Google Reaffirms HTML for SEO, Downplays Localized Subdirectories

Image credit: Abondance

Google representatives clarified that HTML remains the standard for search engine optimization, offering no inherent SEO advantages for content formatted in Markdown.

Search engines and their crawlers are designed to process HTML and extract plain text, a fundamental process for content discovery and indexing, according to statements from Google.

John Mueller, a Search Advocate at Google, emphasized that creating parallel Markdown versions of a website is not recommended, citing increased workload, technical complexity, and the potential for broken versions to be indexed by artificial intelligence.

Regarding international site structures, Google stated that the choice between generic subdirectories, such as /blog/, and localized ones, like /en-us/blog/, yields no practical difference for SEO.

Mueller and Martin Splitt, a Developer Advocate at Google, both recommended that website administrators select the simplest subdirectory solution to manage their international content strategies.

Duplicating identical content across different countries, even when utilizing hreflang tags, is discouraged by Google, which advises either maintaining a single global English version or ensuring content is genuinely localized for specific regions.

The clarifications were reported by Search Engine Roundtable, detailing Google’s official stance on best practices for content formatting and international site architecture.

Source: Abondance