SEO lightning round 2
[JAZZ MUSIC] JOHN MUELLER: Hi, folks. It's good to see
you all here again. There are some questions which
have fairly short and direct answers, so I thought I'd go
through some of these together. Riad asks if blocking
CSS files in robots.txt causes any issues. The short answer is,
yes, it can cause issues, and you should avoid doing that. Being able to see
a page completely helps us to better
understand the page and confirm that
it's mobile-friendly. Prathmesh asks if
there's a simple guide for sitemaps available.
Unfortunately, there's
no common simple solution that works across all
kinds of websites. However, most website setups
have simple sitemap solutions of their own. Check your site's documentation
for a sitemap setting or for a plugin that
creates sitemap files. Often it's just a matter
of turning that on, and you're all set. Mischa asks if it's
possible to reset the indexing of a website. Unfortunately, no, it's not
possible to reset indexing. However, the good news is that
if you've changed your website, search engines
will automatically focus on the new version and
drop the old version over time. You can help this along
by using redirects from any old URLs
to the new ones. Jacco asks if
having RSS feeds is problematic for crawling
since Googlebot fetches them so often. The short answer is, no,
these are not problematic. Google systems balance crawling
across a website automatically. Sometimes this means crawling
some pages more often, but this only happens once we've
looked at the important ones already. Oof. That was a lot. I hope this helps to clarify
some of these questions. If you'd like more
information, join in on the discussions
in our help forums or add your comments below.
See you next time. [JAZZ MUSIC].