Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google’s John Mueller hinted that you should aim for your “Time spent downloading a page” metric in Google Search Console to be less than a few 100 milliseconds. He said he has seen some less than 100 milliseconds and some way over 1,000 milliseconds….

This is a somewhat funny conversation between an SEO and John Mueller from Google. The SEO wants a quick and automated way (maybe via the API) to check 1.5 million domains for any manual actions specific to links. John said “our systems aren’t design…

I saw an interesting question about the location, directory, the XML sitemap is placed in. Does that matter to Google, and if so how? John Mueller from Google responded that it depends.

Many web sites put a keyword rich one line short description of the content on the page in their title tag. Many of those companies also add to the end of their title tag the company or brand name of the site. Google confirmed that it is 100% okay to…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that Google almost certainly cannot index a page that requires cookies. He said if you want Google to index the page, make sure to “remove the dependency” on cookies.

We covered the change to the Google Search Console performance and search analytics reports several times here, where Google dropped the anonymous queries figure from the sum of the overall queries filtered output. This resulted in a ton of confusion …

Google can show a featured snippet from multiple sources, we covered this before, but here is a slightly new look at how Google may show it. You can see for car reviews, Google will pick up snippets from three different sites with some useful informat…

Google’s John Mueller reminded us on Twitter that manual actions still do expire, we knew this from 2011. He also added that sometimes when they expire, they might not come back as a manual action because an algorithm might deal with it in the future….

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.