Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google’s John Mueller said Google does not penalize pages for having weird product or brand names. John said on Twitter “Companies & products use all kinds of weird brand names.” So when someone asked if Google might lower those rankings, he said “No, I don’t think that would make sense.”

Lizzi Harvey from Google created a single page to follow the major updates made to the Google Search Developer documentation. So now you can just scan this page over here and see what updates she and her teammates made to the Google Search Developer d…

Friday, Google began sending out notices via Google Search Console of event markup issues. This comes after Google released new supported markup for events for labeling them as virtual, postponed or cancelled.

Google’s Martin Splitt said it is a myth that Google prioritizes AMP pages in Google search. We know AMP is not a ranking factor for Google, but is it really a myth that some AMP content cannot see better placement in Google?

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that he feels Google should continue to try to improve the search results even during the coronavirus outbreak. “There are lots of great sites that deserve to be shown where relevant, if we can,” he added.

Google has virtually stopped showing featured snippets in the top right position of the search results page. There are some exceptions but for the most part, in virtually all cases, Google is no longer showing the top right featured snippets.

Google’s John Mueller said in a webmaster hangout earlier this week that maybe in the future Google will look at speed metrics in a more granular way when it comes to ranking. Right now, only super slow sites are really impacted by the speed update bu…

Google has added some timely new properties for event schema. You can now mark your events with these additional properties. These new properties are for the eventStatus property sets under schema.org.

Eliav Lankri asked me yesterday if Google is now preventing emojis from showing up in the FAQ schema rich results. I had a hard time finding any examples of emojis showing in these FAQ results but I did find one. Did you all notice a reduction in emo…

Google made it so that Chrome would show a site is not secure when there is mixed content. But does that impact how the page ranks in Google search? Not currently.

Google launched Discover performance reports in Google Search Console almost a year ago. It is available for sites that see traffic from Google Discover. So not everyone sees it.

But there is no API for it yet…

It is a rough question because Google’s search results are always updating by itself, i.e. new content gets added, new links, new signals, etc. So the Google search results are always in a state of flux. But in terms of bigger search algorithm update…

John Mueller from Google was asked if “having too many non searched pages on website are bad for SEO?” John didn’t say yes or no, he instead said – “that’s up to you.” He said what good is it if no one searches for it?

Gary Illyes from Google said he may do an audio only Google Hangout to talk about search. Gary is not traveling anymore for search conference talks and he said he “kinda miss the conference hall chats.” So he is going to try this out.

Google’s John Mueller said there is currently no official “mechanism to block indexing of a part of a page.” There are “hacky ways” he said but nothing official from Google like a googleon/googleoff tag that is supported only for the Google Search App…

Google’s John Mueller said he would “recommend erring on the side of having fewer pages, especially when starting up a new site.” He said that having too many pages makes it hard for Google to “find the unique value of each page.”

I am not sure why it surprises me anymore but Google had to say that adding support for 3D and AR images to your site won’t help your pages rank better. Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter “No, we don’t” when asked if Google ranks these pages higher…

I am seeing some chatter from March 9th through March 11th (today) about a possible Google search algorithm update. The chatter is not explosive but there does seem to be enough chatter to write about it here. Some of the tools are also showing the cha…

Google’s John Mueller responded to a comment about Google’s guidelines around “Use the robots.txt file on your web server to manage your crawling budget by preventing crawling of infinite spaces such as search result pages.” He said this is less about …

How does Google understand what pages are in a set of pagination? Well, with the rel prev and next no longer being supported, Google has given other advice. Google’s John Mueller was asked about this in a video hangout last week, and while he said hav…