Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

A couple of weeks ago we reported a steep dive in the number of featured snippets Google showed in its search results. Those numbers have not improved and not it is settling in that this may be the new norm – for now. Glenn Gabe shared some examples …

Google’s John Mueller asked if it would help if a site timestamped its content and pages using blockchain. John responded “Google doesn’t use that.” In short, he said Google does not use blockchain for search.

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that when you want to “unindex,” remove indexed pages from Google Search, you should not block Google with robots.txt, but rather use noindex. He said only unindex pages when if you don’t care if the page doesn’t…

Google has announced that it is now offering a free version of its hotel listings, this is now in addition to the paid option. This is very much like how Google made Google Shopping free last year. Google wrote “we’re improving this experience by makin…

Google’s John Mueller was asked about an error with Sitemaps files. The question was around Google not being able to fetch and read two of the few XML Sitemap files but those files are perfectly valid. John said it can be a lot of issues but there is …

Despite all the new messaging that the Google Page Experience update won’t result in massive changes and the impact won’t be huge after it rolls out, many SEOs will still prioritize their Core Web Vitals / Google Page Experience optimization efforts.
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Google’s John Mueller listed a few reasons why your site may not show rich results in the Google Search Results. One of the three reasons is that sometimes Google does not trust the site enough, on the site level, for Google to warrant that the site s…

Daniel Waisberg of Google released a really nice explanatory video on how crawl budget works with crawl demand and crawl rates. He also spent most of the video doing a deep dive into the new crawl stats report in Search Console.

Yesterday reports came in that there was a spike in errors around Google FAQ schema powered through Yoast. The issue is being resolved and should be fixed today but supposedly Google changed how it parses FAQ schema and it caused FAQ rich result to dr…

Most SEOs I know are still grumbling a little about the rel=next and rel=prev is no longer supported, as of two years ago. Google did give us pagination SEO advice in an unstructured format a while ago but really has not put together a document SEOs c…

Here is the monthly Google Webmaster Report where I sum up the more important topics webmasters and SEOs care about when it comes to Google organic search. This past month was super busy with numerous unconfirmed updates, passage ranking rolling out, …

A couple of months ago John Mueller of Google was asked a question about a site with a mega menu of about 1,000 links in it but those links would dynamically change based on user action. John responded that it might be an issue for Google to understan…

Last week, Max Prin from Merkle, notified me that one of his awesome free tools on technicalseo.com was removed over a false DMCA takedown request. There are a couple of issues here (1) the DMCA takedown was false and successfully removed his free tool…

Google Sites over a decade, almost 15 years, has automatically generated XML sitemap files to be used for Google Search Console. Well, that is no longer the case. Google has removed the Google Sites sitemaps details from the documentation yesterday.
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Google posted a Friday blog post named “providing better product information for shoppers.” The blog post mentioned GTINs over 20 times, how is that for keyword density? GTINs, if you are not aware, is one of the more popular product identification n…

Google’s John Mueller was asked how someone can help Google understand which pages of a site it really wants Google to index. A webmaster said that Google was only indexing 10% or so of the site’s pages in the sitemap file. He asked how can they nota…

Here is a fun SEO question I found the other day where Google’s John Mueller if Google passes PageRank to mailto or telephone hyperlinks. The answer is no, Google only follows links between canonical URLs and in mailto and tel links, there is no real …

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that the place where your URL structure matters most is likely with international websites and sites that have sections of adult oriented content. It will help Google figure out the site better and know how to seg…

If you missed the live Google Search Central Live conference from the other day, you are in luck, the recording is now officially available on YouTube. It is relatively short for a conference and won’t take you too long to watch.

Google seems to be showing fewer featured snippets in the search results since February 19, 2021. All three tools that I am aware that track featured snippets all showed a significant decline in the percentage of search results with featured snippets….