Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google’s John Mueller said that implementing hotlink protections with carve-outs for search engines are fine. He added that this is not really a thing sites do that much these days, stating it was a thing in 2010’s or so but not now.

Google has updated its manual actions documentation around site reputation abuse, to expand on the next steps and actions you can take if you receive this manual action. Google now more clearly says that you should not block that content with your rob…

It is time for the monthly Google Webmaster Report. We are now in March as we continue to wait for the first Google core update of 2025. We did have a number of big unconfirmed Google updates, as documented below.

Last April 2024, Gary Illyes from Google said he was on a mission to make web crawling more efficient, he wanted to “figure out how to crawl even less, and have fewer bytes on wire.” Gary updated us saying “there’s lots more in works” for this but imp…

Some sites, hosted on some CDNs (content delivery networks), are experiencing a big spike in server response times for crawling, while seeing a drop in total crawl requests. So technically, the crawling has dropped but Google is taking much longer to …

The Google Search Console API has been delayed for the past several days. Data is days behind the web interface and causing issued for those who use Looker Studio, Big Query and other solutions to see the Search Console data when accessed through the …

Martin Split from Google said that having an audio version of a page or a blog post, does not impact your Google rankings. He said it is good for your users, but has no SEO impact.

Google’s John Mueller said that there is no persistent shortcut to faster crawling. Yes, you can expedite crawling for specific situations and times, but there is no way to just tell Google you want them to crawl you faster, all the time.

Dwarkesh Patel interviewed Jeff Dean and Noam Shazeer of Google and one topic he asked about what would it be like to merge or combine Google Search with in-context learning. It resulted in a fascinating answer from Jeff Dean.

Google Merchant Center recently began showing AI-generated summaries for how well your performance is doing with Merchant Center in Google Search. These are labeled as “experimental” and “AI-generated.”

In 2019, Google stopped using rel prev and next as a signal for its search engines to combine or understand paginated results on your site. Then Google offered up some other advice over the years on the topic. Now, John Mueller of Google explains why G…

Google has updated its Merchant Listing structured data documentation to now support, in beta, membership loyalty pricing property types. Google also updated the docs to provide more examples and instructions around active prices, sale prices, striketh…

So after Google literally paid Reddit for its content and then ranked them incredibly well in Google Search and its search features, Reddit during its earnings call blamed Google’s search algorithm for not hitting its expected user growth.

There is some chatter in the SEO community that Google Image Search may be down ranking, lowering the rankings, of AI-generated images, in favor of non-AI-generated images within the Google Image search results.

Google is making more changes to the Google Publisher Center, in March Google News will fully transition to automatically generated publication pages in March.

Did you ever want to validate to see if Google or other search engines can see your tabbed (hidden in a tab) navigation or content? Well, John Mueller from Google listed some ideas on how to do so.

John Mueller from Google wrote on Bluesky, “and let’s be honest, people can tell when author bios are used purely as an SEO tactic. It’s kinda awkward, not reassuring.” This was in response to a post from Nikki Pilkington who said “Stop treating autho…

Another update in the revised Google Quality Raters Guidelines that was updated on January 23rd was that they added a section for recipe sites and said that requiring “significant scrolling” or making it hard to find the jump to recipe button is not a …

Another update in the revised Google Quality Raters Guidelines that was updated on January 23rd was that they added a section for recipe sites and said that requiring “significant scrolling” or making it hard to find the jump to recipe button is not a …

Gary Illyes from Google reportedly said at event the other day that it is important for us to focus on originality in the coming year. “Originality is something we’re going to be focusing on this year. That’s going to be important,” is how he was quoted.