Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

I woke up this morning to probably close to a hundred messages across email, social media and other channels that Search Engine Land is not currently in the Google Index. People want to know why. I honestly do not know why. I do not have access to th…

Dong-Hwi Lee, a Googler, posted in the Google Webmaster Help forums a large FAQs around indexing questions related to AMP. This is a very comprehensive FAQ around the topic and I thought it would be useful to bring more attention to this document to t…

I keep getting asked if Google is now done migrating sites to the mobile first indexing process. The answer is no, there are many sites, including this one, that has not been migrated yet. Google said many times it can take years and years for it to h…

Google is once again looking for beta testers to help improve the Google Search Console Performance report. John Mueller of Google posted on Twitter saying “we’re looking to make some changes and would love to get your feedback, especially if you use the report regularly & have a kinda complex site.”

I always wonder why Google will confirm some core ranking algorithm updates and not others. So I asked John Mueller of Google if he knows the behind the scenes decision making process on when Google confirms a core algorithm update. He said it is most…

I really wish Google would stop responding to algorithm update questions with “we do hundreds or thousands of changes per year.” Like I’ve been saying for years, I’d bet 95% of those updates have little to do with core ranking but more related to UX, …

Google’s John Mueller said it is wise to think long term with your web site and build a site that is so fantastic that if Google isn’t ranking it well for relevant queries that Google would consider it a bug. Thus Google would have to update their alg…

Google posted that they made a change to how the index coverage status report works around sites that have been migrated to the mobile-first indexing initiative. Google said now the error counts and new issues will reflect the status of mobile-first i…

The Google Home Hub, the one with the display, now supports speakable markup. When the Google Home Hub first launched it did not support speakable markup, like the Google Home without the display.

Google has posted an important notice in Google Search Console, above the Search Analytics report that it will “soon be replaced” by the new Performance report within the new Google Search Console.

Google is yet again testing image thumbnails in their search results snippets. This is a test that has been ongoing for several years now in many different forms. Here it is again and like every case before it, I personally cannot replicate it.
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Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that even if you make a mistake and do keyword stuffing or some other spammy mistake on your site, it is still possible for the site to rank in Google because of the positive things the site is doing. “Usually we’…

For the past few weeks, Google has been having issues indexing or ranking Google News publishers content in Google web search and news search. Google’s Lisa Wang has said numerous times they fixed the issue, only to have to come back in and discover mo…

This is probably obvious to most of you but Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that Google does not index redirects. Meaning, if you redirect page A to page B, any content that might be on page A is not indexed, instead GoogleBot just does a hop, s…

We’ve covered this numerous times but hey, Google had to chime in again about the topic of domain name registration length and the expire date of a domain name not being used as a ranking signal by Google’s search algorithms once again.

In Google Search Console, did you ever see the “discovered but currently not indexed” notice regarding your index coverage status report? Google says in their help document that it might be related to an overloaded server, but Google’s John Mueller sa…

Back at SMX East, Fili Wiese spoke about Google manual actions. He said while he was at Google years ago, he was tasked in writing Google’s internal documents around search quality. He said based on his memory, those docs are a mirror on some level to…

Since I posted about the the story the other day that Google does not use the BBB, Better Business Bureaus score or reviews as well as other third-party trust sites in their ranking algorithm it caused a lot of interesting and unexpected debate in the…

I feel like Google has to spend more time telling SEOs to stop obsessing about specific details then helping with technical SEO issues and I called it with this one. Google’s John Mueller had to say in this mornings hangout “quality rater guidelines i…

The other day, Google launched a new portal named web.dev that pretty much has lighthouse, another Google tool, results for your audit. One of the lighthouse results is an SEO score. So I asked SEOs, should Google be scoring their SEO this way?
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