Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

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…

Google’s John Mueller said it is a “terrible idea” to disavow links based on metrics from a third-party tool. In fact, John is not a fan of disavowing links in most cases.

Google has posted that the Google Merchant Center feeds have issues. The notice is posted here and reads, “We’re investigating reports of an issue with Feeds. We will provide more information shortly.”

Google has updated its help documentation for canonicalization. It removed a line about syndicated content and also updated a line about noindex to prevent selection of a canonical page within a single site.

Google Discover generally should not show content or images that Google’s SafeSearch filter would block. Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, said this on Twitter a few weeks ago but this was implied by previous statements from other Googlers over …

Google’s John Mueller said he would “try very hard to avoid having a “coming back soon” page during a revamp.” He said if you must have the “coming back soon” page then do so for a day or so but serve a 503 server status code.

Google has been saying for years now that there is no E-A-T (or now E-E-A-T) algorithm, but Google does have factors and signals it looks for that align with the values around determining content that demonstrates E-E-A-T. Google repeated it the other …

Historically, Google has said you should not use a noindex along with a canonical tag at the same time. But not always. John Mueller of Google said recently, “it depends.” He said it depends on whether the pages are identical and if you want them index…

Google is now saying that page experience, mobile-friendliness, page speed, and secure site are ranking “signals” but were never ranking “systems.” “It just meant these weren’t ranking *systems* but instead signals used by other systems,” Danny Sulli…

Google has removed the ability to opt out of Education Q&A carousel in its search results. The original help documentation had a section with a link to a form to request not to show your content in the Education Q&A carousel, which was now removed.

Google has noted that it now supports 25 more countries for the applicableCountry property within the new return policy information to the Product structured data documentation. Now Google supports 50 countries for this property.

Some SEOs are seeing Google rewrite more of their titles to something shorter and maybe less descriptive than they would prefer to display in the Google search results.

Google’s John Mueller posted a new form asking you to submit feedback to Google about when the site name Google shows in search is not what you’d expect it to be. The form was posted a few days ago, so if you have not submitted any issues you’ve found…

Google has updated its Verifying Googlebot and other Google crawlers help document to add a new section describing the three categories or types of crawlers they have. They have their Googlebot crawler, special-case crawlers and user-triggered crawlers.

Google has updated its documented ranking systems page over here to remove four ranking systems from the list, including removing three ranking systems. Google has removed the page experience system from the main list, not adding it to the retired lis…

Yesterday, Google announced it made some changes to its guidance around what makes content considered helpful, including adding in good page experience to the equation. Google also made some other changes to this document, which I will detail below.