Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

You hear about sites that gradually see less and less traffic over many months and years from Google organic search. What does that mean? Well, John Mueller of Google said sometimes it can mean that the site “overall isn’t being seen as relevant as be…

Danny Sullivan of Google said on Twitter that if your web pages are ranking on the first page for its relevant queries, then that means you are doing things right. Danny said “being on the first page is a sign you are indeed doing all the right and gre…

The other day we asked you if Google should drop the URL parameter tool because as you know, if used incorrectly, it can do some serious damage to your site. So some SEOs are like, sure – drop it, just give us reporting on what would happen if you use…

Google Search Console, in the old version, has a feature for international targeting. It lets you communicate to Google that your site is more relevant in a specific region. Gary Illyes from Google said on Reddit that this is a strong hint that “may…

Gary Illyes from Google hinted he might consider deprecating the URL parameters tools in Google Search Console. He said on Twitter “maybe we should deprecate that cannon” when Glenn Gabe asked him “you said to be careful with the url params tool in GS…

Yesterday was a fun day in the SEO space, at the expense of LinkedIn. LinkedIn’s www.linkedin.com pages dropped out of the Google search results for about 10 hours. But when it came back, it all came back really quickly. The SEO community is asking h…

This is just a gentle reminder that when Google does a core update, that it does not only impact the rankings in the main Google search results. Core updates do impact Google Discover results as well. We knew this already but it is worth reminding eve…

Do a site command for [site:www.linkedin.com] and nothing will come up in Google. Google seems to have deindexed the main www results from LinkedIn.com. Also, with that, it seems the LinkedIn profile links for people knowledge panels are also gone.
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Ethan Lazuk shared a screen shot showing how a snippet was recently updated by Google but the people also ask version was not, and was still showing the 2017 version. This shows that Google can show a snippet in two different spots from different times…

Google announced yesterday that news sites no longer need to publish using AMP to be seen in the top stories carousel, specifically for COVID-19 related news. Google said for other news topics you need AMP, but there is now an exception made for COVID-…

Google announced this morning that it added support for the new SpecialAnnouncement structured data to Google Search Console. This means that the enhancement report, the Performance report and the rich results test now all support SpecialAnnouncement s…

Gary Illyes from Google said on Twitter “there’s more to ranking than just quality.” He added a fact, that Google uses “hundreds of signals to offer users the most relevant piece of content for their query.” Sometimes other ranking signals can push a …

I am not sure where this is coming from but this is the second time I am covering a topic about Google slowing crawling and indexing because of COVID-19 and the coronavirus. I covered it a few weeks ago and now John Mueller of Google had to say again,…

We’ve been reporting on the Google Question Hub a lot recently, because it is not being tested in the US. But yea, it is not new, it launched in 2018 as a test and went fully live in India and some other regions in 2019. So we have some screen shots …

Google has said this many times, in many different ways, Google does not use Google Analytics for web search. John Mueller of Google said the other day that Google does not use Google Analytics for indexing purposes.

With Google Shopping becoming free, will we see the Google Merchant Center features be introduced into Google Search Console? John Mueller of Google was asked this, where he implied that this would be unlikely.

Do you have many soft 404 errors in your Google Search Console reports? Well, that might mean that you are linking to these pages internally within your site and you should check your internal links to see if this is something you can fix.

Google’s John Mueller said that in some cases, if your site goes down, Google may start to remove URLs from its index within two-days. This is on a URL by URL basis, so Google needs to see if the URL is not active and then try a couple more times, and…

Google’s John Mueller was asked for advice on what to do with old articles published on a pop culture publishing site that has nearly 25 years of content on it. Of course the answer is it depends; you can either remove the content, noindex the old art…

In early March, Google announced it would switch fully over to mobile-first indexing by September 2020. But now Google may decide to delay it because of COVID-19. So far, John Mueller from Google said, it seems like things are on schedule but they ma…