This is our last weekly update for the year 2018.
During the year 2018, the SEO domain saw some major revelations in terms of Google updates and web content optimization techniques.
Google does support ETag/If-None-Match
Recently an article was published on the Search Engine Land that had details about Bing supporting the ETag/If-None-Match.
John Mueller from Google confirmed that Google also supports the ETag/If-None-Match. However, rarely websites are seen using it and mostly it is replaced by the If-Modified-Since tag.
In a tweet reply when asked if GoogleBot supports the ETAG, Mueller replied, “Last I looked we supported that, though most sites seem to use If-Modified-Since more.”
Last I looked we supported that, though most sites seem to use If-Modified-Since more.
— ? John ? (@JohnMu) November 13, 2018
You can find a more technical description on this in Mozilla developer console.
Google doesn’t skip over-saturated content on the web
We all have this common question whether Google ever stops indexing new content on a particular topic that already has enough content. Someone asked John Mueller the same, he replied that it is highly unlikely that Google has a mechanism to stop indexing any new content irrespective of its niche. He added, “There are a lot of topic areas with a ton of content, but sometimes people still find a new spin.”
I doubt it. There are a lot of topic areas with a ton of content, but sometimes people still find a new spin.
— ? John ? (@JohnMu) May 29, 2018
Google image search requires both images and associated landing pages indexed
To include your images in the Google Image Search you have to make not only the image is indexed but the page it is included in is also indexed. If either one of them is not crawled or indexed for some reason, then Google the image will not appear in the image search.
Replying to a Google Webmaster Help thread, John Mueller said:
I suspect there’s something not quite working as expected with your web page removal. In order for an image to be shown in Google Images, we need both the image and an associated landing page indexed. If the landing page has been removed (or temporarily hidden with the removal tool), then we wouldn’t be able to show the image either. My suspicion is that there are multiple landing page URLs involved (sometimes this can be hard to spot, with subtle differences in the URLs of the pages), and one of them has been removed, but the others are still indexed. If that’s the case, work to get the other landing pages removed as well, then this should result in the images also not being shown (you could also take it further and also remove the image URLs if this is on your own website). Sometimes this takes a bit of practice, but it sounds like you’ve already been able to get one version removed, so you probably “just” need to focus on the exact URLs involved, and clean those up too.
