Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

A week or so ago, I asked Google’s John Mueller in a video hangout if it is possible that the changes in searcher behavior we are seeing are influencing the overall Google search ranking algorithm. We have been seeing a lot of fluctuations in Google se…

A week ago we we reported that Google has new structured data named SpecialAnnouncement that some sites can use to markup their Google search results. Well, Google didn’t write a blog post about it until Friday afternoon and it isn’t live yet. Danny …

For as long as I can remember, Google has always said it has to crawl, index and rank and imperfect web. That means broken markup, grammar and typos, sites not built with accessibility in mind and so forth. John Mueller of Google was asked if he think…

Google’s John Mueller was asked if Google is filtering out web sites for searches related to the coronavirus. John said no, he isn’t “aware of anything where we’re manually filtering out sites specifically around health terms.” He did say that Google…

As part of the structured data specific to COVID-19 announcements that we covered the other day, Google has launched a new beta tool for posting an announcement to your search results listing using Google Search Console.

Google has posted a new developer help document guiding SEOs and webmasters on how to use structured data with JavaScript. This goes through using Google Tag Manager to generate JSON-LD dynamically and using structured data with custom JavaScript.
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Brian Freiesleben shared a screen shot of a featured snippet showing up not in the first position of the Google Search results page but lower down on the page. Back in the old days, I thought featured snippets can show in multiple locations but I can b…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter “spammers would love to know which links aren’t recognized as spam.” That is why Google does not label which links they know are spam in Google Search Console. Google has said this before but sometimes it needs t…

Google has added new help documentation around using structured data specific to COVID-19 announcements. Google said on Twitter “We’ve released new docs on how to add structured data for COVID-19 announcements to your web pages. This isn’t yet visibl…

Google has launched a new initiative to help official health organizations, such as national health ministries and US state level agencies, to become more visible in search. Google is doing this by sharing a new document on important best practices fo…

Last November Google held an SEO and webmaster conference at their Mountain View offices, the GooglePlex. I was there and posted my takeaways over here. But today, Google has released all the video recordings from the event. Now you all can watch the …

Gary Illyes from Google said technically he and his colleagues are able to lookup the PageRank values of a page but there “rarely” is ever a reason to do so he said. He said the toolbar PageRank score, the pretty one, which is 0 through 10, is long go…

Yesterday I reported about new preferences with Google Search Console but focused on the email preferences. You can also communicate to Google that you want to hide the search performance for this query report snapshot you sometimes see in the Google s…

Valentin Pletzer posted screen shots on Twitter of a new email preferences feature in Google Search Console. This is something we knew Google has been working on but now we can see some of it in these screen shots that Valentin shared. It looks like mo…

As promised, Google has put together both a blog post and a detailed developer document on how to pause your online business. This document helps you manage and retain your search rankings while not accepting business online.

We have heard Google talk about two waves of indexing or crawling, espesially when it comes to processing JavaScript. But now Martin Splitt from Google says there is no such thing. He did hint a while back that it is going away but now says there was …

Gary Illyes from Google said the company is working on putting together “some more thorough do’s and don’t’s” around what e-commerce and other site owners should do with their web sites if the business is temporarily closed due to the coronavirus. But…

Google’s John Mueller said that right now there are no webhooks or APIs for tracking issues reported within Google Search Console. So what he recommends to do now is set up an email box that you can program a script to read those emails and feed them …

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter “Some tools find all sorts of irrelevant links — there’s absolutely no need to place every such link in your disavow file.” He said, instead you should “focus your time on useful things instead.”

Google’s John Mueller said it is a myth that the web spam team would make a site that has sufficiently fixed a manual action wait a longer period of time. Google doesn’t simply say that this site did something bad, so you have to wait. Once it is fix…