Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google has added to its Merchant listing structured data documentation help page that it now supports the Product.category property and a new Sale duration mechanism within the schema.

John Mueller from Google said that the new Content Signals robots.txt directive invented by Cloudflare last year has “no effects whatsoever for any crawler or LLM.” He added that it “just adds bloat and future maintenance to your robots.txt file.” As f…

Google has fixed the page indexing report within Google Search Console after it was struck and delayed for over three weeks. It was literally just fixed within minutes of this story going live, as I continuously check the report like an unwell-OCD man.

Here is the monthly Google Webmaster report, where I summarize the major organic Google Search news and SEO topics from the past month. The big news was the Google June 2026 spam update, which took only two days to roll out and felt like it started ear…

Google updated how it handles sending searchers to AMP pages within Google Search. Now Google will send searchers directly to publisher-hosted AMP pages instead of the cached pages displayed in an AMP viewer. Google said this was done because it “simpl…

Google AI Overviews can show the contents of the markdown files of web pages directly in the snippets within those AI Overviews. Google’s John Mueller called this “unexpected” and that this does not mean Google treats markdown files any differently tha…

Google AI Overviews can show the contents of the markdown files of web pages directly in the snippets within those AI Overviews. Google’s John Mueller called this “unexpected” and that this does not mean Google treats markdown files any differently tha…

Google has always allowed you to request that content be removed from Google Search via the legal DMCA request form. But in the past year or so, this legal route has become a negative SEO nightmare. Real content, owned by the original publisher and w…

The Google Search Console Generative AI performance reports just launched recently and already Google has documented a data logging bug with the Discover and Generative AI in Discover search performance reports.

Google’s John Mueller said that while it is useful for site owners to add meta descriptions to their web pages, it is “definitely not a requirement,” he added. The usefulness comes from sometimes writing a meta description, “helps you to figure out a …

Earlier this month, Google announced new ways to control how Google’s general search AI features (like AI Mode and AI Overviews) can use your content and link to your content. Well, Google has released a super detailed help document explaining how it a…

Google’s John Mueller explained when Google will count an impression for a web page within the generative AI features in Google Search. In short, there needs to be a link to your site being shown in AI Overviews / AI Mode for it to show as an impressi…

The page indexing report within Google Search Console is now two weeks delayed. It is stuck at June 11, 2026, for me, and has not been updated in 14 days. Google has been reporting issues with Search Console often enough, so this is not unusual, but …

Google seems to be expanding access to the new Search Console generative AI performance reports to more regions, outside of just the UK. I see a number of people in India who are now reporting seeing the new AI report. I personally do not see these new…

Google’s John Mueller warned a site owner from moving his domain name from a .ca to .com just for branding purposes.

Google held a Search Central Live event in Milan this week and spoke about several topics including chunking, site-wide signals, AI settings in Search Console, commondity versus non-commodity content, paywalled content, subscriptions for news sites, wh…

Google has updated its site move and domain migrations help document to note that for domain migrations, you should make sure to submit Change of Address requests for all domain variations. Google said the “domain migrations work best when all variants…

Google’s latest Off The Record podcast was titled Markdown vs HTML with John Mueller and Martin Splitt talking about the use cases for both. In short, both said that when it comes to SEO and Search…

John Mueller from Google said that when it comes to having a multinational site, making a specific US folder structure won’t give you any practical SEO difference. It might be easier for you to manage or for your to analyze with your analytics and data…

Google has updated its guide for optimizing for generative AI search help document to clarify that (1) LLMS.txt files don’t help or hurt with search rankings and (2) AI files, markdown files, etc are not used in Google Search.