Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google’s Gary Illyes said that the Googlebot JSON file IP address list is updated within a few days of a new IP being added to the list of IPs that Googlebot crawls from.

Google’s John Mueller said lesser-used or known languages published on the web are not considered low-quality content just because they are lesser known. He said on Mastodon “good content is good content” no matter what language it is written in.

In the latest Google SEO office hours session, Gary Illyes answered how Google decides when to show links in Google Search to a company’s mobile app. The short answer is deep linking; if Google can find there is an official app for that company or pro…

On Friday, Bill Elward noticed how a featured snippet had a header above it that read “Advertisement.” Bill asked if this was a new Google Ad format from Google for featured snippet placement – the answer was no. The featured snippet simply picked up t…

Not too long ago, John Mueller from Google blasted an agency for using a disavow file and now he is doubling down on that, adding on Twitter in response to disavow link services, saying, “Some people do things that they can bill, regardless of whether …

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter, “Page size is not a ranking factor.” Meaning Google does not have anything specific signal that says page sizes of X to Y get a ranking boost or decline.

A few weeks ago, I reported that Google has updated its help documentation to specify that Google Discover visibility can be impacted not just by the core updates but also specifically by the helpful content update. I asked Google when this changed an…

Google’s John Mueller was asked if having hyphens in your domain name, like www.my-site-goes-here.com, can cause ranking issues in Google Search. John Mueller said no, domains with hyphens are not seen as low quality by Google algorithms.

Google’s John Mueller was asked about a domain name purchased several months ago but still does not rank well in Google Search. John explained that the domain has a “long and complicated history.” “It’s going to be hard to convince search engines that it’s something very different & unrelated to what was done in the past decades,” John added.

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.