Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

When Google launched featured snippets anchor and highlight feature, it came with added tracking parameters to the URL you click on from Google. Google adds on #:~:text= to the URL you click on from Google.

Brodie Clark posted screen shots of Google showing rich results, i.e. stars and FAQ schema, for a couple of site’s home pages in the Google search results. Google has said it generally does not show rich results for home pages, both John Mueller and Ga…

John Mueller of Google said on Twitter that when he is asked for input publicly around web spam issues, like on Twitter, he often would not report that directly to the Google webspam team. He said “in most cases I run across here, where people ask us …

Google’s John Mueller said if you still see that Googlebot Desktop is still the main crawler for your web site in Search Console settings, then you can try to “double-check the usual things to make sure your site is as strong on mobile as it is on desktop, for search & your users.”

There has been a lot of speculation around some recent unconfirmed Google search ranking updates. But one of those theories was shot down by John Mueller of Google around old domains getting some sort of ranking boost or change.

Well, it was a pretty jammed packed month for Google webmaster and SEO related news. Google announced an upcoming ranking change named the Google Page Experience Update, where core web vital metrics and page experience metrics will become a ranking fac…

John Mueller of Google said that your robots.txt content-type can be anything really. He said “any content type is fine,” adding “the important part is the content itself.”

John Mueller of Google confirmed on Friday’s webmaster hangout video that Google does and can use historic or legacy data about your web site for ranking purposes. He gave a few examples of how Google uses it; your links over time, the adult SafeSearc…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that using the URL parameter tool is no replacement for using a robots.txt file for blocking content. John was asked “how reliable is it” when setting “crawl no urls” of a certain type of URL pattern. John said “…

John Muller from Google posted a stream of tweets yesterday of tidbits he found interesting to share with the SEO community. He said “Since the Core Web Vitals are now in Search Console, I wanted to do a quick round-up of the tidbits I found while res…

The other day I wrote a story asking if the Google May 2020 core update messed up Google’ search quality or not. I also posted a poll asking did Google’s May 2020 core update have a positive or negative impact of overall search quality? The poll clos…

Gary Illyes from Google mocked that it does and can go to link selling forums and Facebook groups, even likely private ones, to uncover link networks. Although, it sounds like Google does not worry too much about these that much, as its algorithms ten…

Google’s John Mueller said that if you submit all your search pages, i.e. search results, tags, categories (I guess), to Google, it will make “crawling & indexing significantly harder for large sites.” He said this on Twitter the other day, adding “this is where smaller sites can prioritize much better than larger ones can.”

That was quick, just a couple weeks ago, Google announced the core web vitals on the Chrome blog. Now these metrics have replaced the speed report in Google Search Console. Yep, when you login to Google Search Console, that speed report now says “Cor…

John Mueller of Google said that “the choice of font doesn’t matter for SEO.” He said just “use one that works for your site.” There is no such thing as an SEO friendly font. Use something you like and your web site visitors will like.

Google’s John Mueller said in a Reddit thread that if you end up showing your hreflang markup just to search engine crawlers and not humans, i.e. cloaking, that it would still be considered cloaking but you probably won’t be penalized for doing so. He …

The number of complaints I am seeing from SEOs over the past couple of weeks around indexing is large. Basically I am seeing Google have to respond about there being no issues with how fast or deep Google is indexing sites. Googlers are saying, it mi…

In February we covered some complaints about Google showing “uploaded by” in some of the search result snippets. Often, the upload by will cite the person who uploaded the video and not the person who wrote the content on the page where the snippet is…

Danny Sullivan of Google did another one of his explanatory blog posts on the Google blog. This one is on explaining how knowledge panels work in Google Search. In this post he explains what knowledge panels are, what information these panels can show…

Marie Haynes, who does a lot of Google SEO penalty recovery work, said just yesterday she received two reconsideration request approvals from ones submitted back in February and March. In January, we asked if there were longer wait times for these reco…