Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google’s John Mueller said that links do not expire, but it may be the case that links can become less important over time as the pages that link to you become less relevant over time.

Earlier this week, we covered that Google’s John Mueller said H1 tags are not critical for your search rankings. The SEO community kind of divided and went nuts on this topic. Some said, but how can H1 tags not be critical to rankings, while others a…

Google’s John Mueller said “really large sites” should not use the crawl setting because “setting maximum value is probably too small for what your need.” Larger sites need to go beyond that max value in Google Search Console and it is not possible to…

A WebmasterWorld thread has some complaints that the number of external links reported in Google Search Console’s link report is down by about 50%. Like Google cut out about half of the links they were originally reporting. So I checked some older scr…

Google announced it is changing the user agent name of the current GoogleBot in December. We knew this was coming when Google launched the new Evergreen GoogleBot. Google didn’t change the user agent from Chrome 41 to what it was really running to not …

A sigh of relief swept through the SEO community yesterday (sounds like something I’d read in a book) when Google announced the change of address tool is now part of the settings section of the new Google Search Console.

Google’s John Mueller caused a bit of a panic yesterday when he started questioning why so many SEO and digital marketing agency web sites do not list the physical address of the business. He had to clarify later that this was just a personal question…

Google’s John Mueller posted on Reddit that he agrees, that HTML sitemaps are not worthwhile for SEO purposes. He said “I agree. When it comes to SEO … for small sites, your site should be crawlable anyway (and if you’re using a common CMS, it’ll almost always be fine) & for large sites, they’re not going to be useful anyway (use sitemaps, use normal cross-linking, check with a crawler of your choice).”

RankBrian launched in 2015 and is a way for Google to understand user queries better. Google has said you cannot optimize for it but you can work on making your site better. Gary Illyes from Google said basically making your content for users is acco…

Google’s John Mueller said that your site can rank fine with or without H1 tags. You don’t have to use any H1 tags, or you can use many, either way, it is not a critical issue specifically for Google search. He did say it helps Google understand the st…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that he strongly recommends sites, espesially new sites, not use m-dot URLs. Google has always strongly recommended sites use responsive designs but here John is saying stay away from m-dots as a strong recommend…

John Mueller from Google launched a new video series on the Google Webmaster YouTube channel called Google Search News. It looks like Google will be providing a news recap, maybe monthly, of the more important releases and changes that webmasters care …

A week or so ago, Google launched a new Search Console enhancement report for breadcrumb markup. Well, that report already had a bug with it. Google posted in the data anomalies page “Google fixed an error in Breadcrumb validation (the last crumb in t…

About ten days ago, Google announced new rules around which search results will get reviews (stars) in their search results snippets. We saw a steep decline reviews rich results showing in the Google search results a couple days after the announcemen…

Google’s John Mueller said that if someone takes your image and embeds it on their site using your image URL as the source, also known as hotlinking images, that image would not be considered a link to your web site.

In 2008 Google added a feature to Google Webmaster Tools (as it was known back then, now known as Google Search Console) to let you set your crawl rate. Google does this automatically based on what your server can handle but you can override it. If yo…

Gary Illyes from Google said last night on Twitter that emailing Google for support with your SEO and your ranking problems in Google never really works. He said “That’s impossible” when someone claimed that emailing Google did help his ranking issues…

John Mueller from Google released another #AskGoogleWebmasters video where he said the only real thing that changes, temporarily, when you move a site from one server to another server, is how fast GoogleBot crawls that content. Google will throttle b…

I am not sure if you remember, but back in May Danny Sullivan shared screen shots from a Google Ranking Fair where he shared SEO and webmaster concerns. One of those concerns was “Webmasters want more control over sitelinks, titles, snippets, mixing im…

There are numerous reports that those using Blogger, Google’s blog platform, are having issues with getting their content into the Google Index.