Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

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…

Want some pure myth busting from Google? Well, here it is. Google’s official Google Webmaster Twitter account said “traffic to a website isn’t a ranking factor.” This is in response to an SEO asking if it is.

Google told us they would give us data within Google Search Console about the “swipe to visit” image feature that only works with AMP pages right now. And now you can access that data in Google Search Console.

Like we covered before, you cannot opt out of Google’s mobile-first indexing initiative – it is going to happen with or without you. There is no hiding from it, there is not cheating it, it is coming for you. Heck, Google’s John Mueller made a video j…

Back in 2015, on mobile, Google went from showing the URL to showing the site name, plus the breadcrumb in the search results. This morning, I have been hit up numerous times about Google doing the same on desktop. It doesn’t seem 100% rolled out yet,…

I love it how the name “Google Sandbox” which originated back in 2004 or so, is still around today. So much so that Google year after year has to say there is no Google Sandbox. In short, back in 2004, SEOs noticed that new sites took a while to start…

Google’s John Mueller was asked how should a web site document that its medical and health content was reviewed by a doctor or expert on the topic. John said you can use text, link to the doctor’s profile and add other elements to the page to communic…

Google’s John Mueller again is saying that putting dates on content and articles is a good thing for the quality of a piece of content on the web. John said on Twitter the other day “Better for me is to know what the date was, that makes it easier to …

Google’s John Mueller said it is normal for a site to rank well for a short period of time for a specific query. He said on Twitter “It can happen that a site ranks or a short period of time for a query.” It can happen a lot.

It took just under 20 days from the official public release of Chrome version 76 for GoogleBot to support it but as of yesterday, August 18th, 2019 at around 3pm ET, GoogleBot now supports Chrome 76 features.

Here is a super interesting featured snippet feature in Google search. It shows a featured snippet but right below it, it shows also a word from the featured snippet that Google thinks you might want a definition on.

Did you know that Google Discover can also show product pages that may interest you? Merlinox shared on Twitter his Google Search Console performance report for the Discover feed and said these are all product pages. The Google Discover help docs do…

Sometimes Google may remove a featured snippet from showing in the search results because it doesn’t comply with its own internal policies or guidelines. Google currently does not notify webmasters when such a removal happens but Danny Sullivan from G…

45 days ago I wrote that Google is going to be cracking down on sites that lease out its own subdomains and subfolders so that other companies can rank their content better on leased domains. Google now officially posted on Twitter about the topic.
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So now as SEOs, you need to follow all the latest changes in Chrome because whatever support Chrome adds, it is likely that GoogleBot will support it as well with the evergreen GoogleBot. Ilya Grigorik from the Google team posted that the Chrome team …

Google’s John Mueller clarified on Twitter that if you remove links from your disavow file, those links will start to count again – well, if Google hasn’t discounted them other ways (i.e. Penguin or other methods). I am surprised I never outright cove…

Google has added new issue types to the rich results reports within Google Search Console. Specifically Google added product, Sitelink Searchbox, and unparsable types to this report. Google said “the ability to report on these issues is new; the issu…

Google recently posted a new help document around JavaScript and SEO. Google received some early feedback from the SEO community around the doc and as of this morning has updated the doc to address those questions and concerns.

This is probably super obvious to most of you but this may be the first time I’ve heard Google comment about this. Amazon has this Alexa rank feature, they had it since like 1996, a super long time. Google’s John Mueller was asked if Google uses it fo…