Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

An SEO is in a situation where a site needs to move from www.domain.com to new.domain.com and then a few months later back to www.domain.com. John Mueller of Google was asked if they should use 302 redirects but John said, no, use 301 redirects.

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that it is an SEO myth to say you can use the nofollow attribute on links to hoard your links. He said, “You don’t hoard anything when you make links nofollow.” “It’s a common SEO myth,” he added.

Here is the big Google webmaster report for March 2023, where I cover all the most important things that happened with Google search over the past month. The highlights include the Google product reviews update and a few unconfirmed updates. Of course…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter, “when it comes to web pages in Google Search, hashtags are just words, they have no special meaning or effect.” So if you are big into hashtagging everything, Google will consume it as just content on the page.

Google’s John Mueller spoke a bit more about when you should update the date in the lastmod tag in the XML sitemap file. He said on Twitter if you are “providing something new for search engines that you’d like reflected in search,” then update the dat…

Google’s John Mueller was asked if Google Search would be impacted if you block other crawlers, like Bing or the ChatGPT crawler. John said no, “Google doesn’t care if you block other crawlers.”

Both Semrush and RankRanger are reporting several point drops in the percentage of time a people also ask box shows up in the Google search results. The drop started on Friday, February 24th, a few days after the rollout of the February 2023 product r…

Gary Illyes from Google gave a keynote and a Q&A session yesterday at PubCon and while the keynote was pretty vanilla stuff, the Q&A did reconfirm a lot of what has been said in the past around authorship, links and disavowing links.

Gary Illyes from Google said in his Q&A session yesterday at PubCon that while recovering from a Google helpful content update is possible, you can’t always get back to where you were.

Google’s John Mueller went back and forth multiple times with some SEOs on the topic of using ChatGPT not to write content from scratch but to rewrite existing content. The responses from John are educational, useful and somewhat funny as well.

Gary Illyes from Google noted that the list of Googlebot IP addresses that Google started to publish in 2021 and has updated last month is actually maintained in real-time by pulling directly from the “production systems’ configuration files,” he said.

Google’s John Mueller was asked if it would help with web rankings in Google to embed reviews from sites like Facebook, Bing, Google, etc on your web site. John said, no, not for web search and he also warned us about not using structured data on those…

Google has updated the site move related search documentation this week. It seems like most of the changes were mostly about simplifying things around site moves, removing some content, clarification and so forth.

Google has updated its favicon search developer documentation to now say that you don’t need to host the favicon in the same domain in order to be eligible for a favicon in Google Search results. Google removed the line, “the URL must be in the same do…

Google Search Console pushed out a security control update that reworked how the user and permissions management works. This is to bring over the old Webmaster Tools version to the new Search Console, and Google will sunset the old version in the comi…

Google has updated both the Google Discover help documentation and the Google helpful content system page documentation to clarify that Google Discover uses many of the same signals as Google Search for ranking. The big news is that previously Google …

Google has just added a new feature to export your data in bulk, on an ongoing basis, from Google Search Console to Google’s BigQuery. Daniel Waisberg from Google said on Twitter, “I have been dreaming about this for a long time, so excited to see it l…

Google’s John Mueller said on Mastodon that an existing site would not drop in ranking just because it uses an exact match domain. “Changes like that would be due to other reasons,” he added.

Google’s John Mueller said on Mastodon that for small and local businesses, “in most cases,” core web vitals work should not be at the top of their list. He said this because the page experience ranking factor is not huge and more so, for sites with v…

What happens when the noindex, nofollow directives are in the HTTP header and that URL is also being redirected somewhere, will Google respect or ignore the directive. Gary Illyes from Google hinted that Google will likely ignore the directive to be safe.