Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

GoogleBot is pretty good, actually, very good, at not crawling most sites too much where it actually ends up slowing down the site from loading. GoogleBot is designed to detect that and back off. But if you have a specific set of pages or a page that…

John Mueller of Google said it would be “a really bad idea which will cause all sorts of problems” if you block Google or other search engines from crawling pages that return a 404 server status code. He said “billions of 404 pages are crawled every d…

Alexis Sanders of Merkle sat down with Martin Splitt of Google last year (before COVID) and spoke about crawl budget. It may be one of the more informative videos in the SEO mythbusting series to-date.

Here is a new question I don’t think I’ve seen before. Someone asked Google if it is safe to keep a 302 redirect up for a long time. The question was “how long is it safe to use a 302 redirect?” The answer is, it is safe to keep them up for a long ti…

John Mueller of Google said it is a good idea to remove the URLs of pages you remove from your web site from your XML Sitemap file. He said “if you remove or change a lot of pages on your site, it’s good to reflect that in a sitemap file.”

Google’s John Mueller, Gary Illyes and Martin Splitt released another podcast this morning. This one they covered a bunch of topics including rendering with SEO but also John Mueller kind of had a rant on ranking factors. It is fun to listen to, so I …

Let’s say your site has a DA of one billion and you get a link from a site that has a DA of 999,999,999, which is obviously less than one billion – can that hurt your Google rankings? In short, does getting links from pages that are lower quality than…

Google has updated the help document on Google Discover. It has been almost completely revamped but one of the more interesting areas of the update is the section added to E-A-T. I mean, we know Google Discover can be impacted by Core updates in a bi…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that links placed without any input by you is not a bad thing, often he said it is a good thing. John wrote “just because links are placed without your input doesn’t make them bad (it usually makes them good, eve…

Google’s John Mueller said the way to make your site architecture and navigation easy and interesting is to make a “smart site structure.” This will not only help GoogleBot find your content and more interesting pages but also help users navigate and …

Gary Illyes from Google said it is probably not a good idea to use JavaScript redirects. This was specific to redirecting users based on their location to a country specific version of the page. But Google has said before that server side redirects a…

Martin Splitt from Google was asked on Reddit “are there plans to support service workers?” This would be specific to Google Search supporting it. Martin responded that no, Google has no such plans. He then went on to explain why Google has no plans o…

Google has updated the structured data policies page, specifically the section on having multiple items on a page with structured data. It added whether you nest the items or specify each item individually.

A few weeks ago we reported Google was testing knowledge panel expandable elements within Google Image Search preview results. Well, now it is live and Google announced it on its blog.

There you have it, Google’s John Mueller said not all link building is bad. He said on Twitter “there are lots of ways to work on getting links that are fine, and useful for both the site and the rest of the web.” “To say all link building is bad woul…

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.