Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google announced yesterday that the Rich Results Test Tool is out of beta – yay! Google announced with that news that the Structured Data Testing Tool will be deprecated at some point. Google said “the Rich Results Test fully supports all Google Searc…

Gary Illyes of Google said on Twitter “achieving a SEO score 100 in Lighthouse just means that you can follow a handful of directions, not that you’re great at SEO.” He did say “but good job!” Those that do score 100 he said are good at following dir…

In 2018, Google launched AMP Stories and then they got more visual, with visual stories in 2019. Now, Google renamed them from AMP Stories to Web Stories. Did you know that if you publish a web story, Google’s mobile search results will show you a fa…

People either love or hate regular expressions, so if you love them – you are going to love what is coming to Google Search Console’s Performance report. Google is adding the ability to use regular expressions in that report according to an updated hel…

Gary Illyes from Google posted on the Google blog that spam reports are not used for manual actions. That spam reports are used for improving Google’s spam detection algorithms. Was it ever used for manual actions? Gary would not say.

Google’s Gary Illyes posted a pop quiz for SEOs the other day on Twitter. The responses of the poll showed that SEOs are split on the answer of how Google would handle a contradictory robots.txt file directive.

Google announced on Twitter that it made a change to how Google Search Console reports on your video structured data. Specifically, Google wrote “if you use video structured data, our reporting is now aligned with the docs and will warn if neither embe…

Google’s new ranking algorithm that launches next year, the Page Experience Update, has metric named CLS, Cumulative Layout Shift. It checks to see if things on the page jump around as it loads. Philip Walton, a Senior Developer Programs Engineer at G…

As I covered at Search Engine Land last night, according to a Wall Street Journal article, Google confirmed that it has systems that automatically will add products to your e-commerce site’s shopping cart. It does this to verify the price merchants giv…

It is time for the monthly Google Webmaster Report where I sum up the more important organic Google topics for SEOs and webmasters. The big news is that Google had some unconfirmed algorithm updates and one was big that had a larger impact on governm…

Google released the first video in part two of the SEO Mythbusting series. It starts with Martin Splitt of Google sitting down and talking with Sandhya Guntreddy of Bing. In short, they talk mostly about SEO community related topics.

John Mueller of Google posted on Twitter “I imagine the top-ranking sites don’t use any SEO plugin.” This was after someone posted a poll asking “which SEO Plugin is perfect for SEO?”

It seems that even after Google said it fixed the indexing issues with Disqus that has been lingering on for a while, that Google still may not be able to index all Disqus comments. Glenn Gabe said he noticed issues after the fix was rolled out. He s…

Google’s John Mueller was asked if using stock photography on your pages would hurt the page’s chances of ranking well in Google search. Do you need a unique image per page? John Mueller responded that “it doesn’t matter for web-search directly.”
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Google’s John Mueller said that “there is no effect in regard to SEO for Google” when it comes to if a site or page supports landscape orientation. Yes, it does matter if the page is mobile-friendly and has content on mobile-first indexing, but if you…

Google has made several changes to the how Google search works document within its help center. The changes include how Google crawls both desktop and mobile, it has a new section on JavaScript, it talks about your CSS, scripts and image files and has…

The other week I reported how Google is sending out emails about Google Search Console and Google Analytics integrated reports. Well, I’ve now seen this through an anonymous source and it is pretty cool. It is called Google Search Console Insights and …

Google’s John Mueller was asked if one should disavow random or unrelated links pointing to his site. The question was “if a domain has a lot of irrelevant links that are not related to the service the site offers would you suggest to disavow or conta…

Google’s John Mueller said again that using structured data does not give Google something that it can rely on for saying a page or piece of content is correct, trustworthy and authoritative. Google’s John Mueller said in a recent Google hangout at th…

Google is testing showing just a single star icon for the star rich results, even if the rich results should show multiple stars. This was spotted by Vlad Rappoport and here is the screen shot he posted on Twitter.