Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Martin Splitt of Google gave me a softball yesterday when he said on Twitter “all things being equal (spoiler: they never are), a page with CWV field data may have a tiny advantage over one without.” In short, if your page has core web vitals field da…

In 2019, Google had issues with displaying images in the rich results recipe carousel for a nice number of recipe sites. The issue I think was resolved twice and ultimately fixed. But it might be happening again, in 2021.

Google is likely going to keep releasing new features and functionality for Google Search Console over the years. John Mueller of Google kind of confirmed that when he said on Twitter that the Search Console team is preparing for “future functionality…

John Mueller of Google wrote something on Twitter that caught my eye (well, everything he writes on Twitter catches my eye but this one more than others). He said “Yeah, the difference between technically indexed, and practically indexed is tricky.” So…

Google has upgraded the Search Console reports specifically for the Q&A and FAQ structured data. Now Google will check the validity of FAQ and Q&A structured data that is below the root entity level.

Google announced that its PageSpeed Insights tool as of March 3, 2021 uses http/2 to make network requests, that is if the server supports it. If your site is on HTPT/2, you may see your PageSpeed Insights scores go up as a result. No, your rankings …

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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