The Ten Commandments of SEO

Since 24 September 2026, Search Console's performance reports include image-based searches (Lens, Circle to Search, image uploads) under a new multimodal filter.

Not yet in the Search Console API, so the weekly audit cannot pull it.

Google defines scaled content abuse as making many pages mainly to rank, with little value, however they are made, including combining content from other pages without adding value. It tells sites that host such content to keep it out of Search.

The policy does not name directories or programmatic pages as such; they fall under it only when they match the definition.

Since 30 August 2026, Google enforces its site reputation abuse policy (third-party content hosted to borrow a site's standing) differently in Europe: no manual action there, and the section may be ranked separately instead.

Covers third-party content only. Republished Beis Moshiach articles are first-party.

Google's August 2026 spam update ran from 18 to 21 August 2026, worldwide and in all languages.

Google's own podcast on the Page Indexing report presents 'Crawled, currently not indexed' as usually a site-wide quality issue rather than a technical bug, and says a healthy site does not need every page indexed.

Confirmed from the show notes and Google's help page; the transcript was not read.

Google warns that CDNs and security layers sometimes serve Googlebot an 'are you a bot?' challenge page with a normal 200 status, which corrupts crawling.

Spoofing the Googlebot user agent does not reproduce rules keyed to Google's IP addresses; the URL Inspection live test is definitive.

Bing Webmaster Tools can import sites and sitemaps straight from Google Search Console, up to 100 sites at a time, verified automatically.

The how-to is a 2019 Bing post. Bing rechecks ownership against Search Console, so revoking Google access can drop sites.

Bing says duplicate content brings no penalty, but AI systems group near-duplicate pages and pick one to represent the group, possibly an outdated copy.

Bing gives no data on how often the wrong copy gets picked.

Netlify redirects www and plain domains to each other, but its docs do not promise that a site's netlify.app address redirects to the real domain, and draft URLs are not documented as hidden from search.

Netlify's docs are silent on this, so the behavior has to be measured site by site.

Bing recommends IndexNow, a ping that tells participating search engines which pages were added, changed or removed.

Helps only engines that take part in IndexNow; Google is not one of them.

Google says that to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode a page only has to be indexed and eligible for a snippet. It needs no special AI text files or special schema.

Google only. The page was last updated 2025-12-10.

For questions asked in Chinese, ChatGPT ran its web searches in English about two thirds of the time.

The 67 to 70% figures come from SEJ, not the paper's abstract. Only Chinese was tested, on 40 questions; Hebrew and Yiddish are our inference. The added English must never alter the Torah text itself.

In four case studies from the August 2026 spam update, sites with mass programmatic pages lost visibility across the whole site, not only on the thin pages.

Only four anonymized cases, measured with third-party visibility tools, no control group.

The fall in ChatGPT referral traffic in analytics from about 9 October appears to be mostly a tracking gap: inline answer links stopped carrying the chatgpt.com tag and referrer, so visits showed up as Direct. A fix began rolling out on 15 October.

Evidence comes from vendor posts (Adobe, Graphite, LLM Pulse, Profound). The 'bug' confirmation is one person's private report from OpenAI; OpenAI's own release notes do not mention it.

Google's Gary Illyes reportedly said recovery after a core update typically takes three to six months (slowest six to twelve), and site moves one to three months.

Only from an attendee recap of Search Central Live Barcelona on 2 October 2026. Google has not published these figures.

Google's John Mueller reportedly said 'Couldn't fetch' on a valid sitemap usually reflects low crawl demand, which often depends on how Google rates the site's quality.

Not confirmed at the source; the transcript was unavailable.

Ahrefs warns that static sites often answer missing pages with a normal 200 status, usually because a catch-all rule serves the home page for every unknown address.

One practitioner case, no wider data.

Marie Haynes argues that a stalled domain move, with pages left unindexed for months despite correct redirects, may be Google re-judging the site's quality rather than a technical fault.

One hobby-blog case; the author calls it a theory.

Generated sitemaps on static sites often list pages that are marked noindex, and robots.txt cannot stand in for noindex.

General practice, no data.