to innovate together, there’s just no substitute for coming together in person.”

These changes are positioned as part of a cultural shift toward spending more time in the office and aligning around shared goals.

Tied to Google’s Broader AI Push

This move comes as Google deploys its AI strategy across multiple business units. Over the past year, the company has:

This shows AI is driving changes both internally and externally.

Fitzpatrick’s memo opens by framing the current moment as a “transformational” shift for Google:

“AI is reshaping everything—our products, our tools, the way we work, how we innovate, and so on.”

Looking Ahead

While Google insists this isn’t about cutting jobs, the voluntary exit program and mandatory RTO policies make a couple of things clear. Google is fine-tuning who builds its products and how they do it.

Google wants its teams engaged, in-office, and ready to build the next generation of AI-driven tools.

For marketers and SEO professionals, this restructuring could foreshadow faster product rollouts, rapidly evolving search experiences, and continued automation in advertising tools.

Featured Image: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock

Google Shows Why Rankings Collapsed After Domain Migration via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google’s John Mueller used a clever technique to show the publisher of an educational site how to diagnose their search performance issues, which were apparently triggered by a domain migration but were actually caused by the content.

Site With Ranking Issues

Someone posted a plea for help on the Bluesky social network to help their site recover from a site migration gone wrong. The person associated with the website attributed the de-indexing directly to the site migration because there was a direct correlation between the two events.

SEO Insight
An interesting point to highlight is that the site migration preceded the de-indexing by Google but it’s not the cause. The site migration is not the cause for the de-indexing. The migration is what set a chain of events into action that led to the real cause, which as you’ll see later on is low quality content. A common error that SEOs and publishers make is to stop investigating upon discovering the most obvious reason for why something is happening. But the most obvious reason is not always the actual reason, as you’ll see further on.

This is what was posted on social media:

“Hello SEO Community,

Sudden Deindexing & Traffic Drop after Domain Migration (from javatpoint.com to tpointtech.com) – Need Help”

Google’s John Mueller answered their plea and suggested they do a site search on Bing with their new domain, like this:

site:tpointtech.com sexy

And when you do that Bing shows “top ten list” articles about various Indian celebrities.

Google’s John Mueller also suggested doing a site search for “watch online” and “top ten list” which revealed that the site is host to scores of low quality web pages that are irrelevant to their topic.

A screenshot of one of the pages shows how abundant the off-topic web pages are on that website:

Where Did Irrelevant Pages Come From?

The irrelevant pages originated from the original domain, Javatpoint.com, from which they migrated. When they migrated to Tpointtech they also brought along all of that low quality irrelevant content as well.

Here’s a screenshot of the original domain, demonstrating that the off-topic content originated on the old domain:

Google’s John Mueller posted:

“One of the things I noticed is that there’s a lot of totally unrelated content on the site. Is that by design? If you go to Bing and use [site:tpointtech.com watch online], [site:tpointtech.com sexy], [site:tpointtech.com top 10] , similarly probably in your Search Console, it looks really weird.”

Takeaways

Bing Is Useful For Site Searches
Google’s John Mueller showed that Bing can be useful for identifying pages that Google is not indexing which could then indicate a content problem.

SEO Insight
The fact that Bing continues to index the off topic content may highlight a difference between Google and Bing. The domain migration might be showing one of the ways that Google identifies the motivation for content, whether the intent is to rank and monetize rather than create something useful to site visitors. An argument could be made that the wildly off-topic nature of the content betrays the “made-for-search-engines” motivation that Google cautions against.

Irrelevant Content
A site generally has a main topic, with branching related subtopics. But in general the main topic and subtopics relate to each other in a way that makes sense for the user. Adding wildly off-topic content low quality content betrays an intent to create content for traffic, something that Google explicitly prohibits.

Past Performance Doesn’t Predict Future Performance
There’s a tendency on the part of site publishers to shrug about their content quality because it seems to them that Google likes it just fine. But that doesn’t mean the content is fine, it means that it hasn’t become an issue yet. Some problems are dormant and when I see this in site reviews and generally say that this may not be a problem now but it could become a problem later so it’s best to be proactive about it now.

