Google Explains Why Its Crawler Ignores Your Resource Hints
In a recent episode of the Search Off the Record podcast, Google’s Gary Illyes and Martin Splitt explained how Googlebot processes HTML—and why some common technical “SEO fixes” may not impact rankings. Resource Hints Don’t Help Googlebot Features like DNS prefetch, preload, and preconnect are designed to improve browser speed for users with slower internet connections. However, Illyes clarified that Google’s infrastructure doesn’t face those limitations. Googlebot can resolve DNS extremely fast, so these resource hints don’t provide crawling advantages. HTML Validation Isn’t a Ranking Factor Illyes also made it clear that valid HTML is not a ranking signal. HTML validity is binary—it either passes or fails—and small issues like a missing closing tag won’t impact user experience or rankings. Splitt added that while proper heading structure and semantic HTML are important for accessibility and usability, they don’t carry significant ranking weight. Why This Matters for SEO For busines...