Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google’s John Mueller explained how Google handles redirects within its index. At the 5:30 mark in his November 10th SEO office hours hangout, John said they “put them (the URLs) into a shared cluster that we then use for canonicalization.”

Glenn Gabe submitted a question to Google’s John Mueller asking him how will Google roll out the passage indexing – what will it look like when it rolls out. In short, John said he doesn’t really know but based on his experience, Google will experimen…

Martin Splitt from Google said Google may be using machine learning in crawling in production right now, or it might be just an experiment, but here is how it does use machine learning for crawling in search. I should note, as far as he is aware, mach…

As you know, we now know the Google Page Experience Update is coming on May 2021. But don’t try to fool or trick the metrics, specifically the iFrame loophole. Google’s Addy Osmani said that the Chrome UX report does not take into account content in …

So I put John Mueller of Google on the hot seat and asked him what is up with Google taking away goodies from us like the request indexing tool. He said “I am not planning on taking away anything.” He said the survey was just for him to learn what, if…

Google has released a short video on how Search Quality Evaluators help Google make Google Search better. I assume this is part of Google trying to debunk some myths and get the word out that these Search Quality Evaluators do not manually impact the …

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that having an XML Sitemap file is “a minimal baseline for any serious website.” Basically, all serious websites should have an XML sitemap file part of it or it is not a serious website.

Got to say, this is an unusual response from Google’s John Mueller. In short, someone with an exact match domain asked John why his site is not ranking for its brand name. The web site domain has Christmas Trees in it and the search query he shared a…

Three weeks ago, Google “temporarily” suspended use of the request indexing tool within Google Search Console. Today, John Mueller of Google says he has no news yet on the tool but created a Google Form asking SEOs why they are missing the “URL submiss…

A webmaster or SEO said on a site he works with, about “18,000 urls were suddenly deindexed” by Google “in a few days.” And John Mueller from Google said on Twitter “things always come & go over time, so just hearing about 18k URLs dropping out doesn’t seem that surprising to me.”

What happens if you have two different canonical URLs listed on the same page, you know where they point to different URLs. John Mueller from Google said that leads to the canonical information being undefined. So Google will use other signals to det…

Google has documented that on October 28, 2020 it has, in some cases, misclassified some Google Discover data as video in the Performance report after it has been fixed. This may result in “a drop in your Discover report’s video appearance statistics,…

John Mueller from Google was asked why does Google sometimes rank a home page for a specific keyword phrase when there is a deeper page in the site that answers that query better. The home page is more generic and covers a wider topic but there is a m…

Valerie Stimac, a travel blogger, complained on Twitter that while her site’s content is ranking better than ever in Google Search, the traffic numbers from Google Search are down. She wrote “this is a classic case of Google’s erosion of organic traff…

This morning our Google friends, John Mueller, Martin Splitt, Gary Illyes and also Lizzi Harvey (Google’s technical writer) posted a new podcast. It was obviously fun to listen to but in it, Gary Illyes went super deep on how Google handles duplicate …

Last night I had to get clarification from Google about their internal project name DeepRank. In short, and as that amazing video said at the 44:10 mark “they named their project DeepRank after the deep learning methods used by BERT and the ranking as…

Google’s John Mueller was asked if sites with higher traffic are more likely to be given a cache link in Google Search. The answer John Mueller gave was no, “our caching in search isn’t dependent on traffic,” he said.

We have seen Google give official advice on how you should handle out of stock products on your web site. But what about products that you sell that are one-of-a-kind, made unique, made once, and sold to one person. What do you do there?

A week ago we reported that although Google told us they would sunset support for data-vocabulary.org back last April 6, 2020 and then they pushed it off to June 2020. But that came and went and Google still supported it a couple of weeks ago. Well, Go…

John Mueller of Google was asked if Google Search understand the difference between B2B and B2C web sites? John responded that no, not really, he said “we don’t have a direct understanding of the difference. They’re essentially webpages, if they can r…