Given that the search performance issues occurred after the site migration but the irrelevant content was pre-existing it appears that the effects of the irrelevant content were muted by the standing the original content had. Nevertheless the irrelevant content was still an issue, it just hadn’t hatched into an issue yet. Migrating the site to a new domain forced Google to re-evaluate the entire site and that’s when the low quality content became an issue.

Content Quality Versus Content Intent
It’s possible for someone to make a case that the content, although irrelevant, was high quality and shouldn’t have made a difference. What calls attention to me is that the topics appear to signal an intent to create content for ranking and monetization purposes. It’s hard to argue that the content is useful for site visitors to an educational site.

Expansion Of Content Topics
Lastly there’s the issue of whether it’s a good idea to expand the range of topics that a site is relevant for. A television review site can expand to include reviews of other electronics like headphones and keyboards and it’s especially smoother if the domain name doesn’t set up the wrong expectation. That’s why domains with the product types in them are so limiting because they presume the publisher will never achieve so much success that they’ll have to expand the range of topics.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Ollyy

Google Responds To Site That Lost Ranks After Googlebot DDoS Crawl via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google’s John Mueller answered a question about a site that received millions of Googlebot requests for pages that don’t exist, with one non-existent URL receiving over two million hits, essentially DDoS-level page requests. The publisher’s concerns about crawl budget and rankings seemingly were realized, as the site subsequently experienced a drop in search visibility.

NoIndex Pages Removed And Converted To 410

The 410 Gone server response code belongs to the family 400 response codes that indicate a page is not available. The 404 response means that a page is not available and makes no claims as to whether the URL will return in the future, it simply says the page is not available.

The 410 Gone status code means that the page is gone and likely will never return. Unlike the 404 status code, the 410 signals the browser or crawler that the missing status of the resource is intentional and that any links to the resource should be removed.

The person asking the question was following up on a question they posted three weeks ago on Reddit where they noted that they had about 11 million URLs that should not have been discoverable that they removed entirely and began serving a 410 response code. After a month and a half Googlebot continued to return looking for the missing pages. They shared their concern about crawl budget and subsequent impacts to their rankings as a result.

Mueller at the time forwarded them to a Google support page.

Rankings Loss As Google Continues To Hit Site At DDOS Levels

Three weeks later things have not improved and they posted a follow-up question noting they’ve received over five millions requests for pages that don’t exist. They posted an actual URL in their question but I anonymized it, otherwise it’s verbatim.

The person asked:

“Googlebot continues to aggressively crawl a single URL (with query strings), even though it’s been returning a 410 (Gone) status for about two months now.

In just the past 30 days, we’ve seen approximately 5.4 million requests from Googlebot. Of those, around 2.4 million were directed at this one URL:
https://example.net/software/virtual-dj/ with the ?feature query string.

We’ve also seen a significant drop in our visibility on Google during this period, and I can’t help but wonder if there’s a connection — something just feels off. The affected page is:
https://example.net/software/virtual-dj/?feature=…

The reason Google discovered all these URLs in the first place is that we unintentionally exposed them in a JSON payload generated by Next.js — they weren’t actual links on the site.

We have changed how our “multiple features” works (using ?mf querystring and that querystring is in robots.txt)

Would it be problematic to add something like this to our robots.txt?

Disallow: /software/virtual-dj/?feature=*

Main goal: to stop this excessive crawling from flooding our logs and potentially triggering unintended side effects.”

Google’s John Mueller confirmed that it’s Google’s normal behavior to keep returning to check if a page that is missing has returned. This is Google’s default behavior based on the experience that publishers can make mistakes and so they will periodically return to verify whether the page has been restored. This is meant to be a helpful feature for publishers who might unintentionally remove a web page.

Mueller responded:

“Google attempts to recrawl pages that once existed for a really long time, and if you have a lot of them, you’ll probably see more of them. This isn’t a problem – it’s fine to have pages be gone, even if it’s tons of them. That said, disallowing crawling with robots.txt is also fine, if the requests annoy you.”

