Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

John Mueller from Google has confirmed an issue with the data being displayed in the URL parameter tool within the old Google Search Console. In short, the tool is showing sometimes zero and often less than it should, URL parameter settings for the si…

We have another Google Search Console bug to report, this one is with the crawl stats report. Yes, another legacy tool and report. The crawl stats report is a bit out of date, only having data as fresh as December 30, 2019. That is over a week old, an…

There have been numerous reports within the SEO community that Google has been really slow recently to respond to some reconsideration requests. Some are taking months but most are taking many weeks. I believe at some point, responses use to take day…

I see a lot of SEOs over the years push out new stories, repurposed, with a new headline for the new year. So this year you’d see articles on “how to optimize for Google BERT in 2020” whereas last year it would be “how to optimize for Google BERT in 2…

It seems that Medium, the popular publishing platform, hasn’t been doing too well in Google over the past couple of months – especially since December. And it seems like it is getting worse. Some are saying the site has 40% declines in organic visibil…

Gary Illyes from Google posted on Twitter “It’s a new year, maybe we can put the voice search optimization fad to sleep finally…” What does he mean by this? I don’t think he means that voice searches aren’t growing but rather that SEOs can optimize…

Google’s John Mueller was asked by a webmaster if he should remove the mobile alternative pages since the site is now responsive. John Mueller said yes, saying “Fewer page types make things easier, so if you can migrate away from m-dot that seems like…

Google’s John Mueller said that persistent 5xx error responses to Google’s requests by your server would result in Google slowing its crawl of your web site. John wouldn’t say if there is a specific percentage of your site’s URLs that are required or …

John Mueller and Martin Splitt from Google released a cheesy video, literally cheesy in many ways, around questions around the URL inspection tool. These are FAQs that you probably know the answers to already but the video is so funny to watch that you…

Mike King asked John Mueller of Google an interesting question around issues that come up with the web rendering engine and blocked endpoints with JavaScript rendering issues. Mike asked if it would be considered cloaking if Google does not end us seei…

Google’s John Mueller said on Reddit that Google uses XML Sitemaps like an energy drink. John said “All sitemap files of a site are imported into a common, big mixing cup, lightly shaken, and then given to Googlebot by URL in the form of an energy drin…

Google’s John Mueller said again that linking out to high authority web sites does not help you rank better in Google. He said “no” when asked if it is true based on what this graphic says, which is “multiple SEO experiments and studies show that link…

There is currently a ten-day delay with the Google Search Console coverage report. It is not uncommon for these reports to experience delays but often the delay is about three-days. We are now showing data as late as December 20, 2019, which is ten-day…

Let’s say you have a web site that just serves audio or video or images or other forms of multimedia – will Google be able to understand it all? John Mueller of Google said on Reddit “You always need textual content on-page, regardless of what other k…

Google has removed the Google search help documents for the live coverage carousel, which was something Google launched in 2016 as a pilot launch. John Mueller from Google said “It’s currently still in very limited availability, so it doesn’t make sen…

Google’s John Mueller said in a video hangout this morning at the 53:52 mark into that video that E-A-T is less important for e-commerce sites. E-A-T is more focused on sites where “the type of information is critical for the user, where they really ne…

Google Search Console is super useful and helpful and the messages can be critical for the performance and safety of your web site. But some messages are not as useful, such as the uncommon downloads notification. Over the past few weeks, webmasters …

Martin Splitt from Google seemed almost upset by advice he saw someone was given around how to use HTML headings or Hx tags on a page. An SEO was told to use H3 tags for level-2 subheading. So what this person did was was make a style for h3 aria-leve…

John Mueller from Google was asked if a salience score matters for SEO. His response was “Where do you see that?” Reading into that, I suspect he means, no – but where is that myth coming from. If you dig a bit, you can see it mentioned in the Google…

Google’s John Mueller posted a single #AskGoogleWebmasters video answering seven SEO questions. All the questions are pretty basic and you probably heard John answer them before. He even answered the question “What is the secret to ranking better?” Th…