Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison was on the defensive yesterday when there were a number of complaints that Google was showing adult content from governmental web sites. The issue is, it is not a Google bug, instead, it is the governmental web …

A couple of weeks ago, Google announced the Rich Results Test Tool is out of beta and the Structured Data Testing Tool will be eventually deprecated. SEOs did not like this news and it seems like Google has heard the feedback. Google’s John Mueller sa…

Google’s John Mueller was asked about why Google is showing a blank screen for the Google Cache. Well, John said “to be blunt, perhaps don’t show a loading screen and instead just show your content. *ALL* time you spend showing a loading screen is a d…

If you are tearing down your web site and rebuilding it completely from the ground up, you should expect a lot of search ranking fluctuations. If you want to control and track as much as you can on the SEO side, it is recommended you do it in stages a…

For over a year, Google said it is working with the WordPress team to build in to the core of WordPress the ability to generate XML Sitemaps. Well, now with WordPress 5.5 it is now out. Pascal Birchler from Google announced on WordPress.org “in WordP…

Google has updated its developer documentation to clarify that if you use multiple fact checks on a page it may not show up in the search results as rich results.

Google Search Console has a new (I think it is new) button to let you share a report with someone else through a secure link. The share button is next to the export button on many of the reports. At the time I am writing this, I do not see the button…

Google’s John Mueller said that “best way to improve indexing is to create great – unique & compelling – content that users have been seeking out, and which users recommend to others.” Google has said that many indexing issues are related to quality issues.

Google, as expected, has decided to push off the deadline for going 100% into mobile-first indexing. The previous deadline was September 2020, but after COVID hit, Google said they may push this deadline back to give site owners more time to prepare du…

Google’s John Mueller and Martin Splitt confirmed on Twitter that GoogleBot, despite what Chrome does, will continue to pass along the user agent when it crawls web sites. John said “my understanding is that we’ll continue to use “Googlebot” in the U…

Google’s John Mueller said there is no need to worry about duplicate content when you are migrating content from one site to another. John said “there’s no need to worry about duplicate content if you’re migrating it from one site to another.”

You can now slice and dice your Google Search Console Performance report by news content versus web, image or video content. Google just added a new filter under the performance report “search type” option for “News.”

Google’s John Mueller said that Google has very different people in the corporation who are responsible for reviewing search algorithms from those who review user reports of spam and feedback. Both are humans but those humans do not impact the search …

GoogleBot is pretty good, actually, very good, at not crawling most sites too much where it actually ends up slowing down the site from loading. GoogleBot is designed to detect that and back off. But if you have a specific set of pages or a page that…

John Mueller of Google said it would be “a really bad idea which will cause all sorts of problems” if you block Google or other search engines from crawling pages that return a 404 server status code. He said “billions of 404 pages are crawled every d…

Alexis Sanders of Merkle sat down with Martin Splitt of Google last year (before COVID) and spoke about crawl budget. It may be one of the more informative videos in the SEO mythbusting series to-date.

Here is a new question I don’t think I’ve seen before. Someone asked Google if it is safe to keep a 302 redirect up for a long time. The question was “how long is it safe to use a 302 redirect?” The answer is, it is safe to keep them up for a long ti…

John Mueller of Google said it is a good idea to remove the URLs of pages you remove from your web site from your XML Sitemap file. He said “if you remove or change a lot of pages on your site, it’s good to reflect that in a sitemap file.”

Google’s John Mueller, Gary Illyes and Martin Splitt released another podcast this morning. This one they covered a bunch of topics including rendering with SEO but also John Mueller kind of had a rant on ranking factors. It is fun to listen to, so I …

Let’s say your site has a DA of one billion and you get a link from a site that has a DA of 999,999,999, which is obviously less than one billion – can that hurt your Google rankings? In short, does getting links from pages that are lower quality than…