Google: Again Provide Clear & Consistent SEO Signals

Mar 5, 2018 - 7:36 am 17 by

Google Lighthouse

For as long as I can remember, Google's John Mueller has been preaching consistency when it comes to SEO. He did it again last week on Twitter saying that often issues arrive when you provide Google with conflicting signals around canonicals, internal links, sitemaps, hreflang, rel-canonical, etc. So be consistent across all your signals.

If you have 301 redirects in place to one URL but the canonical says something else, that is confusing. If you are using hreflang but canonicals conflict with them, that can be an issue. The lists goes on and on.

Be consistent, it is not just a life lesson but a technical SEO lesson.

John wrote:

The clearer you make your signals, the easier they are to trust :). For example, if internal links, sitemaps, hreflang, rel-canonical, etc all align, there's not much to guess. Often it's quite inconsistent & harder to pick.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Search Video Recaps

 
- YouTube
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: July 18, 2025

Jul 18, 2025 - 10:00 am
Search Video Recaps

Search News Buzz Video Recap: Google June Core Update Done, Local Ranking Update, AI Mode Updates & AI Calling Businesses

Jul 18, 2025 - 8:01 am
Google Maps

New Google Business Profile Check Edit Status

Jul 18, 2025 - 7:51 am
Google Search Engine Optimization

Google: Login Service Pages Are Hard To Rank In Search

Jul 18, 2025 - 7:41 am
Google

Google AI Overviews For Movie Queries

Jul 18, 2025 - 7:31 am
Google Ads

Google Ads Rolling Out Smart Bidding Exploration To Some Advertisers

Jul 18, 2025 - 7:21 am
Previous Story: Google: We Do Not Use GS1 Web Markup