Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

A couple of weeks ago Forbes blocked its coupons directory on its website from being crawled by Google. Now Forbes has completely wiped out all the coupons from its site, serving a 410 status code and removing the coupons link from its navigation.

Google opened up its feedback form after it announced the Google March 2024 core update was completed and it seems most SEOs did not send Google feedback. Why? Maybe because many don’t believe Google will use that feedback to help them? Maybe because …

Last week, Shameem Adhikarath shared an example of an individual that shows up twice as two different entities in Google Search. It is like maybe Google was fed two distinct entities for the same person and now Google is showing both of them, with the …

Tuta Mail, a popular encrypted email service, complained to European Union tech regulators that Google dropped its rankings for all sorts of keyword phrases with the Google March 2024 core update. Tuta is upset they no longer rank for [encrypted email…

Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, said that the search company will add the upcoming site reputation abuse policy to the spam reporting tool when the policy begins to be enforced.

Google has removed the feature to add publications manually to the Google Publisher Center. Instead, publications will be automatically added when Google’s algorithms decide to.

Google has updated its favicon documentation for Google Search to add definitions for each supported rel attribute value in the Google Search favicon documentation.

Want to scare an SEO? Just tell them they need to manage a site migration. Want to make an SEO faint? Tell them they need to manage to split a site into two or more sites while merging content on those sites. John Mueller from Google said it takes Goog…

Gary Illyes from Google said on stage at the SERP conference last week that there is no way that Google would change how the 301 redirect signal works for SEO or search rankings. Gary added that it’s a very reliable signal.

Google’s John Mueller said the link best practices SEO documentation on its website are still “good guidelines” for both SEO and overall “accessibility & UX reasons.” The guidelines are only about 14 months old, so they are recent.

Gary Illyes from Google said on stage at the SERP conference last week that Google has taken steps to combat what some of us call parasite SEO in the most recent Google algorithm update. He was quoted as saying, “We have already done stuff against Par…

When it comes to crawl budget and Google not crawling your site too much or too little, Google takes into account all Googlebot activity across all verticals. So that includes crawling for web search, Merchant Center, ads, and all the various crawling…

Gary Illyes from Google spoke at the SERP Conf on Friday and he said what he said numerous times before, that Google values links a lot less today than it did in the past. He added that Google Search “needs very few links to rank pages.”

Forbes has blocked its coupons section of its web site at forbes.com/coupons using an x-robots-tag: noindex directive prior to Google enforcing the upcoming site reputation abuse policy. As a reminder, Google will enforce that new policy on May 5th bot…

Google was asked if having two websites and Google finding out about them would cause the websites to drop in rankings. John Mueller from Google said that is “not likely,” adding that many people have several websites and that is fine.

Gary Illyes from Google said in the recent Google SEO office hours the Google Indexing API may work for unsupported content formats, but that you shouldn’t be “surprised if suddenly it stopped working for unsupported verticals overnight.”

The topic of using hyphens in domain names is one of the oldest SEO topics we have in this space. Heck, in 2004, SEOs said there was a specific Google ranking algorithm that filtered out domains with hyphens in them (Google did not by the way).

Google has discontinued its support for video carousel markup and has thus removed it from its video structured data help documentation. Initially, Google tested video carousel on a limited number of sites and is now saying that it “ultimately found th…

Google Search Console has a new security feature under user and permission management to help you manage your unused ownership tokens. Basically, it helps you manage who has permissions to your Search Console profiles and who should not, maybe some leg…

Martin Splitt from Google posted a one-line question asking, “Should we do something to explain the crawl stats report in GSC?” This was posted on Mastodon, which has a small audience, but the responses were pretty good.