Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

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.
…

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….

One other little tidbit or nugget from the Search Central Live event was that Gary answered how many times Google changed its search algorithm due to SEOs gaming the system. Gary said in the past ten years, he thinks it was about four or five times, th…

Has there been a time where Google has said they no longer use a specific ranking signal? I mean, they said this like 20 years ago with maybe the meta keywords tag? Google said this with rel next/prev, Google News stock tickers and keywords, and some o…

Google’s Danny Sullivan said to start, when the Page Experience Update rolls out, it won’t be a massive change. It might grow in terms of importance over the years. But to start, Danny said “it shouldn’t be the case that overnight, we flip some type o…

Google’s John Mueller said that having mixed content on your site and getting mixed content warnings won’t result in your site being removed from Google Search. We said previously that the Chrome mixed content notifications do not impact Google Search…

Some folks were complaining that SEO is to blame for the bloat on the web. Specifically when some sites that are so bloated with trackers and other add-ons that the sites are not only slow but slow down your computer. John Mueller from Google said “there is no SEO reason for making such terrible & bloated sites.”

Malte Ubl, a Technically a Software Engineer at Google, said he won’t be talking about any efforts around abuse and spam prevention for the upcoming Google Page Experience update. Specifically how some may try to fake the Chrome User Experience Report …

Gary Illyes from Google said in last night’s Google Central Live event that there is a benefit, I assume an SEO benefit, to having title tags longer than what is displayed in the search. He later added that you should keep the title tag “precise” to th…

Google’s John Mueller confirmed that Google Search does not have a penalty for having too many redirects. John said on Twitter “No, Google won’t penalize a site for having 15 redirects (or any other number).”