Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

The topic of URLs for SEO and ranking is one that has been around since search engines first existed and 25+ years later, it is still a popular topic. Google has said time and time again that keywords in URLs don’t offer a significant ranking boost for…

Google said that core updates should have no impact on a site name in the Google Search results being updated or changed. When asked, John Mueller of Google wrote, “That shouldn’t be related to a core update.”

Did you ever run the Google Search Console URL inspection tool, and click on the view crawled page link, and then see a blank screenshot under the screenshot tab? It might not be an issue, says Gary Illyes of Google. As long as you see the HTML you wan…

Google’s John Mueller said that simply adding country codes to your URLs won’t result in “any change at all” for regional ranking reasons. He added, changing your URLs will result in “temporary fluctuations” because of the URL change but it won’t help …

A Redditor posted a question asking if startups in 2025 need a blog. This was posted in the SEO section of Reddit, so John Mueller replied by just saying “no.” I guess a startup does not “need” a blog for SEO purposes, it is not a requirement.

Talk about a busy month – the last 30 days has been pretty wild. We had the November 2024 core update finish in December, then we had a new December 2024 core update start and finish, while also having the December 2024 spam update start and finish in …

Google’s John Mueller was asked if the Google Search Console screenshot feature in the URL Inspection Tool is what Google Search sees. John responded saying, “For the most part, yes” and then added some caveats.

Google has posted a new help section for Google Merchant Center, a Merchant Center Next Glossary. This glossary defines key Merchant Center terms and links you to related articles with more detail about each term.

Google’s John Mueller said, “It makes no sense to block” privacy, disclaimers, or other legal types of pages from your site. He added on Reddit, “They don’t cause a ‘duplicate content issue’.”

Google Merchant Center now lets merchants specify which payment methods and options they offer customers. Google would normally handle this in an automated way but now Google is letting you override those payment options, in case Google is getting it …

Mark Williams-Cook gave an unbelievable presentation at SearchNorwich named Improving your SEO with conceptual models. Lucky for you and me, this presentation was posted on YouTube for us all to enjoy. It covers how Mark found an exploit in Google’s e…

Forbes has reportedly fired some of its freelancers for some stories over its ongoing issue with Google’s site reputation abuse policy, aka parasite SEO. The Verge wrote, “Forbes will stop using freelancers for some types of stories indefinitely ‘” and…

Jonathan Jones attended the Google Search Central Live event in Zurich last week and posted excellent and detailed notes about the event, including a bit more on the more often core updates. But he also covered how Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liai…

Google’s John Mueller reiterated in a big way that SEOs and site owners should not spend time disavowing “toxic” links. He said it is a “billable waste of time” to disavow toxic links, as provided in some of these SEO toolsets.

Google has repurposed its 2014 blog post on faceted navigation best practices (which we covered a decade ago) and created a new help document page named Managing crawling of faceted navigation URLs.

Google’s Daniel Waisberg confirmed that the new 24-hour date filter that is in the Google Search Console web interface is not yet supported by the Google Search Console API. Of course, you can query the API for any date range and it will bring back dat…

Google’s John Mueller said it again, he said on LinkedIn, “We’ve been pretty clear that Core Web Vitals are not giant factors in ranking, and I doubt you’d see a big drop just because of that.” Google has been saying Core Web Vitals are important in ge…

Google is now saying it has ranking systems that “aim to understand if a section of a site is independent or starkly different from the main content of the site. This helps us surface the most useful information from a range of sites.” This is the reas…

Google has added a new search document on Google Trends while also making some small updates to the URL structure, best practices documentation, and favicons documentation. Google has been doing a lot of videos around Google Trends, so the new document…

Google Search Console’s performance report seems to have a bug where it is showing almost zero data for today. I can replicate this across numerous Search Console properties, so maybe something is stuck with Search Console right now.