Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google’s John Mueller clarified how SEOs should think about Google’s index and links on the web. He said on Twitter “we index pages, we don’t index links. Links are between pages.” That means, Google will index a page, that page may have links on it, …

We know Google has said numerous times that word count is not a ranking factor, nor is it indicative of quality. We know Google said short content can rank just fine. But Google has to answer this question often enough. John did that this morning in …

In the longest SEO mythbusting video yet by Google’s Martin Splitt, he invited Glenn Gabe to talk about site migrations. It is a wonderful topic and they covered a heck of a lot. One of my favorite parts was the analogy with food trucks and how they …

In 2007, 25% of all queries that searchers entered into the Google search box was never seen by Google before. That figure changed to 15% in 2013 and has remained at that figure according to Google even through today.

If you read the Google docs on XML Sitemaps and look at the lastmod field, Google says “Google reads the lastmod value, but if you misrepresent this value, we will stop reading it.” Lily Ray asked John Mueller of Google if changing the lastmod date of…

If you use dataset structured data then you may see a spike in warnings in your Google Search Console enhancement report for those datasets. Google said it is now reporting warnings for any Dataset object that is missing the recommended property “creat…

Google has a new form you can use to report false positives around security issues with your site. In short, if you think your site was mistakenly flagged by Google Search for security issues, you can ask Google for a review using the “Report a Securi…

Google added a new section to the supported structured data developer docs for home activities. This structured data should be used on recorded or live videos where you offer instructions on what activities, like fitness classes and so on, to do from y…

Bing’s Fabrice Canal said on Twitter “Sitemaps are a daily, and ideally real time, snapshots of all relevant pages of your sites.” “Sitemaps must include these main ranking pages,” he added. This was in response to Dawn Anderson posting something a dev…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter there is maybe a small bandwidth savings when it comes to GoogleBot crawling your site when you use webp over jpeg image formats. But then you would only see that difference when the site is a “very image-heavy si…

“Is it just me or have things been a little too quiet recently,” said on SEO at WebmasterWorld. That is the feeling recently since we saw a couple search ranking (or indexing) bugs a couple of weeks ago and it has been 3 months and 22 days since the l…

Fairly recently Google told us we should not expect to see a filter to see featured snippet related data in our performance reports in Search Console. But then we saw the that Google started showing #:~:text= url parameters in the reports for image res…

The Google Sandbox theory started in early 2004, where new sites would not rank well for a while. Well, Gary Illyes and his Google friends spoke about it in the latest Search Off the Record podcast. In short, Gary said he thinks it wasn’t a ranking r…

On Friday Google posted a new blog post about an old feature that confused some in thinking what Google was talking about was new. In short, Google told me the reason the company posted about it was because they wanted to remind retailers before the h…

Google’s John Mueller said on Reddit that links from Wikipedia not only have no SEO value but also those links “will do nothing for your site” from a Google search perspective. In fact, John said all you are doing is “creating extra work for the Wikipe…

Google seems to be testing showing favicons or company logos in the autocomplete search suggestions for some local results, specifically brands. Someone posted a screen shot of this in action in the Local Search Forums, here it is:

Google’s John Mueller said that sometimes “swapping out the URL can certainly help” when that URL has been 404ed or noindexed for a while. He said “sometimes our systems are so used to a URL not “working” (noindex, 404, etc) that it can take a bit of t…

Canonicalization is when Google tries to combine any URLs together as one when it thinks there might be duplicate URLs. How Google does that can depend on a lot of different signals. John Mueller of Google listed some of the signals Google uses for c…

Squarespace, the web site builder tool, now can show data from Google Search Console within its portal. Google announced on Twitter “If you’re a Squarespace user, you can now see how people found each of your pages in Search.”

Earlier this week, on the August 18th webmaster office hours with John Mueller, I asked John for more details on first the Google indexing failure on August 10th and then if he can share any details on what happened last Saturday, August 15th. The sho…