Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

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.”

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…