Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google upgraded the publisher center over the past couple weeks but not everything in the new publisher center seems to be working properly. A Google Publisher Center help thread says that when you try to add a new section using the web crawl option, i…

Aleyda Solis interviewed not one, but five Google Webmaster Trends Analysts at the same time while at the Google Webmaster Conference in Zurich. It was pretty fun and interesting to see how they interact with each other while answering questions. How…

John Mueller from Google said that using Google’s own domain name service, Google Domains, will not help you rank better in Google search or with your SEO. Well, most of that statement is true. If you want me to nitpick, it does help you slightly veri…

This is a small but useful change Google made in Google Search Console. So the report overview pages for the performance reports, the coverage report, etc, now have small checkboxes in the boxes so you know when a specific category is selected. I alwa…

Google’s John Mueller said at the 3:16 mark into a webmaster hangout from December 13, 2019 that Google does try to understand the blog comments section of a page but at the same time would still categorize that section as primary content. We have cov…

Google posted in the data anomalies page and on Twitter that it has updated the coverage report within Google Search Console and as a result, you may see more indexed pages being reported as of December 15, 2019. In short, some pages that were “Crawle…

As you know, Google launched a speed report in experimental mode in Google Search Console. Since it launched I’ve seen numerous complaints that Google is all of a sudden reporting the site as slow when it was moderate or OK. Well, now I am seeing the…

Google’s John Mueller was asked by Mihai Aperghis in a webmaster hangout at the 58 minute mark about a page Mihai 404ed but Google is showing as a 301 to a new URL, like Google canonicalized the 404 URL to the new URL.

Joost de Valk noticed that the Google help document for Google News sitemaps has removed any mention of support for stock tickers and genre. We know Google dropped support for the Google News specific meta keywords tag and in the XML sitemap in Februa…

If you try a site command on Google News right now, you will be out of luck. Zero, no, results will be found or returned. This is a bug that Google has acknowledged and Google will fix it “in 2020.” When in 2020, I do not know, but it will be fixed i…

Glenn Gabe noticed that if you try to block Google from showing your news stories in just Google News by blocking Googlebot-News, it no longer works. So if you want to follow the old advice (I do not see new advice) to block Google News, you can no lon…

Google announced on Twitter that the Discover performance reports are now also showing fresher data. In September, Google brought fresher, more up-to-date data in the performance report for your search reporting. Now that has arrived as well for your…

Google has documented a bug with Google Search Console reporting, specifically the performance report when filtered to Discover data. Google said you may see a dip in your Google Discover reported traffic because a reporting bug, but in reality, there…

As you know, Google told us the user agent names are changing in December, this month, with the new evergreen GoogleBot. Martin Splitt from Google said you may see this new user agent in your log files now, because Google is rolling it out as an exper…

Google’s John Mueller dug into a question about a site that spent time improving its “mediocre quality” content but still did not see significant ranking improvements. John said that is not just about improving the content, but rather also working on f…

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…