Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google may be having issues with indexing and serving new content within Google Search. The issues started around 2pm ET and have been sporadically happening since then. I personally have been seeing new content come up randomly but most of my queries …

For years and years now, spammers have been creating fake obituaries using automated methods. In fact, Danny Goodwin covered the issue Google Search has with obituary spam a couple of years ago when Bill Slawski passed. But it is still an issue and i…

Google has added a new section to the Google Discover documentation to explain three reasons why Google Discover traffic may drop. Those three reasons include changes in interests, content type changes and updates to Google Search algorithms.

Generally, Google has said that when pages are not indexed and there are no technical issues, the reason it might not be indexed is that the page does not meet the quality marks to be included in the Google Search index. But John Mueller of Google said…

Google has announced a new Googlebot, a new Google crawler, named Google-Extended that you can use to control if your content can help improve Bard and Vertex AI generative APIs or future Google AI products. So if you want to disallow Bard from using …

Google’s John Mueller defends Google’s position of helping SEOs by providing documentation, video content, and responses to questions on multiple channels. This comes after some are upset that Google is targeting content and websites that are overly SE…

A few years ago, Google’s Daniel Waisberg wrote two blog posts, one on analyzing Google Search traffic drops and the other on improving SEO with a Search Console bubble chart. Both those blog posts are now new evergreen Google search help documents wit…

Google has confirmed it is working on fixing the delayed Google Search Console reports. Many are delayed a couple of weeks when normally those reports are updated daily or within a few days of the current date. John Mueller from Google said on X, “Yes,…

Google has been downplaying the importance of links in its ranking algorithm for the past couple of years now. But last Thursday, at PubCon, Gary Illyes from the Google Search team said he wouldn’t even put links into the top three ranking signals Goo…

Gary Illyes from the Google Search team said at PubCon that comments sections on websites can be a good thing. This messaging is on target with what Google has said about comments sections in the past, assuming the comments are useful and not filled w…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that removing content doesn’t make the rest of your content rank higher. He said, “keep in mind that removing content doesn’t make the rest rank higher.”

Google posted on Twitter “we recommend not adding meaningful content or symbols using ::before or ::after CSS pseudo-elements.” Google said such content “might not be used for indexing your pages.”

When the September 2023 Google helpful content update came out, Google added new information to its documentation around this update. One thing was specific to this documentation change was around hosted third-party content. But Gary Illyes from Google…

Google’s John Mueller was asked if adding a language indicator to the meta title tag would have any impact on SEO and Google Search in any way. John Mueller replied that he does not think so, not in any positive or negative way, at least.

There is a fun new Google Search Off the Record podcast to listen to with John Mueller and Gary Illyes from the Google Search team. The short is that quality impacts everything related to Google’s search systems, from sitemaps, crawling, indexing, rank…

Last week we reported that the Google site names issues, according to Google, has massively dropped off, after the last big upgrade to site names in Google Search. Well, that might not be the case for the Google news tab.

Google’s John Mueller said on X that a compilation of ChatGPT output does not make your content unique or worthy of outranking other content on the internet. He posted on X that a site should instead “focus on unique, compelling, high-quality content …

Google seems to be testing highlighting portions of text in the search result snippets. This seems different from the highlighting of featured snippets, people also ask, things to know or sections of the explore feature. This is Google using blue high…

Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, said on X that the number of issues and complaints posted in the forums about site names being wrong in Google search has “massively dropped” since the last Google site names update in July.

In August, Google announced it would do away with How-to rich results on the mobile search results. Now, Google has decided to completely do away with How-to rich results both on mobile search and also on desktop search.