Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Last month I reported that it looks like Google won’t release a feature in Google Search Console’s Search Analytics tool for featured snippet reporting. Well, it looks like I was right…

One of the more confusing things around the mobile first index is will page speed be a factor or not when it launches. Google has said no, it won’t be and then they said yes it will be.

It seems like Google is reworking how their measure page speed…..

Google’s Gary Illyes also said yesterday during the SMX mobile-first panel that while this whole mobile-first index is up in the air, they may decide to “smear” some desktop signals into the mobile-first index…

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…

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…

John Mueller from Google answered a question about if Google’s search quality algorithms, such as Panda, Penguin and others…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 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’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…

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]…

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’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…

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 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…