Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

I love when Gary Illyes talks about Google. He was asked about what is RankBrain and goes off to explain that “RankBrain is a PR-sexy machine learning ranking component.” I would love to see how Google’s sexy PR team talks to Gary about this comment.
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In that Reddit AMA with Gary Illyes, Gary said out right and clear that the theories around Google using UX and behavioral signals such as CTR and dwell time are “generally made up crap.” He added “Search is much more simple than people think.”
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Right now, if you try to access Google Search Console you will get a 404 page not found error.

This is not intentional, something is wrong and Google is working on the fix…

Google announced pretty big news for most of the readers here related to the performance report in Google Search Console. Starting the end of next month, the data in the performance report will be based on the canonical URL, which means the AMP, mobile…

Google has one again made updates to the QA page content guidelines, this time providing dos and don’ts with more detail. Previously Google added these guidelines in December of last year for the new QA page schema.

Joost de Valk announced at YoastCon that the popular WordPress plugin, Yoast SEO, will provide live indexing with both Google and Bing starting next month. I’ll be honest, I am a bit confused on how this will work with Google but I assume with Bing – t…

Google’s John Mueller was asked if Google’s algorithm can associate negative factors with people or organizations that would lead the unrelated site to be downgraded in their search results. John said he doesn’t believe Google has such an algorithm bu…

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 …