Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Joost de Valk from Yoast SEO, who has a wealth of access to tons of SEO data, asked Google on Twitter “did Google roll out a change in video snippets? We’re seeing video card and snippets in the normal search results for loads of sites that didn’t have…

Google’s John Mueller in this morning’s video at the 22:47 mark said that building too many links in a short period of time is not an issue by itself but rather it is the types of links you are probably building in that time period. He said often it l…

When Hannah Poferl said the New York Times saw a decline in Google organic search traffic because of either the Google BERT update or the site being switched to mobile-first indexing, John Mueller from Google said it probably isn’t the mobile-first ind…

Google’s John Mueller was asked if Google would add to Google Discover traffic a referrer that shows that click as coming from Google Discover versus Google search. John said no, Google has no plans on doing that. He said you can get to the data withi…

Danny Sullivan from Google said on Twitter that BERT does not assign values or scores to specific pages or web sites. It doesn’t work that way. BERT is simply (well, not so simply) about Google understanding languages better. Danny wrote “BERT doesn’t…

Google posted another #AskGoogleWebmasters video, this one on site speed and this one is different. It is (1) much longer than the average #AskGoogleWebmasters video and (2) it has both John Mueller and Martin Splitt from Google in the video.

The New York Times said it may have seen a “huge” impact from the Google BERT update and by impact it means a decline in search traffic from the search engine. Hannah Poferl, the Associate Masthead Editor for Audience at The New York Times told me so …

Earlier this month, Bing announced a pilot to allow some publishers to submit content and the HTML to the search engine without Bing having to crawl the page at all. This would effectively remove the requirement to crawl these sites. I asked Google i…

I never understood why people would use a crawler to build their XML sitemap file. I guess if you don’t have access to read the database of your CMS you would do that but seems so inefficient. John Mueller of Google said that also on Reddit.

As you know, I watch the SEO community closely. I also watch Google algorithm update chatter and signals closely. When I was reporting about those Google updates last week, they seemed on the weaker side, but then Google announced BERT rolled out thro…

Elon Musk, the co-founder of PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX and the list goes on and on, said on Twitter that it is hard to go to Google and find Tesla’s solar roof panels. He said “Unfortunately, it’s hard to google Tesla solar links due to tons of ads & SEO.”

Google said in its Google Webmaster Twitter account that diminishing traffic of a backlink does not lower the value of that backlink in the eyes of Google. That was the question and Google said no, it does not lower the value of that link in terms of …

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that he believes using the nofollow link attribute for internal PageRank sculpting is a waste of time. He said “I think it’s a waste of time to do that.”

Google announced this morning that it will stop indexing content within Adobe Flash files, SWF files, this year. Google said “Google Search will stop supporting Flash later this year. In Web pages that contain Flash content, Google Search will ignore …

Google has officially deprecated the corporate contact markup for knowledge panels. Lizzi Harvey from Google posted about it on Twitter, she said “Corporate Contact markup for Google knowledge panels is deprecated. If you’re verified as an official rep…

Google’s John Mueller said merging one site into another is not the same thing as a site moving from one domain to another. You should not use the change of address tool when doing a site merge, it should only be used when moving a site fully to a new …

Back in July Google fixed a bug with recipe rich results but that bug may be resurfacing according to Lisa Bryan, a food blogger. She said starting around October 15th her site, and others, started to see the images of their recipes disappear from Goog…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that if you automatically translate your content from one language to another, using automated translation services, it likely will not lead to a Google penalty or manual action. He did add that the content might …

Google’s John Mueller asked if a 404 page was noindexed, would that make it drop out of the Google index. John Mueller said no, he said “No. If we crawl and see a 404 or a noindex, it’s all the same.”

Several weeks ago we saw Google testing “in this video” timelines, which they announced later as “key moments” in video. Well, Google may now be rolling it out for more videos than just a test group.