Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

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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Google announced that by mid-October it will make Google Shopping free not just in the US, but also worldwide. Google said it is “bringing free listings to the Shopping tab in countries across Europe, Asia, and Latin America.”

John Mueller of Google said on Twitter that if you use the submit URL within Google Search Console that it has no influence on Google reprocessing your XML sitemap file. He said Google just regularly reprocesses that XML sitemap file, so there is noth…

Sometimes you see in your Google Search Console reporting, like the performance report, URL fragment identifiers. You know the URLs with the # signs in them. We saw them when Google was testing displaying featured snippet scroll to and highlights in S…

It looks like Google.com and Sitemaps.org host the same exact copies of the Sitemaps.org information. Is this a classic no-no when it comes to duplicate content? Jamie Alberico posted about this on Twitter and yea, it seems to be the case.

On Sunday I reported about a canonical URL issue with Google that may have caused major turbulence with the Google search results last week. Well, Google said they need examples to investigate.

Remember that possible Google search ranking algorithm update from September 23rd? As I mentioned in my weekly video this Friday, some felt it may have been caused by a canonical bug with Google search. I wanted to share more around that topic before…

You know that many uses of anchor text on links around the web do not say much about where it is linking to. There are tons of “click here” links or other links that are not descriptive. Mihai Aperghis asked John Mueller of Google about the context a…

Here is a new question I’ve never seen before – does being removed or I guess added to the Wayback Machine impact your Google search rankings? John Mueller from Google said no on Twitter.