Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google’s John Mueller had to say on Twitter again that Google does not penalize sites using old school HTML, like old table designs or invalid HTML. He said “no, we don’t penalize sites that use old-school (or invalid, table-designs, etc) HTML.”
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Matt Cutts, who has not been with Google for a long time now, was asked to comment about alleged action Google took on a site a dozen or so years ago. Matt said he doesn’t specifically recommend this case but said in general “In many of the cases I sa…

Google posted on Twitter on the Google Webmaster account that Chrome is making changes to how it handles mixed content and you should be on top of it for your users. Also mixed content can break your HTTPS security, but as we know, the HTTPS ranking b…

Daniel Waisberg from the Google Search Console team said while on stage at SMX East this week that the Search Console team is working on “new email stuff.” It is unclear what exactly this new email stuff is but there have been complaints from SEOs tha…

Lizzi Harvey from Google announced that the video structured data doc got a big refresh. I took a quick look and yes, it is so much better. Google added More screenshots, how to mark timestamps on YouTube videos, how monitor your video performance wi…

Yesterday at SMX, Daniel Waisberg, Search Advocate at Google who works with the Search Console team, announced a new YouTube series on the Google Webmaster channel named Search Console Training. Yep, this series will train folks on how to use Google S…

Martin Splitt from Google announced at the Chrome Dev Summit 2019 that the median time for GoogleBot to render is 5 seconds. But even the 90th percentile is done “in minutes” he said. He said “you don’t have to worry about week long delays” for rende…

John Mueller from Google said that generally Google is quicker at processing malware reviews than hacked content reviews. Malware is when you have some some of malware installed on your web site, removing it and submitting a reconsideration request wil…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter “Google doesn’t use the spam score.” This was in response to someone saying they have an 11% spam score (I guess on some third-party tool). Yes, your site can have either one or more algorithmic penalties or manua…

Gary Illyes from Google was quoted as saying “We rewrite page titles in a low number of cases.” Jennifer Slegg also loosely quoted him as saying “if Google is rewriting your titles, that is a sign you should work on rewriting those titles.” This is f…

John Mueller of Google reminds us that when you use the geographic target setting in Google Search Console it will not stop you from getting traffic to your site from users outside of that target region. All it does is help Google understand your site …

Kieron Hughes posted on Twitter that he is seeing a test where Google is not displaying a site’s normal snippet in the search results when Google displays that URL for the featured snippet. Generally when Google shows a URL as a featured snippet, it wi…

We all get it and get it a lot, email spam selling links, DA, PR, and metrics around trying to improve your rankings in Google by manipulating Google’s algorithm. Some of this spam comes from places like India (not all) and Gary Illyes from Google sai…

Google’s John Mueller said you should absolutely not “use robots.txt to block indexing of URLs with parameters.” He said if you do that then Google “cannot canonicalize the URLs, and you lose all of the value from links to those pages.” Instead use r…

We had a slew of tweets triggered by Gary Illyes of Google and then followed up by John Mueller of Google around robots.txt and XML sitemap files ranking in Google. In short, if they rank for normal queries, John Mueller said “that’s usually a sign th…

Earlier this week, I wrote how yet another Googler once again said Google does not use user behavior signals for rankings. But what happens is people don’t believe Google and they come up with theories on how Google does use user behavior as a ranking…

Dr. Pete, Pete Meyers, from Moz, posted on Twitter “Any algo update that impacts query interpretation or relevance will impact Featured Snippets.” This was retweeted by Google’s John Mueller, so I guess that is a vote of confidence without passing DA …

I knew this Martin Splitt laptop head-bang GIF would come in handy the day he would answer this question. Many Googlers have said over the years that user actions, such as dwell time, time on a page, and so forth at not used by Google as a search rank…

One of the takeaways from the Google Webmaster Conference was that if Google tries to access your robots.txt file is unreachable but it does exist then Google won’t crawl your site. Google said about 26% of the time GoogleBot cannot reach a robots.txt…

Google recently released the Google Search Console Speed Reports, which is still in the “experimental” stage. But SEOs want to know when there will be an API for this data. John Mueller from Google said there is currently no ETA for an API for these …