Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

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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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…