Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

There are numerous threads in the Google News Publisher Help that there is a bug with the feature to submit a site for inclusion into the Google News index. After you request inclusion, it says successful but then goes back to its original state. It s…

Google’s John Mueller said something obvious to most the readers here, that “BERT does not affect indexing.” BERT launched as a way for Google to understand queries better, which can impact how a site is ranked in Google search because Google might ma…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that “legal interstitials are fine as long as we can index the content without having to do anything special.” That means that you are not requiring GoogleBot to click on anything to accept and load the content aft…

Google’s official webmaster channel on Twitter responded to a question about the ads.txt file. Someone asked if you need it for SEO or search because he sees GoogleBot trying to access it. The answer is no, you don’t need it for Google Search or SEO. …

Google’s John Mueller was asked about links from from “theglobe.net and related spammy domains” and if they should be disavowed or something. John responded “We already ignore links from sites like that, where there are unlikely to be natural links. N…

Google said the best approach for when you allow others to syndicate and publish your content is to make them use the rel=canonical attribute, so Google knows where the source of the article is. Google said on Twitter “For syndication, using rel=canon…

So we just covered that Google said the best approach is to force your syndication partners to use the rel=canonical attribute to point to the content they distributed from your site. But Glenn Gabe said on Twitter he has seen Google not honoring that…

This past month we had a bunch of tremors and somewhat unconfirmed and semi-confirmed Google search algorithmic updates. We also had a big Google Local and Maps update that seems to be about relevancy, not proximity. It was not an insane month of news…

John Mueller from Google said in a Reddit thread that using a blank robots.txt file or just stating all is allowed in that file is the same thing, it doesn’t matter which you use. He said “Doesn’t matter” when he was asked Is there a difference? I’ve …

Google’s John Mueller said a word I kind of dislike, “impossible.” But technically it is true. He said, it would be impossible for Google to index the whole web. This was in response to why Google has not indexed all the pages in a sitemap for a spec…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that generally Google will not make up URLs to index on your web site. So if you find weird parameters at the end of the URLs showing up in the Google index for your web site, Google probably found someone linking …

Would it be valuable for Google’s own engineers, the ones that work on search, compete to rank their own test web sites in Google search? Probably not but it might be good for them to have real world experience with building their own web sites, John …

Earlier this month, we reported that Google has been investigating a bug with its recipe rich results where the images would disappear from the recipe results. This can obviously be devastating in terms of click through rates and traffic to those site…

This is probably common sense and a topic we’ve covered numerous times here before. But if you take something you’ve published and then distribute that content to be republished on other sites or another site, those other sites may rank above you for t…

One of the new Google snippet controls, the new meta tags, recently launched, had a bug where it can trigger Google to deindex the specific page. If you used max-image-preview tag and set the value to none, it would result in Google removing the page…

I’ve been covering search for a while and sometimes you see questions you really haven’t seen before, this is one of those times. Someone asked Google’s John Mueller if Google still has an indexing limit of 250 static pages per web site. The answer is…

There is a known issue of some sorts with following the Google help documents around getting Google to pick up on your noindex tags faster through the fetch as Google. John Mueller of Google is aware of the issue and said the workaround “is to test th…

Yesterday, Google added a new search appearance filter to the Google Search Console performance reports for “product results.” If you use product rich result markup on your pages, you are eligible to see this data in Search Console.

Google has documented that it lost or “dropped” data around image search clicks. Google wrote “Some image click data was dropped; as a result, you might see a dip in both click rate and CTR during this period. The issue has been fixed. This issue affe…

Google announced yesterday on Twitter that the rich results test can now show you how your recipe mark up looks not just in Google Search but also on Google Home devices and smart displays. Here is a screen shot from Google showing this in action.
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