Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

A funny question came up in a Reddit thread, and I am in the mood for funny right now. The question was, can you hypnotize someone to get links to your web site and if you do, is it against Google’s webmaster guidelines? The funny thing is also that J…

So here we have Google’s Gary Illyes again defending what Google has said in the past, when SEOs say what he said is not true. This is around Google giving full weight to content on mobile within accordions or tabs. Some reports say Google does not do…

Since 2010 we knew that using Google Translate or other automatic machine translation services to convert content from one language to another and to rank it in Google was against Google’s guidelines. But recently some are saying with Google Translate…

As you know, when GDPR, the European law about data privacy regulations across the web, went live – some sites simply decided to block any European visitor from visiting their web site. This results in some searchers seeing content from these sites bu…

Google has been caught buying or paying for links before but doesn’t always take action against themselves when caught. Google’s John Mueller just talked about giving charity and getting a link and then shortly after Tad showed how Google Canada donat…

Back in March, Google tested showing zero search results with just the answer for specific queries for about ten days. Google was caught testing it again yesterday but Google said it was just a glitch and was not the zero results feature from back in …

Google’s John Mueller said in a webmaster hangout video that Google can show either the original published date or the last modified date of URL in their search results snippets. He said they are flexible about these dates and if the content substantia…

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…