Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google’s John Mueller issued a “PSA” this morning clarifying that the old Google Search Console is not closing in March. What is closing are some of the old features noted that are going away in March. But the old Search Console will remain active for …

Google’s John Mueller said on yesterday’s Google hangout at around the 8:17 mark that Google is pretty good at ignoring link cruft. Basically old, spammy and irrelevant links accrued by the site over the years. This is similar messaging from before b…

Google’s John Mueller said it is okay to add your test or development site to Google Search Console, even if it is noindexed and disallowed by search engines. There are still some useful tools you can run on your site before you launch it that may hel…

Over the past couple of weeks some local SEOs are reporting weird drops in their Google Search Console Search Analytics reports for Google My Business profiles that use UTM code tracking. Joy Hawkins said for some of her clients, they are noticing “huge drops in impressions & clicks for the URL we use in GMB that uses UTM codes.”

Some folks are seeing a new useragent in their log files named google-speakr. The for that useragent, at least during accessing the sites is 66.249.81.186 which resolves to Google. SEOs and webmasters are asking if this is some sort of Google Assista…

It was a busy January with a few unconfirmed Google algorithm updates around the 15th, 9th and 6th of January. Google also said the next 50% of mobile-first indexing will be the hardest.

Ari Nahmani posted on Facebook (public URL) a message he got for one of his clients in Google Search Console that is unique. It is directly from John Mueller, the same John Mueller we cover here, about a critical and urgent issue with their web site.
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Over the past couple of days, some SEOs have been sharing some unusually looking charts from Google Search Console’s Search Analytics report. It shows negative numbers, charts that don’t connect, numbers that are off, etc. John Mueller from Google ev…

Google has ported another feature from the old Search Console to the new, the security issues section. Google said on Twitter “We hope you don’t need to use a Security Issues tab” but if you do, it has been migrated to the new Search Console.

Google told us the Fetch as Google tool is going away and being replaced by the URL Inspection Tool. But some SEOs, well, seems like the majority of SEOs, want Google to port over the Fetch as Google tool as well. A Twitter poll with 88 results shows…

Google’s John Mueller was asked if there is a way in the new Google Search Console to remove old Sitemaps files. He said you can 404 them to remove them. Maybe Google will add a button to delete old Sitemap files there but for now, 404ing them will e…

Yesterday we reported on widespread AMP errors with Google Search Console and Google mobile search. As we suspected, it was an issue on Google’s end – not an issue with the the configuration on the webmasters/developers end. At least, in this particul…

Google’s John Mueller did some myth busting this morning around HTTPS. There are always some SSL providers trying to use Google’s HTTPS ranking signal in their marketing efforts. One said that “Without an SSL Certificate Google is likely to drop your …

This is a bit heartwarming – to see John Mueller back up Joost de Valk and Yoost when someone incorrectly claimed their was a bug with the Yoast SEO plugin causing major Google issues. John from Google came in and backed up Joost, confirming Joost and …

Google’s John Mueller said in a hangout last week that he would recommend that you not just disavow links that have already resulted in manual actions but you can also disavow links that you think would lead or result in a manual action. This is in add…

We’ve been tracking the big AMP crawl error and AMP issues in search over the past week. Yesterday Google confirmed it was a bug on their end and said they would fix it. Today they documented the issue on their data anomalies page and RankRanger is s…

Over the past few days or so, Google has been having issues showing AMP pages in the search results. I’ve been hearing reports on social media around publishers seeing their content show up in Google search labeled as AMP and then that content goes mis…

I reported on Friday that Google will be deprecating some or all of the old Search Console features so they can focus more on the new Google Search Console. Well, Google made it official by posting a blog post on the news on the Google Webmaster Blog….

Google’s John Mueller said last night that bigger changes are coming to Google Image search this coming year. Instead of thinking of how to optimize for images like you have been for the past two decades, you will need to think differently about image …

As you know, Google said over 50% of the search results they deliver were processed through the mobile-first indexing mechanism. But Google still has another 50% or so to go and that next 50% will be the harder batch for Google to migrate over.
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