Gary Illyes
Analyst on the Google Search team
Gary Illyes is an Analyst on the Google Search team. He focuses on publishing information about Google Search systems to help publishers create websites that work well both for users and Search.
Crawling out of December: the 2024 recap
Tuesday, December 31, 2024 It might happen that by the end of this post you're going to try to decide who wrote this blog post, a large language model (LLM) or Gary. And you'd be right to ponder that and delve into the intricacies of the language
December 31, 2024
Crawling December: CDNs and crawling
Tuesday, December 24, 2024 Content delivery networks (CDNs) are particularly well suited for decreasing latency of your website and in general keeping web traffic-related headaches away. This is their primary purpose after all: speedy delivery of
December 24, 2024
Crawling December: Faceted navigation
Tuesday, December 17, 2024 We just published a new document about faceted navigation best practices, which was originally published as a blog post. This is a summary of some of the important parts of the new documentation page. Faceted navigation is
December 17, 2024
Search Central Live Kuala Lumpur and Taipei 2024: Recap
Friday, December 13, 2024 The Search Central Live events in Kuala Lumpur and Taipei were nothing short of amazing, in large thanks to the over 600 people who attended the events! We were thrilled to see the level of enthusiasm and engagement from
December 13, 2024
Crawling December: HTTP caching
Monday, December 9, 2024 Allow us to cache, pretty please. As the internet grew over the years, so did how much Google crawls. While Google's crawling infrastructure supports heuristic caching mechanisms, in fact always had, the number of requests
December 9, 2024
Crawling December: The how and why of Googlebot crawling
Tuesday, December 3, 2024 You may have heard that Google Search needs to do a bit of work before a web page can show up in Google Search results. One of these steps is called crawling. Crawling for Google Search is done by Googlebot, a program
December 3, 2024
Search Central Live Jakarta and Bangkok 2024: it's a wrap
Tuesday, October 15, 2024 Our first two Search Central Live events in Asia this year have been wrapped up and we finished looking back at what we've learned and what we can do better. On July 25, 2024, we were delighted to host 335 people in Jakarta
October 15, 2024
Search Central Live 2024 is coming to Kuala Lumpur and Taipei
Tuesday, Aug 27, 2024 As previously announced, Search Central Live is coming to Kuala Lumpur and to Taipei in the last quarter of 2024. And yes, we're very excited! What can you expect? A whole day of learning about Search while having some fun along
August 27, 2024
Search Central Live Bangkok 2024
Thursday, June 20, 2024 We're coming back to Thailand with Search Central Live! As mentioned in our blog post about our APAC plans for SCL, we now have a date and a site where you can sign up for a chance to secure your spot at Search Central Live
June 20, 2024
Search Central Live 2024 is coming back to the APAC region
Wednesday, May 29, 2024 Search Central Live is coming back to the Asia Pacific region, bringing you insights from Google Search, fun networking opportunity, and more! This year we're aiming to visit Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Thailand, but keep
May 29, 2024
The SEO Starter Guide got a makeover
Friday, February 2, 2024 We refreshed our SEO Starter Guide to better fit its namesake (you guessed it): a starter audience. Launched in 2008, this guide was originally a 22-page PDF that was designed to be a one-stop-shop for the most common SEO
February 2, 2024
This is over
Sunday, December 31, 2023 I'm sure you're all wondering why we have gathered you here today. That's right: it's the end of year blog post in which we go over what happened in 2023 on Google Search Central, and have some fun along the way! In 2023 we
December 31, 2023
Upcoming deprecation of Crawl Rate Limiter Tool in Search Console
Friday, November 24, 2023 The crawl rate limiter tool in Search Console is being deprecated on Jan 8th, 2024. This tool has been available for over a decade, but with the improvements we've made to our crawling logic and other tools available to
November 24, 2023
Traditional Chinese Blog: Search Central Live Taipei 2023
Thursday, November 2, 2023 We are ecstatic to announce that for the first time ever, Search Central Live is coming to Taipei! Part of the Search Central Live events series, this is the first in-person event we are organizing in Taiwan, and we're
November 2, 2023
Search Central Live Singapore 2023
