Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google’s John Mueller confirmed this morning in a webmaster hangout at the 1:09 mark into the video that Google does plan to close down, discontinue, not port, every single feature from the old Search Console to the new Search Console.

I am not sure if this is a new snippet, but I don’t think I’ve seen it before where Google shows how many years ago the question was specifically asked in this format. Bhumika Kateliya shared on Twitter an example of this and I was able to replicate a…

A lot of news came out yesterday evening around an old Google knowledge panel exploit that let’s you manipulate almost any query to show any knowledge panel. Yes, this is embarrassing for Google but even more so because it is something that was report…

I spotted John Mueller of Google giving a Reddit user advice on how to handle helping Google index content that still uses some of the old AJAX crawling scheme that Google deprecated long ago. I don’t fully understand the advice but here it is.
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This is not a new topic, we’ve been saying this for probably over a decade and even Matt Cutts posted a video answer on it in 2013. But hey – John Mueller from Google answered it again. You are allowed to do geolocation based redirects, directing US u…

Google announced on Twitter yesterday that the Google Rich Results Test now lets you not just test live or sample code, but also let’s you make edits to code that you run and test it on the fly. So after you run it, you can then click into the code on…

Have a lot of pages you want removed from the Google index and don’t want to use the page removal tool for each URL? Google’s John Mueller said you can try to 404 and noindex all the pages you want removed and then submit a temporary sitemap to Google…

Google’s John Mueller said it again, if you 301 redirect pages that should 404 to your home page, Google will treat them as soft 404s anyway and thus all you are doing is confusing your end users. There is no benefit in using a 301 redirect for a page…

Google’s John Mueller was asked if there is a difference between a human adding unnatural links on your web site compared to AI, algorithms doing it on their own. John responded that ultimately it is the responsibility of the site owner to make sure t…

Google’s John Mueller often doesn’t give direct advice that contains hard messages. But in a Google Webmaster Help thread John decided to give the hard truth to one webmaster producing low quality content. In fact, John recommended that he “take the s…

Google’s John Mueller responded to a question on Twitter around having too many internal links with repeated links to the same page. John implied that it doesn’t hurt for you to link naturally internally to your pages.

In our first monthly recap for 2019 we covered a couple smaller unconfirmed Google updates. It was a slower month with the holidays and New Years but Google launched some new features…

This may be filed under the super obvious category but John Mueller from Google confirmed that you do not need to disavow links to your site just because those links come from pages that are in your language. So if you write in English and a site in S…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that sometimes hard to understand and really complex URL structures can lead to pages being removed from the Google search index. He said specifically “many URLs leading to the same content, making our systems assu…

Google’s John Mueller said Google does support ETag/If-None-Match after this Search Engine Land article shows that Bing supports it. He said it is rare to see sites using it, most use If-Modified-Since instead.

Google’s John Mueller confirmed that Google won’t be looking at the max-age value of your JavaScript or CSS files when crawling and indexing those details. John Mueller said on Twitter “No, generally not for search” we do not look at that.

Google’s John Mueller was asked on Twitter about Google’s plans to upgrading their crawling to better support GoogleBot as Chrome 41. Basically giving GoogleBot the ability to crawl modern sites and JavaScript better. John said, don’t wait for Google…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter some time ago that the trailing slash after the domain name is an implied canonical. He said “The trailing slash after a domain name is always there, even if it’s not shown.” “It’s always implied for canonicalizat…

Someone asked Google’s John Mueller if Google might skip crawling and indexing content that Google knows they have enough content around. So if you have a new blog post about title tags and SEO, will Google crawl and index that new post when Google kn…

John Mueller to me seems like a real genuine person and someone who is in a tough position every day trying to balance the line of defending the Google search results while helping some people who try to manipulate those same results. Each Christmas e…