Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google has announced that March 12, 2024 will be the official date for when Interaction to Next Paint (INP) will replace First Input Delay (FID) as a Core Web Vital metric. We knew it was coming in March but we didn’t have the specific date until now.

Not only is Google having indexing issues this morning, but Google has been having issues with showing recipes in the carousel and images of recipes in search over the past several weeks. Google is finally responding to some of those concerns, but ther…

Google’s John Mueller said that you don’t need to worry about those spammy emails you get asking to buy or trade links based on a certain DA or other link score. Instead, just report them as spam in your email box and move on with your day.

Lily Ray asked Google’s John Mueller what does Google do with all the ranking signals from the content syndication partners when Google Search decides which URL should be the canonical. It seems Google will consolidate most, if not all, of those signal…

Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, replied to with very specific feedback on a specific article on how to make that article more helpful. I figured I’d share those details, even though it is a super specific example. But it may be useful for ot…

It has been almost 12 weeks since the last confirmed Google search ranking algorithm was released. That was the November 2023 reviews update. Before that was the November 2023 core update. Since then, we have had plenty of unconfirmed updates (or rank…

Google is in the process of reworking its popular SEO starter guide, which it initially released in 2010. The starter guide is about 8,500 words right now, but it will be less than half that when the revised SEO starter guide comes out.

Gary Illyes from Google said that the HTML structure for your web pages does not matter much for rankings. He said this on the latest Search Off The Record podcast, saying, “I know that some people like to think that HTML structure matters all so much…

Google’s John Mueller had a nice one-liner again on X; he said, “Nobody can guarantee you traffic, sorry.” This means you can’t say making X changes will result in Y traffic for sure. You can’t guarantee it he said.

Google does not read or use the content within your HTML comments for Google Search or ranking purposes. Google’s John Mueller confirmed this once again saying, “Googlebot doesn’t understand your HTML comments.”

Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, said that Google may soon target or penalize recipe collection pages using recipe structured data, when recipe structured data should be used on pages that list out the food item and include both ingredients and…

Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, responded to the article from 404 Media titled Google News Is Boosting Garbage AI-Generated Articles. In short, Sullivan said that the way they filtered Google News was by date and not relevancy (relevancy fil…

Google Search seems to be ranking some websites just fine during the weekdays and then removing that ranking over the weekends. It seems to be focusing heavily on non-standard TLDs, you know, those new vanity TLDs that you can make up. I am just not s…

A recent post on Reddit asked about the impact of having a website where most of the text was within images. Would Google be able to read the text, what is the SEO impact and would the text rank in the search results?

Google Search may not be showing news boxes, like top stories, for some election types of queries. So if you search for [iowa caucus] or [2024 United States primary elections] and others don’t seem to trigger news boxes.

I am seeing an unusual number of complaints around the reported 404 errors within Google Search Console reporting. This is specific to your URLs having /1000 appended to the end of the URL.

Google’s John Mueller said that changing from www to non-www for your domain shouldn’t change much. I suspect he means that doing that wouldn’t hurt or benefit your rankings that much and Google will likely pick up on the change and the rankings would …

A year ago I reported that the Google Search Console’s URL inspection tool can show a nofollowed link as the referring page. But it also seems that the URL inspection tool can also show non-linked URLs as the referring page.

A site owner posted on Reddit his concerns after noticing “hundreds of thousands” of backlinks from “AI-generated blog posts” directed to his or her site. John Mueller from Google said those links can be ignored and the posts might not be AI-generated…

Google has updated its structured data documentation to now use hashtags for @id references. If you don’t use hashtags, it is fine, but Google said it is “schema best practice to use hashtags as resolvable in-page node identifiers in RDF.”