Wednesday, October 18, 2023 We're excited to announce that Search Central Live Singapore is coming back this year again on November 22. As usual, the event is hosted by the Google Search team and we're looking forward to bringing together the
October 18, 2023
The comedy of errors
Thursday, August 24, 2023 Every now and then we get questions about errors that we may have shown for sites in Search Console, and every now and then we encounter folks who seem to be confused about where an error came from. This is understandable:
August 24, 2023
Search Central Live is coming to India
Thursday, August 17, 2023 With three Search Central Live events behind us this year, it's time to announce the one we get asked about the most: Search Central India! We are coming to you to two locations: Interested? Sign up for Search Central Live
August 17, 2023
Search Central Live Tokyo and Jakarta: it's a wrap
Thursday, July 27, 2023 It’s been about a month since Search Central Live Tokyo concluded and about 2 weeks since SCL Jakarta! Looking back at the events makes us happy; it’s really great to be back and meet people in person! But let's ponder what we
July 27, 2023
Sitemaps ping endpoint is going away
Monday, June 26, 2023 The Sitemaps Protocol was introduced in 2005 to help search engines with the discovery of new URLs, and also to help with scheduling new crawls of already discovered URLs. It's a wildly popular protocol that hasn't changed for
June 26, 2023
Indonesian Blog: Search Central Live Jakarta 2023
Wednesday, June 7, 2023 A few weeks back, we announced that Search Central Live is coming to a few locations in Asia Pacific throughout 2023. If you speak Indonesian fluently and are interested, Search Central Live Jakarta 2023 is happening on July
June 7, 2023
Search Central Live: Tokyo and future plans for APAC
Tuesday, May 16, 2023 Search Central Live is back in Asia Pacific throughout 2023 and we can’t wait to meet you in person! In November 2022 we resumed our search event series with SCL Singapore. Encouraged by the success of the event, we're now ready
May 16, 2023
How x-default can help you
Monday, May 8, 2023 A few recent issues made us realize that the hreflang x-default value is potentially underused by sites that already use hreflang to help search users find the right version of their pages. We want to remind you that it can be a
May 5, 2023
Don't use 403s or 404s for rate limiting
Friday, February 17, 2023 Over the last few months we noticed an uptick in website owners and some content delivery networks (CDNs) attempting to use 404 and other 4xx client errors (but not 429 ) to attempt to reduce Googlebot's crawl rate. The
February 17, 2023
Thanks, 2022
Friday, December 30, 2022 You know what time it is: year in a review. With only a few days left of 2022 and with all the quiet in the office, we thought it would be nice to reflect on this year from Search Central's perspective. Search Console
December 30, 2022
Introducing the Google Search Status Dashboard
Wednesday, December 14, 2022 As we head into 2023, we want to introduce another tool for the public to understand the most current status of systems which impact Search—crawling, indexing, and serving. While system disruptions are extremely rare, we
December 14, 2022
Visual Elements of Google Search
Tuesday, December 13, 2022 Walk into a library and ask for a book, without specifying which one. After puzzled looks, you'll probably get dozens of questions from the helpful librarian to try to identify the specific book: there are so many of them (
December 13, 2022
Refreshed guidelines for site owners
Thursday, October 13, 2022 In 2002 we launched a page with a set of guidelines for site owners that gave an overview of best practices when it came to building a site. We called this page "Webmaster Guidelines" and it's been with us ever since. Since
October 13, 2022
Back in business: Search Central Live events
Thursday, October 13, 2022 In 2019 we organized events called Webmaster Conference for site owners and SEOs in over 15 countries, specifically in regions that otherwise don't get much search conference love. Then we had to stop for a while, but
October 13, 2022
Googlebot and the 15 MB thing
Tuesday, June 28, 2022 Over the last few days we've received a great deal of questions about a recent update to our documentation about Googlebot. Namely, we've documented that Googlebot only ever "sees" the first 15 megabytes (MB) when fetching
June 28, 2022
Spring cleaning: some sitemap extension tags are going away
Friday, May 06, 2022 Over the years, we introduced a number of tags and tag attributes for Google sitemap extensions, specifically the Image and Video extensions. Most of these tags were added to allow site owners to deliver data more easily to
May 6, 2022
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