Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Gary Illyes posted a new blog post on the Google Search Central site asking all of you to stop using 403 and 404 server status codes to reduce the crawl rate of Googlebot. He said they have seen an uptick in the number of sites and CDNs doing this and …

John Mueller of Google said not all Googlebots use the same rendering engine, in fact, not all Googlebots need to do rendering John added. So while the main desktop and mobile Google search crawlers, the main Googlebots, do rendering and render JavaSc…

Google has published a new, or vastly revamped, document on SEO link best practices. The previous document was just on how to make your links crawlable but the new one adds tips on anchor text placements, how to write good anchor text, internal links w…

Google’s John Mueller posted at Reddit why he is not a fan of using keyword-rich hyphenated domains. He said, “I’m not a fan of keyword-keyword domains, but YMMV.”

Gary Illyes from Google said on Mastodon this morning that you should 301 redirect URLs when there is a “close-to 1:1 match” for that URL. We know that, but what he added was this is even true for when the “language of the content doesn’t match.”

A Reddit thread, spotted via Areej AbuAli on Twitter, says that there is an SEO guy who travels across multiple regions in Europe to upload photos to Facebook from that local region. The SEO claims it helps with “better reach and ranking in the eyes of…

Last November Google introduced a new catchall search spam policy named policy circumvention. That spam policy was listed to be able to take action on sites that bypass the other Google spam policies through other means.

I believe Google changed the sitemaps-related search developer documentation last week. I am not sure if any of the content specifically changed, but Google did rename some of the pages and create new pages, maybe to consolidate the content and make i…

Gary Illyes from Google is back and this time he said that those “Checking if the site connection is secure” interstitials you see on some sites, some of the time, is the “last search-friendly things you can do.”

Google’s John Mueller said he thinks, and he said he might be wrong, that the final mobile-first indexing batch will be done in the next couple of months. Desktop indexing is not going away, and it will be used for “a tiny number of sites,” John added.

Google’s Danny Sullivan reiterated that when it comes to AI content, Google is fine with it, as long as the content is useful and written for people. If you are using AI to write spam, then that is against Google’s guidelines. But Google also added a …

Google’s John Mueller confirmed that the GoogleProber and the GoogleProducer (which we covered here) are both legit Googlebot user agents and crawlers. “These are official Google requests with a user-agent specific to the Google News config in Publish…

Google has clarified in its search developer documents that JSON-LD, Microdata and RDFa are all fully supported forms for structured data and Google Search. Google wrote, “all three supported formats are equally fine for Google, as long as they are val…

Google’s John Mueller was asked again about if you should translate the content of the URL itself to the language of the content used on that page. John this time said, “translating parts of the URL per language is less critical for search.”

Google has updated its search help documentation around canonicalization this morning. The Google Search Relations team split in three distinct sections and updated a lot of the content to provide clearer details around how Google Search and canonicali…

Google may be crawling the web with a new crawler, a new Googlebot, named GoogleProducer. This useragent is not listed on the official Google crawlers page but maybe it is too new to be listed yet?

It is time for the Google webmaster report, where I summarize the most important SEO and webmaster-related Google topics for the past month. Google completing the long rollout of the December 2022 helpful content update and link spam update may be the…

Gary Illyes from Google posted a new PSA on LinkedIn saying that the most common reason a site unexpectedly blocks Googlebot from crawling is due to a misconfiguration of a firewall or CDN.

Gary Illyes said in the Google SEO office-hours from yesterday that verifying your website in Google Search Console won’t impact your Google Search indexing or ranking whatsoever.

John Mueller of Google blasted SEO or marketing agencies that sell both link-building services and disavow link services. He said on Twitter, “These agencies (both those creating, and those disavowing) are just making stuff up, and cashing in from thos…