Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google has updated its guidelines for sites with explicit content to now specify that ecommerce sites must “label adult products in ecommerce feeds or markup.” There is also a new section at the bottom of the help document titled, “For Google Shopping …

Google’s John Mueller said that he expects the position and impression tracking for AI Mode, AI Overviews and Google Search to “evolve over time” as Google Search, AI Mode and AI Overviews “evolve too,” he wrote.

Google’s John Mueller said it is normal for Google Search to take a while to update image thumbnails in its search results with updated images from the website it pulls from. And it can take even longer if the image is still on the page, but was only m…

The Google Search Console page indexing report is now missing a huge chunk of data from June 2026. It seems something is super buggy with this report over the page several months or something weird is happening with indexing in Google Search. I am hop…

Google’s John Mueller responded to questions about how impressions are counted for Generative AI in Google Search Console. Google has a document that explains that, and John just reiterated that. But what he added was that “the old “position 1 – 10” is…

There is a new Google ranking factor survey out for 2026. It has been a while since we had one, and it is here. This one was done by Cyrus Shepard and Dawn Shepard and posted at Zyppy. It says content relevance, backlinks, and content quality are the m…

John Mueller has one of his Google lines again, he said in response to someone trying to pick the right answer for an SEO question – he said, “Sometimes there is no absolute right answer — but you can choose one, and make it the right answer.”

Yesterday, for a short period of time, Google Search Console was reporting pages as not being indexed and in the status of “Crawled – currently not indexed.” The issue seemed to have been resolved within an hour or so and now John Mueller from Google c…

The Google Search Console link report has now not been updated for a month. The last time the report was updated with fresh link data was around August 8, 2026 – a month ago.

Google’s John Mueller went off again on programmatic SEO, this time saying that programmatic SEO can “often leads to a site that’s either spam, borderline spam, or low quality,” he wrote. These tactics can often lead Google’s “systems have possibly los…

Over the past several days, I have been hearing from some publishers that while their content is being crawled, indexed, and served in Google Search results, some of it is missing from the news tab. It may then later show up in the news tab, much late…

Google’s John Mueller said the Google disavow tool “does have effects,” adding, “but it has its place & time.” This was in response a complaint about a site dropping in the search results after adding links to the disavow link tool.

For real this time, Google has released the Google Search Console generative AI performance reports and Search generative AI controls to everyone globally. This follows a slow rollout that began in the first week of June and expanded access to the fea…

It is time for the monthly Google webmaster report, where I recap the larger stories from the past month, specifically related to Google SEO, search, and webmaster/site owner topics…

Google’s John Mueller was asked if Google would penalize a site for old outbound links to a site that once hosted quality content and now changed ownership and hosts shady content. John said Google won’t penalize such links; he said “no” and added, “t…

Google’s John Mueller said Google “primarily” announces search updates to provide “transparency for site owners.” He added that when Google publishes blog posts, updates policies, and help center documentation, that is an actionable announcement site o…

Google has updated the favicon search developer documentation to list out the supported favicon file formats. Google added this line that reads, “Google Search supports the following favicon file formats: BMP, GIF, ICO, PNG, JPEG, PPM, and TIFF.”

Google announced it will not enforce manual actions under the site reputation abuse policy in the European Economic Area (EEA) due to a mandate set by the European Commission, effective August 30, 2026. Google said searchers in the EEA will not benefit…

Over the past few days, the IRS website (and other government sites) has tanked within Google’s search results. My gut feeling is that the federal government implemented some bot-blocking that was too aggressive and blocked Google, among others, result…

Google’s John Mueller said on Bluesky that there is nothing special for one to do for generative AI responses within Google Search. He wrote, “from our POV there’s nothing really special you need to do for generative AI responses in search.”