Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

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.

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 …