Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google’s John Mueller said that “the total number [of backlinks] essentially is completely irrelevant” to rankings in Google in a video hangout last week. I heard the statement and didn’t cover because it is SEO 101 but then I saw some of the responses…

Google has enhanced the associations controls within Google Search Console. Google now makes it super clear where your Search Console account is associated with, in terms of other Google accounts. The list of associations includes Analytics, YouTube, G…

Google’s revised mobile-first indexing deadline is coming up in the next several weeks. Google said it is going 100% into mobile-first indexing. Google moved the deadline from September 2020 to March 2021. John Mueller of Google said today the March…

Google has made a change to its performance report around reporting on your Web Stories. This change may lead to seeing more impressions and clicks from Google Discover to your web stories.

Google may have a bug with the URL inspection tool in Google Search Console specific to websites on HTTP/2. The tool shows a malformed response when it is run on the HTTP/2 server.

Google told one site owner, this is specific advice to one specific site owner and not meant to be a generalization for all sites, that he should not focus on his individual pages but focus more on the category level pages. The issue was the individua…

Google’s John Mueller said on Reddit “no” WhoisGuard, the NameCheap domain privacy setting, does not impact your SEO or rankings on Google. Google does not care if you use domain privacy settings or not when you register your domain name.

Google made a small change to how it plots the core web vitals data in Google Search Console. The change goes into effect on February 17, 2021 and using less than as a boundary, Google is using less than or equal to.

Google’s Gary Illyes said that Google Search can process JavaScript redirects but Google still does not recommend using JavaScript redirects because other search engines might not pick up on it.

Google’s John Mueller said Google may discover and index URLs it finds in form action attributes, just like it does when it finds URLs in simple text files. Again, these are not normal HTML hyperlinks but URLs listed in files.

Danny Sullivan from Google said Google is “looking at” providing a mechanism to block pages or subsections of your site from being displayed in Google Discover. This comes off the controversy that there are new manual actions for Discover and Google Ne…

I see a ton, absolutely a ton, of confusion in the SEO industry around the Google launch of passage based ranking. A reminder, according to Google, passage based ranking launched in the US English results in the afternoon of February 10th PST time. Bu…

Dan Shure shared a screenshot on Twitter of a client of his who got a big win in Google Discover. Then they decided to create more articles on the same topic to see if those new articles can ride the same Google Discover wave and it seemed to work.
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Valentin Pletzer along with Saijo George came up with a little trick or hack to get Google Search Console to show you a screenshot of the middle or portion of your page. Normally, the URL inspection tool screen shot is of the top of the page only but …

Google’s John Mueller posted one of the more detailed responses I’ve seen from him on the topic of overall search spam, penalties, quality algorithms and more. I am not sure if the comment is showing up anymore on Reddit, so here is a screenshot of it….

Lily Ray posted a Twitter poll asking the SEO industry if they think the core web vitals, or I guess the upcoming Google Page Experience Update, will have an “discernable impact” on your Google organic rankings. As expected, the results are somewhat al…

A couple of weeks ago, the SEO industry couldn’t stop talking about stop words. SEMrush posted a list of “SEO stop words” and the community began buzzing. John Mueller of Google even responding saying on Twitter “I wouldn’t worry about stop words at …

Google has added a new AMP error to the Search Console AMP enhancements report for disallowed !important CSS qualifier. This was added back on January 19, 2021 and as a result, you may see an increase in the number of AMP errors reported after that da…

With the launch of passage ranking this past week, there has been a lot of confusion about if you can “see” these in the Google search results. The answer is no, you cannot see them in the search results as we covered last week and December 2020.
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Google’s John Mueller said Google does not have manual action penalties for building sites that are missing logos, or missing the menu links at the top or even the footers at the bottom. John said on Twitter “I’m not aware of any manual actions / penal…