Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

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…

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…