Google: Mobile-First Index Many Quarters Away, Sometime In 2018
We know the Google mobile-first index isn’t launching any time soon and there were rumors it won’t go out in 2017 because hitting quality neutral has been a harder thing to achieve than they once thought…
Google’s Two Pronged Approach To Search Spam: Ignore vs Penalize
We’ve known for some time now that Google sometimes selects to ignore spam and sometimes selects to penalize the spam (i.e. devalues vs demotes). The topic came up again when we covered how Gary from Google talked about how they ignore Forbe’s link sp…
Google: Our Quality Algorithms Don’t Use Machine Learning In A Targeted Way
John Mueller from Google answered a question about if Google’s search quality algorithms, such as Panda, Penguin and others…
Google Explains What Near Duplicate Content Is
Google’s Gary Illyes explained what he meant is the term “near duplicate content.” Gary posted it on Twitter saying near duplicate content can be thought of as “a piece of content that was slightly changed…
Google: Most CMSs Have XML Sitemap Implementations & 3rd Party Tools Unnecessary
In the early days of when Google first introduced XML Sitemaps, Google also a collection of 3rd party sitemap generation solutions. That page now shows a notice that the top that reads “this Google Code project has been deprecated and is no longer main…
Google Posts Now Within Google My Business
Maulik Panchal shared a screen shot on Twitter of the Google Posts feature, which enables businesses, organizations and personalities to share information in more real time within the knowledge panel in Google search…
Google Expands Reach Of Featured Snippets In European Regions
The folks at RankRanger posted on Twitter that their Google features tracking tool noticed massive increases in the chances a featured snippet will show up at the top of the Google search results in many European regions…
Google: We Can Ignore Links On Any Site Including Forbes & Entrepreneur
Yesterday we covered how a link seller was trying to sell links to a Googler and we posted some advice around that not being the best idea. Well…
Google: Use 503 Status Code Only For Hours, Not Weeks
A 503 Service Unavailable server status code is to be used when the server is currently unable to handle the request due to a temporary overloading or maintenance of the server…
Google: Site In In One Language? No Need To Use hreflang.
The purpose of hreflang is to communicate to Google how they can access different language/region variations of a web page. If your page is only in one language, then there is no need to use hreflang…
Google: Order Of Language Values In hreflang Doesn’t Matter
Google uses the hreflang attributes to serve the correct language or regional URL in their search results and many sites that use hreflang have multiple variations of their pages. One webmaster asked if it matters which order you place the hreflang in…
Google: Pop Up Style DIVs Better Than Interstitials
Google’s John Mueller said it is generally better to use pop up style DIVs for age verification authentications or gates as opposed to using interstitial forms. He said this on Twitter this morning.
He said when it comes to age verification gates tha…
Google: Hyphens In Search Queries Can Change Results
If someone searches for a word or term with or without a hyphen, Google can show different search results based on the query having a hyphen in it or not. So for example, [popup-style] vs [popup style] or [s-eo] vs [seo]…
Google: No Spring Cleaning On The Search Index
John Mueller from Google said at the 14:08 mark in the webmaster hangout video from Friday that Google doesn’t perform “Spring Cleaning” on their search index. He said “it’s not that we have Spring Cleaning in our index…
Google: Less Crawl Rate Isn’t Necessarily A Bad Thing
Google’s John Mueller said in the pas that crawl frequency and ranking higher are not directly related and you can rank high without a high crawl frequency…
Google: We Penalizes Egregious Link Manipulation; Otherwise Ignores The Link
As you know, Google treats links from spammy sites vs unnatural links differently. But Google also treats different types of unnatural links differently as well. Unnatural links …
Google Search Console Rewords “Other Resources” To “Web Tools”
Google has changed one of the menu items within the Google Search Console. They changed what was listed last as “Other Resources” to “Web Tools.” This came with the launch of the ad experience report that we covered on Friday…
Google Stops Support For NOODP Robots Directive & Taking DMOZ Description
Google announced this morning that they are no longer supporting using the description and title from DMOZ, the Open Directory Project. Why…
Google: No Plans For Mobile-First Index Test Sandbox Preview
Before Google made a massive index change in 2009 or so named Caffeine, Google released a public sandbox for you to preview the changes in the search results based on this index change…
SEOs Try To Help Google Rank For Google
Most of you know that one of the most searched on words in Google is actually the name [google]. It happens way too often where someone will go to Google and then search for Google to bring up Google…