Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google’s John Mueller said on a webmaster hangout this morning that white space pushing content down for design and layout purposes is not an issue for SEO or ranking in Google. He said the issue really revolves around having ads where it is hard to fi…

Google’s John Mueller said he doesn’t see an SEO problem with taking reviews left about your company on Google Maps, Yelp and other third party web sites and copying some of them or all of them to your own web site to showcase them. He said the one th…

Yesterday we reported that Google began directing users by default when they login to Google Search Console to the beta version instead of the old version. Well, several hours after we reported that, Google announced Google Search Console is now out o…

As you know, Google has graduated the Google Search Console out of beta and with that, added a new live feature for the URL Inspection tool and also brought in the manual actions section into the tool. Google also cleaned up the side bar navigation to…

When you go to the main Google Search Console home page at google.com/webmasters and click the sign in button, you are now taken to the new BETA version of the Google Search Console. You are no longer defaulted to the old version of the Google Search C…

Google’s John Mueller said this morning on Twitter that if you want your images to rank in Google Image search, it is extremely helpful to Google if you add alt text to your images. The advice itself is not new, it dates back over 10 years ago but thi…

As you all know, I am a huge fan of dates on articles and blog content. I even suggested Google should penalize pages that do not put dates on articles. Google has not gone that far, yet – but John Mueller seems to be a fan of dates on articles as wel…

Google’s John Mueller said that Google ignores a lot of links on EDU TLDs because they are more often link spam targets. Google said there is a misconception that EDU links are more valuable, hence why they are more of a spam target and thus why Googl…

Google is testing showing searchers a section in search called “relevant history.” It seems to show your past searchers that are relevant to the search you just triggered right now. This feature brings awareness to Google storing your search history.
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Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that the source of the link alone doesn’t make the link a bad link. It also depends on other factors. For example, John asked if the the destination owner placed the link on the source themselves or not.

Google has updated their search settings page sometime in the past 12 hours or so. With that change, Google removed the option to change the number of results displayed on the page and seems to have added a handwriting option.

Google’s John Mueller said that Google will convert PDF documents, as well as other documents, from their original form and into HTML in order to better index those documents.

Google has officially launched their structured data codelab, which allows you to walk through a step-by-step process to make your own structured data for your web site. Google’s codelab walks you through adding several types of structured data to a si…

Google’s John Mueller said in a video hangout that Google can technically process canonicals within JavaScript. This is assuming that what is shown in the JavaScript doesn’t conflict with other signals. John confirmed this on Twitter when Patrick St…

Remember we reported that Google dropped anonymous queries from the Search Analytics and Performance reports in Google Search Console on August 19th? Well, Google is now clarifying that the data was never displayed but the queries they hide were previ…

There is a thread at Reddit on the topic of someone building out a PBN, a public blog network. These are often used to manipulate Google’s search results through link schemes. Well, Google’s John Mueller commented on the thread saying “Sounds like an…

Google’s John Mueller said again that any type of bad content on your site, be it content you write yourself or content published by users – i.e. user generated content, can be used to judge your site. He said the content displayed is what Google uses…

Google’s John Mueller said it is great to go through old content and make sure it is still valid and accurate. But doing so doesn’t mean that you should update the date of the content to the date you reviewed it. If you want to inform the users who are…

Last week we reported that some were notice huge drops in their Google Search Console reports when using the query filter. Well, Google just posted on their data anomalies page that they have removed what they call “anonymous query.”

Google’s new link report in the beta Google Search Console does have a download latest links button. It was just hard to find as Bryson Meunier said on Twitter. It is on the main links screen, it is not within the external links screen.