Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

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…

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.