Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

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…

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…