Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google Search likely does not use ARIA Accessible Rich Internet Applications, for ranking or even indexing purposes, according to both John Mueller and Martin Splitt at Google. ARIA is a set of attributes you can add to HTML elements that define ways t…

Google may have hit Fortune Recommends with a search penalty, downgrading its Google search rankings. This may be related to the site reputation abuse policy, like it may have done previously to Forbes Advisor a few weeks ago and some other large publi…

Google’s John Mueller said he understands why some in our industry look to optimize for metrics within various SEO tool platforms, but he said there are not shortcuts in SEO and optimizing for those metrics won’t directly lead to Google search ranking …

Google is deprecating the ten-year-old Sitelinks Search Box. It is going to start to disappear from the search result snippets starting on November 21, 2024. This does not impact the normal sitelinks, just the search box.

Google’s AI Overviews seem to not show citations or link to sites that were hit by the helpful content update (and probably core updates), even when you ask the AI Overview directly about that site and even if that site is ranking well for that query i…

There is this interesting conversation on LinkedIn around a robots.txt serves a 503 for two months and the rest of the site is available. Gary Illyes from Google said that when other pages on the site are reachable and available, that makes a big diff…

Google is rolling out the Store ratings feature beyond US Search. It is rolling out to searchers in Australia, Canada, India and the United Kingdom. Although, we’ve seen examples of Google showing them in Australia and other countries over the years, …

Google added eight or so words between brackets to clarify that fields that aren’t explicitly listed in the robots.txt documentation aren’t supported. Why did they do this? Because sometimes Google gets questions about it.

Google announced two new features for Google Merchant Center (1) Video generation in Product Studio and (2) Amazon MCF integration with Merchant Center.

Google now supports Certification markup support for merchant listings in the product structured data documentation. Google wrote, “starting in April 2025, we’re replacing the EnergyConsumptionDetails type with the more robust Certification type, as th…

With Google removing the cache operator from its search service, Google has stopped supporting the noarchive directive in Google Search. The directive, the noarchive meta tag, would tell Google not to keep a cache copy of your page. Since Google doesn…

Google has updated its developer documentation to warn about sites using JavaScript-generated Product markup and that the search company recommends putting Product markup in the initial HTML for best results.

Google has updated its performance reports in Google Search Console to have the filters you set, stick. Meaning, the next time you go back to the report, it should be where you left it, with all the filters you set. You can of course reset the filters …

Google’s John Mueller was asked about if it is still okay to use noindex and canonicals at the same time and when to use one or the other. This is a topic we covered several times here over the years but I spotted a new Reddit thread with John’s commen…

John Mueller, a Google Search Advocate, said on Reddit, that he does not recommend you use generic server or CMS holding pages for new sites. Instead, either “keep DNS disabled or put up a custom holding page.”

Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, has been interviewed again – this time by Alyeda Solis. It is pretty similar to my interview with Google’s Search Liason, but this one is recorded and available for everyone to watch.

Google may have hit Forbes Advisor with a manual action, downgrading its rankings over maybe the site reputation abuse policy. Lars Lofgren wrote about this marketplace, as he put it, on September 18th and then a week or so later, it looks like it wa…

About 8 weeks ago, Google announced Google Search Console Recommendations and rolled it out to a limited number of properties within the platform. Google said the roll out will be slow and yea, it is slow. Daniel Waisberg from Google confirmed on Fri…

Google has refreshed and updated its web search policies documentation. The big change is Google added more language around the site reputation abuse policy, while expanding, simplifying and clarifying other sections of its search policies.

Google is reportedly working on fixing a bug with not being able to properly respond to a noindex directive on some JavaScript generated pages. This is happening for some React apps using Single Page Applications (SPAs) that have the noindex directive…