Google’s John Mueller answers a mixed bag of SEO questions in rapid fire style in the latest video on the Google Search Central channel.
This video is the latest installment in the Ask Googlebot (formerly “Ask Google Webmasters”) series where members of Google’s search advocacy team answer questions submitted by site owners.
Previous editions of Ask Googlebot have focused on answering one question per video. But not every SEO question needs a four minute video in order to give a complete answer. Some can answered in a quick one or two sentences.
Here are five of those questions along with Mueller’s responses. There’s no theme to these questions, as they range from canonicals, to CDNs, to sitemaps files.
Let’s get into it.
Question 1: Canonicals
Q: Any chance a self referential canonical can override an existing canonical or preferred page? Are self canonicals really needed?
A: Mueller says site owners should avoid using multiple rel canonicals on the same page with they point to separate URLs.
Question 2: URLs
Q: Is it okay to put the month and date in URLs? Will this affect Google rankings?
A: Having the date in a URL is fine, Mueller says. It doesn’t affect crawling, indexing, or ranking of the page.
Question 3: Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)
Q: Is it a problem to use CDNs to deliver images? (Since the images are not on the site’s server and Google doesn’t support image canonicalization)
A: Using CDNs for images is fine. Mueller says images do not have to be on your server.
Question 4: Broad Audience Targeting
Q: What is the best way to appear in SERPs if a site is targeting a global audience with a single domain?
A: It’s fine to have a single domains for a worldwide audience, Mueller says. Many sites have just one version that’s globally available, and they are able to rank in multiple countries.
Question 5: Sitemap Files
Q: Is it a bad thing to leave the Google Webmasters verification file out of the sitemap.xml?
A: You don’t need to include the verification file in your sitemap file. Mueller says the verification file is just for Search Console. Nobody else can do anything useful with it.
See the full video below:
