Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google said it is now able to catch “20-times the number of scammy pages,” that it did in the past, leading to a reduction of “these scams by more than 80% in Search.” Google credits investments in AI-powered scam detection systems and improved scam c…

Google held another Google Creator Summit where they invited 7 creators on a fully paid expense trip to their Washington, D.C. office to spend the first two days in some larger Small Business Summit and then day three with Danny Sullivan, Paul Haahr an…

Google’s AI crawler, Google-Extended, the crawler it uses for Gemini and other related AI services, does render itself and can render JavaScript, just like Googlebot, Google’s main web search crawler.

Here is our monthly Google Webmaster Report – the May 2025 edition – where I summarize the past 30 days or so of the big organic Google related news in one place. Google did not have any official Google ranking updates but we sure did see several days …

We know Google will be bringing Google Discover to the desktop interface, heck, we’ve seen Google testing it for a while now. But did you know that Google will also show the breakdown of mobile versus desktop performance of Google Discover in Google S…

Google’s John Mueller said having “four identical links on a page to another page seems fine & common to me.” He said, don’t worry if you have that in your navigation, and implied it won’t have an impact on your SEO.

Google’s John Mueller explained that changing the dates in your XML Sitemaps lastmod date to all show today, the most recent day, won’t favor your rankings or SEO. He said on Reddit, “setting today’s date in a sitemap file isn’t going to be something t…

I am hearing reports that the Google Search Console API and tools that use the API, including Big Query exports, bulk exports and third party tools, are stuck with data from April 22nd but nothing sooner. It seems like there is something stuck in the …

Google’s John Mueller pretty much said that using image streaming techniques will not result in an SEO friendly outcome. He actually said, “It’s a great way to prevent your images from being found through search engines.”

Google updated its Google Merchant Center merchant listing structured data documentation to removed the EnergyConsumptionDetails properties and added an alternative solution to the certificationIdentification property. But keep in mind that the hasEner…

Google announced it will be deprecating the Special announcement structured data on July 31, 2025. This structured data was introduced during COVID as a way to communicate special announcements from websites and businesses related to health and safety.

Google announced it has refreshed its Shopping tab listings report which it initially launched in November 2022 and renamed it to the Merchant opportunities report. The refreshed report now includes details about payments methods and store ratings, Goo…

Google’s John Mueller said if you have hreflang tags that point to a 301 redirect, it is probably okay. But you probably also want to automate the process of setting up those hreflang tags so that there is no redirect.

Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, said it again, that Google does not have a system to recognize if a site is run by a big brand and then automatically just ranks it higher. He said on X, “but no, we don’t have a brand-ranking system.”

It appears that Google is letting Reddit’s AI translated pages rank too well within its search results. This is in addition to Google letting Reddit get a lot of other search visibility, but AI translation, well, that should really not perform so well.

It’s time for the monthly Google Webmaster Report – the April 2025 version. This month we had the Google March 2025 core update kick off and finish rolling out. Google launched AI Mode, AI Overviews are now powered by Gemini 2.0, we saw some weird AI …

Last month we reported that Google News Publisher Center changes are coming, well those changes should have happened and been fully completed by today. Google updated its help document on the topic to say “Google News is fully transitioning to automati…

Google made a really small change to its spam policies documentation to say, “In the context of Google Search, spam refers to techniques used to deceive users or manipulate our Search systems into ranking content highly.”

Google’s John Mueller responded to a concern on Reddit about a site that scored a D with its Pingdom score. Pingdom measures sites uptime and overall page speed metrics. John Mueller responded to the concern saying, “this is not affecting your SEO.”

Google would not give a specific date for when we will see independent sites to start surfacing better and higher in Google Search. As a reminder, Google wrote with the March 2025 core update, “We also continue our work to surface more content from cre…