Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

For many many years, some SEOs have a strategy of breaking up their XML sitemap files into categories. SEOs do it for various reasons, sometimes it is dependent on the site and site structure.

Are you the type of SEO that digs into all the Google Search Console reporting every single day, to find technical issues or other problematic issues? Or do you sit back and just wait for an email from Search Console warning you about an issue you need…

It looks like the Google Search Console link report has gone haywire and is broken pretty badly. Tons of SEOs are seeing zero links in the report, whereas others are seeing huge drops in the link counts in the report.

Google added the hasAdultConsideration property to the Merchant listing and Product variant documentation, and it is now officially supported and listed as a recommended property for both Merchant listing and Product variant structured data with Google…

Google has added markdown files, .md.txt files, to the Google Search help documents. But John Mueller from Google said that these are not being used for Search or generative AI responses in Search.

On Friday, Google published a new help document named Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search. This document covers much of what Googlers have said over the years, including a myth-busting section that will trigger some in t…

On Friday, Google published a new help document named Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search. This document covers much of what Googlers have said over the years, including a myth-busting section that will trigger some in t…

Google’s John Mueller said, “The indexing API is inundated by bloggers trying to act like legitimate sites.” This means that Google needs to be more careful about who and what they accept through the Google indexing API.

Google updated the leading paragraph in the search spam policies to clarify that the policies apply to the Google Search AI responses, such as AI Overviews and AI Mode (or whatever else is AI-generated). Google said, “the Google Search spam policies al…

Google had yet another Search Console reporting bug, this time with the Discover performance report. Between May 7, 2026 and May 8, 2026, Google confirmed a data logging issue that can result in the report showing fewer clicks and impressions. It is …

A new study from Ahrefs says that adding schema does not and did not boost citations on any of the AI platforms including Google (AI Overviews or AI Mode), ChatGPT and others. “Adding schema produced no major uplift in citations on any platform,” Ahre…

Google announced on Friday that Google Search, as of May 7th, no longer shows FAQ rich results within the Google Search results. Google will also drop reporting on it within Google Search Console and the respective APIs in the future.

Google proposed a number of changes to the EU in order to avoid fines from the European Union. One of those changes is around the site reputation abuse policy, which the EU watchdog said directly impacts a common and legitimate way for publishers to m…

Google posted new developer documentation for how to authenticate requests with Web Bot Auth. This is a “new cryptographic protocol that helps websites to validate that bots are authentic,” Google wrote.

A month ago, Google posted that between the dates of May 13, 2025 through April 27, 2026, just about 50 weeks, there was a “logging error prevented Search Console from accurately reporting impressions.” Google updated the post to now say “This issue h…

A month ago, Google posted that between the dates of May 13, 2025 through April 27, 2026, just about 50 weeks, there was a “logging error prevented Search Console from accurately reporting impressions.” Google updated the post to now say “This issue h…

SEOs and site owners are always complaining about indexing issues with Google Search. Why is this page not indexed, why is that page not indexed. But some seasoned SEOs are asking if Google is more picky about what it indexes in the past month or so, …

I missed last month’s Google Webmaster Report, so I am combining both April and May into one big report. Google completed rolling out the March 2026 spam update in March, and started the March core update, which completed in April. We also had a lot …

As you know, Google announced a new search spam penalty for back button hijacking. Site owners have until June 15, 2026 to remove any such functionality from its site or it will be subject to a manual action and/or automated algorithmic adjustment. Now…

A couple of weeks ago, Google stunned many by saying that they updated their spam report to pass along all information to the site that you enter in the spam report. There was a lot of backlash to that and Google reverted, now saying if there is person…