Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google announced that it will begin to preemptively disapprove free standard listings for products that are marked as out of stock in the product data in Merchant Center, but are in stock on their landing pages. I do not think this applied to paid lis…

Google is once again testing how-to schema rich results on the desktop search results again. Brian Freiesleben first noticed this a couple of days ago. Google first tested this for a couple weeks back in late May and then discontinued the test.
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So yesterday during John Mueller’s keynote talk at PubCon, he summed up what has been announced over the year around SEO changes at Google. One was on the mobile-indexing changes and the deadline. That caused some confusion amongst the SEO industry t…

Google announced it has suspended, temporarily, the request indexing feature, within the URL inspection tool in Search Console. It didn’t say why, outside of making infrastructure changes. But it comes at a bad time as tons of sites are complaining ab…

Google has just updated the Search Quality Raters Guidelines PDF. The last time it was updated was on December 5, 2020, which was 10 weeks and 10 days ago. The new date on this document is October 14, 2020. It has been expanded from 168 pages to 175 p…

Google had added two notations around specific data anomalies within Google Search Console with Web Stories. Both are related to Google Discover and Web Stories, one was related to the launch of Web Stories on Google Discover.

Google’s John Mueller said in a video he recorded on October 2, 2020 but just uploaded to the Google YouTube channel this morning that the Google News team is backed up in accepting new sites into Google News.

Thomas Steiner, a web developer advocate at Google, said that soon you will be able to style a text fragment URL highlight on pages with the target-text pseudo class. So instead of the highlighted text being yellow, it can be blue, green, purple or wha…

A question that comes up often in the SEO world is how long does it take after one submits a reconsideration request in Google Search Console to get a response. It can vary and earlier this year we seemed to have some backlogs there but John Mueller o…

When Google announced that Web Stories will be shown on the Google Discover feed, the announcement said the Stories carousel will be “at the top of Discover.” But it is not at the top, it is towards the top as Vamsee Jasti from Google clarified.
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Google released the next the next Search Off the Record podcast, which was actually recorded at least two months ago, Gary Illyes from Google broke down what the Google caffeine index and system actually does.

Earlier this year, Google updated the change of address tool but maybe the new tool makes things a bit less clear? When it launched, it seemed clear to me. But when you do a site move, it will tell you “this site is currently moving to…” And that w…

A few weeks ago, I reported about many publishers complaining their Google Discover traffic dropped off a cliff right around August 10th, right around the same time of the August 10th Google Search glitch. While I have seen some folks report recoverie…

Gary Illyes from Google said the Google Search Console team is “working hard on estimating the impact and potentially annotating the reports affected.” That means Google may add annotations and short footnotes to document the indexing bugs specificall…

Just to keep you up-to-date on the status of Google’s efforts to fix the indexing bugs. Google said last night that it has restored 25% of the URLs impacted by the canonical issue and about 50% of those impacted by the mobile-indexing issue.

Britney Muller spotted someone using Apache Nutch with a GoogleBot useragent name when crawling a site. Google has confirmed GoogleBot does not use Nutch in its useragent. Nutch is “highly extensible and scalable open source web crawler software proje…

It has been an interesting month with Google Search. We saw numerous bugs with Google Search around canonicalization, mobile-indexing, news indexing, top stories carousel, and many of those may have been associated with my reports of possible Google up…

After noticing changes in Google since September 23rd and actually calling out canonical issues with Google a few days later, Google has now confirmed the indexing bugs where pages were dropping out of the index. The issue was two-fold Google said; on…

One of the items in the core web vitals, which is part of the upcoming Google Page Experience Update, is Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). There have been some reports that cookie consent banners have been impacting a site’s Cumulative Layout Shift score…

Google’s John Mueller on Twitter stated something that is obvious but he said “ff links are the reason why a site is ranking higher, then if you remove them the site will rank lower.” But then he added that “links aren’t the only reason sites rank.”
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