Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Gary Illyes from Google said on Reddit he thinks it is unlikely that core web vitals “would ever become the primary factor for organic traffic.” He said you shouldn’t ignore it but Google and other search engines rank primarily based on “highest qual…

On August 25th, Google updated its web browser Chrome on desktop and mobile to version 85 and then by as early as September 1st, GoogleBot was already crawling and rendering pages using version 85. It is really an evergreen Googlebot.

Back in the old days, when you received a manual action Google did not notify you in Google Search Console with a message. But can that still happen today? Can you get a manual action without a notification from Google? Most SEOs believe that can and …

Google’s John Mueller said it isn’t recommended to use // – double slashes – in your URL path. He said generally if browsers can handle it so can Googlebot. But he said on Twitter “// is generally considered a bad practice though, since what it’s rea…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter “we don’t have a concept of toxic domains.” It was in a reply about a third-party SEO tool saying some of the links to his site are low quality and maybe toxic. Google said previously most site do not have toxic …

It was an interesting month for Google Search. We had a confirmed Google search glitch that had a huge temporary impact on the Google rankings and search results. SEOs are bracing themselves for the next core update. Google Search Console launched I…

Gary Illyes from Google has confirmed that Googlebot does indeed support Brotli compression. Brotli is a data format specification for data streams compressed with a specific combination of the general-purpose LZ77 lossless compression algorithm, Huffm…

Google’s John Mueller clarified how SEOs should think about Google’s index and links on the web. He said on Twitter “we index pages, we don’t index links. Links are between pages.” That means, Google will index a page, that page may have links on it, …

We know Google has said numerous times that word count is not a ranking factor, nor is it indicative of quality. We know Google said short content can rank just fine. But Google has to answer this question often enough. John did that this morning in …

In the longest SEO mythbusting video yet by Google’s Martin Splitt, he invited Glenn Gabe to talk about site migrations. It is a wonderful topic and they covered a heck of a lot. One of my favorite parts was the analogy with food trucks and how they …

In 2007, 25% of all queries that searchers entered into the Google search box was never seen by Google before. That figure changed to 15% in 2013 and has remained at that figure according to Google even through today.

If you read the Google docs on XML Sitemaps and look at the lastmod field, Google says “Google reads the lastmod value, but if you misrepresent this value, we will stop reading it.” Lily Ray asked John Mueller of Google if changing the lastmod date of…

If you use dataset structured data then you may see a spike in warnings in your Google Search Console enhancement report for those datasets. Google said it is now reporting warnings for any Dataset object that is missing the recommended property “creat…

Google has a new form you can use to report false positives around security issues with your site. In short, if you think your site was mistakenly flagged by Google Search for security issues, you can ask Google for a review using the “Report a Securi…

Google added a new section to the supported structured data developer docs for home activities. This structured data should be used on recorded or live videos where you offer instructions on what activities, like fitness classes and so on, to do from y…

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…