Happy November! This is another week of SEO news. Do you hear the Christmas jingles ringing yet? We are just 50 days away from Christmas. Without further ado, let us get into our list of SEO news for the week. 

• Google’s John Mueller on having duplicate content URLs in the sitemap
• Case study on whether local reviews affect SEO 
• Google Search Console verification does not affect crawling

31/10 – Google Search Console Verification Does Not Affect Crawling

A Twitter user asked John Mueller on Twitter whether having your website by Google Search Console would increase your crawling intervals. 

In response, John Mueller replied saying that crawling is independent of whether a website is attached to Google Search Console or not. 

However, webmasters should note that you can use the URL inspection tool to manually push URLs to be crawled faster. However, it is only on an URL-to-URL basis and done manually. 

Google’s John Mueller On Having Duplicate Content URLs In The Sitemap

Again, a Twitter user by the name of John Dietrich asked John Mueller whether having duplicate content URLs in the sitemap would affect a website’s ranking. 

In response, John Mueller responded saying that it would unlikely affect the immediate rankings for the whole site. However, you would initially see confused crawling as an early effect due to the duplicate content URLs. 

Case Study On Whether Local Reviews Affect SEO 

A local SEO expert – Joy Hawkins, recently conducted a study on whether adding specific keywords in local reviews would affect a business’s SEO. 

To conduct her research, she chose something that was out-of-season, a Christmas tree business in the middle of summer, to have the most accurate result as possible. 

And over the next few months, she had six different people leave reviews to make it look more natural, incorporating keywords such as “fresh cut Christmas trees” and “Christmas trees”  into the reviews.

Ultimately, the result showed that adding keywords to local reviews does not affect your local SEO. The conclusion? Don’t coach your clients to include clients certain words in their weirds; keep it natural and genuine. 

The End 

That is it for this week’s news. How was it? Did you learn anything valuable? Let me know in the comments below and as always, see you next week! 

Updated: 16 May 2025