Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google’s John Mueller was asked if “unlinked brand citations can help in defining trust of a website / brand?” In short, when someone says the Wall Street Journal said X, but does not link to the Wall Street Journal (see what I did there WSJ, who rare…

John Mueller from Google was asked if it is true that Google will remember that a page or site had a noindex directive set. And if it remembers that, even if the page/site removes the noindex, that it will make it harder for that page/site to be re-ind…

Google posted that there was a data logging issue with Google Discover traffic and Google Search Console. Because of that, Google performance reports for Discover traffic starting on May 12th and ongoing might be off. Google said “you might see a signi…

A site owner said that after getting hit by a core update in March 2019, he is going to have to shut down his site. John Mueller of Google responded to that saying “I recommend taking a look at the top queries & top pages from before & after a change, and asking yourself if your site is really the best result for those.”

Google Search Console has added support for guided recipes. Guided recipes are step by step instructions on how to complete a recipe in Google Search and on Google Assistant. There is a new enhancement report for guided recipes in Google Search Consol…

We know that 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 hint and not as a directive. But since then, it seems Google did not make any real change to search since…

John Mueller of Google said there is no fixed timeframe or duration for when Google will try to crawl and index a page that was returning a 410 status code. He said on Twitter “there’s no fixed duration” for that.

Google announced on Friday that if you are using batch HTTP and JSON-RPC requests with the Google Search Console API, you will want to change that ASAP. In 2018, Google announced it will discontinue support for such methods – well, two years later, Go…

I am sure you heard the news, GIPHY was acquired by Facebook for $400 million last week. You may remember, in 2017, GIPHY drastically dropped in Google’s search results and since then, GIPHY’s Google traffic really has not returned.

Gary Illyes from Google took a shot at explaining how he sees Google’s core updates. He said on Twitter “when i say “core algorithm” publicly, i mean the collective of algorithms that are part of the scorer (IR score in information retrieval) & generally unnamed externally.”

Google’s John Mueller said in a video hangout from May 1st, that often when he looks into SEOs or publishers complaining about Google de-indexing issues, often the issue is with Google not finding enough quality on the pages it has deindexed. John sai…

Lizzi Harvey, a tech writer at Google who works on a lot of the search related developer documents, said on Twitter that it normally takes about two weeks for the developer documents to be translated. So if the document is published in English on May …

Last June we reported that Google was looking to build directly into WordPress the automatic generation and submission of XML Sitemaps. This way when you publish content, and you didn’t set up an XML Sitemap, the XML Sitemap file will be done automati…

Google’s John Mueller responded to a tweet asking why Pinterest ranks so well in Google search when the Pinterest pages have little to no textual content on the pages. John Mueller from Google said “sometimes images, even with minimal textual content,…

So remember that last Google core update, the last Google algorithm update, the May 2020 Google core update that touched down on May 4th? Well, it is possible that that update has “hit” (as Google does not like us to say) this site and the site’s over…

In 2015 Google said they would deprecate the AJAX crawling schema and then in 2017, two years later, Google did do that. A year after that, Google said they stopped crawling #! for the most part. But today, in 2020, Google said technically they still…

Sometimes Google’s John Mueller has funny and humorous one liners on Twitter. Here is one when someone told him that they were buying links and there is nothing he, John, can do about it. John responded “Yeah, those weekend AliExpress shopping splurge…

Gary Illyes from Google shared this morning that he presented a two-hour demonstration to new search engineers at Google named the “Life of a Query.” Gary said he has been a loaq (life of a query) instruction since 2012. I asked if anything in that p…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that when you merge or split a site, it is “essentially creating a new site.” So that might mean, that if it is a substantial enough site merge or split, that Google may decide to treat the site as a brand new one…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that the disavow tool was not created for negative SEO. He said “Not to put more fuel on the fire, but negative SEO is not a reason we have this tool — and I honestly can’t recall a situation where a site ever nee…