Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google has replaced the “Trusted Store” badge in the product results within Google Search with a “Top Quality Store” badge. Google said, “there’s no action you need to take, and the update will not affect your performance metrics at all.”

Google announced Google Merchant Center Next, a more lightweight, easier-to-use version of Google Merchant Center at Google Marketing Live. Google added, “while we’re simplifying, the features that larger retailers rely on aren’t going anywhere.”

Google Search Console confirmed it had a bug in reporting video-specific traffic in the performance report between May 4th and May 17th. Google seems to have resolved the issue going forward but your reports between May 4 and May 17 might be lower tha…

Google has added back the edit code button to the Rich Results Test tool. Ryan Levering from Google posted this news on Mastodon saying, “Excited for this new button in Rich Results Test that makes it easier to test fixes to live code.”

Google now supports the site names feature on subdomains, Google said subdomains on mobile devices is supported. Site names are still not supported on the subdirectory level.

Google’s John Mueller felt the need to post a PSA that said having an incorrect date set in your last modification date within your HTTP header won’t hurt your SEO. He said on Mastodon, having an incorrect date set there “won’t negatively affect your s…

If you still use AMP on your site, then go to the AMP enhancements report in Google Search Console and filter by “crawl issues.” You may see a spike in the number of crawl issues reported on and going forward from May 12th.

I am hearing reports from SEOs that Google did another batch switchover from desktop-first indexing to mobile-first indexing for many sites. As you know, Google started the mobile-first indexing over six years ago but told us earlier this month that th…

For the past 20 years, I’ve seen the SEO line; well, this SEO trick that is against Google’s guidelines works for this website, why shouldn’t I do it for my website? John Mueller of Google responded to one of those on Mastodon, saying it is simply a g…

Google has added a new user agent to the list of Google crawlers, Googlebots. This one is named Google-InspectionTool and goes under both the Googlebot user agent and also the name Google-InspectionTool.

Google Search Console Insights is posting a notice that says there may be data changes in its reports when the Google Analytics 4 migration starts on July 1, 2023. The notice reads, “Starting June 1, 2023, you might notice some data changes. This is be…

Google’s John Mueller clarified that there are no plans to enable historical data exports with the Google Search Console to Google Big Query automated bulk data export feature.

Gary Illyes from Google said that having invalid schema markup does not hurt your rankings or your site. He said the worse case, if Google cannot parse the markup, it won’t use it.

As expected, although it took a lot longer than we thought, Google announced it will be replacing the FID metric with the INP metric for its Core Web Vitals. This won’t happen until March 2024, but it will happen.

Google’s John Mueller had one of his good oneliners again. He posted a reply on Twitter saying, “something can be high-quality content with a lot of information for users and still be of low value for the web.”

Over the past month or so, we’ve been seeing a huge drop in the number of FAQ rich results Google has been displaying both on mobile search and now desktop. Google has not commented or said anything on the topic, that is until now.

Gary Illyes from Google posted on the Google Search blog about some of the more “hidden” advantages of using hreflang x-default value. As Gary noted on LinkedIn, “incidentally, it can also help with feeding Googlebot URLs that the poor thing otherwise …

In the latest Google SEO office hours, Google said that Google does not trust outbound links from a site they think is spammy. Duy Nguyen from the Google Search Quality team said this at the 35 second mark into the video.

Google has updated the video structured data to say that the description property is no longer a required field. Instead, Google moved the description property item to the “recommended” section, from the “required” section of the help document.

John Mueller of Google said there is no percentage of traffic you should expect from your Googlebot activity compared to other bot and traffic activity on your site. Meaning you don’t need to worry if Googlebot is taking up 2% of your server resources…