Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Yesterday we reported that Google said the new name for the GoogleBot useragent is now 100% live. Well, that was wrong, it technically was not 100% live. Martin Splitt from Google broke it down for us explaining that when the web rendering service rend…

Martin Splitt from Google said on Twitter that the new name for the user agent for GoogleBot should now be 100% live. The new user agent name is dynamic, meaning, it will show the latest version of Chrome that GoogleBot is using to crawl and render yo…

Google’s John Mueller said that if you can, it is best to use the rel=sponsored link attribute on your affiliate links. You can still use nofollow or combine them if you want, but it would make things clearer for Google if you uses rel=sponsored.
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Google’s John Mueller had to say on Twitter that “URL length is not a ranking fraction.” He was told that a CMS autogenerates URLs that are often longer than what is recommended for SEO. Now, what is recommended for SEO in terms of length?

Google had a bug with the method of verifying your web site or property within Google Search Console through Google Tag Manager. This has now been fixed according to Google and those who had issues might need to now reverify their properties now.
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With the Google Search Console manual submission issues with getting pages into the index, John Mueller from Google said on Twitter “If your site relies on manual index submission for normal content, you need to significantly improve your site.”
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Over the weekend there has been numerous complaints about using Google Search Console to get content indexed faster – in short, SEOs are saying it doesn’t work. I guess this is through the “request indexing” feature in Google Search Console. To be cl…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter “Most sites don’t have “toxic” links, or at least, created them on their own.” He then added his line that there are “more important things to focus on, by our engineers, and definitely by site owners.”

Google’s John Mueller said there is “no need to spend your time” on preemptively disavowing links. That means spending time on disavowing links before that site links to you. He said there is no need to do that and I doubt he recommends doing so.
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Here is something that someone shared with me that I found funny and thought might make you all smile. A people also ask snippet that looks like a Google Ad but really is not. It says “sponsored ad” but really, Google is just pulling from the content…

Google’s John Mueller said that sites based in the United States do not get crawling priority from Google. It doesn’t matter where the site is located in terms of what priority Google will crawl the site. He said on Twitter “we don’t prioritize crawl…

Google’s John Mueller said in a Google webmaster hangout video at the 34:30 mark that he believes implementing schema markup for rich results won’t be getting any easier. In fact, he said over the next few years he feels it will continue to get harder …

Danny Sullivan from Google said on Twitter that Google has “heard the feedback” around the “image issue” with featured snippets. He added “I especially push for improvement here.” Google seems like they are looking into how they can make changes ther…

Danny Sullivan from Google said on Twitter “Maybe we’ll eventually break out that type of data” when it comes to showing click-through rates on featured snippets. Google almost gave it to us, it was a beta filter that went away back in 2017 for some r…

Does having and creating Google Assistant Actions help you rank better in Google search for your web site in general? I never saw anyone ask this question until today and Danny Sullivan of Google said no, it does not help with your organic rankings or…

There has been an enormous amount of confusion around the Google featured snippet duplication change. In short, Google made the change, didn’t communicate the change was done until SEOs saw it live and Google, mostly Danny Sullivan, has been answering…

A senior writer at Forbes, shared some data on Twitter showing that Forbes.com has seen a huge and very concerning drop in traffic from Google organic search. He said traffic is “down circa 10x” starting January 27th at 11pm ET. He posted this on Twit…

Google’s John Mueller said it doesn’t hurt you to used mixed languages in your URLs but it might confuse users who look at your URLs. John was asked on Twitter “Mixing language in url path” is it bad? John said “I don’t see a problem with that.”
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Let’s say you have a large multilingual site and all your pages are translated into the localized language. So page A in the US has the same content as page X in France, but the content is translated into French on page X. The image however is generic…

It seems like Google may be having issues indexing and ranking Ikea’s international and localized web pages properly…