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Crawling Challenges: What the 2025 Year-End Report Tells Us.

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​Join Martin and Gary as they dive into Search Off the Record’s Episode 103, unpacking the 2025 Year-End report on crawling issues. Discover fascinating insights on faceted navigation, action parameters, irrelevant parameters and more, highlighting the biggest challenges faced by web crawlers last year. With humor and expert analysis, this episode reveals critical takeaways for webmasters and SEO professionals. Don’t miss valuable tips to enhance your site’s crawl efficiency!

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Resources:

URL structure best practices for Google Search → https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/url-structure

Crawling December: Faceted navigation →

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/12/crawling-december-faceted-nav

Xkcd (programmer humor) →

https://xkcd.com/327/

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Crawling Challenges: What the 2025 Year-End Report Tells Us – Transcript

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Search Off the Record takes you behind the scenes of Google Search and its inner workings! In each episode, the folks from the Search Relations team will give you background info on the decision-making behind launches, feature prioritization in Search Console, and the projects Google Search teams are working on. They will share fun stories from the many conferences they attend as well as from their day-to-day working life at Google. They will also dive into the currently trending conversations in the SEO community at large. Have a listen!


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How Browsers Really Parse HTML (and What That Means for SEO)

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Martin and Gary unpack how HTML parsing really works, why the HTML standard is so lenient, and how messy markup can silently break key SEO signals like hreflang and rel=canonical. They revisit validators and cross‑browser hacks from the Netscape/IE days, and discuss whether semantic HTML and strict validity truly matter for search. You’ll also hear when link hints like preload, prefetch, and DNS prefetch help performance (and indirectly SEO), and where meta and link tags really belong.

​ Resources:

HTML Living Standard → https://html.spec.whatwg.org/

Episode transcript → https://goo.gle/sotr105-transcript

Listen to more Search Off the Record → https://goo.gle/sotr-yt Subscribe to Google Search Channel → https://goo.gle/SearchCentral

Search Off the Record is a podcast series that takes you behind the scenes of Google Search with the Search Relations team.

#SOTRpodcast #SEO #GoogleSearch

Speakers: Martin Splitt, Gary Illyes

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How Browsers Really Parse HTML (and What That Means for SEO) – transcript

by

Search Off the Record takes you behind the scenes of Google Search and its inner workings! In each episode, the folks from the Search Relations team will give you background info on the decision-making behind launches, feature prioritization in Search Console, and the projects Google Search teams are working on. They will share fun stories from the many conferences they attend as well as from their day-to-day working life at Google. They will also dive into the currently trending conversations in the SEO community at large. Have a listen!


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Do You Still Need a Website in 2026?

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In this episode of Search Off the Record, Martin and Gary from the Google Search Relations team tackle a deceptively simple question: do you still need a website in 2026? Starting from the recurring industry claim that “the web is dead,” they explore how the web has evolved through the rise of apps, AI chatbots, and social platforms, and why the answer almost always ends up being “it depends.” Tune in for an engaging discussion on how websites remain relevant and what it means for content creation and discovery.

Episode transcript → https://goo.gle/sotr103-transcript

Listen to more Search Off the Record → https://goo.gle/sotr-yt

Subscribe to Google Search Channel → https://goo.gle/SearchCentral

Search Off the Record is a podcast series that takes you behind the scenes of Google Search with the Search Relations team.

#SOTRpodcast #SEO #GoogleSearch

Speakers: Martin Splitt, Gary Illyes

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