Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter he was surprised that so many international SEOs were interested in Google supporting regional hreflang markup. He thought hreflang was complex enough, to support another layer, would be overboard.

Google’s Gary Illyes said at PubCon last week that Google finds content mostly through links and XML Sitemaps. He said the number one way is through links, crawling links on the web and the number two way is through XML Sitemaps.

Google’s John Mueller responded “nope” when asked if IP addresses matter for backlinks and search rankings. Like does it matter if some of your links to your US site come from Australia? Stuff like that.

Google has said they can issue a rich snippets or results manual action, removing the ability for the site from showing rich results in the Google listings. But do other penalties, like link penalties, also result in removal of rich snippets? It appe…

It looks like Google has fixed that ongoing bug with the Google cache 404ing after being switched to mobile-first indexing. The bug has been happening for the past several months and as of last Saturday, it seems Google fixed it.

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that putting out more content doesn’t necessarily make your web site any better, nor does it necessarily make your web site rank higher in Google’s search results.

Google’s John Mueller said in a Google Webmaster Help thread that there is a bug with the Sitemaps reporting section of the old Google Search Console specifically with sites that moved to mobile-first indexing. John said it is jut a reporting bug and …

Google’s John Mueller confirmed on Twitter that Google does cache your JavaScript and CSS files for a “fairly long” time and thus, if those files change what content shows up on the page or what new URLs you produce, then that might be an issue for you…

Google announced this morning on Twitter that some reports within Google Search Console are delayed. They are delayed because of pipeline issues with getting data from sources within Google. The specific reports that are more delayed than normal include AMP, Rich Results / Structured Data, Hreflang, Index Coverage, & Mobile Usability.

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that Google does not currently use isRelatedTo or isSimilarTo schema for product schema in web search. He said as far as he knows, they do not use it.

In this mornings hangout with Google’s John Mueller, one web site owner who lost 60% of his traffic over a Google search algorithm update several months ago asked John what he should do. The interesting thing, John did bring his detailed examples to th…

Yesterday at PubCon, Gary Illyes from Google said you can use the noscript tag as a way to give Google more content around your lazy loaded images. I was always under the impression that Google ignored the noscript tag, at least for the past few years…

You know I just reported yesterday that Google’s John Mueller confirmed that the AJAX crawling scheme has really been deprecated. The same day, Gary Illyes from Google in one of his slides at PubCon said “no # in URLs” and said on stage “do not use ha…

Google’s Gary Illyes said at PubCon that they are able to fully render 98% or more of the web pages they crawl. With that he also added rendering takes longer than normal crawling and indexing. He said it can take days to a few weeks to fully render …

Another debate came up based on what Google’s Gary Illyes said at PubCon and what Google’s John Mueller said previously. Gary Illyes said GoogleBot is not able to scroll down your page, whereas John Mueller said GoogleBot can scroll a bit.

Google has been deprecating, killing off support for, their old AJAX crawling scheme since 2015. It has been dying a slow death but now Google’s John Mueller has said on Twitter is has been fully deprecated.

Google may have a new web crawler that specifically looks for Favicons, the little icons you see in your browser bar next to the URL. Favicons are associated with a particular website or web page and can be customized by the site owner.

Google’s John Mueller said that most Google Search algorithm updates will have an impact on every site, even if the site did not see any ranking changes. John said on Twitter “our algorithms generally affect all sites in the search results, though not…

Here is some advice from Google’s John Mueller on Reddit. He said, “my go to answer for these kind of questions is if it’s not documented it could change over time.” The question was on how Google treats 301 versus 308 redirects.

You know those browser requests you get where it says this website wants to know your location and makes you click block or allow? Well, GoogleBot, Google’s crawler ignores them.