Caution: Technical SEO Ahead

This next part is where the SEO gets technical. Mueller cautions that the proposed solution of adding a robots.txt could inadvertently break rendering for pages that aren’t supposed to be missing.

He’s basically advising the person asking the question to:

• Double-check that the ?feature= URLs are not being used at all in any frontend code or JSON payloads that power important pages.
• Use Chrome DevTools to simulate what happens if those URLs are blocked — to catch breakage early.
• Monitor Search Console for Soft 404s to spot any unintended impact on pages that should be indexed.

John Mueller continued:

“The main thing I’d watch out for is that these are really all returning 404/410, and not that some of them are used by something like JavaScript on pages that you want to have indexed (since you mentioned JSON payload).

It’s really hard to recognize when you’re disallowing crawling of an embedded resource (be it directly embedded in the page, or loaded on demand) – sometimes the page that references it stops rendering and can’t be indexed at all.

If you have JavaScript client-side-rendered pages, I’d try to find out where the URLs used to be referenced (if you can) and block the URLs in Chrome dev tools to see what happens when you load the page.

If you can’t figure out where they were, I’d disallow a part of them, and monitor the Soft-404 errors in Search Console to see if anything visibly happens there.

If you’re not using JavaScript client-side-rendering, you can probably ignore this paragraph :-).”

The Difference Between The Obvious Reason And The Actual Cause

Google’s John Mueller is right to suggest a deeper diagnostic to rule out errors on the part of the publisher. A publisher error started the chain of events that led to the indexing of pages against the publisher’s wishes. So it’s reasonable to ask the publisher to check if there may be a more plausible reason to account for a loss of search visibility. This is a classic situation where an obvious reason is not necessarily the correct reason. There’s a difference between being an obvious reason and being the actual cause. So Mueller’s suggestion to not give up on finding the cause is good advice.

Read the original discussion here.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/PlutusART

Google’s Update To Recipe Structured Data Confirms A Ranking Criteria via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google updated the Recipe Schema.org structured data documentation to reflect more precise guidance on what the image structured data property affects and where to find additional information about ranking recipe images in the regular organic search results.

Schema.org Structured Data And Rich Results

The SEO and publisher community refers to the text results as the organic search results or the ten blue links. Google refers to them as the text results.

Structured data helps a site’s content become eligible to rank in Google’s rich results but it generally doesn’t help content rank better in the text results.

That’s the concept underlying Google’s update to the Recipe structured data guidance with the addition of two sentences:

“Specifying the image property in Recipe markup has no impact on the image chosen for a text result image. To optimize for a text result image, follow the image SEO best practices.”

Recipe structured data influences the images shown in the Recipe Rich Results. The structured data does not influence the image rankings in the regular text results (aka the organic search results).

Ranking Images In Text Results

Google offers documentation for image best practices which specify normal HTML like the and elements. Google also recommends using an image sitemap, a sitemap that’s specifically for images.

Something to pay particular attention to is to not use images that have blurry qualities to them. Always use sharp images to give your images the best chance for showing up in the search results.

I know that some images may contain slight purposeful blurring for optimization purposes (blurring decreases image size) and to enhance the perspective of foreground and background. But Google recommends using sharp images and to avoid blurring in images. Google doesn’t say it’s an image ranking factor, but it does make that recommendation.

Here’s what Google’s image optimization guidance recommends:

“High-quality photos appeal to users more than blurry, unclear images. Also, sharp images are more appealing to users in the result thumbnail and can increase the likelihood of getting traffic from users.”

In my opinion I think it’s best to avoid excessive use of blurring. I only have my own anecdotal experience with purposely blurred images not showing up in the search results. So, to me it’s interesting to see my experience confirmed that Google treats blurred images as a negative quality and sharp images as a positive quality.

Read Google’s updated Recipe structured data documentation about images here:

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/recipe#image

Read more about images in Google’s text results here.

Read about blurry and sharp images here:

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/google-images#good-quality-photos%20optimize-for-speed

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Dean Drobot