Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

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.”
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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.”

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…