Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google’s John Mueller reiterated in a big way that SEOs and site owners should not spend time disavowing “toxic” links. He said it is a “billable waste of time” to disavow toxic links, as provided in some of these SEO toolsets.

Google has repurposed its 2014 blog post on faceted navigation best practices (which we covered a decade ago) and created a new help document page named Managing crawling of faceted navigation URLs.

Google’s Daniel Waisberg confirmed that the new 24-hour date filter that is in the Google Search Console web interface is not yet supported by the Google Search Console API. Of course, you can query the API for any date range and it will bring back dat…

Google’s John Mueller said it again, he said on LinkedIn, “We’ve been pretty clear that Core Web Vitals are not giant factors in ranking, and I doubt you’d see a big drop just because of that.” Google has been saying Core Web Vitals are important in ge…

Google is now saying it has ranking systems that “aim to understand if a section of a site is independent or starkly different from the main content of the site. This helps us surface the most useful information from a range of sites.” This is the reas…

Google has added a new search document on Google Trends while also making some small updates to the URL structure, best practices documentation, and favicons documentation. Google has been doing a lot of videos around Google Trends, so the new document…

Google Search Console’s performance report seems to have a bug where it is showing almost zero data for today. I can replicate this across numerous Search Console properties, so maybe something is stuck with Search Console right now.

Google Search likely does not use ARIA Accessible Rich Internet Applications, for ranking or even indexing purposes, according to both John Mueller and Martin Splitt at Google. ARIA is a set of attributes you can add to HTML elements that define ways t…

Google may have hit Fortune Recommends with a search penalty, downgrading its Google search rankings. This may be related to the site reputation abuse policy, like it may have done previously to Forbes Advisor a few weeks ago and some other large publi…

Google’s John Mueller said he understands why some in our industry look to optimize for metrics within various SEO tool platforms, but he said there are not shortcuts in SEO and optimizing for those metrics won’t directly lead to Google search ranking …

Google is deprecating the ten-year-old Sitelinks Search Box. It is going to start to disappear from the search result snippets starting on November 21, 2024. This does not impact the normal sitelinks, just the search box.

Google’s AI Overviews seem to not show citations or link to sites that were hit by the helpful content update (and probably core updates), even when you ask the AI Overview directly about that site and even if that site is ranking well for that query i…

There is this interesting conversation on LinkedIn around a robots.txt serves a 503 for two months and the rest of the site is available. Gary Illyes from Google said that when other pages on the site are reachable and available, that makes a big diff…

Google is rolling out the Store ratings feature beyond US Search. It is rolling out to searchers in Australia, Canada, India and the United Kingdom. Although, we’ve seen examples of Google showing them in Australia and other countries over the years, …

Google added eight or so words between brackets to clarify that fields that aren’t explicitly listed in the robots.txt documentation aren’t supported. Why did they do this? Because sometimes Google gets questions about it.

Google announced two new features for Google Merchant Center (1) Video generation in Product Studio and (2) Amazon MCF integration with Merchant Center.

Google now supports Certification markup support for merchant listings in the product structured data documentation. Google wrote, “starting in April 2025, we’re replacing the EnergyConsumptionDetails type with the more robust Certification type, as th…

With Google removing the cache operator from its search service, Google has stopped supporting the noarchive directive in Google Search. The directive, the noarchive meta tag, would tell Google not to keep a cache copy of your page. Since Google doesn…

Google has updated its developer documentation to warn about sites using JavaScript-generated Product markup and that the search company recommends putting Product markup in the initial HTML for best results.

Google has updated its performance reports in Google Search Console to have the filters you set, stick. Meaning, the next time you go back to the report, it should be where you left it, with all the filters you set. You can of course reset the filters …