Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

I know this is obvious for most of you but while Google Ads (AdWords) has a way to exclude your site for coming up in the search results for specific keywords, Google organic search does not. You cannot tell Google, please do not rank my site when peo…

The other day I reported that Google said in most cases it is perfectly safe to ignore, not act, on bad links pointing to your site. That caused a bit of a ripple through the link building, well, the nofollow, SEO industry. John Mueller from Google ha…

We’ve all seen examples of Google showing too many search results from a single domain name for one query. But here is one where the search results are simply really not that diverse. And the query itself is not that incredibly obscure.

Since before October we have been covering issues uncovered by news publishers that their content is not being properly indexed and ranked in both Google News and Google web search. Well, after Google said they fixed it numerous times, there are still…

Since the Penguin 4.0 update Google devalues bad links versus demoting the pages they link to. So when John was asked why Google Search Console doesn’t have a way to notify webmasters of bad links pointing to their site, John said “If we recognize the…

Google’s John Mueller said that moving to a new hosting company doesn’t cause ranking declines. Of course he means if the new hosting company doesn’t prevent GoogleBot from crawling your site. But in general, moving hosts doesn’t have a negative impact…

Back in January, we reported that when you look at the new Google Search Console Performance report and compare it to the old Search Analytics report, they do have the same data but the day they plot the data is a day off from each other. With Google s…

Google posted on the data anomalies page that Google Search Console AMP error reporting starting today, December 10th, will become more generic in nature. Specifically Google said “AMP enhancement report will now combine some over-specific issue types …

Google’s John Mueller had to say on Twitter that people scraping your content is not a signal that Google will rank your content better. John Mueller said “Scrapers copy all kinds of content without judging the quality, so I don’t think that would be …

Google has posted the date of December 13, 2018 as the date they will be removing some of the old Google Search Console reports. The reports are already replaced by similar reports in the new Google Search Console.

Google’s John Mueller said it again, do not worry about words or keywords in the URLs. John responded to a recent question on Twitter saying “I wouldn’t worry about keywords or words in a URL. In many cases, URLs aren’t seen by users anyway.”

Google announced audio news for the Google Assistant. This is not speakable markup or YouTube videos playing on the Google Home Hub, this is real audio news, like broadcaster, podcaster, etc that produce audio form content.

Aaseesh from Google responded to a complaint about Google not picking up on a web site’s canonical tags. He said that “even if you setup the canonical tags properly, other signals like inconsistent redirects can make Google not select your preferred U…

Google announced yesterday on Twitter that they updated their Google Images best practices guide. I did a compare of the old and new pages, and for the most part, it seems like there is no new specific advice. They cleaned up some of the text and page …

Google now supports showing livestreams in the search results and in Google Assistant. Google added structured data to help Google understand the information in the live stream and also added using the Indexing API to support communicating the new liv…

Google launched new structured data for question and answer pages named Q&A Page schema. Google updated the guidelines to say it is against their guidelines to use this markup on FAQ style pages.

Here is our monthly Google webmaster report that summarizes and links to the more important SEO and webmaster related stories. The big news this past month was the nice number of unconfirmed Google ranking updates. Google also launched the zero result…

Google posted a notice in the Google Search Console data anomalies page that they dropped Google Images data from the performance and/or search analytics report. It reads that on December 1st and ongoing “some data for clicks in Google Images from mob…

Google announced yesterday a new supported structured data format named Q&A pages. It is designed to help Google with the question and answer formatted snippets carousel, where they let you slide through answers to questions from Q&A pages.

Google’s John Mueller said on a hangout last week that when it comes to images, he thinks it is worthwhile to have unique images on each of your pages. If you have the resources, making your own images, instead of using blanket stock photography, shou…