Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google published its first podcast named Search Off the Record and in that podcast, Gary Illyes from Google talked a bit more about all the nofollow link changes coming. He said again that he is working on something but it seems like these changes won’…

Did you know that the Google Merchant side of things crawls a bit differently than the rest of Google. Google’s Martin Splitt said on that podcast this morning that the Google Merchant team will first try the HTML only and if it cannot find what it nee…

Again, Google has said that it does not look at [Google] Analytics bounce rate data for ranking web sites. John Mueller of Google said in a webmaster hangout video at the 25 minute mark, “I think there’s a bit of misconception here that we’re looking a…

Last week we covered that Google said again, nofollow links in guest blog posts, even if they are not paid guest blog posts. This is not new, Google said this many times over the years. But whenever I cover these statements, some SEOs are a bit shocke…

Over the past several weeks and months it seems more and more site owners and SEOs are complaining about Google not indexing their web sites as it once did. I asked Google’s John Mueller if anything was new here and he said no, Google has not changed …

Google’s John Mueller confirmed, despite the nofollow attribute slapped all over links on YouTube pages, that Google does not use links on YouTube for search.

Google is asking for examples of logos that are in .webp format that also uses logo structured data markup. Google recently updated the logo structured data markup developer documents to add .svg to the supported file format list. But Google wants to …

Does search spam age where the longer you leave it, the less offensive the spam gets? The answer might be no. John Mueller from Google said on Twitter “if parts of your website don’t comply with our webmaster guidelines, and you want to comply with o…

In 2017, Google’s John Mueller said all guest blog posts, no matter how often you contribute, should have all links nofollowed. This week he added, even if those links are not paid for – as long as those links can potential pass signals – they should …

There has been some confusion, sorry to say it, around this nofollow link attribute change from last September. In short, Google made a change to the nofollow link policy, that starting on March 1, 2020, Google can look at a nofollow link attribute as…

A couple of weeks ago we reported that Google was testing how-to schema on desktop search. It seems like that test is now over. According to Brodie Clark and also by Glenn Gabe, the test ran from around May 20th through June 4th or 5th.

Last week we covered how Google launched for some browsers and some featured snippets that Google will highlight and scroll down to the content of the featured snippet on your web page. As expected, some publishers and web site owners are not happy abo…

Another interesting tidbit from Marie Haynes interview of John Mueller was a snippet around how people place text on the bottom of e-commerce category pages. John kind of suggested that 90% of that content is unnecessary but it is useful to have a sen…

Whenever Google confirms a temporary indexing issues, you see weeks and weeks afterwards SEOs and webmasters ask Google if there are still indexing issues. Why? Well, many individual sites do not get fully indexed by Google and thus they feel there is …

Gary Illyes from Google responded to a question around if brand based queries can hold any influence around search rankings. In short, he said it is a hard question to answer for a number of reasons.

It seems Google has added new search appearance filters to the Google Search Console performance reports. The filters are named “recipe gallery” and “recipe rich results.” This was shared with me by Brian Freiesleben but Google has not yet confirmed …

Friday we reported that Google was showing rich results for home pages. Well, it turned out this was “unintended” and “it’s being fixed.” Gary Illyes from Google responded to me on Twitter saying “this change was unintended and it’s being fixed.”
…

Google’s John Mueller in an interview with Marie Haynes said that it would be “really rare” that disavowing links would result in your web site doing better in search algorithmically. Sure, if you have a manual action, maybe but not without a manual ac…

Another snippet from Marie Haynes interview of John Mueller was around BERT. The short snippet, as Glenn Gabe nicely summed up, is that BERT helps Google understand content better but it does not help Google with evaluating quality.

Google’s John Mueller was asked if Google maybe does a first round of ranking of a new page based on the URL, even before it does any content analysis. John responded on Twitter “not that I’m aware of.”