Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google has updated its URL structure best practices help documentation – it was pretty much a rewrite but the overall guidance is not new. Google said they added “clearer flow and is easier to navigate, with added examples based on real-world URLs we’v…

The term, The Great Decoupling has really been catching on over the past couple of weeks. It is being used to describe what we are seeing with impressions and clicks moving further and further apart since AI Overviews has become more of the norm in the…

Google has now officially confirmed that Google Search Console is counting AI Mode data. Google said, “AI Mode is now counting towards totals in Search Console.” We saw this when AI Mode went fully live in the US late last week, which Google announced…

Google has yet again dropped support for more of its structured data elements/markup that it uses for rich results in the search results page. Google calls this “Simplifying the search results page.”

In the early days, Google was not a fan of using tools to automatically translate your pages and then have Google index and rank those pages, even with Google Translate. But now as AI is getting better at it, Google is now okay with it, assuming the tr…

Google’s John Mueller responded to a complaint about indexing issues and ranking drops within Google Search, citing that the possible reason is unrelated content on the site. John said in response to the complaint, “One of the things I noticed is that …

Google has made a small but I assume meaningful change to the search ranking systems document, the section for “Removal-based demotion systems.” Google changed the wording from a “high” volume to a “significant” volume throughout that section.

Google added new markup support for loyalty and membership programs with special pricing. This was supported in Google Merchant Center but now is supported in under Organization structured data combined with loyalty benefits under Product structured d…

Google Search Console’s API has not reported on data since June 3rd. The API is simply stuck since then, and I am not sure if it has anything to do with the Google Discover reporting issues or not – I suspect not fully since those were different dates.

Ever want to find query data in Google Search Console where the query is a conversational query style? The long long queries that give you insight into how people may be finding your content via AI search engines, the ones where people talk their quer…

Google has updated the event structured data and recipe structured data help documentation. The changes include removing the online event properties, adding more examples and also saying that recipe markup has no impact on the image chosen for a text r…

Google has updated its search ranking algorithm to “more strongly affect the sites that host explicit videos but don’t allow Googlebot to fetch those video files” which may lead to a “significant drop in ranking” for some of these sites. Google also u…

Several individuals have inquired whether Google has been indexing fewer pages on websites since late May. I’ve seen a number of complaints, and while nothing is verified on Google’s end, I wanted to share these reports with you.

It’s time for the big Google Webmaster report where I recap all the big organic Google Search related news I covered here over the past month. We had Google I/O and with that, AI Mode went live in the US, with a bunch of new AI features. AI Overviews e…

Gary Illyes from Google described how search engine crawlers have changed over the years. This came up in the latest Search Off the Record podcast with Martin Splitt and Gary Illyes from Google.

Google has once again confirmed that in order for Google to show your content as a citation or link in AI Mode, it generally needs to be crawled and then indexed by Google. This is the same thing for a page to be shown in Google Search, Google AI Over…

Google is testing a new design for the crawl stats section in Google Search Console. Instead of the more list view section below the main chart at the top, this new interface is much more visual with numerous charts.

Google’s John Mueller does not want you to lump programmatic SEO with technical SEO. He said they are different things and that while technical SEO “will definitely continue to be a thing,” programmatic SEO is another story.

I am seeing a number of complaints from the SEO industry in India and those regions around Google not indexing live broadcast types of content fast with the Google Indexing API. There are quite a number of complaints on X this morning about the issue -…

Google’s John Mueller once again told SEOs to stop using the Google Indexing API for unsupported content types. The Google Indexing API is supported for job postings and live stream content and nothing else, but yet many still try to use it for other t…