Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

With Google saying yesterday that they are deprecating support for data-vocabulary markup because of the “popularity of schema.org” – some would assume microformats is next. But John Mueller from Google said microformats are still supported and there…

John Mueller of Google said again, .gov TLDs, top level domain names, do not get a ranking boost or preference in Google search. Having a .gov, just because it is a .gov, does not directly help you rank better. However, a lot of .gov domain names hav…

Google’s John Mueller said on Reddit “A site is not going to outrank your site just because of hidden text.” He also added “Inversely, just having hidden text on a page won’t get the site banned from Google.”

Google has announced that it made “significant updates” to its developers documentation on mobile-first indexing. You can see the new docs over here and here is the cached version that is old (updated in October 2019).

Google has released a new video on how image search rankings work. John Mueller of Google answered how to rank images on Google and provided useful tips on the topic.

Google announced this morning that after April 6, 2020 it will no longer support the data-vocabulary markup for rich results. Google is going all in with Schema.org. Google said “with the increasing usage and popularity of schema.org we decided to focu…

Shay Harel, the founder of RankRanger, spotted Google showing a tweet, yes, a post from Twitter, in the Google featured snippet section and people also ask section. Here is his screen shots via Mordy on Twitter.

Jeff Hawley shared on Twitter that he thinks Google not only is showing how-to schema more randomly and less often but also changed how they function a bit. This, he said, coincided with the November update.

Danny Sullivan from Google responded to complaints about spam in Google search asking the user to report the spam using the form. The user complained and Danny responded that good spam reports often lead to “a deep dive to understand networks and take…

Google, once again, had to say structured data does not impact ranking in web search. But this time Google had to say it because their structured data warnings in Google Search Console were confusing to understand and came off like bad structured data …

Google has confirmed that some may see a spike in unparsable structured data errors within Google Search Console. This spike should be ignored if it happened between January 13 and 16th of this year. Google said “This was due to an internal misconfig…

Google’s John Mueller was asked if adding cookie acceptance banners are going to cause an SEO problem for Google search. John said “Cookie banners are fine.” He added that you want to avoid “replacing your page’s content with an interstitial.”

Google has upgraded the rich results test to show embedded resources. It is beta but it can show external elements included by a page. Here is an example of a page here but you can run it on any page.

Google seems to have recently made the new GoogleBot user agent name that is dynamic for the evergreen GoogleBot live. Bastian Grimm said he started noticing the new name on January 12, 2020.

Gary Illyes from Google said it has fixed an issue with the search engine indexing its own cache pages. It took a few weeks after it was reported but Gary said it should be fixed. I checked just now and it was not fixed but maybe the fix takes time t…

Google’s John Mueller said a link on an HTTP page is just as valuable to Google as a link on an HTTPS page and visa versa. He said on Twitter “we treat links on http the same as links on https sites.”

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that “that would be pretty rare” if you removed your tag and/or search pages from Google’s index and preventing Google from crawling them, that it would it would result in a ranking boost for your site. He said you…

Google may have dropped table schema for datasets that it launched in beta in 2018. If you try to find examples of these types of rich results showing up in search, you probably won’t be able to find it.

Google’s John Mueller was asked how can one communicate to Google that a page with evergreen content is as value as it was when it was first published several years ago. John responded that “If it’s evergreen, then by definition you don’t need to chang…

When it comes to site moves, if you pick some URLs and not all, it can cause issues for Google. In short, moving all your URLs from one place to another will result in a much faster site migration than taking portions of your site to migrate at a time….