Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

There is a nice number of SEOs in our space that focus on Google News and news publisher related SEO. But sadly, John Mueller and his team are not the best folks to ask at Google with Google News related questions. The Google News publisher support, …

We already heard a bit about the differences between featured snippets and passage indexing from Google. But in a video interview with Martin Splitt of Google, Martin went a lot deeper into the differences.

There was an excellent phrase I wanted to pull out from another part of Martin Splitt’s interview on passage indexing. Martin said at the 38:30ish mark that passage indexing is really a lifeline for pages that have good content on them but it is buried…

It seems like for many, the manual actions within Google Search Console are disappearing. This is no magic trick, instead it seems to be some sort of bug. Google has not yet confirmed it but I am seeing numerous reports of complaints around this from …

Google has finally migrated the old version of the disavow link tool to the new version of Google Search Console. With that, Google made the form prettier, added the ability to download the file as text and added more errors to the error reports for up…

Google has also updated the remove outdated content tool. Google said the update is more visual, saying “we freshened the tool interface and also made the existing capabilities more intuitive to use.”

Google shares the same crawl budget between GoogleBot, the organic free web crawler, and Google AdsBot, the paid Google crawler. Keep in mind, Google has dozens of crawlers and they all likely share the same crawl budget.

It has now been well over 6 months, yes, a half of a year, since the last confirmed Google core update was released on May 4, 2020. But we might not see another core update before the end of the year. Mihai Aperghis asked John Mueller of Google and J…

In continuation to the conversation Mihai Aperghis had with John Mueller of Google about the core update timing, Mihai asked about why are some Google algorithm updates bold and jarring when they roll out and others more smooth. He compared the old Pan…

In the Search Off The Record Podcast released this morning, John Mueller, Gary Illyes and Martin Splitt had a special guest from Google, Pascal Birchler. In this podcast the four spoke about how Google indexes images, videos, audio and AMP. They also …

Last month Google told us that beginning in November GoogleBot will support crawling sites over HTTP/2. Well, that time has come and if you see that happening, it is because Google thinks can save computing resources for your site crawling that way.
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Google has updated its Q&A schema structured data guidelines to specify that STEM-education related Q&A pages are now allowed. So if you have such Q&A related pages focused on STEM learning, you can use Q&A markup.

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…