Goossips SEO: Content Merges, Forgotten URL, Alt Text

Content merging is more complex than a domain transfer

According to John Mueller, merging content on a website is more complex for Google to handle than a simple site move. Indeed, when you decide to merge several pieces of content by reducing the number of URLs, Google takes longer to process those changes than it does for a straightforward domain transfer from A to B without other modifications. This statement followed a question from an internet user about merging two pages via a 301 redirect. Even if the “detached” search results show the merge is effective, personalized results (notably when signed into Gmail) can continue to display the old page, especially in featured snippets. John Mueller also notes that even long after a migration, Google may continue to show the old URLs if a user searches for them specifically, considering that the user knows what they want ".

Source: Search Engine Roundtable

Although it can pay off, merging two pieces of content can represent a major SEO challenge, especially if it involves strategic pages. It’s worth noting John Mueller’s remark that Google may serve new content under an old URL.

Goossip #2

Certain signals can lead Google to forget a URL

Gary Illyes clarified the status “URL unknown to Google” in Search Console. According to him, when a URL receives this status, it means it is literally unknown to Google’s systems and therefore has no indexing priority. This answer followed a question on LinkedIn about crawl priority hierarchy. The user had noticed that pages previously indexed eventually received this status without any changes. Illyes explains that URLs move from one state to another depending on signals collected by Google. In the case of the “URL unknown” status, the signals led the systems to completely “forget” the existence of the URL.

Source: Search Engine Roundtable

If the problem occurs and you want the page indexed, it can be wise, for example, to create internal links to the URL in question, check that no tags, redirects, or robots.txt rules block its crawling, verify the sitemap, update the content, and request indexing.

Goossip #3

Alt text is, above all, an accessibility feature

John Mueller indicated that the decision to use alt text for an image should not be motivated solely by SEO concerns, but by accessibility reasons. On the occasion, he shared a W3C decision tree for appropriate use of alternative text.

Source: Search Engine Journal

While we know that alt text (and the text surrounding an image) is important for SEO, let’s keep in mind the primary purpose of this element: making the web more accessible to people who cannot view images.