Google acknowledges that its help documentation isn’t always up-to-date, and says it’s worth researching recommended best practices for yourself.
This topic is discussed in the latest episode of Google’s SEO & Devs web series on YouTube, which is all about trusting the official help documentation.
Martin Splitt of Google’s Developer Relations team and iPullRank founder and managing director Michael King got together to discuss how Google’s documentation is causing developers to mistrust SEO professionals.
SEO advises developers based on information in official Google documentation.
Google aims to keep these documents accurate and trustworthy, but the information sometimes lags behind the actual work in SEO, and information that is no longer relevant.
One specific example they addressed was a situation that emerged in 2019 when Google revealed it was discontinuing support relative=”next” and relative=”previous” told the search community a few years ago.
This means that SEOs tell developers to use code that is no longer relevant to Google Search.
Google made no official announcement about this, but simply removed the documentation related to rel=”next” and rel=”prev”.
Until Google’s search advocate, John Mueller, received a question about it on Twitter, no one at the company told the search community about the change.
Some SEO professionals and developers may have come to this conclusion on their own after noticing that Google understands pagination well without using rel=”next” and rel=”prev”.
Here’s an example where your own research can help you understand how Google Search works, rather than just relying on the official documentation.
Splitt shared background on the situation and the difficult choices Google had to make in communicating these changes to the search community.
Why aren’t Google’s help documentation always up to date?
Google searches change quickly, so Split cautions against viewing company documents as the only source of truth.
Regarding the rel=”next” and rel=”prev” cases, Splitt says:
“The documentation isn’t always in sync. We’re doing our best to work with the team and help them keep the documentation updated, but in this case it happens every now and then, as a group of search quality engineers found out — ‘Hey , wait, we don’t really need rel-next and rel-prev links anymore to be sure that pagination is happening. We can figure this out ourselves from the rest of the content on the page.
When it was discovered that the code was no longer needed, Google’s engineers pulled support for it.
Splitt explains the decision-making process behind communicating this change to SEOs and developers.
“… what do you do? Did you update the documentation to silently delete that section because it’s no longer relevant?
Or are you going to say ‘Hey, by the way, that’s not necessary anymore. Honestly, this has not been necessary for the past six months.
It is very clear that people are reading the documentation, making recommendations to other people based on the documentation, and then those people are putting in the work, time and money to make it happen. “
Split goes on to say that the choice is either to remove the documentation and make it clear that rel=”next” and rel=”prev” are obsolete, or to keep the documentation in the knowledge that the code is no longer needed.
“And the other option is to let it exist in the document, even if it’s wrong it doesn’t hurt.
So we took a full positive approach and was like – ‘Well, that’s the way it is. It was removed a while ago, sorry for that, but now our documentation has been updated.
And I don’t think a single choice is easy or necessarily perfect, but that’s what happened. So I think we’re trying to update the documentation as much as possible. “
So that’s the story behind rel=”next” and rel=”prev” and why Google handles this situation this way.
The key takeaway from this story is to always test and do your own research.
Figuring out what works on your own is probably more reliable than Google’s help documentation.
If you don’t think something is necessary, even if Google recommends it, your intuition might be right.
See the full video below:
Featured Image: Screenshot from YouTube.com/GoogleSearchCentral
