Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Gary Illyes from Google said that it is “sorta ok” to remove alt attributes from images only when if there is relevant text around the image that helps describe the image. But I wouldn’t remove the alt attribute because Gary then added doing so “might…

Google sometime in September 2018 added to the manual actions report help document a section named “View my manual actions history.” It talks about how Google will retain the old manual actions for up to a year for a specific property even if it chang…

Google announced on Twitter yesterday that they added a new feature to the Rich Results testing tool to allow you to pick if you want to see how Googlebot mobile or Googlebot desktop sees the structured markup on the page.

Google’s John Mueller said he would recommend you look at Archive.org’s WayBack Machine to see if a domain name or URL had a previous sketchy or spammy history. He said this on Reddit, “archive.org is pretty useful — it doesn’t cover everything, but …

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that the Indexing API is not for use on all types of content. He said it only should be used for job posting & live stream structured data. Anything else you want to push to Google, use XML Sitemaps he said.

I didn’t expect Google to announce that they are putting together a blitz of 15 different conferences in 6 different languages across India within a few month period – but they did. The languages include Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu, and …

Last August, I came up with this wild theory that the August 1, 2018 core update was more focused in on medical and health/wellness types of web sites. Google said no, it was across all categories but a lot of the data showed that while it did hit all…

I don’t follow much about search quality with Google specifically outside of the United States because we know Google tries hard to make their algorithms work globally but sometimes based on the content saturation in some languages, their algorithms s…

Google has been very busy updating their developer documents related to structured data, mobile-first indexing, and more topics related to Google search. In fact, it seems like Lizzi Harvey, a technical writer who works at Google for over three years, …

I’ve been covering the favicon change in the search results almost every day since it launched but a new question SEOs want to know is how long would it take Google to update the favicon they display in the mobile search results for your site after you…

If you are still having indexing issues with Google, they are unrelated to the previous Google bugs we reported about says Google’s John Mueller. Google had two indexing bugs last week with discovering fresh content and then a month ago, had indexing …

Martin Splitt from Google confirmed that Google’s crawler, GoogleBot, can indeed crawl and index web workers but only if they don’t delay the work. He said if you are using web workers and you want it indexed by Google, you should “schedule your work …

I asked Google’s John Mueller in yesterday’s Google hangout if Google will be notifying new sites after the July 1st change over if those sites are not ready for mobile-first indexing. The issue is, by default, all new sites on July 1st will be indexed…

I am really trying hard to understand the process webmasters and SEOs can take when it comes to first learning that their favicon was removed from Google’s mobile search results page because it violated the guidelines and then if it was, how they can m…

Google announced this morning that starting on July 1, 2019 they will begin to index new web sites, not yet discovered by Google, using mobile-first indexing by default. Old web sites not yet in mobile-first indexing still won’t be switched until they…

Google has launched their new mobile search design that shows favicons in the search snippets. Some folks started to take advantage of that intentionally while others just had favicons against Google’s favicon webmaster guidelines. Yesterday Google b…

There has been some rumors floating around that Google is not going to migrate the disavow tool from the old Google Search Console to the new one. John Mueller from Google hinted that is not the case and for now people can still use the disavow tool i…

It is incredibly rare for a public company to admit they got hit by an algorithmic update by Google search. But Eun-Ji Noh, the data scientist in LinkedIn’s SEO department shared at SMX London that they did indeed get hit by the update and how they re…

Google has confirmed yesterday that they fixed the indexing issue that started Thursday night with Google indexing new content. It is a similar issue from the day prior to that where Google stopped indexing new fresh content as well. Both are now supp…

John Mueller from Google posted on Twitter that he will be creating more Q&A videos around SEO and webmaster related questions with Google search. He said you can submit your not site-specific questions to him via Twitter using the hashtag #AskGoogleWebmasters. Submit those questions there and he will compile them and answer what he can in those short form Q&A videos.