Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

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.

Google announced yesterday that you no longer need to use Google Merchant Center to communicate your shipping details in the product search results. Now you can use new shipping detail schema markup to do the same thing.

Google’s John Mueller had to say after he disputed that cheap and shared hosting does not influence your rankings, that hosting on Google Cloud servers won’t give you a ranking boost. He said on Twitter “we don’t do anything special for hosting on Goo…

Google’s John Mueller was asked on Twitter if using a dual stack IPv4/6 setup give you some sort of Google Search or SEO ranking boost with Google. John said no, it does not. John responded saying “No. There’s no SEO effect for that. Make your site w…

Google has updated its fact check Google Search developer document to list out all the current guidelines, both eligibility and technical guidelines. There were guidelines listed there before, but now all the guidelines are in this one document now.
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We know Google has general said it does not offer private SEO or Google Search support. All Google Search and SEO requests should be done in a public setting. But that does not mean that Googlers like Gary Illyes, John Mueller or Martin Splitt do not…

Recently an interesting experiment was published on Reboot Online that says cheap hosting with low-quality, spammy bad neighborhoods of sites, can actually impact Google rankings. But John Mueller of Google disputed this study saying it is not really …