Google Explains How It Handles Non-Consensual Explicit Imagery In Spam Policies & Ranking Guide
Google has documented how it Google handles sites with a high proportion of non-consensual explicit imagery. Google updated its spam policies and the Google ranking systems guide with links to this help document explaining the topic.
Google On Why Some Sites Should Use Hierarchical Site Category Structures
Gary Illyes from Google explained when he thinks it makes sense to use a hierarchical versus flat structure for your website. In short, he said larger sites might benefit from a hierarchical structure if they want to encourage Google to crawl sections …
Google’s Sullivan Collecting & Submitting Low Quality & Problematic Search Results
Over the past few months or so there has been a lot of complaints both from the SEO community and the general internet community about the quality of the Google search results. The SEO community has been very vocal on social and on this blog about the…
Google: No SEO Is Perfect
Google’s John Mueller said in the last Google SEO office-hours from December 2023 that there is no such thing as perfect SEO. He said, “in fact no SEO is perfect.”
Why Google Seems To Not Penalize Sites After Paid Backlink Reports
A common question I hear from new SEOs is why Google is not taking action against the spam I reported to them. A competitor or site is ranking well because it paid for backlinks or is spamming Google in one way or another, why does that site still ran…
Google Merchant Center Browsing Experience BETA Card
Google Merchant Center is beta testing a new score card to help merchants understand how their browsing experience score is doing. This card is called “Browsing Experience” and it shows how well your site’s products are doing with image quality.
Google Search Console API Is Delayed
For the past few days or so it seems that the Google Search Console API has been delayed. There has been complaints about this on social media and in the Google forums. It is not uncommon for Search Console to run into these delays but I see a lot of…
Most SEOs Think There Will Be Another Google Algorithm Update Before 2023 Ends
Most SEOs believe Google will push out another confirmed algorithm update before the end of the 2023 year – so within the next few weeks. I ran a poll on X asking SEOs “Do you think Google will push out another confirmed update before the 2023 year en…
Google: You Can Publish Both PDF & HTML Formats
Google’s John Mueller said it is fine to publish some content in both PDF and HTML formats. He said both “can be shown independently in the search results.” If Google sees them as duplicates, in some cases, Google may just show the HTML version in its…
The Google Groups Search Ranking & Visibility Boost Is Now Dropping
A couple of weeks ago, I reported about that Google Groups was seeing a very big ranking and visibility boost. Well, it seems to have caught Google’s attention, the rankings of Google Groups seems to be declining and their visibility in Google Search h…
Google To Rename “Parasite SEO” In Near Future
There has been a bit of controversy over the name parasite SEO in the industry and Google itself doesn’t like the term either. So they said they will be renaming parasite SEO to some new term in the near future.
Google: Video Is Not The Main Content Of The Page Error Spike
There has been a surge in complaints from site owners and publishers who are seeing the “Video is not the main content of the page” error in the video indexing section of Google Search Console. This should come as no surprise to many of you who read he…
Google: We Have Taken Steps To Deal With Parasite SEO & More To Come
On Friday, Google’s Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, said that the search company has taken steps to deal with the parasite SEO problem. He also added that the specific change with the upcoming helpful content update is still not live yet but Google di…
Google: SGE Does Not Show You Google’s Search Ranking System
Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, said something that is probably somewhat obvious to many of the readers here, that SGE is not able to tell you how Google’s search ranking systems work, what scores or ranking factors it does or does not use, or…
Google’s Alternative Feeds, Secondary SERPs & Current Tracking Challenges
A site owner’s guide to understanding Google’s alternative feeds and secondary serps and how it’s becoming harder than ever to track clicks and impressions from Google’s ecosystem.
When Googlers Delete Posts On X (Twitter) – Did Google Rollback HCU?
I’ve been noticing that Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, has been removing posts from his X (formerly Twitter) account a lot. I also noticed on select posts, John Mueller from Google has also done that but a lot less often.
Known Issue: Google Site Names With Some Internal Pages
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. Now, Google confirmed a known issue where the site name for internal pages may take…
Google How-To Rich Results Also Returning To Search?
As a reminder, in August, Google stopped showing the How-to rich results on the mobile search results, and then in September, they did the same for desktop results. Well, they seem to be returning to the Google Search results, around the same time we …
Google Search Console To Remove Product Results Search Appearance Filter From Performance Reports
Google is going to remove the Product results search appearance filter from both the Performance report in Search Console and from the Search Console API. This will happen in about a month, sometime in January 2024.
Google Expands Video Guidelines (Primary Content) Change To Video Mode Results
Google is now requiring that the video be the main or primary content on the page for it to show your video in video mode, not just as video thumbnails in the search results like it did back in April. Google announced, “we’re extending this change to s…