Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Gary Illyes from Google said it is an “silly idea” to re-block or re-disallow pages after you allowed them to crawl that page in order for Google to see the noindex tags on that page. I apologize for the title of this story, it was a hard one to write…

Google has new structured data markup for the practice problems and math solver search results. We first saw these results in the Google Search results back in late December 2020. Now, Google has officially launched this feature and with that launch …

Google posted in the data anomalies page that the crawl stats report deep inside the Google Search Console interface had internal reporting issue between March 10 and March 23, 2021. As a result of the data issues, you may see a
“drop in data in this…

With all the unnecessary panic over the Google Page Experience update coming up in May, the question now is, will this update roll out slowly or abruptly? Will Google slowly roll out the impact of this update or will it be a jarring release all at onc…

The topic of hyphens between words is a classic old time SEO question, something we’ve covered here many times. Recently, John Mueller of Google was asked about how Google treats words with hyphenation. For example, is WiFi the same as Wi-Fi to Googl…

Here is a new question I have never seen asked before; does Google downgrade the search rankings of web sites that receive FTC warning letters about their medical and health content. The answer is no, not that I know of, but it is interesting that som…

Alan Kent, Developer Advocate at Google, posted a lightening talk on the Google YouTube channel around how to get your products in search. This can help e-commerce sites get more visibility and sales from Google Search.

Google’s John Mueller, once again, said that for SEO purposes, for ranking in Google purposes, you do not need to worry about your site’s bounce rate. John said this on Reddit “Google doesn’t use that for SEO, so if you’re focused on SEO, you can igno…

We’ve all seen the message in Google Search Console’s index coverage report for “Page indexed without content.” Google’s Gary Illyes said when you see that, most of the time (not all of the time), it is about “pages that are blocked by robots.txt.”
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Ever see one of your sites rank well for a featured snippet in Google Search but the information that was shown was not something you are proud of? Maybe it was inaccurate, maybe it has a typo, maybe it had some other issue? How do you update the feat…

Recently, Google’s John Mueller posted about what to do if your site goes offline. The advice was to serve a 503 server status code if the outage is short term. So someone asked if they can serve a 502 server status code instead. John Mueller said you…

Google’s John Mueller said in a video hangout on Friday that Google has stopped automatically moving sites to the mobile-first indexing system. Instead, the last batch of sites are being queued up and will all be moved over sometime in the coming mont…

Google added support for regional availability and pricing to Google Merchant Center / Google Shopping feeds in the United States. Regional availability and pricing let you provide product availability and variable pricing based on your business prese…

Google’s John Mueller was asked if Google looks at the number of blog posts on a blog as some sort of metric to figure out if the site should rank well or not. John Mueller said “Google doesn’t count your blog posts.”

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that he thinks that many SEOs and sites think about links “much more than necessary.” He said Google does “use links to help discover new content.” He didn’t mention ranking but yes, Google does use links for ran…

Google has made some updates to the meta robots directive help documentation, specifically by adding more examples for the max-snippet and specifying for each tag what Google’s default behavior is when the tags are omitted. I highly recommend you re-review these docs starting from the valid indexing & serving directives until the end of that section.

So while Google made some additions to the meta robots directives section of the robots help documents, Google’s Gary Illyes and Lizzi Harvey said more is to come. They said if you have feedback and want anything added or explained in the docs, to let…

Google has published some new and updated resources around video SEO. First, there is a new video, lighting talk, on the topic of video SEO best practices by Danielle Marshak, Product Manager at Google. Second, there is an updated help doc section on …

Over the past week or so, there has been a lot of chatter in the SEO industry around the potential threat third-party browser extensions can have on your core web vitals scores. Specifically how it might impact your rankings in Google Search based on h…

Over the past couple of days I am seeing more reports of people seeing Google multiple display product image thumbnails throughout the mobile search results snippets. Not just a few but in excess. Yes, Google does show product image thumbnails in the…