John Mueller of Google had a nice one liner that I thought would be useful to highlight here. He said on Twitter “SEO is all about not requiring search engines to read your mind.”

The context is that when it comes to communicating information about your site to Google, do not confuse Google by sending Google conflicting signals. So don’t use tags or attributes that cause Google to say there is a conflict on some sorts. Like with hreflang or canonicals telling Google different things than what the site’s navigation is saying.

There are many examples – but this is what a lot of technical SEO is about, making sure Google knows exactly what the proper URLs are and how to crawl the site and content on the pages.

SEO is all about not requiring search engines to read your mind 🙂

— 🧀 John 🧀 (@JohnMu) October 2, 2021

John has said this before, mostly talking about SEO and consistency and being consistent and clear consistent signals.

Forum discussion at Twitter.