Technical SEO News & Updates for February 2025

Google Search Enhances Speed with Speculation Rules API for Faster Navigation

8 days ago

Google announced improvements to search speed via the Speculation Rules API, enhancing user experience by prefetching and prerendering results. It now prefetches the first two search results while ensuring privacy with features like anonymous IP usage. Tests showed significant loading time reductions. Prefetching extends to more results when users hover over links. Currently available on Chrome and Edge, Google aims for broader adoption and future enhancements.

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Google Sunsets Web Vitals Extension as DevTools Integration Completes

1 months ago

SEO Technical SEO

Google has ended the Web Vitals Chrome extension with Chrome 132, finalizing the integration of Core Web Vitals into the DevTools Performance panel. Users will get end-of-support warnings, and the CrUX API key will be revoked. A migration guide is available for transitioning to DevTools, and instructions for keeping a local copy of the extension are provided for those who cannot migrate. Google will continue to improve the Performance panel's features.

Google Updates PageSpeed Insights with Enhanced CrUX Data Transparency

1 months ago

SEO Technical SEO

Google has updated PageSpeed Insights (PSI) to enhance visibility into the data collection period for Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) metrics. PSI now shows CrUX data for the 75th percentile of real user visits over a 28-day period with a two-day delay. This update helps developers monitor site optimization impacts and affects Google search rankings. The implementation of CrUX data varies across Google's tools, improving accessibility for developers.

Google releases guidance on faceted navigation and its impact on crawling efficiency

2 months ago

SEO Technical SEO

Google released a document on best practices for faceted navigation, addressing SEO challenges. While it enhances user experience, it generates numerous URLs, leading to overcrawling and delayed content discovery. Each filter combination creates distinct URLs, complicating SEO. Google suggests two strategies: blocking non-essential URLs with robots.txt and optimizing URLs with standard separators and consistent filter order.

Google Emphasizes HTTP Caching Importance for Efficient Web Crawling

2 months ago

SEO Technical SEO

Google's crawling infrastructure has seen a decrease in cacheable requests, dropping from 0.026% to 0.017% over the past decade. Caching is essential for fast page loads, resource savings, and bandwidth efficiency. Google supports heuristic HTTP caching through ETag and Last-Modified headers, with ETag being the recommended option for reliability. Implementing caching can save server resources and improve user experience, especially for sites with static content.

Google Clarifies How Robots.txt Works for Managing Website Crawling

2 months ago

SEO Technical SEO

A robots.txt file allows website owners to control how their site appears in Google Search by managing page indexing. It should be in the root directory and contains rules for bots. Robots meta tags provide another method to control indexing and bot behavior. Common mistakes include blocking pages in robots.txt while using meta tags. Best practices involve using meta tags for indexing control and testing configurations with Google tools.

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Google Chrome Site Engagement Metrics Framework Assesses User Interaction and Browsing

2 months ago

Technical SEO

Google Site Engagement Metrics Framework assesses and analyzes user engagement with websites using metrics like user interactions and engagement scores. Chromium tracks engagement through key metrics: Total Origins Engaged, Mean and Median Engagement, Engagement Score, and Engagement Type. Data is recorded using UMA histograms. Functions like RecordTotalOriginsEngaged and RecordMeanEngagement log unique origins and average scores.

Google Updates URL Parameter Best Practices for SEO

3 months ago

SEO Technical SEO

Google has released new guidelines for URL parameter structure, emphasizing standard encoding methods: equal signs to separate keys and values, and ampersands to separate parameters. Discouraged formats include bracket and colon methods and comma separation. The goal is to improve URL readability, ensure consistent parameter handling, enhance crawling efficiency, and reduce indexing issues.

Google Updates robots.txt Guidelines Clarifying Supported Fields and Format

4 months ago

SEO Technical SEO

Google updated its robots.txt documentation, clarifying support for four fields: user-agent, allow, disallow, and sitemap. Fields like 'crawl-delay' are not supported. Valid lines need a field, colon, and value, with optional spaces. 'Allow' and 'disallow' are rules specified as 'rule: [path]', with paths starting with '/' and case-sensitive. This aims to reduce confusion and ensure effective use of robots.txt. Webmasters should review their files.

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