Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Danny Sullivan from Google spoke at the Google Search Central event in Toronto a couple of days ago and a few of his slides spoke about it is important to produce “unique, authentic and non-commodity content.” And then Sullivan dug into what commodity…

Google’s John Mueller said the other day that “SEO is not belief-based, nobody knows everything, and it changes over time.” Super true, I’ve been covering SEO changes over the years and I spot this all the time.

Google’s John Mueller said that since SEO is complex, multifaceted, and resilient, you “can do a lot of things that don’t work & still do ok.” Meaning, you can mess up on several SEO things and still do well with search rankings.

Google Search Console seems to have a bug with the performance report, specific to the jobs listing and jobs search appearance filter. The report is showing zero impressions and clicks since the 16th of this month.

A Reddit thread asks if there are any issues with Google Search handling a domain name that has a single letter change in the domain name from another domain name. John Mueller from Google said that usually this is not a problem from Google Search.

Google rolled an important change with how AI Mode works yesterday and it can have a big impact on the experience for desktop users. Now when users click a link in AI Mode…

Google has made a number of updates to its Merchant Center product data specifications. Some changes went into effect on April 14, 2026 and others happen June 30, 2026 and January 31…

Google has posted a clarification that says it now “Google may use spam report submissions to take manual action against violations.” The update was posted here and added to the report spam page.

It’s been a while since Google has come out with a new search spam policy and penalty to accompany it with and now we have a new one, “back button hijacking.” Back button hijacking is something many of us were surprised Google didn’t specifically disal…

Google’s John Mueller said on Reddit that Google can handle and deal with having multiple URLs for a single web page, but it is not a good practice. He said it makes it harder for Google and Google will just pick one URL anyway.

It looks like Google is testing a new report within Google Search Console named AI contribution. I have no clue what it looks like but I suspect it is a lot like the Bing Webmaster Tools AI performance reports.

Google was asked if it is possible to add a new status to the XML sitemap statuses for “still processing.” John Mueller from Google responded on Blueshy saying, “I’ve chatted with the teams involved about this on & off, I’ve seen that it can be annoyi…

On the latest Search Off The Record Podcast, Martin Split and Gary Illyes discussed the growing page weight issue and how that impacts users and Googlebot crawling. This follows Google updating its documentation to clarify file size limits for Googlebo…

In January Google announced a change to how AI Overviews worked where clicking the “Show more” button at the end of an AIO would directly take you into AI Mode. But that was only on mobile. Now it seems Google is testing that functionality, but on de…

Google announced a logging error on Friday, April 3rd in the data anomalies report and explained that error prevented the accurate logging of impressions in GSC since May of 2025. That’s right, almost a full year of inaccurate impressions…

Google posted a new blog post named Inside Googlebot: demystifying crawling, fetching, and the bytes we process alongside episode 105 of the Search Off the Record segment named Google crawlers behind the scenes.

Google Search Console’s performance report may have some sort of bug or tracking issue. When you set some filters, you may see a huge spike in impressions start to show up in the report.

Google’s John Mueller chimed in on Reddit when a teenager of a family vacation rental business said he was trying to save his family business through SEO after being burned by previous SEOs. In short, it seems the family has a vacation rental in Spain…

Google had made a few changes to its SEO developer help documentation. First it documented how Google Search handles and processes robots meta tags outside the HTML head. Second, it added more supported properties for Discussion Forum and QA Page markup.

There is new data out from Newzdash that shows just how often AI Overviews appear within Google across new sections. And while AI Overviews shows 60%+ of the time for health queries, when it comes to breaking news and major headlines, it shows less th…