Search Engine Journal

Google Explains Why Its Crawler Ignores Your Resource Hints via @Sejournal, @MattGSouthern

Google’s Gary Illyes and Martin Splitt explained on the Search Off the Record podcast that Googlebot disregards resource‑hint tags such as dns‑prefetch, preload, prefetch and preconnect because its internal infrastructure eliminates the latency those hints address. They emphasized that metadata—including meta robots, canonical and hreflang links—must appear in the section, as tags placed in the body are ignored for security and parsing reasons. The duo also clarified that HTML validity is not a ranking signal, though it aids accessibility and user experience. These insights reshape how SEOs prioritize technical fixes.