Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

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 …

Google’s John Mueller every now and then has to respond to someone with the old saying, two wrongs don’t make a right. Often enough people ask him, my competitor is doing X, which is against Google’s guidelines. My competitor is ranking well, can I d…

Google held its first Google Webmaster Conference Product Summit at Mountain View, California – the GooglePlex. It was a full day event, unlike most of the previous Google Webmaster Conferences and it was filled with awesomeness. I posted some of my …

Martin Splitt from Google said that his co-worker, Lizzi Harvey, has updated the JavaScript SEO basics guide and the JavaScript troubleshooting guide for web components. The JS guide now shows the best practices for web components and troubleshooter h…

Danny Sullivan has confirmed that the reports submitted about the rich results for recipes not working properly are being reviewed. A couple of weeks ago we reported there was an issue but the issue is still not resolved but Google is looking into it.
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GoogleBot is now running Chrome 78, this started as soon as this past Friday, on November 1st. The stable version of Chrome 78 was released on October 22nd…

Google is now rolling out the experimental and new “Speed” reports within Google Search Console. Google began testing this last May and we have seen more and more webmasters get this report since then but now Google announced it is rolling out as “expe…

When Google announced it bought Fitbit last week, the company wrote in the blog post “Fitbit health and wellness data will not be used for Google ads.” But no real mention about organic search, so I joked Google can use steps a person does in a day as…

Google announced last night that those running WordPress site can now install Google’s Site Kit with ease. Site Kit gives you data from Search Console, Analytics, AdSense, PageSpeed Insights, Tag Manager and Optimize – assuming you use all of those fe…

Joost de Valk from Yoast SEO, who has a wealth of access to tons of SEO data, asked Google on Twitter “did Google roll out a change in video snippets? We’re seeing video card and snippets in the normal search results for loads of sites that didn’t have…

Google’s John Mueller in this morning’s video at the 22:47 mark said that building too many links in a short period of time is not an issue by itself but rather it is the types of links you are probably building in that time period. He said often it l…

When Hannah Poferl said the New York Times saw a decline in Google organic search traffic because of either the Google BERT update or the site being switched to mobile-first indexing, John Mueller from Google said it probably isn’t the mobile-first ind…

Google’s John Mueller was asked if Google would add to Google Discover traffic a referrer that shows that click as coming from Google Discover versus Google search. John said no, Google has no plans on doing that. He said you can get to the data withi…

Danny Sullivan from Google said on Twitter that BERT does not assign values or scores to specific pages or web sites. It doesn’t work that way. BERT is simply (well, not so simply) about Google understanding languages better. Danny wrote “BERT doesn’t…

Google posted another #AskGoogleWebmasters video, this one on site speed and this one is different. It is (1) much longer than the average #AskGoogleWebmasters video and (2) it has both John Mueller and Martin Splitt from Google in the video.

The New York Times said it may have seen a “huge” impact from the Google BERT update and by impact it means a decline in search traffic from the search engine. Hannah Poferl, the Associate Masthead Editor for Audience at The New York Times told me so …

Earlier this month, Bing announced a pilot to allow some publishers to submit content and the HTML to the search engine without Bing having to crawl the page at all. This would effectively remove the requirement to crawl these sites. I asked Google i…

I never understood why people would use a crawler to build their XML sitemap file. I guess if you don’t have access to read the database of your CMS you would do that but seems so inefficient. John Mueller of Google said that also on Reddit.

As you know, I watch the SEO community closely. I also watch Google algorithm update chatter and signals closely. When I was reporting about those Google updates last week, they seemed on the weaker side, but then Google announced BERT rolled out thro…