Google Answers Five SEO Lighting Round Questions In Less Than Two Minutes

Google’s John Mueller answered five different SEO related questions in a video less than two minutes long. It is called the SEO Lighting Round video where he answered the following questions.

Here is the video:

Here are the questions:

(1) Can a self referential canonical override an existing canonical or preferred page? (submitted by @adityaskrishnan) (0:04​)

It should be avoided, John said.

(2) Will putting the date and month in URLS affect my Google ranking?
(submitted by @VaranasiBlogger) (0:22​)

It is fine and doesn’t impact crawling, indexing or ranking, John said.

(3) I heard that using CDNs to deliver images might be a problem for Google Search since it’s not on my server and Google doesn’t support image canonicalization. (submitted by @loujay60606) (0:38​)

It is fine to use CDNs, John said.

(4) What is the best way to appear in Search if you have a global audience to target with a single domain? (submitted by @rahulsetia007) (0:57​)

It is fine to have a single domain, John said.

(5) Is it such a bad thing to leave the Google Webmasters verification file out of sitemap.xml? (submitted by @RMWPublishing) (1:20​)

You do not need to include the verification file there, John said.

If you want to ask John future questions, you can do so on Twitter using the hashtag #AskGooglebot.

I’m thinking it’s time to line up a second series of these! Which “evergreen” (non-boat) questions should we cover? I’d love to hear from you!

Drop me a reply here, or mention #AskGooglebot in a tweet. https://t.co/hY8fQLe4NZ

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) March 31, 2021

That’s all folks. I love the ending of the video of course.

Forum discussion at Twitter.