Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google just announced this week a new algorithmic update to not show review markup, review rich results, in the Google search results for specific cases. You can learn more about those new rules over here. And it looks like Google is acting on it. Ac…

Google’s John Mueller said in an #AskGoogleWebmasters video that now that “you no longer need to do anything special for hashbang URLs,” if you still have those old URLs for the old AJAX crawling scheme, you should redirect those URLs.

Over a year after Google launched the ability for dataset schema to show up in the Google search results, Google has added reporting around it in Google Search Console. The new datasets schema report is now in the enhancements section for sites that ha…

Google has updated its rules for how and when it shows the reviews rich results, the review stars, in the Google search results. In short, the new rules are there is now a defined set of schema types for review snippets, self-serving reviews aren’t al…

Google’s John Mueller confirmed that although the nofollow link attribute is just a hint now, there is still no need to use the disavow link tool for links that are nofollowed. He said on Twitter “You definitely don’t need to disavow nofollow links –…

As you know, Google warned publishers about leasing out portion of their sites so that third-parties can piggy-back off the site’s authority and trust and rank their content better. Google then began penalizing some of those sections on the web sites …

Joost de Valk, from Yoast but a person who is super tight with WordPress, said WordPress will adopt the new link attributes announced by Google the other day. He said it will be introduced in the next release because “it’s a one line change” to the cod…

Gary Illyes from Google clarified last night that if you place a nofollow in your robots meta tags, it will also follow the new rules as the nofollow link attribute. Hence, as Gary said “Meta robots nofollow is a hint now, like rel-nofollow.” Although …

Google announced a change to the nofollow link attribute yesterday and with that announcement, Googlers spent the next day responding to questions about it on Twitter. I will go through what changed according to the announcement and then cover almost …

Google after two years of launching the beta version of the new Google Search Console and opening that beta up a year ago, Google has finally removed access to the old Google Search Console. There are still ways to get to some of the legacy reports bu…

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…