Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Danny Sullivan posted a bit of a cryptic tweet last night, asking SEOs how they want the search results listings to appear, what controls they want, things they dislike, etc. He wrote “We’re curious about what’s top-of-mind in your hopes and dreams ab…

For past few years, we have heard Google suggest that it is better to improve content and not remove content that is low quality. We also heard Google say removing content also works improve overall site quality. Which is it? The answer is that it i…

Google has a said that when the Google Structured Data Testing tool accesses a site, it uses a neutral crawler in terms of desktop versus mobile. It depends on what the site serves by default and John Mueller said, it probably will serve Google the des…

Last night, John Mueller did a hangout at the GooglePlex and Martin Splitt from the Webmaster Trends Analyst team was with him who was able to answer some really technical JavaScript questions. This one was about lazy loading scroll events and how Goo…

Martin Splitt from the Google Webmaster Trends Analyst team said yesterday on a hangout that they are working on closing the gap between how modern browsers render web pages and how GoogleBot renders web pages.

After months of complaints in the Google News Help forums from some Google News publishers saying their content is not being surfaced or discovered by their audience in Google News, Google said they are investigating. Lisa Wang from Google wrote the o…

Google had a big issues years ago, every Google algorithm update was about PageRank and subsequently DA (which is something Google doesn’t even have) – it was all about links. Google knew that was an issue. But in the past year or two, espesially sin…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that it is best not to leave your meta descriptions blank. Instead he said try to fill them out because you know your content best. This is despite a recent study from Yoast that shows that Google often uses your …

Some folks are noticing that Google is showing two featured snippets for a single query. It is not the multifaceted featured snippets from earlier this year where Google would show you variations of featured snippets based on multiple ways to understa…

Long gone are the times of monthly Google PageRank updates, Google dances, and checking Google data centers – and to be honest, I somewhat miss those days. But the question I see asked a lot is how much have things changed? The answer is a lot has cha…

Google is testing a new design for the “claim this knowledge panel” link under a knowledge panel that is eligible for verification. Before it was just a line of text, now it is a prettier and fancier button.

Google is sending out a new warning and notice via Google Search Console to let webmasters know they need to fix their really slow pages. The notice starts off by reading “fix slow page loading on domain.com.

Google announced on Twitter that they fixed over 50 bugs in Google Search Console over the past month or so. Google then describes that is not just about adding new features but maintaining old features and fixing issues that arise.

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that when it comes to implementing canonical tags on your site, it is recommended to use absolute URLs instead of relative URLs. He said this will help ensure Google has interpreted them correctly.

Back in 2015 Google launched a test of showing a red live label in the Google search results for blogs and publishers that covered events live. It looks like Google removed support for it, but it is unclear if Google is going to kill the feature compl…

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.