Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

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…

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’…