Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Yesterday we were the first to report that Google was having an issue indexing the web. Google then confirmed the issue a couple of hours later. It seemed it was resolved around 1pm ET yesterday. Google has confirmed two hours ago that it was indeed…

All of you know there are ranking algorithms, data refreshes and infrastructure changes – those are the big three. There are other things in search, such as feature changes, user interface changes and more. But they are all separate systems and don’t…

Let me first start off with the title may sound more scary than it is, but I tried hard to come up with a short title for this post and I failed (traveling this week and I am tired). In short, with the new evergreen GoogleBot able to do more, some ad …

For years and years now, Google has been suggesting that Google Search Console way add ways to see your query data filtered by voice search. So you can see how people search using voice versus other inputs. John Mueller from Google said he personally …

Google’s URL Inspection tool within Google Search Console only works for web pages. It doesn’t work for images or other file types yet. John Mueller from Google had to confirm this on Twitter the other day.

Google has been caught testing features that do not work in Chrome 74, but work in Chrome 75. Chrome 75 is not out yet in production for the public, it is being testing in beta right now. Valentin Pletzer caught Google testing Chrome 75 features yes…

The last time Google updated the search quality raters guidelines was in July 2018. On May 16, 2019 Google pushed out an updated version of the search quality raters guidelines used by humans hired as consultants to review both the live and test Googl…

Martin Splitt from Google said one thing you need to be aware of when it comes to Google handling POST requests it that since Google doesn’t cache them, they can use more of your crawl budget than GET requests.

Did you know that the URL Inspection Tool within Google Search Console will label a 410 HTTP server status code as a 404 HTTP server code, not the 410 it truly is?

It is common, you visit a web site, click through the web pages on that web site and you see that a large chunk of the page has the same content and elements as the rest of the pages on that site. Blocking those pieces of duplicate content is not nece…

Martin Splitt from Google responded to a question from an SEO around if Googlebot support fetch (or XMLHttpRequest) POST-requests? Martin said he had to test it and he did and he said Google does indeed support simple POST requests based on his test.
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We know Google has said numerous times that content hidden within tabs on mobile is something that Google will index and rank. But John Mueller of Google explained they will not show this content in the search results snippet because users won’t see t…

Google’s Martin Splitt posted the first SEO Mythbusting series and in there, a developer asked him what can to help his sites and apps do better in search. What are the “top three things I should consider” he asked. Martin answered in the form of bein…

Watching the comments about Google’s first mythbusting video reminds me of the comments around the final season of Game of Thrones. All this hype for this series and the first show did not live up to its expectations. To be fair, the Googlers who put…

After months and months of complaints from the SEO community, Danny Sullivan from Google said the cache bug should be fixed soon. He posted on Twitter saying “We’re aware of this and expect it will be corrected soon. “It has no impact on indexing. We h…

Just an FYI, Google did not simply flip the switch last week and turn on the new GoogleBot, the evergreen GoogleBot, over night. Google said it was already indexing 10% of the web back in November. It scaled from less than 1%, to 1%, 10%, 20%, 30%, 40%…

Google’s Martin Splitt said the new GoogleBot has zero impact or was completely unrelated to the indexing bugs we saw back in April. He said “Fair question, but no” when I asked if they were related at all.

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that it doesn’t necessarily make sense to just go into your content management system and delete old pages after a certain date. John said “FWIW sometimes good, old stuff becomes interesting again over time, so you…

Valentin Pletzer didn’t want to just take Google’s word that the new evergreen GoogleBot is live, so he tested it. In short, Google’s word was the truth and the new GoogleBot is indeed live.

Google’s PageSpeed Insights, last week, as I noted very briefly my weekly video this past Friday, has done a smallish design update to the tool. You can visually see they moved the score to the top and centered it, rounded some of the bars corners and…