Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

So let’s say you are searching for pizza stores in Saint Moritz, Switzerland – does that mean you live there or you are about to travel there. Google’s John Mueller said while Google does try to understand where you are searching from, it does not dif…

On Friday, Google’s John Mueller was asked if longer or better anchor text is better. Anchor text are the words in the hyperlink, so the underlined blue link (in many cases). John said longer versus shorter anchor text is not better or worse, it just…

I am a bit surprised I am writing this but yes, anchor text is a signal Google uses for ranking purposes. Yes, Google can ignore spammy links that try to manipulate rankings but normal anchor text does help Google rank a page for what the anchor text …

Mark Williams-Cook posted the results of an SEO Twitter poll that said most believe Google does not fully render a JavaScript page/document prior to ranking. In fact, the results showed that almost 70% of SEOs felt those pages were not always rendered…

Let’s say your company name is Google and then after 17 years you decide to change your name to Alphabet – just a theoretical name change. So you remove Google from all your home page and change it to Alphabet. Did you know that the home page can stil…

A post on Reddit asks what is stopping someone from building a bot to click on your Google search result listings, going to your site, spending some time there and sending Google positive click data. The truth is, no one is stopping you from doing th…

Google has announced the launch of the new crawl stats report and to be honest, it is a huge upgrade from the previous report. This report now gives you data you can use to debug crawl issues and check the health of your site with crawl related issues…

Google’s John Mueller said that having a private whois domain name registration status does not change how Google trusts the site. It really does not impact the site’s rankings in Google Search.

The other day I reported how Google was showing featured snippets with overlays but some of those featured snippets were autogenerated web stories generated by Google’s own AI techniques. Well, after I covered it last night again at Search Engine Land…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that just because someone is copying your content, that doesn’t mean your pages will rank lower in Google Search. He said “others copying your content wouldn’t be reason for your pages to rank lower.”

As you know, Google began crawling some sites over HTTP/2 this month. While you can opt out of this, i.e. GoogleBot crawling your site over HTTP/2, you cannot opt in to it, at least not now. John Mueller of Google said on Twitter “we don’t manually pick sites for trials like that, it’s more about whether it’s possible & makes sense for crawling.”

When you move your web site from one host to another, Google generally knows about it. When Google detects the change, it can and likely does attempt to relearn how fast and frequent it should crawl your site. Gary Illyes from Google said this on Twi…

Last week starting around Wednesday November 18th manual actions began disappearing from Google Search Console. Well, it seems those manual actions are now reappearing in the manual action viewer.

How do you sum up how Google renders and crawls web sites in about two minutes? Well, John Mueller of Google was tasked to do just that and he managed to do it in this video.

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.”