Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

We know that all new sites that have launched after July 1, 2019 would default to mobile-first indexing in Google’s index. But what if you launched a brand new site on an existing old domain name that has not been switched to mobile-first indexing?
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Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter “the SEO effect of keywords in the URL is minimal once the content is indexed.” Google has said keywords in URLs are a small factor and not to worry about it because it is an overrated SEO factor.

There are a nice number of vocal SEOs and online publishers who have been complaining all year long about their new online publishing news web sites are not being indexed and ranked in Google News. It is hard for me to debug any of this but they aske…

Google has upgraded the AMP enhancement report within Google Search Console to show Signed Exchange related issues. Google noted that this does not impact your rankings in Google search, that this is just a reporting update within Google Search Consol…

Pascal Birchler, a Developer Programs Engineer at Google and works closely on WordPress related tasks, used this 𤅠facepalming emoji after quoting this on Twitter “a good-looking XML sitemap will bring a better user experience.”

There has been a ton of chatter in the SEO industry around GPT-3, Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text and its use for translating content that Google might want to co…

Over the weekend there has been a lot of chatter about headers and their importance for ranking in Google search. It may have been that what John Mueller said in a recent video hangout was taken a bit out of context (trust me, I know, I have done this too). John Mueller of Google clarified on Twitter afterwards on header tags “they’re useful for understanding the context of content (text & images), but they’re not magical pixie dust that will make your site rank better.”

Google has announced a new Google Search Console Insights BETA tool for publishers. We told you this was in the works a couple of months ago and now Google officially confirmed it. Google said “today we’re starting to roll out a new experience to beta…

Google has another SEO mythbusting video, this one is on canonicalization and it is with Rachel Costello and Martin Splitt. Martin Splitt explained first you need to understand that canonicalization is about duplication management. But the whole vide…

Google’s John Mueller said even if your site has “high domain authority with backlinks” there is no guarantee that it will lead to high Google rankings. This is a good continuation from our coverage of Moz spam score and DA not being Google ranking fa…

Google’s John Mueller was asked if there is such a thing as having too many outbound links, even if those links are natural. John said “I’m not aware of anything like that.” He did add that maybe there is a situation where you are lacking content beca…

There have always been rumors that if you are listed in someones disavow file that it can end up hurting your site. But Google has said time and time again that is not true. Being in a disavow file won’t end up hurting you Google said. And it won’t l…

Just to catch you all up, on Monday afternoon we saw some insane changes to the search results rankings. Google confirmed later it was a bug and things were back to normal. Google then explained the bug stemmed from the indexing system. But what doe…

Google has added article structured data support to the rich results test tool. So that is one less thing you need to rely on the structured data testing tool for and I am sure more and more is coming.

Google updated its Google Image best practices to specify that images referenced in structured data must be in one of the image file formats that are supported by Google Images. These formats include BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, and SVG.

Google’s John Mueller said that links from guest blog posts have zero value. He said on Twitter when asked about that as a link building strategy, he said “those links have zero value.” “It’s a waste of time if you’re just doing it for the links,” John…

John Mueller from Google said he does not believe that an image that is licensed and copyrighted would rank better in search because it has a copyright label on it. Google does have that newish license metadata but all that does it let you show a lice…

The other day I reported that Google said the order of your header tags and elements do not matter for SEO purposes. Then a bunch of SEOs say but Google’s Lighthouse tool gives you warnings when your headers are out of order. So Patrick Hulce, the fo…

In the last webmaster hangout with John Mueller of Google I asked him why he seems to get so many questions about hreflang when I suspect a very small percentage of sites on the web actually implement it. I then asked if he knew how many sites do impl…

Izzi Smith posted a Twitter poll asking “does something being a “confirmed ranking factor” help you get optimisations approved internally?” The responses were fun, where 42% of those who responded said yes.