I Wish Google Would Stop Saying They Do Hundreds Or Thousands Of Updates Per Year
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: Build A Site That If Google Doesn’t Rank Well, It Would Be A Search Bug
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 Search Console Index Coverage Report Updated For Mobile-First Indexing
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…
Speakable Markup Is Now Supported On Google Home Hub
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.
Notice: Google Search Console To Replace Search Analytics With Performance Report
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 Tests Image Thumbnails Again In Search Result Snippets
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: You Can Rank In Google Even When You Spam By Mistake
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’…
Google: We Fixed The Google News Indexing Bug Again & Again
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…
Google Does Not Index Redirected Pages
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…
Domain Name Registration Expire Date Or Length Not A Google Ranking Factor
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.
Google Discovered But Currently Not Indexed Help
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…
Google’s Internal Search Quality Docs Kind Of Mirrors The Manual Actions Help Docs
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…
Google: Trust Associations & Memberships Are Not Used As Direct Ranking Factors
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…
Google: Quality Raters Guidelines Are Not One-To-One With The Ranking Algorithm
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…
Google Tool Scores Your SEO: Should Google Be Scoring Your SEO?
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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Google Search Console Performance Reports Get Event Listings & Detail Filters
Google has added to the Google Search Console performance reports a filter under the “search appearance” filter for both event listings and event details. This is a new filter to help you see how well your event markup is performing in search.
Google: We Fixed Web Indexing Issues With Google News Publishers
Google’s Lisa Wang said yesterday, about 12 hours ago, that they fixed the indexing issues some news publishers were experiencing. In short, news publisher’s content would not show in the web search results, for hours and sometimes days, after the con…
Google: Nofollow Link Attribute Helps Publishers Focus On Content
Yesterday I posted that John Mueller of Google said to a publisher that they shouldn’t worry about links and just link naturally. Then people started getting upset with Google about the nofollow link attribute and why Google has it at all. John Muelle…
Google: Alt Image Attribute Is Used By Web Search But More So For Image Search
Google’s John Mueller clarified in yesterday’s webmaster hangout video that while Google does look and read the alternative image attribute (alt tag) for use on web search, it plays a small role there. It is more heavily used by Google in image search…
Google Does Not Use BBB Or Other Trust Building Sites For Ranking
Google’s John Mueller confirmed yesterday in a video hangout 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. So all that talk about making sure you have a …