Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

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 …

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…