Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

A few months ago, Google quietly updated the manual action policy violations list for News and Discover policy violations. Google removed the adult-theme and artificial freshening sections and then added a slew of deceptive practices sections, while a…

Google’s John Mueller clarified once again that your URLs do not need to be lowercase, they can be uppercase, it really doesn’t matter. But he did say, pick either lowercase or uppercase, just be consistent.

It seems like Reddit, the site that ranks well for every single query in Google Search, is starting to see a small but visible ranking drop in Google Search. It seems Reddit is losing Google Search visibility when you look at its ranking reports in Sem…

Google’s John Mueller said that using generative AI to create blog posts and content for the purpose of getting backlinks is “almost certainly against Google’s spam policies.” He said this in response to a complaint that this was being done on their si…

What happens when you lose a lot of links really quickly, how might that impact your Google search rankings and SEO performance? Well, John Mueller of Google was asked that question and after much back and forth, he responded, “SEOs often overestimate …

Using the “validate fix” button within Google Search Console to communicate to Google that you fixed an issue, does not signal to Google to expedite anything on its end. It just a reporting mechanism for you to track when Google recrawls the issue and …

Google now added the new 24-hour hourly data from the performance report in Google Search Console to the export functionally. So now you can export hourly data, the most recent data, from Google Search Console’s performance report.

The topic of URLs for SEO and ranking is one that has been around since search engines first existed and 25+ years later, it is still a popular topic. Google has said time and time again that keywords in URLs don’t offer a significant ranking boost for…

Google said that core updates should have no impact on a site name in the Google Search results being updated or changed. When asked, John Mueller of Google wrote, “That shouldn’t be related to a core update.”

Did you ever run the Google Search Console URL inspection tool, and click on the view crawled page link, and then see a blank screenshot under the screenshot tab? It might not be an issue, says Gary Illyes of Google. As long as you see the HTML you wan…

Google’s John Mueller said that simply adding country codes to your URLs won’t result in “any change at all” for regional ranking reasons. He added, changing your URLs will result in “temporary fluctuations” because of the URL change but it won’t help …

A Redditor posted a question asking if startups in 2025 need a blog. This was posted in the SEO section of Reddit, so John Mueller replied by just saying “no.” I guess a startup does not “need” a blog for SEO purposes, it is not a requirement.

Talk about a busy month – the last 30 days has been pretty wild. We had the November 2024 core update finish in December, then we had a new December 2024 core update start and finish, while also having the December 2024 spam update start and finish in …

Google’s John Mueller was asked if the Google Search Console screenshot feature in the URL Inspection Tool is what Google Search sees. John responded saying, “For the most part, yes” and then added some caveats.

Google has posted a new help section for Google Merchant Center, a Merchant Center Next Glossary. This glossary defines key Merchant Center terms and links you to related articles with more detail about each term.

Google’s John Mueller said, “It makes no sense to block” privacy, disclaimers, or other legal types of pages from your site. He added on Reddit, “They don’t cause a ‘duplicate content issue’.”

Google Merchant Center now lets merchants specify which payment methods and options they offer customers. Google would normally handle this in an automated way but now Google is letting you override those payment options, in case Google is getting it …

Mark Williams-Cook gave an unbelievable presentation at SearchNorwich named Improving your SEO with conceptual models. Lucky for you and me, this presentation was posted on YouTube for us all to enjoy. It covers how Mark found an exploit in Google’s e…

Forbes has reportedly fired some of its freelancers for some stories over its ongoing issue with Google’s site reputation abuse policy, aka parasite SEO. The Verge wrote, “Forbes will stop using freelancers for some types of stories indefinitely ‘” and…

Jonathan Jones attended the Google Search Central Live event in Zurich last week and posted excellent and detailed notes about the event, including a bit more on the more often core updates. But he also covered how Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liai…