Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

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.

I’ve heard this before where to keep your links “looking natural” you want to make sure your nofollowed to followed link ratio is a good and natural looking one. But just by saying a statement like that means your link ratio of followed and unfollowed…

Google announced this morning it has been upgrading the infrastructure for the Google Search Console API. Google said this is an infrastructure change and that “API is backward compatible and there are currently no changes in scope or functionality.” …

Google’s John Mueller was asked if putting an H5 before an H1 on a page would end up hurting the page from ranking well in Google. John said “nope” it won’t end up hurting the page from ranking organically in Google Search.

Google’s John Mueller said that many of those manual actions are probably not used anymore. Why? He said because many may have been automated and done algorithmically. I did ask John for a list but he refused, go figure.

I have covered Google saying that its quality raters, which are third-party consultants who are not even employed by Google directly, do not have any direct influence in Google search rankings. I reported Googlers saying this countless times and I did…

The other day I reported that Google said negative reviews on the web about your brand or business won’t hurt your rankings in Google search. Yesterday, I was on the video call with John Mueller and I asked him this question and brought up the Decor My…

Martin Splitt from Google went a bit deeper, on Twitter (yes on Twitter), on how Google goes about rendering and measuring what it renders. Here is what Martin Splitt said on Twitter.

The other day, Danny Sullivan of Google went back and forth with the SEO community on why Google does not want to add paywall content labels to publisher sites that require you to pay to see the content. For a user, it can be frustrating to go to an a…