Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google has confirmed an indexing issue or bug specifically with the Top Stories section in Google Search. The issue started around 6pm ET on Friday, September 11th and lasted through around 10pm ET on Friday, September 11th.

Gary Illyes from Google seems to have a new interest, making the site command more reliable for some sites. He posted on Twitter the other day that he is looking for examples of when the site command count returns “wildly off” numbers compared to what …

Brodie Clark noticed that Google is now showing some featured snippets also have how-to schema show up in Google Search. Brodie said he “thinks this might be the first time I’ve seen Structured Data influence a Featured Snippet.”

Last week at Search Engine Land I wrote Google says you can recover from core updates without a new core update. Part of the video conversation where I spoke to John Mueller of Google on this topic is now publicly available. In this video John discusse…

Yesterday, Google posted two blog posts around how it delivers reliable information in its search engine. Some believe this is a pre-announcement to a core update but it is not. It does not mean a core update is not happening very soon, we are due one…

John Mueller presented at SEO Day virtually and someone noticed that on his Chrome browser was this little robot extension and shared a screen shot of it on Twitter. I am not sure what it does but I would guess it does some internal debugging related t…

Martin Splitt and Lily Ray in the latest SEO mythbusting video has just been released and it is chockfull of information around content. If you write content on your web sites, which I hope you do, you will want to watch this video.

It has been a long time since we heard Google speak anything on the topic of speakable markup. I’ve implemented it here and have not seen it in action in Google in a long time either. Plus it seems like Google is not accepting news publishers into th…

Google’s John Mueller said that within Google Search there is no way to limit the visibility of a URL in the search results by country. So if you do not want a specific URL to show in Google UK but you do want it to show in Google Ireland, there is rea…

The same question was asked both on Twitter and on Reddit, asking do URLs in the image:loc tag also count towards the 50K XML sitemap limit? The answer is no, it does not count to the 50,000 URL limit in the XML Sitemap files.

Sadly there can be pretty immoral people in the world, including a lack of business ethics. It seems an SEO company and their client got in a disagreement about a work contract and the client wanted to part ways. The SEO company allegedly decided to …

Google Search Console seems to be having another data issue. This time with the coverage report. The last it was updated was around August 31st or September 1st, from the reports I am seeing. Normally it is about 2-3 days delayed but not over a week de…

Google’s John Mueller said on Friday’s webmaster hangout that while the current URL parameter tool has been missing data for a while, it is not a sign that Google will deprecate it. In fact, he said when the tool does migrate to the new Search Console,…

Gary Illyes from Google said on Reddit he thinks it is unlikely that core web vitals “would ever become the primary factor for organic traffic.” He said you shouldn’t ignore it but Google and other search engines rank primarily based on “highest qual…

On August 25th, Google updated its web browser Chrome on desktop and mobile to version 85 and then by as early as September 1st, GoogleBot was already crawling and rendering pages using version 85. It is really an evergreen Googlebot.

Back in the old days, when you received a manual action Google did not notify you in Google Search Console with a message. But can that still happen today? Can you get a manual action without a notification from Google? Most SEOs believe that can and …

Google’s John Mueller said it isn’t recommended to use // – double slashes – in your URL path. He said generally if browsers can handle it so can Googlebot. But he said on Twitter “// is generally considered a bad practice though, since what it’s rea…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter “we don’t have a concept of toxic domains.” It was in a reply about a third-party SEO tool saying some of the links to his site are low quality and maybe toxic. Google said previously most site do not have toxic …

It was an interesting month for Google Search. We had a confirmed Google search glitch that had a huge temporary impact on the Google rankings and search results. SEOs are bracing themselves for the next core update. Google Search Console launched I…

Gary Illyes from Google has confirmed that Googlebot does indeed support Brotli compression. Brotli is a data format specification for data streams compressed with a specific combination of the general-purpose LZ77 lossless compression algorithm, Huffm…