Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

There have been some discussions about Google penalizing guest blog posts or a spike in unnatural link penalties. They were wrong. Gary Illyes from Google said “no” there was no change, adding “I don’t know of any specific campaign run recently, but t…

An unnamed Google employee posted an FAQ around that new Google Image license metadata for the licensable label on images. The Googler said that the “FAQs listed below where you can also submit feedback or additional questions if you need help to trou…

Gary Illyes from Google said on Twitter a “site being “tainted” after a manual action is a SEO myth.” He said once you “you request a reconsideration request and if successful, you’re off the hook.”

I often give this fluffy advice that you should “build a site and content that Google is embarrassed doesn’t rank well for the queries they deserve to rank for.” Well, here is an example of that advice working. John Mueller of Google has watched a si…

Google’s John Mueller said that in 2020 does “use PageRank internally.” He added that it is one of among many other signals Google uses. But Google does not use domain authority, a metric from Moz, he had to say again.

A change is coming to Google Image Search on desktop later this week. You know that little label you see in the bottom corner of an image when you mouse over the image thumbnail in the search results? It shows the dimensions of the image… Well, that…

Google just announced it has made some seriously big improvements to the data exports within Google Search Console. Google said that you will “now be able to download the complete information you see in almost all Search Console reports (instead of jus…

Bill Slawski posted about a new Google patent application filed in August of 2018 that was just revealed last week named Website Representation Vector to Generate Search Results and Classify Website. This patent can explain a lot around the August 201…

Danny Sullivan at Google again explained what the role of the search quality raters are. Again, for those who do not know, Google search quality raters are not Google employees, they are third-party contractors. They grade search results and the sites …

John Mueller from Google said just because a web site was once penalized, it does not mean it cannot be penalized again for the same issue. It is not like when you get a specific virus, that if you survive it, you become immune to getting that specific…

Gary Illyes from Google came on to Twitter for a brief moment to share a PSA about 429/503 HTTP status codes. He said while you probably know 429/503 HTTP status codes will slow GoogleBot’s crawling activity, what you might not know is that if those …

John Mueller from Google posted a mindful and useful response on Reddit mostly around where to start with hreflang. He said “It’s easy to dig into endless pits of complexity with hreflang.” “My recommendation would be first to limit the number of pages you create to those that are absolutely critical & valuable,” he added.

In 2012, 2017 and 2018 Google said they do not use the BBB (Better Business Bureaus) rating of a business as part of its search ranking factors. Well, Google had to say it again, this time in 2020. Danny Sullivan of Google said on Twitter “No, we don…

Danny Sullivan from Google said that while its search systems are not looking for EAT specifically, Google does hope the outcome of the search results that the algorithm outputs “align with what a good human EAT assessment would be.”

Google has added two new features to the change of address tool in Google Search Console. The one helps you validate your move with redirect validation. The other feature reminds you, or someone else with Search Console access, that the site is moving…

John Mueller of Google was asked if there is a difference between a Google broad core update and a Google core update. John responded “I imagine that’s generally the same.” I suspect they are.

I don’t think I’ve seen this before in the Google search results. A snippet that shows “uploaded by” next to an organic search result listing. This was shared by Ryan Clutter on Twitter and it is hard to know exactly why this is shown. It seems like …

John Mueller from Google posted a short, less than two minute video, for the #AskGoogleWebmasters series on YouTube around dealing with webspam manual actions from Google. In short he said if you are not sure what to do with a webspam manual action, th…

Google wants the AMP version of your page to be equivalent to the main mobile version of that page. So if your page has a comments area, Google would like to see those comments in the AMP version as well. But technically, John Mueller said, Google wo…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that text within an image’s alt attribute is generally seen as text “as a part of the page where the image is embedded.” If that text is within an H1 tag, then Google will also see it as part of the H1.