Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

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.

Google’s new spam algorithm update also introduced new spam policies including the upcoming site reputation abuse policy that won’t go into effect until May 2024. Google has confirmed it will fight site reputation abuse spam using both manual actions …

Google has clarified in its image search help documentation that images are only extracted from the src attribute of img tags in Google Search. This is not new, but Google decided to update its documentation based on some questions it received about th…

Recently, we covered some of Google’s rationale for ranking forums like Reddit and Quora so well in the Discussion and Forums box for many queries. Just a few days ago, we covered how I was sad to see Google ranking some dangerous and potentially harmf…

Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of the Verge posted a new article with the intent to both rank for [best printer] in Google Search, as well as mock Google for how he can game Google’s search rankings using AI-generated content, while throwing in some affi…

Google gives every hostname its own allocated crawl budget. So that means each domain, subdomain, etc has its own unique crawl budget.

Google once again said that its indexing systems are completely independent of its ranking updates, like the core update. Gary Illyes from Google said indexing, canonicalization, and those types of “systems are independent” of core updates.

Google has made some changes to its new Structured data carousels (beta) documentation to list the feature availability of this carousel and also to clarify where to place the markup. Google wrote the “markup must be on the summary page, and you don’t …

Over the past few weeks, Google’s Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, has been replying to complaints about some examples of search results being not just low-quality but also potentially harmful and dangerous. The sad part to me is that a couple of years …

The SEO topic of using a 404 versus a 410 error status code for pages not found is one of those topics that has been around for the past two decades. And now Google’s John Mueller replied to another question about it saying that the difference between …

As a reminder, with the release of the Google March 2024 core update, the old Google helpful content update is no longer a thing. As we reported, Google has incorporated helpfulness signals into the overall core update, but that old helpful content upd…

Google’s John Mueller had another one-liner, this one he said, “keep in mind that SEO is not really about magic.” This was in response to trying to SEOs trying to find some magic by using various HTML elements and thus seeing some sort of SEO benefit t…

Google has published its yearly update for its Merchant Center product data specification. Some of the changes listed below went into effect yesterday, April 9, while some go into effect on July 31, 2024, and others don’t go into effect until September…

Google’s John Mueller recommended that you do not disallow your internal footer links. A Reddit thread asked, “Should I disallow some pages that are in footer?” John replied, “If you do this, future-you will be annoyed by the problems current-you is cr…

Google has posted yet another reporting and data logging issue with Google Search Console. This one occurred between March 28, 2024 through April 2, 2024 and impacted reporting on AMP pages and Web Stories in Google Images. This was just a reporting i…

Google’s John Mueller for the umpteenth time said that sharing IP addresses and/or having your site on a shared server and/or using a CDN that does all of that, is fine for Google Search, SEO and ranking. In fact, he said it is “normal” for sites to do…

After a relatively slow Google webmaster report last month, this month was the extreme opposite…