Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Earlier this month, Google announced platform properties, a way to see content that you manage but on third-party platforms, including social platforms and video platforms. So if you have an account on Instagram, TikTok, X and/or YouTube, you can claim…

Google supports the unavailable_after meta attribute, which will tell Google not to show this page in search results after the specified date/time. The problem with this, is that if you try to change the unavailable_after date later, Google might not …

Google’s John Mueller confirmed it has not and likely won’t publish publicly Google Search’s defined order of precedence for metadata reconciliation. In other words, if you have conflicting signals you are sending Google, which signal trumps the other….

Since June 11th, Google Search Console’s page indexing report has been getting stuck and not showing more daily data for the past several weeks. Google has fixed it a few times, but it leads to seeing the data grouped by weeks rather than by days.

Google updated its review snippets structured data markup guidelines on Friday to provide a pretty obvious guideline that Google felt it needed to spell out. Google wrote, “Don’t include fake or undisclosed incentivized reviews on your page or in your…

Google may have a bug or issue with using the request indexing or recrawling your robots.txt files within Google Search Console. Supposedly, the feature is not working properly for all sites, but it is working for some sites as well.

Google has updated its Optimize your crawl budget page, it said to “improve clarity, terminology consistency, and flow.” One thing that is new in the document is that Google said that “Every site starts with the same default, conservative crawl capacit…

As many of you know, Google has user-triggered fetchers including Google-NotebookLM. But with NotebookLM being renamed to Gemini Notebook, Google had to update the user agent name of Google-NotebookLM to Google-GeminiNotebook.

Google has updated the help document named How to fix: Google StoreBot crawler can’t access your in-store product page. The document has a number of big updates with a lot of clarifications including the user-agents, checking robots.txt, blocking IP ad…

Google’s John Mueller and Martin Splitt spoke about the Google Search Console indexing report in its latest Search Off the Record podcast. One item was on how quality issues, including low-quality AI-generated content, can result in those pages not bei…

Google’s John Mueller and Martin Splitt spoke about the Google Search Console indexing report in its latest Search Off the Record podcast. One item was on how quality issues, including low-quality AI-generated content, can result in those pages not bei…

Google’s John Mueller noted that if your A/B tests are “significantly different” from one and the other, then that “could be visible in search results too.” He also said, “Depending on your setup, what might happen is that one or the other version is u…

Google’s John Mueller noted that if your A/B tests are “significantly different” from one and the other, then that “could be visible in search results too.” He also said, “Depending on your setup, what might happen is that one or the other version is u…

Google has updated its Google crawlers help documentation to fix a typo under the Google-InspectionTool user agent string. In short, Google had a semicolon as part of the Google-InspectionTool user agent string and it should not have been there, so Goo…

Google has updated its canonical help document to say “Do include a rel=”canonical” link on the canonical page itself (also known as a self-referential canonical).” The advice is not new to Google’s communication but it was just added to the help docum…

There is this hack (or trick) to force Google Search Console to show you the generative AI performance report for your social and video content, the new platform properties feature. All you need to do is add “/ai” after “search-analytics” or “discover”…

Google has updated the Fix canonicalization issues help documentation to add a new section to the top around how long it takes to fix those issues, if the pages are clustered together, and if the pages are different enough.

Google seems to be rolling out the new Generative AI controls in Google Search Console to sites outside the United Kingdom. It initially launched a month ago only for .co.uk based sites but now we are seeing it roll out for some (not all) sites based …

Google Search Console can now show how your social and video content perform within Google Search. This includes channels such as Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube. Google kind of did this before, but now this data is going into the Performance reports…

Google has added to its Merchant listing structured data documentation help page that it now supports the Product.category property and a new Sale duration mechanism within the schema.