Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

When Google announced the launch date of the Google Page Experience Update it also said that they may launch a label or indicator in the search results to convey to the searcher which pages do well with those metrics. We saw Google testing this icon a…

Google has updated the index coverage report in Google Search Console with more “more fine-grained” status and categories. The change will cause some of the errors or statuses to “relabeled with the new, more specific categories,” Google said.

We have seen John Mueller of Google respond to this question before, the question of why does my competitor rank above me when they are doing X, Y and Z wrong. Why does this site rank when they are spamming or have lower quality content, etc. The ans…

Here is a SEO new question I don’t think I’ve seen before. Someone asked if you need to link to all your pages from your home page. The answer is obviously no but not all new SEOs or site owners know this. John Mueller of Google said on Twitter “No, …

We’ve heard of Google ranking copied scraped content before and even getting the canonical wrong. But here is a clear night and day example of a site that copied another site completely, with the logo and everything but the URLs and Google Search thoug…

Google’s John Mueller responded to a concern in the Reddit forums that when it comes to the Salesforce Commerce Cloud, the only real way to use a 404 page not found, is not to use a 404 but a 410 status code. John Mueller of Google said “404 is fine. …

Google seems to be categorizing and labeling news articles in mobile search by intent, such as interviews or other intents. Valentin Pletzer shows a screen shot of this in action. I am not sure if this is new but it is interesting to see Google autom…

You don’t have to worry about email spam getting you in direct trouble in Google web search. Gary Illyes from Google confirmed that Google won’t take action in web search, through a manual action in Search Console, if you get caught spamming folks via …

The folks at the Google Analytics posted on Twitter yesterday that if you are using Google Data Studio and using the connection feature to Search Console, you can now bring in query data filtered by Google News sources. Google said “the Data Studio Se…

Gary Illyes from Google confirmed he is slowly working on improving the robots.txt tester tool, which is currently available on the old version of Google Search Console. He said on Twitter “we’re currently in the process(*) of integrating the tester wi…

Google Search Console Coverage report and URL inspection tool silently follow redirects, as John Mueller of Google put it a while back. Glenn Gabe posted a useful reminder on Twitter yesterday that Search Console reports on destination urls and “if yo…

Google’s John Mueller had to confirm that you do not need to have a Google My Business verified business listing to show up in Google Web Search. You do need a Google My Business listing to show up well in Google Maps and in the local pack results or …

Well, 2020 is over – phew, right? December was a wild wild month in terms of what SEOs and webmasters need to be concerned with around Google Search. We had the December 2020 core update and some unconfirmed updates. We learned more about the page ex…

It seems like Google has once again pruned which sites are eligible to show FAQ/How To rich results in Google Search. This started around December 21st and RankRanger’s tracking tools shows the change but the Mozcast tool does not. Koen Knol noticed fo…

No, this is not new, Google has been sending out these “note from your reviewer” notifications since 2014. But they are rare and maybe, just maybe, Google will be doing more of these in the future. Kristine Schachinger recently received one before th…

At SMX Virtual earlier this month, John Mueller of Google graciously accepted to speak at the event and he shared a lot of amazing tips and changes in search in his presentation. But he also shared some outlook ideas looking forward to 2021 in search …

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that passage indexing/rankings and the page experience update are “very different things.” This came about when Michel Fortin asked if the two might launch together.

In the last Google Search Console training video series of the year, Daniel Waisberg of Google brought in a special guest, the Engineering lead for Search Console – Hillel Maoz. In this video they discuss a bit of what happens behind the scenes.
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A couple of weeks ago we reported that Google Search Console said “issue validation is temporarily disabled due to upcoming changes in the report.” Well, it might be working for some folks, even back when I first reported it. Note – the message is sti…

Google’s Danny Sullivan has said that using the nosnippet tag won’t prevent your pages or passages from your pages from being ranked in Google Search. Danny Sullivan said on Twitter “you can’t use it to block parts of a page from being indexed for ran…