Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Over the past few days or so there has been a spike in complaints around Google Search Console reporting an invalid sitemap error for sitemaps URLs that should be valid. Some are saying adding an allow before the sitemap URL in the robots.txt file fixe…

Google has removed its mobile usability report within Google Search Console and has dropped the mobile-friendly test and API. This was expected, Google told us this would happen back in April and now it happened.

It seems like Google Search is now giving its old Google Groups forum area a massive ranking and visibility boost in the Google Search results. This started a couple of months ago and it may be related to Google surfacing more hidden gems around then?…

Google launched a special page on its Search Central portal with a countdown to 2023. This page has these hidden doors that contain resources that they found interesting or were otherwise noteworthy to the Search Central team in 2023.

Google has announced it now supports new structured data for vacation rentals, which adds rich results to the Google Search results for vacation rental listing pages. With that, Google also announced a new Google Search Console and an updated Rich Resu…

Typically, Google Discover shows content that is less than a day old, but it can show content that is weeks, months, or even years old. However, typically, Google will show more recent content in the Discover feed. Well, that may have changed with the …

Google has yet again launched new structured data named Organization structured data. This new Organization structured data merged the old logo and URL structured data for your business but also adds new fields such as name, address, contact informatio…

The Google November 2023 core update and Google November 2023 reviews update are still both rolling out, and we have no estimated time of when they will finish rolling out. Both are well past their estimated two-week rollout period. I ran a poll yeste…

Is there an SEO benefit, a search ranking benefit, to putting numbers in your headlines? Such as the “10 best reasons to put 10 best in your headlines” or more practically, “10 best toilet seats.” That was a question I found on Reddit, a question I ne…

Google has announced new structured data for discussion forum and profile page structured data on Google Search, with new markup and also new Search Console reports. Also, with this change, Google updated the Q&A forum structured data. This seems related to the new personalized experience within Google Search, the hidden gems, the follower counts and discussion and forum features.

Google Search Console has been having reliability issues since yesterday, as we covered. It is currently down for many users across the world. The outage started again this morning at around 4 am ET.

Google Search Console seems to be down right now. If you try to access it, you will get a 500 server error. I suspect Search Console will be back up shortly but right now, if it is down for you, you are not alone.

Google’s John Mueller answered a question about finding broken links that 404 and if there is SEO value in working on bringing those links back to life. John ended his response by saying on Reddit, “The SEO “value” of bringing a 404 back is probably le…

The legacy feature to control how fast Google crawls your website is going away on January 8, 2024. It is a feature that launched 15 years ago but Google never migrated it to the new version of Search Console. Gary Illyes from Google said, “with the …

Google is testing an “interview” label in the “For Context” news box within the Google Search results. We recently saw a similar styled label named “by the numbers” and now I am seeing an “interview” label.

Many of you are wondering when the Google November 2023 core update and Google November 2023 reviews update will be completed. Normally these updates finish about two weeks after they start but now the core update is 22 days since it started and the r…

Google Merchant Center has been automatically creating and applying promotions to some of your products over the Black Friday holiday season. The truth is, Google has been doing this for some time, but more are noticing this now because there are a lo…

Earlier this week, Google removed its Robots.txt FAQ help document from its search developer documentation. When asked, John Mueller from Google replied to Alexis Rylko saying, “We update the documentation from time to time. Feel free to submit feedba…

Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, confirmed on X that follower count is not used as a search ranking factor by Google Search.

I am seeing some new reports, some publicly, and some not, of Google Search getting the dates they display in the Google Search results wrong. This is a common issue that Google has struggled with over the years but recently seemed to have been gettin…