Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google’s John Mueller was asked by Mihai Aperghis in a webmaster hangout at the 58 minute mark about a page Mihai 404ed but Google is showing as a 301 to a new URL, like Google canonicalized the 404 URL to the new URL.

Joost de Valk noticed that the Google help document for Google News sitemaps has removed any mention of support for stock tickers and genre. We know Google dropped support for the Google News specific meta keywords tag and in the XML sitemap in Februa…

If you try a site command on Google News right now, you will be out of luck. Zero, no, results will be found or returned. This is a bug that Google has acknowledged and Google will fix it “in 2020.” When in 2020, I do not know, but it will be fixed i…

Glenn Gabe noticed that if you try to block Google from showing your news stories in just Google News by blocking Googlebot-News, it no longer works. So if you want to follow the old advice (I do not see new advice) to block Google News, you can no lon…

Google announced on Twitter that the Discover performance reports are now also showing fresher data. In September, Google brought fresher, more up-to-date data in the performance report for your search reporting. Now that has arrived as well for your…

Google has documented a bug with Google Search Console reporting, specifically the performance report when filtered to Discover data. Google said you may see a dip in your Google Discover reported traffic because a reporting bug, but in reality, there…

As you know, Google told us the user agent names are changing in December, this month, with the new evergreen GoogleBot. Martin Splitt from Google said you may see this new user agent in your log files now, because Google is rolling it out as an exper…

Google’s John Mueller dug into a question about a site that spent time improving its “mediocre quality” content but still did not see significant ranking improvements. John said that is not just about improving the content, but rather also working on f…

Google has started to show errors specifically with the rich results when implemented using RDFa or microdata that incorrectly tag a URL where a text value is expected are now shown as an error in the rich result report. This started on December 3, 20…

Danny Sullivan from Google confirmed that speakable markup now can work for content outside of Google News. Danny said on Twitter “Speakable is no longer restricted to news content; we’ll be updating our documentation on this. However, using Speakable …

Google’s John Mueller had to warn one SEO that he should not go ahead and build out 1,300 city based landing pages, with the strategy of trying to rank for your keyword phrase + city name. He said that would be a doorway page and against Google’s guid…

Google announced yesterday a revamp of the Google Publisher Center, which originally launched in 2014. This revamp merges two existing tools, Google News Producer and Google News Publisher Center, into one. In addition, Google said “Content for News w…

Google has posted that in Google Search Console your job posting errors may have changed. There may be a reduction in the general errors and Google may now show you more specific errors instead. The total number of errors should not change but how Go…

Google looks like they might publish new guidelines and help documents around what to do now that the rel=next/prev is no longer supported. This news comes via Igal Stolpner on Twitter based on his notes from the Google Webmaster Conference in Tel Avi…

Google’s Martin Splitt at TechSEOBoost last week in Boston gave an awesome presentation around how Google crawls and renders, with a deeper dive around Google’s WRS, Web Rendering Service. One note that was interesting was that Martin confirmed on Twi…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter “not having a manual action doesn’t mean that the website is good overall.” Simple but true – there are algorithms that judge the quality of the site and if your site is not ranking well, and you don’t have a manu…

Yesterday I spotted that Google updated its Search Quality raters guidelines. George Nguyen from Search Engine Land dug into the changes, you can read the details over there. In short, Google added a page to the guidelines, bringing it up to 168 page…

As we reported, new stuff has now come to Google Search Console’s messaging. Google announced a new method for viewing messages in Google Search Console. You can now access these messages in the bell icon at the top right, it will have a red indicator…

Google is good, really good, at rendering JavaScript these days, even pretty inefficient JavaScript. So much so that Martin Splitt from Google said the only time you really need to worry about CPU usage being a problem is when it is such a big issue t…

Google’s John Mueller was asked if the site should make the meta data of its audio files indexable by Google. In which John responded “Think less about the type of pages, and more about the quality of the pages that you want to have indexed.”