Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google has updated the Google search quality raters guidelines handbook on September 5, 2019. That is 16-weeks after it last updated the guidelines, which was on May 16, 2019 and before that, it was about 10-months since Google updated that document.
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Google’s John Mueller said in a Reddit thread that while “headings on a page are great for SEO & accessibility, but they’re not going to make or break your sites rankings.”

Google yesterday announced two movie and TV related things yesterday and they were not directly related. First Google launched a new mobile experience for searching for movies or shows. Second Google has new developer documents for movie structured da…

Google’s John Mueller explained in this weeks Google webmaster hangout video that if you have a separate M-DOT site it’s more likely that Google might show your M-DOT version in the normal desktop search results. This can be corrected by redirecting…

For most of the readers here, this is very old news but I loved how John Mueller broke it down in such a simple and clear way. This is how Google picks the canonical URL, the URL it shows in its search results, to searchers.

Google may be crawling sites more and harder over the past several days. The WebmasterWorld forums has several SEOs saying they are seeing significant spikes in crawl rates by GoogleBot. Also, I checked dozens of sites in the old Google Search Console…

About a month ago we asked you to fill out the SparkToro Google search ranking survey lead by Rand Fishkin. Well, now the results are out and Rand Fishkin published what 1,584 SEOs think about Google’s rankings.

Even if your site was switched to mobile-first indexing, it doesn’t mean that Google will only crawl and render your pages using the GoogleBot mobile useragent. Google says they still send out the desktop GoogleBot to those pages to check on things.
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Google announced it has added Auto-DNS verification with various domain name registrars to automate part of the verification flow. This is similar to what they did with GoDaddy and Google Domains, as well as similar to Bing’s announcement with Domain C…

There may (or may not) be an issue with the changes Google made back in February around consolidating around the canonical URL, which means the AMP, mobile, etc will all be counted towards the main URL’s data in the performance report. This may not b…

John Mueller from Google was asked if having invalid markup for structured data would lead to having a manual action. The answer is no, John said “Just having invalid markup wouldn’t be a cause for a manual action there.”

September 1st is just a few days away now and Google wants to remind us that those who depend on using the noindex direct in a robots.txt will be in trouble. Google is stopping supporting that starting September 1, 2019.

In the hangout with John Mueller and Martin Splitt of Google, Martin Splitt said “the two waves of indexing play less and less of a role.” He added, “I wouldn’t say that two waves of indexing are dead, it’s definitely not. I expect eventually renderin…

Most of you reading this will say, yea, we know Google has said structured data is not a ranking factor. Yea, we covered that before. But John Mueller from Google said in a Reddit thread that while it is not a ranking factor it may be worthwhile addin…

Gary Illyes, a Google Webmaster Trends Analysts, posted on Twitter “Anyone from the Quora SEO team? We need to talk.” Clearly that implies that Quora is doing something potentially not in accordance with Google’s webmaster guidelines and a penalty is …

This should come as no surprise, but Google has removed the app indexing features within the Search Console API. Google announced this on its blog the other day saying it “no longer support these Android app search appearance types.”

Gary Illyes from Google confirmed that XML Sitemaps are still the second most important source Google uses to crawl and discover URLs. He confirmed this on Twitter the other day after someone quoted him as saying this back in 2014.

We know you can use different forms of markup types, like microdata, RDFa, or JSON-LD on the same page. Google also allows you to use multiple types of structured data on a page.

We know that it is okay to have sponsored content on your site, in fact, Google says in its news publisher guidelines is acceptable as long as it doesn’t exceed your primary content and is not mislead as editorial content. Google’s webmaster guideline…

This isn’t exactly new, news – I covered this in 2014, but with the news around Dejan getting hit badly by a manual action, his plan is to move to a new domain and not redirect the old domain to the new. But John Mueller from Google rained on his para…