Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google has been battling with site name issues since it launched the site name feature in October 2022 for mobile and then site names for desktop results in March 2023. Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, responded to my complaints about site name…

Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, said that there is no such thing as a perfect formula for ranking a web page. Sullivan said this on X, saying, “There’s no perfect formula to follow that must be used to rank highly in Google Search.”

A couple of days ago, we reported that the FAQ rich results dropped out of the search results again, and now we are seeing the how-to rich results drop out of the search results again. This happened around the same time as the FAQ rich results dropping.

Google has officially deprecated the Sitemaps ping endpoints. Now, when you try to access it, Google responds, “Sitemaps ping is deprecated,” with a link to the post about it going away.

Google has finally done away with the crawl rate setting within the legacy Google Search Console. It now redirects to the blog post about the feature going away.

Google officially supports the suggestedAge property as an alternative to suggestedMaxAge and suggestedMinAge within its product structured data. Google says they added this support to make it more flexible for people to specify age ranges for a product.

Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, in response to another SEO hit piece by The Verge said that author bylines and bios do not help a site or piece of content rank better. Sullivan also added Google also does not check out the credentials for ra…

Google has made a number of updates to its how-to control your snippets in search results to clarify that the snippets are primarily generated using the page content. Google removed the section about rich results and structured data on that page.

Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, said that Google Search does not use Google Analytics data for ranking purposes, even when that GA data is connected to Google Search Console.

Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, posted this morning that the search company has changes coming to better deal with the recent flux of search spam we’ve all been seeing in the search results. He said it just sometimes takes time to fully put t…

It looks like Google has stopped showing FAQ-rich results again. Yes, again. Google told us that FAQ-rich results in the Google search results will be shown for only authoritative sites. Then, around September 13th, they dropped out of the search resul…

It seems that YouTube is not showing up in Google News as often as it use to. Will Flannigan, the SEO Editor at the Wall Street Journal posted a chart from The Trisolute News Dashboard showing the drop in visibility experienced by YouTube in Google News.

Google’s John Mueller explained why some links that you think are important might not be that important for search ranking purposes. He responded to a question on Reddit asking why an important link is not shown by the third-party link trackers.

I asked the search community to let me know what features they would like to see within Google Search Console that they do not have yet. I received well over a hundred responses, so I figured I’d highlight and summarize them in a blog post here – Goog…

Remember when we reported that Google Groups seems to have seen a visibility boost in Google Search, which resulted in a lot of spammy and sometimes dangerous information showing up in Google’s search results. Bleeping Computer now reports that Google …

Google launched its data highlighter tool in 2012, and it still works today despite not being migrated to the new Search Console interface, and almost no one I know uses it anymore. Google’s John Mueller said on Mastodon that it just isn’t easier to u…

Did you know that sometimes those bot protection services will serve Google and other search engines noindex directives? Google’s John Mueller said this on X, saying, “Sometimes there’s bot-protection (or a login, interstitial, etc) triggering that has…

Gary Illyes said some search engines can be confused by seeing double slashes in a URL. Previously, Google suggested not to use double slashes in your URLs but here Gary is saying that technically pages load with double slashes but with some search en…

Gary Illyes from Google explained how Google Search may or may not handle special characters within Google Search. He explained this in the latest Google SEO office hours at the 16:10 mark.

Google Search may be having issues with indexing or serving this morning. I am seeing tons of reports from SEOs on X that Google is having indexing issues, tons. So I am posting this story to see if I can see firsthand if Google is indeed still havin…