Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

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…

Both RankRanger and Moz are reporting large reductions in how often the people also ask box shows up in Google search. RankRanger shows a 12 point drop and Moz is showing a 6 point drop (they measure these differently).

There is a site out there claiming that Google has given it some sort of AI ranking contract. Thus this company has an advantage in helping you rank higher in Google. It does not, John Mueller of Google said on Twitter “They don’t. This is likely jus…

So I have been looking for more documentation and details on how to implement and request inclusion for the 3d and AR based images in Google search. Well, thanks to the AMA I did yesterday, someone shared a link I should have seen with more details.
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Big news yesterday, but we saw it coming, was that Google announced all sites are going to be moved over to mobile-first indexing by September 2020. Google is sending out notices about this, Google started doing that last week. But Google also said t…

Gary Illyes from Google wrote in a Reddit thread that “generally” your hreflang annotations are not processed or picked up until all the pages in the set that you are linking to are crawled and re-indexed. He wrote “Generally the hreflang annotations a…