Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

The SEO community is buzzing about some recent U.S. Department of Justice documents released that hint at some ranking concepts at Google. One slide is named “The 3 Pillars of Ranking” and discuss body, anchors and user interactions.

On Friday, Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, shared some internal documents showing how he complies some of the feedback from SEOs online and then prepares that feedback to share with the Google Search teams. He has done this a couple of times …

As a reminder, the Google helpful content system/update is a sitewide algorithm. It looks at your site as a whole when applying its ranking system to the Google Search results. So changing a character on one page of your site, won’t do anything to hel…

The SEO community was in a buzz yesterday when The Verge published an entertaining, detailed, and long piece titled Did SEO experts ruin the Internet or did Google? The short answer is no, SEOs didn’t ruin the Internet, Google did not ruin the Internet…

Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, said that you need to stop thinking, “What should I do for Google” when you are writing content. He said just think what you need to do for your readers and leave everything else out of mind when it comes to t…

Google announced that its mobile-first indexing “trek” is now “complete.” Which is strange to me being that Google said it was done moving sites to mobile-first indexing last May but hey, now it is really done.

While Google has a clear definition of what keyword stuffing is on its spam policies page, Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, explained that it is not about the number of times a word is repeated on a page. Rather, it is about how the words on t…

Google’s Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, said on X that just because content is old, it doesn’t mean that content is unhelpful. He said, “Just because something is older doesn’t make it unhelpful.”

Google’s Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, posted that he is aware of the complaints about recipe pages being too long and hard to find the ingredients and directions. He added that this is something content producers might want to keep in mind. “If you …

Google once again said that adding schema or structured data markup to your pages will not result in those pages ranking better in Google Search. Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, said this on X, “using schema doesn’t give you a ranking boost,…

This is just a reminder that Google uses machine learning to understand if content is helpful or not within the Google helpful content system. This is not new, we’ve known this for over a year, but it seems many of us keep forgetting.

Google’s Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, has provided examples of unhelpful content types. He also provided examples of strategies writers may use to write unhelpful content. As a reminder, the general line of what is unhelpful content to Google is whe…

Google Search as of last week now supports syntax graph merge. This allows you to use two different forms of structured data, such as JSON-LD and Microdata, on the same page, and Google will support both.

Google’s John Mueller said that an issue with Cumulative Layout Shift scores would not be a reason why your website suddenly and significantly drops in the Google search results rankings.

Since late last week there has been a spike in Google Search Console’s URL Inspection Tool showing a “failed: hostload exceeded” error. Google’s John Mueller said on Friday they are investigating but on Sunday, John said it was related to spamming the …

Google upgraded the Rich Result Test now to support the validation of structured data for paywalled content. This means you can check live sites, any site, to see if they are implementing the paywalled content structured data properly and if Google Sea…

Google has updated its paywalled content search developer documentation to explain that Google Search Generative Experience may link to content behind a paywall. Google wrote, “SGE overviews may include links to paywalled content as a way for people to…

Google seems to have stopped showing rich results for event markup in the Google search results. The event lists are no longer showing up event URLs in the Google search result snippet.

Google has updated its favicon search developer documentation to remove the section for the Google Favicon user agent and to clarify that if you want Google to show your favicon you must allow both Googlebot-Image and Googlebot to crawl your pages.

This is just a reminder that despite Google saying the helpful content update will one day be able to find hidden gems in its search results, it does not yet do that. We thought Google would launch it with the last helpful content update, but Google d…