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Search Off the Record takes you behind the scenes of Google Search and its inner workings! In each episode, the folks from the Search Relations team will give you background info on the decision-making behind launches, feature prioritization in Search Console, and the projects Google Search teams are working on. They will share fun stories from the many conferences they attend as well as from their day-to-day working life at Google. They will also dive into the currently trending conversations in the SEO community at large. Have a listen!

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  2. How Browsers Really Parse HTML (and What That Means for SEO)

How Browsers Really Parse HTML (and What That Means for SEO)

Feb 26, 2026

Martin and Gary unpack how HTML parsing really works, why the HTML standard is so lenient, and how messy markup can silently break key SEO signals like hreflang and rel=canonical. They revisit validators and cross‑browser hacks from the Netscape/IE days, and discuss whether semantic HTML and strict validity truly matter for search. You’ll also hear when link hints like preload, prefetch, and DNS prefetch help performance (and indirectly SEO), and where meta and link tags really belong.

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Resources:

HTML Living Standard → https://html.spec.whatwg.org/

Episode transcript → https://goo.gle/sotr105-transcript


Listen to more Search Off the Record → https://goo.gle/sotr-yt  Subscribe to Google Search Channel → https://goo.gle/SearchCentral

Search Off the Record is a podcast series that takes you behind the scenes of Google Search with the Search Relations team.

 #SOTRpodcast #SEO #GoogleSearch

Speakers: Martin Splitt, Gary Illyes