Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

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…

For your images to show up in Google Image Search, you don’t just need to make sure your images are on the web somewhere, you need to make sure that the image itself is on a web page that can also be indexed. If either the image itself or the associat…

A webmaster posted in the Google webmaster help forums after noticing that one of his sites saw hundreds of pages wiped out of the Google index a week or so ago. He noticed that Google is associated one URL to a completely irrelevant canonical URL and …

Someone asked John Mueller of Google if it is true that a statement off an SEO company’s web site was legit. The statement basically said that links are critical with ranking in Google and you should only hire “Google-partner SEO agencies” to create s…

Google’s John Mueller said in a Reddit thread that Google will typically use the most restrictive crawling command or signals they find on the page. “Google will use the most restrictive setting you have on the page,” John Mueller said. It doesn’t mat…

We’ve seen Google ask searchers if they are satisfied with the search results before. Using smily faces or other forms of voting. Here is a screen shot asking searchers if they are satisfied with the news results in the top stories within search.
…