SEO Gossips: AMP, Crawl, AI, ARIA, Core Web Vitals

What to do with your obsolete AMP subdomains

John Mueller advises site owners with obsolete AMP subdomains to keep existing 301 redirects, or to completely remove the AMP subdomains from DNS. He also specifies that there is no risk regarding the sites' crawl budget since most AMP subdomains have their own crawl budget.

Source: Search Engine Journal

Even if the presence of obsolete AMP subdomains should not pose any crawl budget problems, it does seem sensible to implement the necessary solutions so that Googlebot stops crawling thousands of URLs unnecessarily.

Goossip #2

What to do if multiple domains are experiencing a crawling issue?

John Mueller explained how to resolve crawl issues affecting multiple domains simultaneously. He suggests examining shared infrastructures, such as CDNs, which are often responsible for these outages. He also recommends analyzing Search Console data to identify potential DNS issues or request failures, while noting that short interruptions generally do not impact search rankings.

Source: Search Engine Journal

Finding the root cause of a crawling problem is not always easy. Even if such interruptions, provided they are short-lived, do not have seriously harmful consequences for rankings in the SERPs, they can still call page indexing into question.

Goossip #3

The AI phenomenon is not about to stop

Emphasizing that AI is not a temporary phenomenon, John Mueller recommends that industry professionals accept it. He nonetheless acknowledges that AI is often overhyped or met with excessive enthusiasm, which can increase feelings of insecurity for some. He predicts, however, that this exaggerated excitement will fade over time and give way to truly useful applications.

Source: Search Engine Roundtable

Even if it raises more suspicion than enthusiasm for you, it seems somewhat risky not to take at least a passing interest in AI, especially from an SEO perspective.

Gossip #4

ARIA attributes do not influence search rankings

John Mueller and Martin Splitt spoke about ARIA attributes, used to improve accessibility, stating that they do not have a direct influence on ranking or indexing in Google Search. While these elements can help users with specific needs, they do not replace the various elements typically used in SEO.

Source: Search Engine Roundtable

Even if ARIA attributes do not have a direct impact on rankings, it is wise to implement them, if only to make your site accessible to people with disabilities.

Gossip #5

Don't focus too much on Core Web Vitals scores

Once again, John Mueller downplayed the importance of Core Web Vitals in SEO rankings. Although these metrics are taken into account by Google, they do not carry as much weight as content quality and user experience.

Source: Search Engine Journal

John Mueller has repeatedly stated that improving Core Web Vitals scores has not had a significant impact on the SERPs, instead encouraging focus on other, more decisive factors.