Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

As you know, we’ve been living in a RankBrain world for some time in Google. Recently there has been some coverage on it around Google not fully understanding it…

Did you know you can opt out of showing up in the featured snippets box…

At SMX West a few weeks ago, during Paul Haahr’s awesome presentation and Q&A…

Google announced yesterday that they are updating their smartphone user-agent to a new user-agent on April 18th. The new user-agent drops the iPhone bit from the string and replaces it with Android…

Google has deployed RankBrain for some time and we know it is confusing so there are many questions out there on it.

One question posed to Google was how does RankBrain impact crawling on your web site. Does RankBrain determine how much Google will c…

A question was posed to Google’s Gary Illye’s on Twitter if Google’s crawler and indexer understands the text embedded in an image, maybe through OCR or other techniques. I am surprised to hear Gary say no…

Google’s Zineb Ait Bahajji shared on Google+ a change in how Google generates the URLs for the Search Analytics date range based reports in the Google Search Console. Now if you ask for the last 7 days or last X days…

So the folks at Distilled wrote a piece “Google to Announce that Links are no Longer a Major Ranking Factor…

Google’s John Mueller confirmed in a Google+ hangout last Tuesday that Google does use site wide or site authority to determine where new pages that have no page specific signals should rank in search…

Friday, Google posted a warning on the Webmaster blog that if you get a product to review from a manufacturer or wherever, make sure that you nofollow any links back to the person/company who sent you that product…

Google’s John Mueller confirmed on Twitter that content placed in the <aside> tag is treated similarly to other content on the page…

Google’s John Mueller said in a Google+ hangout this morning at the 5:40 mark that Google may show where your page was shown in the search results page. Specifically if you were in the featured snippets box or AMP page carousel or something like that…..

Sometimes Google will use DMOZ, the old old web directory, in their search results. They may use the DMOZ description of your web site for the search results snippet in Google. They use to use DMOZ as their web directory but killed it off in 2011…
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This morning in a Google Hangout on Google+, John Mueller said he is decided to skip a bunch of questions on the topic of being more transparent…

A question was submitted to the Google+ hangout this morning about a site being penalized by Penguin 3.0 back in 2014 and asking for Google to manually update it so the site can break free of the penalty…

The Google App Indexing API for iOS recently fixed a bug where it would result in over energy consumption when the app was running and sometimes lead to the app crashing. Google said they recently fixed this bug in the Google Webmaster Help forums…
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Remember when Google killed off authorship in 2014? I am sure you do. But remember when I covered in October 2015 that Google says you should keep authorship markup on your site if you haven’t removed it yet…

Tom from Google posted four steps to help those wishing to clean up their AMP errors in the Google Search Console. Those who went AMP already are noticing many errors popping up in the Search Console reports. Especially those who use that WordPress …

In November 2015, Google launched their App Install Interstitial Penalty which targeted a very specific and niche interstitial add. It was/is easy to get around technically…

Another tidbit that came out of Google Paul Haahr’s SMX West talk was an experiment Google ran before he even joined the company 14 years ago. He said they ran this long term experiment from 2001 or so through 2005 where they would swap positions 2 a…